My overall impression is that it’s slower than the beta and slower than Safari 3. But that’s gut feel, not with hard data. The “loading” bar is also far less obvious now, and I always find myself wondering whether Safari has stopped working because it takes a while to even start showing activity.

Is there anything that’s more nerve-wracking than taking down a perfectly functioning server in order to do something with it? This morning I had to move two servers (a PowerMac G5 running Leopard Server, and a Mac Mini running 10.4) a whopping 6 feet in order to put them onto a dedicated power circuit. I also needed to install software updates.

Before I ever install any updates on a server, I clone the disk with SuperDuper or CCC. That means I also have to first shut down all the services and pull the system off the net, clone the disk, boot the clone to make sure it’s ok, boot the normal disk, do the update, and test everything. Coupled with having to move the computers, 5 disk drives, and a D-Link switch, I didn’t have a fun few hours this morning.  I didn’t update the Leopard Server machine because I couldn’t get the alternate disk to boot. It turns out that the Iomega portable drive I was using (I love these little disks!) wasn’t getting enough power from the G5’s front connector and needed to be plugged in the back. By the time I figured that out, it was too late, the museum staff people were coming in and I had to have the server running again. So I’ll have to do the update another day.

Now one of the remote users on the updated Mini is having trouble getting in via ssh. So is it due to the move, the upgrade, or something completely unrelated? Having tried a bunch of things and looked at the log files, I’m leaning towards “something else”.

The one good thing that comes from this kind of thing is that you learn whether all the services are properly set up to start at boot time.

Just a quick plug for some Mac applications that make my life a lot easier.

Namely. It’s a free application launcher for Mac OS X 10.5. I used to use MenuStrip in 10.4 but really only used it for the Quick Launcher feature. When I upgraded to 10.5, I found Namely, which does just one thing. You set a hot-key combination that lets you pop open the Namely window. Then type in a few letters of the application you want to launch, and hit enter. I find myself using the dock less and less these days.

Fluid. Another Mac OS X 10.5 only application. It lets you build a “site specific browser” i.e. a separate application out of a browser window. I’ve wrapped my Google Calendar in Fluid and just keep it running all the time.

VoodooPad Pro. I use it for two things. I have one document to keep track of stuff I’m doing. I have another that I lock with a password to keep track of all my passwords. I haven’t done any scripting with its built-in Lua script engine, but I keep meaning to…

FlySketch. I use this for screen grabs all the time. One great use is to capture those web receipts you get when you buy something or pay for something. I grab them with FlySketch and put them into VoodooPad Pro.

Li’l Snitch. A great little app that lets me know what’s happening on my net connection.

I’ve been a Vonage customer for 3+ years now. Lately, though, the vultures and doomsayers have been close at hand as Vonage gets sued over and over. Since I have two lines, our home phone and my office phone with Vonage, I thought I’d hedge my bets and move my home phone to Verizon VoiceWing. The main appeal of going with VoiceWing was that they could actually supply E911 at my location.

That was a bit of a disaster. They sent the new modem pretty quickly, but the installation never worked. I spent about 3-4 hours on the phone with them over a couple of days and they were unable to get it to work.

There was nothing particularly weird about my setup. In fact, my Vonage adapters are sitting in pretty much the same configuration, right behind my main router. What became apparent after talking to the VoiceWing people is that they don’t have the capacity to deal with installation problems at all.

Luckily, I was able to cancel before the first month was up and got (most of) my money back.

Meanwhile, I’ll stick with Vonage for VoIP.

From the “it’s the little things that matter” department – I just saw changethemargins.com written up in the January/February issue of World Ark, a newsletter published by Heifer International. The idea is simple:

What if you could get companies to adopt narrower margins as their printing standard? It would result in a lot less paper consumption. Which of course means saving a lot of trees and cutting down on a lot of waste…but only if a massive amount of people changed their margins.

Not only would this save trees, it would save the energy and pollution associated with the entire paper-making and recycling industry.

Now, I’ve been finding myself turning into a whitespace kind of person. Less clutter, more visual appeal. But I’m willing to take the challenge to trim the fat, as it were, in the future.

This should also inspire us to look at the other places where we can make a small, seemingly insignificant difference. If enough people do it, it starts to add up.

Side note: Almost two years ago, I wrote about “going green” in my computing environment to save money. I’m happy to say that I’ve managed to save a noticeable amount on my electricity bill, and thus my carbon footprint. It’s sometimes a bit hard to tell, with kids coming home from college, changing weather patterns, etc. but electricity use in our house is trending down.

So I’m going to blame my recent lack of postings on my blog to the fact that, like Hobu, I was finding that a Plone-based blog was not so easy to deal with. I decided to jump into the blogging mainstream with WordPress, so here we go.

Along with the switch to WordPress, I’m going to expand from mostly geo-related topics to things I’m dealing with at MIT as well. So for those of you who want exclusively geo-news, link to the geo category and the geo feed in Atom, RSS, or RSS2.

I still have to switch over the Feedburner feeds and tweak a few more bits and pieces, but overall the new version is ready to go.

As I mention in the About page, I’ve kept the old blog intact so that all the permalinks still work.