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Apple’s new PowerMac G5

Apple introduced their new PowerMac G5 on Monday, claiming it’s the “world’s fastest personal computer“, and the “world’s first 64-bit personal computer”.

As an Apple user, I’ve been waiting a long time for this kind of announcement. For whatever reasons, Apple’s hardware has pretty much stagnated since 1999, with only minor “speedbump” updates over the years. This machine leaps several generations of hardware in a single bound, and I am planning on getting one sometime in the September timeframe.

There have been the usual spate of arguments you are bound to get when claiming to be the fastest. Some point out that the 64-bit AMD Opteron was out before the G5, but this can be pretty much dismissed since the Opteron (like Intel’s Itanium) is targetted at servers, not personal computers. The benchmarks have also been questioned, and I believe that this is a much more valid concern.

Apple claimed that using the same compiler on both sides made the test “fair”. Well, no, not really. That is only a fair test of the CPUs, not the machine as a whole. A more fair test would be comparing code produced by the “best” compiler on both sides. It just so happens that gcc 3.3 is Apple’s main compiler, whereas on the PC side there are much better compilers from Intel (and I would assume, Microsoft). Shipping apps will be compiled with gcc 3.3 on the Mac and Intel’s compiler on the PC. Using gcc on the PC is invalid because no app that cares about performance will ever be built using gcc.

I don’t like the nasty new handles that bite into your hand. I expect someone will come out the G4-style handle-wrappers for the G5 after not too long. PCI-X is interesting, but I hope Apple is moving towards PCI-Express, which is way faster. Given the timing, I thought for a while that the G5 would already have PCI-Express in it. Alas, no.

I was a bit surprised that the top-end model didn’t come with an ATI 9700 (or 9800) Pro video card. Why the 9600? Isn’t even the 9500 Pro faster than the 9600? Huh.

iSight — interesting little device, but way too expensive, probably because of FireWire. For the price, I’ll spend a bit more and get a real FireWire video camera instead.

iChat AV — Wow! I’ve used it a bit for voice conferencing, and its quality is the same as that of a telephone call, peraps better. Initially, Iain and I couldn’t get it to work (turned out to be a setting on Iain’s firewall) so we tried other voice-over-IP apps. We were very underwhelmed with what we heard. After getting iChat working, it was a revelation. It was probably good that we saw how bad the other software was, since it made us appreciate iChat all the more. I’m itching to hook up a FireWire camera and try this puppy out. Maybe when I borrow Vartan’s camera I’ll try chatting with Mark.

I’ll add more stuff here as I think of it/find out about it.

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Trackback testing

I just wanted to try out Movable Type’s “trackback” feature. So I’m writing this and putting a trackback URL from Harald’s blog in the “URLs to Ping” section of the entry form for MT.

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Preparing for Algonquin

Friday morning we head off to Algonquin park for a one week vacation on Canoe Lake. We’re renting a cottage and I think we’ll be able to see Jeff and Debbie’s cottage from it. Jeff said they would be up for one or two nights and we can borrow his telescope. I’m hoping to show Michael and Ronnie Saturn’s rings; that had a big impact on me the first time I saw it live through a ’scope.

We have some friends also staying up in Algonquin the same week, although I think they’re closer to the middle of the park. We’re talking about taking turns looking after kids for some nice quality time alone.

When I was young, my family would go up to the cottage on Moon River almost every weekend. It was quite the ritual, and I think my parents were determined to get their money’s worth out of the cottage. It costs a lot to own a cottage. Our strategy so far has been to rent for a week or two here and there, and it seems to have served us well.

We’re off to Wasaga as usual a few weeks after Algonquin. It’s quite different — Algonquin is all rocks, trees and lakes, whereas Wasaga is more beach, sand and water. I think people from outside southern Ontario would be surprised just how tropical Wasaga feels. All it’s really missing are palm trees.

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Caledonia

Scott in his back yard

Went out to Caledonia to visit Scott and Karen Karin (thanks Scott!) on Saturday. We went on the way to Thorold that night. Lots of people there, and I got to play with Vartan’s cool digital video camera. I’m hoping to borrow it at some point to bring all our old Hi-8 video tape over to DVD or something. Not sure how long DVD-R lasts, though. I’ve heard it’s not all that long for CD-R, so perhaps DVD-R has the same durability issues?

Ronnie on bugstomper

Ronnie spent a big chunk of the time on Scott’s gaming machine, bugstomper (sounds like it used to be a dev machine). This same machine was also providing tunes for the party via cool speakers outside that looked just like rocks. When I was setting Ronnie up to play, I realized that if we didn’t do anything, people outside were shortly going to hear the blood-curdling cries of dying orcs mixed in with their party tunes, so I turned off sound in WarCraft III.

Doug compares his 17″ PowerBook with Jeff’s old.. 15″(?) model

Well, okay, so some of us geeked out for a bit. Doug brought his new 17″ PowerBook and some of us stood around, oooh-ing and ahh-ing at the display and wasted far too much time comparing the sound quality of the speakers (the 17″ speakers are *way* better).

I wish I’d had more time trying out Vartan’s camera. It has a widescreen mode, and although I know it’s just slapping black along the top and bottom of the frame, it does look quite cool. I would hope that when you import the video into a computer that it is sent without the black bars though.

