Torsten Curdt’s weblog

So when I joined joost last year I got a new machine for work. A 17″ MacBook Pro (Core Duo) that replaced my private two year old 17″ Powerbook (G4). And frankly speaking I am not really thrilled.

• Display: Compared to my old Powerbook the MacBook Pro screen basically sucks. It is bright – that’s true! But the variance in brightness is just terrible. Now mine even turned out to get some white spots. Since we wanted to get that fixed under warranty I now got a new machine a few weeks ago. (So my second MacBook Pro!) The homogeneity of the brightness is better – but still not up to the level of the old Powerbook.
• Harddisk: The second MacBook Pro I got came with a 7200 rpm drive. Oh my god! In my Powerbook I also had a 7200 rpm drive – which actually was more quiet than the 5400 rpm of the previous MacBook Pro. Now this one is humming and vibrating so much that I went to an Apple store to get their opinion. At least they agreed that this is not OK like that. Seem like I need to get that fixed, too.
• Light sensor: With the MacBook Pro the light sensor sometimes seem to get into a feedback loop – the screen light influences the sensor. If you have your screen on auto dimming that can lead to an interesting dimming game. On, off, on, off…
• The case: This machine is only 2 months old now but the case already starts to make noises when you just lay your hand onto it.
• Wireless:In certain situations I had major problems with wireless where the Powerbook just worked flawlessly.

After I switched to Mac I used to smile at people having these cheap looking windows laptops. I used to tell people “just get a Mac” when they were frustrated with their machines. Now I refrain from doing that. In the end Apple just does not live up their previous quality standards anymore. A sad story! Does this necessarily have to come with growth and success they are seeing?

All this plus the lock-in they are trying to pull (in all sorts of areas) becomes more and more annoying. Mac OSX is still the platform I prefer to work on ….but – things have been better. I hope Apple does not ignore voices like mine.

Just recently I looked into creating Debian packages in java. Funny enough Stefan was also blogging about this. Deployment is so much easier with apt-get. I just love it. Why not leverage that also for java deployments?

So I came up with this little project called jdeb. It provides an ant task to create a Debian package right from you build system. It’s just a first, fairly simple version and I hope to provide a maven plugin as well. But it works …and of course contributions or feedback is welcome.

Just recently I was really annoyed because although I am subscribed to my flickr feed “new pictures from contacts” I was missing so many pictures! So I contacted the support and as it turns out they only provide 5 pictures per contact in that feed. Now this sucks and pretty much and renders this aggregated feed useless to me. Subscribing to each and individual contact is a bit cumbersome. So I suggested to at least provide an OPML export for the contacts.

Ben from the flickr support was so kind to write a little service until this has been fixed. You put in your name and it uses the flickr API to generate an OPML file for you. Sweet!!

I was really positive surprised by the flickr support. Way to go, Ben! And don’t forget to open source your little tool :)

So last christmas I gave it a try and ordered a picture book dirctly at Apple through iPhoto. There are many businesses offering the same kind of service at a much lower price …but what the heck! …it’s so convenient from iPhoto and I just wanted to give it a try.

Designing the book was quite easy. You create a new book, pick a design and cover type and then you can just drag the pictures onto the pages from you library. But there are quite a few annoyances.

• After a while I changed my mind and instead of a hard cover I wanted to get it as soft cover. Sorry, can’t change it! (At least I could not find how) You would have to create a new book and start from scratch. Too much work – so I left it as a hard cover.
• The designs are pretty strict. If you have more to write than what fits into the text boxes you are screwed. No way of altering individual pages. No way of adding additional text to it.
• Anyway after a while the book was finished and iPhoto took my personal information and uploaded everything to Apple. I would have expected they have someone to print them somewhere more local but instead I had to pay big bucks to get it shipped from the US.

When it arrived the packaging was Apple like in a cool white-grey box. Nice! But when I looked at the book I was a little disappointed. The front picture was just glued onto the cover. Not looking very professional. Then I opened it. Printing stripes! Noticeable especially on the black pages. Quite terrible already but even worse – they did not cut the pages correctly. And what no one told me before – the last page (on the inside of the cover) there is an Apple logo and it says “Done with a Mac”. Sorry, but I am not paying around 50 EUR plus a shipping of around 10 EUR and then have advertisement on the last page.

Convenient or not – again Apple failed to deliver. The sad point is that this is becoming increasingly common these days.

If you are also one of the poor fellows trying to get Ubuntu installed in Parallels I hope this entry can save you some time. Me in particular tried to get the server version installed as I wanted to start with a minimal virtual machine.

So what I did is to download the Ubuntu server iso. Well, to save you some time and traffic – don’t! You can install successfully but after the next reboot all you get is a screen of “Unknown interrupt or fault at EIP 00000060 c0100295 00000294″. So what’s next? Google said: “Download the alternate image. That one should do it!” Great! If it only would work as advertised. There is no such thing as a server install on the stupid CD. (Dear, Ubuntu community – WTF?!) So the only way I could get Ubuntu installed was to use the expert install and skip(!) the software selection/installation part. That will leave you with the base install which is booting just fine. (I used the 2.7.10 generic kernel). After you’ve adjusted your “/etc/apt/sources.list” you should be ready to rock and you can install just what you need.