February 2006 Archives

Since I talked about some Photoshop benchmarks the other day I think it's only fair to talk about some real benchmarks that apply to the machines themselves rather than that specific software. Geekpatrol posted their benchmarks yesterday, and TUAW picked up on it. Rather than rewrite their findings, or redo their math, I'll just do some fancy quoting.

Fabienne at TUAW wrote
I took it upon myself to average their twenty benchmark results. Using Geek Patrol's benchmarking results, the MacBook Pro they used is 3.74 times faster than the PowerBook they tested. If I throw out the low results they received from Stdlib Allocate (which they note: "depends more on library performance than raw hardware performance"), the MacBook Pro is on average, 4.26 times faster than a PowerBook.

You'd be right to say, "but those are just benchmarks," but such high numbers make it very clear that the new MacBook Pro will be faster when running a native application. It doesn't mean all applications will suddenly be faster than any other machine ever anywhere, but it does mean a huge performance boost for Apple's laptops.

This comes as a shock to nobody, but Apple discontinued the 15" PowerBook G4s today. They pulled it from their site very quietly some time last night or this morning. I was just marveling at how this hadn't been done yesterday, actually, thinking that it showed lack of support for their fledgeling product line.

Quoth Dan at TUAW:
And regardless of Adobe's recent we-won't-ship-a-Universal-quite-yet announcement, even under Rosetta I imagine Photoshop on the MacBook Pro is faster than on the PowerBook G4.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with that. Jason O'Grady ran some benchmarks between a PowerBook G4 1.5GHz and a MacBook Pro 2.0GHz using Photoshop and the results don't surprise me too much. It seems that Photoshop's dependency upon Rosetta is causing the MacBook Pro's benchmarks to be almost twice as slow as the PowerBook's. Without universal releases from Adobe soon, Apple may be hard pressed to sell new desktops to graphic designers. Adobe posted an FAQ about mactel-native support, and John Nack posted highlights.

Last night I wrote about iTerm, and how much I was enjoying using certain features including text dragging. Unfortunately, the latest release, 0.8.1, isn't very good with the text dragging. Wanting to support the app, I decided to take a look and see if it had been reported as a bug yet. It had. A person by the name of vinc17 left a comment noting that version 0.8.2 has better text dragging support. I went ahead and tried it out (see their cvs section) and found that it's true, but with an exception.

I poked and prodded and the conclusion I came to is that text dragging seems to work great until you have enough in your buffer to have a vertical scroll bar. Then the functionality seems to work poorly.

So it's at this point that I suppose I should point out that we're talking about an open source app that's in development. It can't be expected to be perfect, but it's nice to see that even a little progress is being made. Yay for progress!

I know I'm very late jumping on the iTerm bandwagon, but better late than never. For years I've been a software purist; I prefer to use apps that come with the OS to replacing them. It started slow with Firefox instead of Safari. This is the latest in a long string.

iTerm is a replacement for Terminal.app. It seems to have all of the features Terminal has, and then some. A few of my favorites are:

• Tabs - iTerm has xterm-style tabs which is really nice for someone like me who keeps terminal windows open all day.
  
• Bookmarks - I'll admit that I haven't found much to do with these other than bookmarking ssh commands, but they're still nice.
  
• Text Dragging - We all know that Terminal.app has Text Dragging, but for some bizarre reason you can't drag text to Mail.app from there. iTerm lets you.
  

People complain that it's noticeably slower than Terminal.app but I haven't really noticed.

I'd say give it a try. The worst that happens is you don't like it, and the best is you find yourself with a new terminal application.

I might be a little slow on the up take here, but here's some exciting news. The Burlington Free Press has XML feeds! Check them out here. I, for one, and very happy to see this.

I finished reading The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan a few days ago. It's the third book in his Wheel of Time series, and I'm loving it. The beauty of this book, like the others, is that Jordan illustrates a whole world. He is verbose and every detail is accounted for. Thoughts and emotions are followed. So many characters are involved, so many plot lines. The whole thing is thought provoking. I find myself trying to unravel the plot, staring into the book.

I'll admit it - I had trouble getting into the first book. It's wordy and detailed. It was intimidating to say the least. The reader needs to remember a few things, though. This is not a trilogy. Thus far it is an eleven book long series, and if I've heard right, there will be a twelfth. Now that, too, might seem intimidating but the story is still very fast paced. I find myself engrossed in the book, easily reading fifty pages or more a night and wishing I could stay up later to read more. I'd recommend this series to anyone who is a fan of fantasy literature.

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." - Groucho Marx

Although I tend to agree with the above, Thomas Beller seems to disagree. No book nor dog could provide him with the companionship that his iPod gives. And that's why, against all forms of common sense, he climbed onto the New York subway tracks, braving the rats and trash and the dreaded third rail to retrieve his iPod when it fell. Read the whole story here.

It's like all of the television shows and movies rolled into one. Think of all of the plots about stealing valuable landmarks like the Statue of Liberty or Egyptian pyramids. These masterminds who want to steal these things they could never possibly sell because. . . . Help me out here. Why? I never quite got that.

It's certainly a smaller scale but here in Vermont it's the best we've got unless you plan to steal Lake Champlain. Somebody decided to steal one of UVM's two-hundred pound metal signs while it was at the sign shop for updating. The work never even got done. Honestly now, why would you bother? You stole a sign. Is the metal worth so much money as to counteract what it would cost to turn it into something unrecognizable so it could be sold? If it's a college prank, it's not funny and it makes no sense. UVM has a lot of signs. You're not hurting them, you're just annoying them. If it was anything more than annoyance, the reward for the return would probably be a bit more than some sporting event tickets.

Ah, the degradation of society in 21st century America.

[via Burlington Free Press]

Apparently the Postal Service is considering a plan which would have all mail for Vermont go through White River Junction, eliminating the sorting center in Burlington. Frankly, this is a bad idea. I'll go ahead and repeat some of the things in the article. First of all, this will take a one day service for northern Vermont and turn it into a two or three day service. It'll increase the load on a less populated area of the state. It's, well, just not a good idea.