ZFS looks very cool and it’s open source. It hasn’t been ported to Mac OS X yet, though. A lot of people are hoping that it’s included in Leopard. ZFS supports built-in compression, RAID-like mirroring, dynamic sizing, and everything else you could possibly want in a filesystem.
Macintosh
MacBook Pro Battery recall
My MacBook Pro’s battery is being recalled by Apple. I filled out the form and my new battery is supposed to arrive in 3-5 business days (which will probably be next week, while I’m at WWDC).
Mac OS X Internals
My copy of Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach arrived today. I’ve been buried in it most of the day. This is the first book I’ve seen that really goes deeply into how OS X works.
Roxio Support Nightmare
Roxio’s support site is one of the worst I’ve ever had to deal with. They make it nearly impossible to contact them.
Yesterday I converted some QuickTime movies to PSP format using Popcorn 2. The conversion was perfect, except the names appeared in Japanese on the PSP.
It seems that I’ve registered at their site under several different email addresses, including one I haven’t used for a few years. The site wouldn’t allow me to change my login to my gmail address, since it seems that I’ve already registered separately under that address. There’s no way to contact an actual human about that problem and ask to have my different logins consolidated.
Furthermore, their forums don’t allow you to change your email address at all and when you attempt to ask for help, you end up in the same contact form hell which requires you to log in and only lets you request product-related help (which doesn’t list Popcorn). There’s no way to request help with the website.
Finally I found a thread in the forums about that problem & it turns out that it’s a bug on Intel Macs.
Upgrade Disaster
When I tried to install the Mac OS X 10.4.7 update on my MacBookPro, the machine froze when the update was almost finished and left the machine unable to boot. When I started up in single user mode, it showed that launchd couldn’t be started which prevented it from booting completely. I ended up doing an archive & install from the original MBP system DVD and I now pretty much have everything back to normal.
Blogging from TextMate
I’ve always been a BBEdit user, but TextMate seemed to come out of nowhere and it’s now my favorite text editor. The one feature I miss from BBEdit is the ability to open & save files directly on an FTP server without using an FTP client. Since TextMate plays nicely with [CyberDuck](http://cyberduck.ch/), I can simply open the directory in CyberDuck and double-click a file to edit it in TextMate.
The latest version adds yet another killer feature: Blogging. In fact I composed & posted this entry directly from TextMate.
Toyota Hates Macs
Toyota’s website is one of the most Mac-unfriendly sites I’ve used. I was unable to complete either the build-your-own or loan application forms in either Safari or Firefox. The only way I was able to use it was running IE under Parallels.
Why bother?
I see Lugaru just released a Mac OS X version of their Emacs-style Epsilon editor.
A long time ago (late 80s) I used Epsilon for DOS and I liked it because it was the closest thing to Emacs. Mac OS X includes Emacs, plus enhanced X11 & Carbon versions are available, all free. Epsilon is an X11 application that sells for $250 – it doesn’t even use the Mac GUI. Why should I pay $250 for Epsilon, which doesn’t offer much more for an Emacs user, when good free editors are available?