The camera was “Digital 8″, which I didn’t know much about before. Apparently it uses normal Hi-8 tapes, but if you record digitally, it eats twice as much tape per second, so a 2-hour tape only lasts one hour. Vartan said that Eric Dirks’ 1.5 hour wedding DVD took about 40 gig of space altogether for raw footage and editing room. That sounds pretty manageable to me. I just bought a 120 Gig drive for the iMac, so space would be not a problem. I’ll have to move the video camera up in my wish list.

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Ronnie’s “SuperDad” homework

Ronnie brought some work home recently that was centred around a “SuperDad” theme (for Father’s day, presumably). Here’s what he wrote (caps denote prefixed text he had to finish).

A LETTER TO MY DAD
DEAD DAD,
When we go to McDonald’s, play Unreal Tournament, or play DND, then I love you best. I think you are the best person I ever met.

SUPERDAD
I LOVE DAD BEST WHEN…
Dad and I play Unreal Tournament, go to McDonald’s together, or DND.

MY FAVORITE TIMES WITH DAD ARE…
When we eat at McDonald’s, play Unreal Tournament when I’m home sick, etc.

MY DAD HELPS ME BY…
Bringing me to school, giving me lunch at school, reminding me to bring my backpack to school, etc.

DAD LOOKS HANDSOME WHEN…
He is going out with Mom and his friends.

I CAN BE A HELPER TO DAD BY…
Not typing so loud when he is working and I am playing W3 on BNet (BattleNet).

DND == Dungeons & Dragons. Apparently we play Unreal Tournament a lot. That’s news to me — I haven’t played in a year or two!

I should mention that I often ask Ronnie to play WarCraft III (W3) with headphones on, and while I am using the computer there will be this sudden furious typing/pounding on the keyboard next to me, which startles the hell out of me! It seems that kids who play WarCraft III on BattleNet always try to type the last word in the pre-game chat room as the countdown timer for starting a sessions ticks away. More than once I’ve had to speak fairly loudly to Ronnie, saying “Ronnie, DON’T TYPE SO LOUDLY please.” I have to speak up a bit as he is wearing headphones, so it sounds a bit harsh.

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G5 Specs posted

Last night the Apple Store posted the specs for the new PowerMac G5 by accident. It was a GIF next to a picture of a G4, and was taken down again after 15 minutes or so. Was it deliberate? I don’t think so. Steve Jobs likes to have a big “wow” factor in his presentations. I’m pretty sure that whoever was responsible for this (and possibly their boss) is out of work today.

You can order T-shirts with the G5 specs on them.

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Giving up on Linux Firewall for Now

It was weird. eth0 was connected to my hub, and eth1 was connected to the cablemodem.

I was able to bring eth1 up successfully, and browse the web and all.

However, as soon as I brought up eth0, my default route got blown away!

I couldn’t find any reason for it anywhere. I tried to fix it manually using the route command, but no matter what, I couldn’t talk to the Internet while both interfaces were up.

So, I’ve given up for now and put back the LinkSys. As Jerry Pournelle would say, “Alas.”

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Upgrading an iMac

I’ve been reading up on what’s good for upgrading an iMac. We’re going to Algonquin in a week and bit, and it would be nice to bring the iMac with some   s   p   a   c   e   … So I’m looking into a new hard drive and some RAM. I have found xlr8yourmac’s compatibility database to be way useful. Using this I’ve found out I should get either a Seagate or Maxtor, but *not* a Western Digital drive.

While there I also checked out combo DVD/CDRW drives, and found out that the store built GreyTech FireWire DVD/CDRW combo drive should work fine under Mac OS X. However, it’s $250, so.. maybe not. It would be nice to be able to play DVD’s though..

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Bloody LinkSys

Okay, that’s it. I’ve had enough. It seems like my LinkSys freezes up *every* *single* *day* about 1/2 hour after I get to work. Tonight I’m going to start moving back to using my Linux box as a firewall. This may mean the kids will have a harder time “being the DMZ host”, but I’m hoping I can find some sort of web interface for configuring the firewall. I mean, how hard can it be?

At first my experience with the LinkSys (it’s an old-style, one-port jobbie) was great. It moved the firewall to a piece of hardware that (a) required little maintenance and (b) had more features [web config, DMZ host etc]. Well, then reality set in. It turns out that if you run a server inside the firewall [ItF], and try to access that server from another machine inside the firewall via the hostname you are using (which maps to the external IP on the LinkSys), the LinkSys freezes under the sudden 2-fold 100 Mbps data stream between the ItF server and the ItF client. In an ideal world you would modify the DNS server to point at the internal IP address so as to cut the LinkSys out of the loop. However, as far as I know, there’s no way to configure the LinkSys to do this if you use it for DNS. i’ve fluctuated between using the LinkSys for DNS and using my ISP’s DNS over time.

My partial solution has been to install local hostnames for the server on internal machines. Thus what other people access as http://rae.tnir.org would be accessed internally as simply http://rae which points to the internal 192.168.* IP address. It sorta works, but it’s a major pain and subject to frequent failure.

Well, wish me luck as I configure my Linux box. This install of Linux (Mandrake 8 or 9.. I can’t remember) has never been a firewall before, so it may be a bit of a pain.

UPDATE:
Heh, er, it wasn’t the LinkSys after all — it was tnir’s IP address changing! I’ve updated register.com, so the new IP should be percolating out to the ‘net over the next few hours. This does not mean I won’t be removing the LinkSys. The frequent freezes still happen.

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Ice Cream in 30 seconds

Read a Popular Science article about using liquid nitrogen to make ice cream. John Swain would love this one I think.

from slashdot

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