Category: software

The Amiga’s 30th Anniversary

The Amiga 30th Anniversary Event at the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View this weekend looks like it should be really fun. Too bad I’m in NJ and not CA.

I get nostalgic about the Amiga once in a while. I keep thinking I should try the emulator from Amiga Forever, but I never get around to it. (There’s enough current technology that I don’t have time for; not much point in messing around with a 30-year-old dead OS. Heck, I’ve done almost nothing with the Windows 10 preview that’s installed on my laptop, and working with that would actually be useful.)

The Amiga 500 was my third computer. (The first was a TRS-80, and the second was a Commodore 64.) I bought it when I was in college. It was the first computer I owned that had a real OS, and multi-tasking, and all that good stuff. I could actually use it for some of my programming assignments! (Prior to that, they were all done on the school mainframe, or on shared Unix machines.) I remember that picking up a copy of the Lattice C compiler was a big deal for me. It wasn’t hugely expensive, but it was a significant purchase for a college student.

I wonder if I have printouts of any of my old programs around here somewhere. If so, it’s probably best to leave them buried. I’m sure the memories are better than the actual code!

Trying out Blogo

So now I’m trying out Blogo, another Mac blogging tool. It’s kind of nice, but there doesn’t seem to be any option to view/edit a post in HTML; there’s only the rich-text WYSIWYG editor.

So I think maybe this would be a good tool for someone who didn’t want to get too fiddly and just wanted to stick to WYSIWYG editing. But I know I’m going to want to at least look at the HTML once in a while.

It’s kind of a shame that it doesn’t have HTML editing, since, otherwise, it’s got a really nice user interface. But, I think MarsEdit is more my speed, if I’m going to use a desktop editor at all.

trying out MarsEdit

I’m writing this post in MarsEdit, just to see if I like it better than the normal WordPress admin interface. So far, it works fine, but I’m not sure it’s that much better than just using the WordPress admin. I think maybe if I could memorize the keyboard shortcuts, it would be quite nice.

I’ll keep it on my Mac until the trial period runs out, at least, then make up my mind if it’s worth spending money on.

I’d heard of MarsEdit before, of course, but hadn’t really thought about it much lately. I was reminded of it when listening to MPU 264 with John Gruber. He uses MarsEdit with Movable Type, which I did not realize was still around and being used as a viable blogging platform. (Shows how little I know!) I’ve never been that interested in Gruber’s blog, Daring Fireball, but he does have an interesting history, and has been involved in some interesting work, so that episode of MPU was definitely worth listening to. And of course his big thing is Markdown, which the MPU hosts also love, but which I’ve never been able to talk myself into trying. I like the general idea, but I just haven’t been able to find a good use case for it, for myself.

iTunes 12.2

I’ve got today off from work, since tomorrow is Independence Day. I really didn’t make any plans, so I’m sitting around at home right now just reading a book and messing around. I wanted to do some stuff in iTunes, but geez, the new version of iTunes is a mess. The audiobook section is messed up (none of the books show up in the “authors” view). And trying to get to the “apps” section locks up iTunes entirely, and I have to force quit it. Other people are reporting really major screw-ups with their music libraries, like having millions of copies of the same song randomly added to a playlist, and stuff like that. (Luckily, my music library seems to be fine, for now.) Here’s hoping they get a fixed version out soon. (And that they maybe learn from this and do a bit more testing next time?)

I guess I should turn off the computer and get back to my book. Or, better yet, go outside!

new Evernote pricing and plans

Evernote announced new plans and pricing today. In a nutshell, there’s a new “plus” plan for $25/year, and the “premium” plan is now $50/year. The old premium plan was $45/year, so that’s a fairly minor increase. My premium subscription is up in early 2016. Rather than renew, I’ll probably switch to the “plus” plan, as it seems to be more than adequate for my needs.

I’ve known for a while that they were likely to make some pricing changes this year, but wasn’t sure what they were going to do. I was a little bit afraid that they might decide to make their premium plan $99/year or something like that. I’m glad to see that they haven’t bumped it up too much, and have actually added a cheaper plan that should be more than enough for many people.

Text Editors

Possibly the most time-honored and effective way for a programmer to procrastinate on his or her work is to spend time messing around with text editors and/or IDEs. There’s a good case to be made that spending time selecting the right editor/IDE, and tweaking it appropriately, pays off in spades, due to increased productivity over time. But honestly, I can’t say that I haven’t sometimes spent time messing around with my text editor or IDE just as a procrastination tactic.

Yesterday, a new beta of Sublime Text 3 was released, along with the new version of Komodo Edit/IDE, so it makes sense to think about editors a bit.

I bought a personal copy of Komodo IDE about a year ago, and I’ve been using it on the Mac and on Windows, mostly for PHP programming. And now I’m using it for Ruby too. It’s a little heavy to use it as a general text editor. For quick text file editing, I’m using Notepad++ on Windows and TextMate on the Mac. But Komodo is pretty good for PHP and Ruby.

