Category: General

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OS X unstability, Mavericks is just unfinished!

I am really really disapointed by Apple, and for more than just one reason. Here below is my list of  growing concerns with the company and especially how they molest OS X.

First of, when I have a stable running system, the last thing I want to hear is that there is availability of an upgraded OS version which, on top of providing new features, is correcting several security flaws which won’t be corrected on the current stable OS release!!!

Imagine a world where Microsoft would have stopped providing security updates to Windows XP the day Vista was out, even if it had been for free, would you have done the upgrade right away? No! You want to wait that the new OS gets stable enough (in Vista’s case that meant waiting for Windows 7) before you upgrade.

Well bad luck, Apple decided last October to provide OS X 10.9 (a.k.a Mavericks) to everyone without providing further supports (at least in terms of security updates) to previous OS X versions. Giving this upgrade for free was just the sweet juice to cover the bitter poison taste.

I analysed the vulnerabilities in our current OS X version and decided that I could wait for OS X 10.9.1 before upgrading, hoping that Apple would also see that stopping security updates on previous OS X versions was plain stupid. This did not happen and shortly after OS X 10.9.1 was published I did the jump and upgraded.

The upgrade was bug free, but not the use of OS X since then. For the past month we have been struggling with the following problems:

  • Impossibly slow to switch users (my wife and me are sharing the same and unique MacBook, so we do use quite often this feature)…
  • …when it does not simply hang in the process of switching!
  • The screen, mouse and keyboard freezes randomly, often this is related to the insertion of the Thunderbolt network adapter, other times it is out of the blue.
    Note: sometimes pulling out the Thunderbolt plug unfreezes the Mac, sometimes not.
  • Mail App crashes often or the geometry of the window keeps on changing to the weirdest form. I simply stopped using it.
  • Launchpad should support keyboard input to quickly filter the list of application, so that typing “Con” would propose you “Contacts”, “Console”, etc.. But since Mavericks this handy feature does not work everyday.
  • WiFi needs router reboot to get IP address after the computer was asleep. It is a bug from iOS that has been carefully ported to OS X. Now I can also enjoy router reboot because I just want to use the WiFi! Yeah!
  • App Store updates which get lost: I got notified that I had 1 possible updates, I fired up the App Store app and clicked on Update. I saw that Evernote had an update but then the computer froze. I waited 5 min after which I shutted down and restarted. The App Store shows no update to perform (even after search for them) but looking for Evernote shows that it can be updated! That’s a reliable update mechanism!

Giving upgrade for free is no excuse for the unstability and little testing that this OS X Mavericks has received. Take the example of Ubuntu and their Long Term Support release, that is serious work done and they also provide their upgrades for free!

So I really despise Apple for bragging so much about the 200 new features coming along with OS X Mavericks. Well I have seen a myriad of bugs, if they count as new features then yes they probably are not far from the 200 ones. But apart from an application which provides maps (where is the web version of it, I don’t want an app for that!), another one for reading books (like a MacBook is the most handy reading machine, sure!!) there are close to no visible features to the end-users. Ho yeah I forgot tags, like I am going to tag the 1 TiB of data I own just because I can!!!

Really Apple, stop wasting so much of your developers time into just providing what looks like a new skin for iOS 7+ and invest some valuable effort into bringing back OS X to the stable and professional OS it was!

Addendum – 2014-02-05: Today I tried to rate the OS X 10.9.1 application in the Mac App Store, my rate was one star, I clicked on it but got the following message “To rate this app, you must have purchased it from the Mac App Store”?!? Well it is true that I did not “buy” OS X 10.8, it was bundled with the laptop. So I only upgraded it to the “free” version from the Mac App Store using the Mac App Store.You can't give negative feedback ;-) So I did not technically buy it, true, but I own it! You can see a screenshot on the right-end side.

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Pedelecs are fast!

A quick comparison of average speeds for my daily commute, these numbers are average moving speed.

Note: Bulls is the brand name of my standard trekking bike, Raleigh is the brand name of my wife’s pedelec city/confort bike (electrical pedal-assist up to 25 km/h) and Peugeot is the brand name of our car.

Each of these modes of transport has 2 average speeds. For bicycles, one should understand the “easy” one as going slow enough to avoid too much sweating, whereas the “fast” one is when trying to be as fast as possible. For the car, it is the lowest and highest measured speed (depending on traffic).

