Author: koalie

First impressions on Mac OS X 10,7 Lion

I upgraded less than a week ago.

I don’t remember how long it took to download because I was working at the same time. Also, the Mac App Store put the download in the dock and only showed a little progress bar and no information such as total size, completed download, estimated time.

When the download was done, it took me 1h10 to install the new system (an installation window appeared, saying installation would take about 33 minutes, which took slightly more than 40, and then a new window appeared, similar to the first one, indicating installation would take about 20 minutes, which took 30).

And then, everything looked the same. The obvious difference was that the scroll bar of some windows appears at launch and disappears, the bar revealed only when the window is scrolled. At the top right corner of some windows, there is the new icon for “full screen”, in case I want my screen real estate consumed by just this one window. Windows are now resize-able by each side and corner (woohoo!). Back in 2004 when I used a mac for the first time I was looking for that feature.

Mission control is the new exposé and virtual screens. It’s nicely done. The layout in exposé view is pretty (that is, every window of every program minified and stacked behind the program’s icon) and useful: the icon of the program in the foreground of each stack, and then the window(s) opened belonging to that program are stacked. If I put the mouse pointer on a window and click space, I remain in the exposé view but the window maximises and the effect is similar to quick look. Active corners remain active. I had set them up for a particular Exposé action, and I keep using them as before.

The biggest change is natural scrolling on the touchpad. They’ve unified scrolling on Apple devices, bringing the iPhone and iPad scrolling to the touchpad. I’m still not used to it! As though my brain is cabled to adapt my scrolling direction based on the device. Anyway. When I want to read down a document, I’ve got to pull it (scroll up), and when I want to read up a document, I’ve got to push it (scroll down). In the systems preferences, one can choose old-skool scrolling.

I didn’t notice any improvement in system memory, cpu and battery consumption; it seems no better and no worse than OS X 10.6.

I gave Mail.app a try for one full day. I set it up with IMAP with the same config I have on my iPhone. It didn’t work for me, I’m too used to Opera mail, which I resumed using the next day.

iCal presented me with one disappointment. I don’t mind their aesthetic choice of faux-leather and torn paper line below the leather pad, I really miss the left panel that showed the calendars and allowed me to display as many months I could fit in that space. This was convenient to quickly check, uncheck, select + refresh given calendars, and the small months view was convenient when planning, next to the main window in which I showed the current week. They added a year view which is pretty (small months featuring my calendar colours and the more stuff I have on a given day, the darker the colour), but doesn’t make up for the loss of the left panel. The calendars I created or I’m subscribed to appear in some popup window when I click “Calendars” at the top left of the iCal window and stays on while I mouse-over, click a cal, refresh, etc, until I click somewhere else.

I almost forgot to install XCode! But I had to because I you run stuff like CVS or make. This took me ages and I even feared it would never complete. The Mac App Store let me download XCode (it used to be, I think, on one of the installation DVDs), put the dl in progress in the dock, and when it was done, I was shown Launchpad. It looks like my iPad welcome screen, with icons of all my apps. I clicked on install XCode, entered my system password and waited, waited. Waited. Something went wrong, it was stuck, I had to force quit the installation, do it again, and wait, wait. I think it took more than a couple hours (by that time, I was busy doing other stuff, like cooking, entertaining guests, eating, so it may have just taken 2 hours).

Some apps like TextEdit have active window bars; if I click on the document title on that bar I see light grey text, for example “ – Edited” and if I mouse over, I see an arrow. Click the arrow to lock the file, duplicate the file, revert to last opened version and browse all versions. It might make some use of a my local CVS moot.

Amaya works fine. Quicksilver too.

That’s all folks.

The power of hypnosis

Hypnosis was a discussion topic at work the other day. I once blogged about how hypnosis had failed to help me with snowphobia. This was an epic session and funny, come to think of it. But I never wrote about the power of hypnosis. And I am now, because I was once successfully hypnotised.

It was some time during the summer of 1999, during a family vacation in Crete. The family of my boyfriend of the time. His father’s occupation was psychologist with a skill for hypnosis. I was regularly plagued with massive headaches. I had tried to cut down on coffee without visible effects. He offered to try hypnosis on me and I agreed. I don’t recall very much of the session.

He made me lay on a bed in a quiet room and he sat on a chair next to me. He made me close my eyes and listen to him. He said I wouldn’t fall asleep but the state I would be in would be very close. He said I would remember everything. It was true, but I gradually forgot, years after years.

I think is lasted less than a half hour. Near the end, he said my headaches were taken care of. He added they may return and if they did, we were about to work on how to make them go away. He instructed me to think of one word, and to remember it. Then the session was over. I went back to performing my vacation activities, a little dubious.