I messed around with Sublime Text a few years ago, but didn’t really like it enough to stick with it. (And, at the time, I didn’t really have a good use case for it anyway, given the kind of work I was doing then.) Occasionally, I think about giving it another try.

At work, I don’t really need to worry about text editors much, since nearly all of the work I do is being done in either MorphX (the Dynamics AX IDE) or Visual Studio. Both of those environments work fine, for their intended use, and (in both cases) it wouldn’t be realistic to consider using a different tool for text editing.

But, for my recreational programming, whether that be PHP, Ruby, or whatever else, it’s nice to have a good programmer’s editor handy. I’ve already shelled out the $59 to upgrade my personal license for Komodo IDE to version 9. (If I thought I was going to need to do any serious Ruby development, I’d probably give Sublime Text another shot and see if it was significantly better than Komodo.)

I keep thinking I should be a real programmer, and learn more about VIM and/or Emacs, but I never quite get around to it. VIM Adventures looks like it might be a fun way to learn VIM. (Of course, I’ve been saying that I should learn more about VIM and Emacs for years; I just found blog posts from 2008 and 2005 saying basically the same thing I just wrote here.)

taxes and reminders and things

I’m proud to say that my taxes are done, and February isn’t even over yet. (OK, I’m using an accountant now, and not doing them myself, but I’m still proud. I had to get all my paperwork together, make an appointment, show up for the appointment, etc. Yes, it was more work when I did the taxes myself, but it’s still work.)

I’m going to need to pay (federal and state) estimated taxes for 2015, though, and I’m worried that I’m going to forget one or more payments. I’d like to just set up scheduled payments through my bank or something like that, but I’m not sure that would work out. I’m sure the bank would send the money to the IRS (and State of NJ), but I’m not sure it would get credited right without the proper form attached. The IRS has something called EFTPS for electronic payments, but I don’t think I can just schedule all four payments at once and forget about it. (And I’m not sure I trust an IRS-run web site…)

So I think I’m going to have to use some kind of fancy electronic reminder system for this. A while back I mentioned that I’d been messing with Gneo and Things. Well, I pretty much gave up on both of them, and I’m just sticking with Evernote reminders for my “fancy reminder” needs. I’m sure I can create reminders for the estimated tax payments in Evernote, but I still kind of feel like I should be doing something fancier.

I’ve been listening to the Mac Power Users podcast a lot lately, but they still haven’t quite talked me into trying out OmniFocus, the fanciest of GTD / task management / reminder systems. I’m probably over-thinking this. I should just write down “pay estimated taxes” on the appropriate days on my Doctor Who wall calendar, and I’ll be fine.

Coherent

Coherent was a Unix clone operating system for PCs that was somewhat popular in the late 80s and early 90s. I have fond memories of buying a copy via mail-order, probably from an ad in the back of Dr. Dobb’s, and probably for $99, and using it on my PC at home. In the days before Linux, Coherent was a great way for an individual with a modestly-powered PC and a few bucks to spare to learn all about Unix. Coherent came with a huge manual. (An actual book, printed on paper. Not just a PDF or a bunch of text files.) And it was fairly well-written and well-organized. You could really learn a lot about Unix by reading through the introductory material in that book, then messing around with things on your PC, then going back to the book for reference.

Just recently, the sources and documentation for Coherent were published on the web, including that gigantic manual. I had held onto my copy of the manual for years after I’d stopped using Coherent, just because it was such a good general reference, but I finally threw it out some time ago. Well, now I have a nice PDF copy if I ever need to refer back to it again! I’m tempted to try and get Coherent running in a VM on my current PC, but it’s probably not worth the bother. It would be kind of fun though.

Windows 8.1: almost there

I’m almost done with my desktop machine rebuild. (See here, here, and here for previous posts.)

I had a lot of trouble with the SATA  IDE vs. AHCI issue I described in one of the earlier posts. I got the Windows 8 install done with SATA set to IDE mode in the BIOS, but I wanted to see if there was any way to switch it back to AHCI. I was hopeful that whatever bug prevented it from working in Windows 8 was fixed in 8.1, or in one of the many Windows updates that came down post-install.

Well, first, I found out that, once you’ve installed Windows 8 with the BIOS set to IDE mode, you can’t just switch it back, since Windows doesn’t detect the change automatically. So doing that just results in a boot failure. This blog post describes a way to deal with that; basically, boot into safe mode right after changing the BIOS and Windows will reconfigure itself. But, in my case, that didn’t help.

I also noticed that an optional update for NVIDIA SATA controller was available from Windows Update. I was hopeful that it would fix the problem, but installing that update causes Windows to crash on boot, so that’s no good either. I had to use system restore to remove that update and boot into Windows again. (Oh, and getting to system restore in Windows 8.1 is a bit of a challenge, but that’s another story.) I have a feeling that, maybe, some magic combination of installing that update, booting into safe mode, and switching back to AHCI mode might work, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. If I feel adventurous at some point, I might try the SATA driver found here. But I’ll want to make sure I have a restore point, a full backup, and ample spare time before messing with that.