Transport-Average-Speeds

For more information on pedelecs: Wikipedia article on Pedelec.

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Home Server – What do I want?

What service do I want to run on my Home Server?

I do have a NAS already which has the following services: File Sharing (Samba, AFS and NFS), Media Streaming Server (DLNA), VPN Server, Cloud Sync Repository. So I do not intend to have redundant services on my Home Server. What is left?

My Home Server could support:

  • Backup: Having a proper backup of all important files from the NAS and our laptop. Implementations: rdiff-backup, Box Backup, fwbackups*, duplicity*, rsnapshot or storeBackup.
  • (N)-IDS: As I have services open to the internet, I want to take some precautions and check that no exploits is taken advantage of. I am not sure this is enough, but it is the least I can do. Implementations: AIDE or Suricata.
  • DNS cache/server: I am thinking of hosting my own DNS server to perform some caching and hopefully enhance a bit the browsing experience in terms of performance. Though I would need to benchmark this to make sure I have any gain as I suspect my old router to do some caching. Implementation: dnsmasq.
  • DHCP server: My home router is a Netgear WG614 and its features for what concern DHCP are fairly limited, having my home server addressing this issue is a nice idea (until we get a better router). I could be even tightly coupled with the DNS server (see earlier bullet point) so that one could use hostname within the local network. Implementation: dnsmasq.
  • Syslog server
  • Maybe – ownCloud: maybe one day I would prefer to use an open source solution for Cloud Sync rather than the closed source one from my NAS vendor.

*: FreeBSD support is uncertain.

As one can see, I could use Linux or BSD based OS or a mixture. However, ZFS is so compelling that I am seriously considering to go for FreeBSD+jails and basta cosi! February will be the month where I try to set-up a FreeBSD server.

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HI (Human Intelligence) in Computer Science

The number of errors you find in forums or user groups is sometimes amazing. Here in this thread, the first answer mix up file system journaling with indexing, the second rightly tries to correct the thread but adds more errors by stating that ZFS is a journaling FS, which it isn’t. It is a transactional copy-on-write file system.

And this other thread on Ubuntu Forums is even worse. First, people do not exactly answer the question, some just express opinion/beliefs without facts, finally some are trying to base their answers on facts but those are incorrect. Example: “NTFS does not have a journal, neither is it 64 bit like Ext4.” (it is pretty hard to have that many wrong facts in one sentence, bravo!) Thanks, some users are trying to sanitize this thread (e.g. Udayakiran or falconindy), sadly their answers are flooded in the mass of bad/wrong ones.

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Flash Player “Square” is out on preview for Linux

Adobe Flash Player 64bit

Adobe released yesterday a preview of Flash Player “Square”. It includes native 64bit support and IE9 hardware acceleration enhancement. Yes, you’ve got it! Adobe is again supporting a 64bit release of their plug-in and for all 3 platforms: Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

I have updated my previous article on surfing the web in 64bit with the new details.

To get more information, jump to Adobe Labs.

Note: there is a free (libre) alternative to Adobe Flash product called Gnash, however it is still far from being stable enough on all web sites to be widely use. But anyway, it is a highly interesting project which have made recent huge improvements towards reliability and speed. You should try Gnash first and if it doesn’t work for you, then go for Adobe.

Update: Flash Player “Square” is now Flash Player 11, and there is a second beta released this August 2011.

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An Icelandic Saga

On the road...We are on the edge to write a new Icelandic saga. In a few days, we will embark on a plane direction: Iceland.

10 years ago we were leaving Iceland after an incredible time there. Now we are going back with our bicycle to explore it differently.

Iceland is an amazing place, but it is a difficult one too, especially on a bike. The weather is harsh, the wind strong, the roads are tricky and bridges only exist on road #1! But Iceland is a magical place, it’s wild, it’s colourful, it’s warm and cold.

Just let’s go exploring it!
Continue reading “An Icelandic Saga”

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How do geeks have fun?

How do computer geeks have fun?
Warning: If you are not a geek, you better not read further for 2 good reasons:

  1. you will not find that funny at all!
  2. you will be scared about the psychic health of geeks and ask the police to arrest them.

While installing a software, I stumble on this small message:

If you are a hardcore computer nerd staring at this file through your favorite text editor, you are probably hunting [the build instructions!] Well it’s not here. […] Because all the build instructions are now in Apache’s cool web-site.[…]

Continue reading to learn more about the context.

Continue reading “How do geeks have fun?”