I didn’t have a single headache for many months and when I had one, it wasn’t massive like before, and it was rare.

As to the magic word that he made me think of —a word that I invented at the time— it still works even today. I don’t have to say it, I just have to think of it, say it in my head, and the headache disappears within seconds. It’s wonderful.

Book: Bel Canto (Ann Patchett)

Amy gave me a book a few years ago, Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett, that I found again a couple weeks ago and that I really enjoyed reading. Amy had liked the book and wrote a note on the first page that she hoped I would enjoy the world the book creates as much as she did. Thanks, my friend, I enjoyed it immensely.

The author creates a wonderful world, where time stops to matter, a world that I knew would end and that I was loath to leave. It isn’t about opera, but the story is weaved around opera. The story is that of a group of terrorists –adult and children– somewhere in South America, who hold hostage forty or so men, and a soprano, during several months.

Here are the quotes that I liked particularly.

They were so shaken by the beauty of her voice that they wanted to cover her mouth with their mouth, drink in. Maybe music could be transferred, devoured, owned. What would it mean to kiss the lips that had held such a sound?

He saw La Sonnambula three nights in a row. He had never sought her out or made himself to be anything more than any other member of the audience. He did not assume his appreciation for her talent exceeded anyone else’s. He was more inclined to believe that only a fool would not feed about her exactly how he felt. There was nothing more to want than the privilege to sit and listen.

No one could see her objectively anyway. Even those who saw her for the first time, before she had opened her mouth to sing, found her radiant, as if her talent could not be contained in her voice ans so poured like light through her skin.

There was a television in this room. A few of them had seen a television before, a wooden box with a curved piece of glass that threw back your reflection in peculiar ways. They were always, always broken. That was the nature of televisions. There was talk, big stories about what a television once had done, but no one believed it because no one had seen it.

His own daughters presented him with a mathematical impossibility, one minute running around the house wearing pajamas covered in images of the blankly staring Hello, Kitty, the next minute announcing they had dates who would be picking them up at seven. He believed his daughters were not old enough to date and yet clearly by the standards of this country they were old enough to be members of a terrorist organization. He tried to picture them, their plastic daisy barrettes and short white socks, picking at the door frame with the sharp tip of a knife.

Russian was by no means his best language, and if his concentration lapsed even for a moment it all became a blur of consonants, hard Cyrillic letters bouncing like hail off a tin roof.

Always we would go to the opera. As young men we would stand in the back for a few rubles, money we did not have at the time. But then jobs came we had seats, and with better jobs came proper seats. You could mark our rise in the world by our position in the opera house, by what we paid and, later, what we were given. Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev, we saw everything that was Russian.

Again and again he sang the chorus, almost whispering for fear someone might hear him, mock him, punish him. He felt this too strongly to think that it was something he could get away with. Still, he wished he could open himself up the way she did, bellow it out, dig inside himself to see what was really there.

“God forgives you,” the priest said.
Beatriz opened her eyes and blinked at the priest. “So it will go away?”
“You’ll have to pray. You’ll have to be sorry.”
“I can do that.” Maybe that was the answer, a sort of cycle of sinning and sorriness. She could come every Saturday, maybe more often than that, and he would keep having God forgive her, and then she would be free to go to heaven.

She closed her eyes and looked for her dark pile of sins, hoping she could release a few more on her own without the help of the priest, thinking that fewer sins would give her a lightness that these new men would recognize. But the sins were gone. She looked and looked behind the darkness of her eyelids but there was not a single sin left and she was amazed.

The mds process was too greedy


Every now and then when my mac is slow, I take a peek in the Activity Monitor, to find out what is the culprit. Today I didn’t find any usual suspect and the only odd bit was the process mds. While it was using barely 10% of the CPU, the memory it used was outrageous. I remember having only 1MB free memory left, and that mds was using 14GB of the virtual memory (this figure stuck, while the real memory one didn’t).

I had learnt that mds is in use for Spotlight indexing. I have no use for Spotlight indexing, because I use other tools or tricks. So I searched for the way to disable Spotlight and did it in the Terminal:

sudo mdutil -a -i off
Password:
/:
 	Indexing disabled.

All of a sudden the process mds jumped from using 14GB of virtual memory to 77MB of virtual memory, whee! And the system memory, of which 1MB was free, reached the comfortable level of 1.7GB, re-whee!

If I ever need Spotlight, the command above is reversed by using “on”.

You’re welcome!

Update of the day after:
It turns out I need that Spotlight indexing after all, if only to search in iCal. <sigh />
mds is on again! until it gets too greedy, that is.

sudo mdutil -a -i on
Password:
/:
 	Indexing enabled.