I’m not sure how much of a performance penalty there is in running in IDE mode rather than AHCI. I searched for some info on that, but didn’t find anything definitive. The main performance advantage with AHCI would be related to Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which would increase performance on some drives in some scenarios. In my case, I’m not sure if it would be enough of a difference to bother with.

Regardless of all that, the machine seems much faster now than it did before all this. I imagine most of the performance bump is just due to the clean install, but some of it may be from Windows 8.1 being a bit faster than Windows 7 in some ways. So I’m mostly satisfied that all this work wasn’t for naught.

Oh, and just for yuks, I decided to run the Windows System Assessment Tool on the desktop PC, and on my ThinkPad, to see what the performance difference is between the new SSD in the ThinkPad vs. the old-fashioned drive in the desktop. And it’s a doozy!

Using the command “winsat disk -drive c”, I got the following numbers on the desktop:

> Run Time 00:00:15.75
> Disk  Random 16.0 Read                       0.86 MB/s          2.9
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   84.51 MB/s          6.3
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                  68.13 MB/s          5.9
> Average Read Time with Sequential Writes     6.986 ms          5.3
> Latency: 95th Percentile                     121.125 ms          1.9
> Latency: Maximum                             475.244 ms          3.7
> Average Read Time with Random Writes         13.882 ms          3.6
> Total Run Time 00:01:07.41

And here are the numbers on the laptop:

> Run Time 00:00:00.63
> Disk  Random 16.0 Read                       411.49 MB/s          8.2
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   524.08 MB/s          8.1
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                  375.03 MB/s          8.0
> Average Read Time with Sequential Writes     0.121 ms          8.8
> Latency: 95th Percentile                     0.302 ms          8.8
> Latency: Maximum                             0.981 ms          8.9
> Average Read Time with Random Writes         0.112 ms          8.9
> Total Run Time 00:00:06.86

So, yeah, that’s a big difference!

My big takeaway from all this messing around is that my desktop PC is definitely near the end of it’s useful life. I’m not going to want to upgrade it again, past Windows 8.1. So I think I’ll keep using it as-is for the foreseeable future, then, maybe in a year or so, consider a new machine. Maybe when Windows 10 comes out.

For the past 20 years or so, I’ve always had a Windows box at home as my main desktop computer, generally in a mid-tower case sitting on the floor next to my desk. But I’m starting to rethink that. Depending on what happens with Windows 10, and what happens in my professional life, I may switch over to a Mac Mini as my desktop machine, and just keep a Windows laptop for the stuff I really need Windows for. I’m definitely using my MacBook a lot more often than either my ThinkPad or desktop PC at this point. But I don’t really need to make a decision on that yet.

slow progress on my desktop rebuild

I didn’t get too far with my desktop PC rebuild last night. I got as far as getting Windows 8 installed, and I got started on installing the many pending Windows updates. I left the PC on when I went to bed, hoping that maybe the updates would be all installed when I woke up, but that didn’t work out. I had to go through a couple more install/reboot cycles to get everything cleared out, to get to the point where I could do the Windows 8.1 upgrade. At this point, I’ve done that successfully, and did a little work on copying stuff from my backup drive back to my main drive.

But I hit a snag when trying to copy my iTunes library back over. That’s a really big folder, and the copy runs OK for about 45 minutes, but then the USB drive just… disappears… and the copy fails. I can get the USB drive going again by simply unplugging it and plugging it back in, but that’s not a good solution for a copy that would take four hours, if it was running smoothly.

So I did some research, and found this blog post from the Windows USB core team. If the issue described there is indeed my problem, then it’s fixed in a Windows update. So I’m giving up on the file copy stuff for now, and installing all the Windows 8.1 pending updates. Then, we’ll try it again.

If it’s not the issue, then I think I’m going to have to crack open that USB case, remove the drive, and mount it in the PC internally. I’m hoping it won’t come to that. But it would likely allow the copy to run much more quickly.

When I think about all the work that’s required to get a functioning Windows 8.1 machine set up, given a Windows 8 DVD and key, it’s really quite frustrating. It really seems like, with a little effort, Microsoft could shorten the process considerably. There are so many things wrong with the process as it is. Why can’t we go straight from Windows 8 to 8.1 without installing every single Windows 8 update? For that matter, why can’t someone with a Windows 8 key download an 8.1 ISO, and skip Windows 8 entirely? And if you’re going to require that people install 8.1 from the Windows store, why not set things up so that at least that’s done from an updated install image that includes all the 8.1 updates? The current process is basically the worst of all possibilities: Install Windows 8 RTM. Apply all updates. Download & install Windows 8.1 RTM. Apply all updates.

Well, I needed to vent about that. I feel a little better. I’m going to go back to watching Netflix now.