Chris Mallinson

Multi-touch is the new interface buzz-word of the last few years, inciting a geek-frenzy after its big screen debut in “Minority Report”.  While such an interface is still a little bit far fetched for the consumer market, the multi-touch concept has made its way to consumers, notably via the iPhone and the trackpads of the Apple notebook computers. Other companies are embracing multi-touch, but I think it’s fair to say that no company has nailed it like Apple. I’ve used many smart phones and computer screens with touch interfaces, and nothing comes close to the natural feel achieved by Apple engineers.

Now, full disclosure – I’ve been called an Apple fanboy – but in this case I have objective proof, and his name is Scott. My son Scott is six years old, and his first six years have been difficult. He was born at 24 weeks gestation, just over a pound and barely able to survive.  He followed an all too common path familiar to his preemie peer group, and came through the experience with several conditions that will challenge him in life.  He is completely deaf, and has also lost much of his vision. The combination of hearing and vision loss make it very difficult to learn communication skills, and to use the tools on which our society has become dependant. Using a mouse is hard, since he finds it difficult to relate the movements of the mouse to a screen that he can only partially see.  Now Scott is a smart kid – he can figure out a lot of complex things by employing his curiosity, and he’s not afraid to try again and again.  He loves looking at pictures of people (and trains/trucks/wheels or course) and since we spend a lot of time in doctors’ offices, his Mom showed him the pictures on her iPhone one time, and he soon figured out that moving his fingers on the screen “did stuff”.  The moment he figured that out, he knew how to use an iPhone. It didn’t take him long to figure out how to switch apps, use the home button, “swipe to unlock” and make phone calls to random people. He even came within a button press of replying to an email from the CEO of my company. We now restrict him to an iPod Touch.

Apple’s touch interface removes a lot of the learning that is required to use a new high-tech device.  One almost needs to forget some of the conditioned impulses, and regress a little bit to use it. The iPad takes this a step further, more closely representing the form factor of everyday objects that we may interact with. This removes a barrier for people with disabilities.

I’ve met a lot of people with challenges that have been overcome with the use of technology. A well known example of this is Stephen Hawking, who speaks with the assistance of a computerized voice. He uses a speech synthesis system that runs on a laptop attached to his wheelchair. This is a fairly common set-up for people with disabilities, whether their disability is purely physical or if they need their device to help them form their thoughts as well as communicate. A set-up like this can get really expensive. A touch-screen laptop like the TuffTalker Convertible costs close to $10,000. Simpler devices that only show a group of pictures and say a phrase when a picture is touched can cost well over $1000. An iPhone or an iPad, with some rudimentary software (examples of which are already showing up in the Apple app store) can do all of this, cost far far less.

People with disabilities will never be a market with huge buying power, but the trend towards accessible, simple products is making the world a more welcoming place, and the classroom more inclusive.

I have a late 2008 15″ MacBook Pro – the first of the unibody models. It’s got 4GB RAM, and it’s an amazing machine.  But like anything I’ve had for more than a year, it’s starting to feel a little slower than I remember. A fresh installation of Leopard always helps, and although defragging hard drives is not something that is often required on a mac, large virtual machine files in the 40-60GB range can mess with the hard drive a bit, and defragging helps this.

This post applies to those people with an ExpressCard slot on a fairly new machine. This will work for all unibody models, as well as some models released prior to that. New MacBook Pro machines, as of summer 2009, have had their ExpressCard slots replaced with SD card readers, with the exception of the 17″ (surfboard) model.

Like 90% of MacBook Pro users, I’ve never used my ExpressCard Slot for anything, and I’ve kept my eye on the market for useful things to put in there. There have always been flash drives made for ExpressCard slots, but the access times have been too slow to make them very useful. Then along came the Wintec Filemate 48GB ExpressCard drive (currently $140 from Tiger Direct).  It has access speeds of 65MB/s for write, and 115MB/s read – fast enough to use as a boot disk, and to handle file operations faster than the fastest hard disks available for the MacBook Pro.

I’ve read lots of reviews of this device, and people seem to have different opinions about the best way to use this fast drive.  Some people suggest that it should be used as a scratch disk for Photoshop, or other programs that do a lot of reading/writing to the HD. A few others have used it as a boot drive for Leopard. That’s what I wanted to try.

I have to say that the first drive I ordered was a dud. It worked as a USB drive (the drive actually can be plugged in via USB, which is immensely helpful) and I even installed Leopard on it via USB, and booted from it. It was very fast, even on a USB interface, but when in the ExpressCard slot, the machine froze when transferring any files larger than a few megs. Had to exchange it. When the new one came, I was all ready.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Partitioned my 250GB drive into 50GB and 200GB partitions, with my old version of Snow Leopard on the 200GB Partition, and an Empty 50GB partition to be used later.
2. Backed up everything via Time Machine, and double backed up my important files to a firewire drive.
3. Installed Snow Leopard to the ExpressCard Drive, making sure to exclude extra language files and printer drivers.
4. Booted into the new instance and ran software update a couple of times. At this point you can migrate your settings from your old system via Time Machine or your hard drive, but I decided to start fresh with a smaller set of applications, and moved my settings over manually and selectively.
5. Install all your applications. I was able to fit all my applications on the new drive for optimum performance, but if you use some huge apps, you may need to install some on your old hard drive.  As you add new applications, you can put them in the default “Applications” directory, or in an applications directory on your old hard drive.
6. Move your user directory. You don’t need to store all your music and videos on your solid state drive. Instructions here.
7. Trim the fat. I used Monolingual and xSlimmer to remove extra language files from installed applications and to remove PowerPC binaries (do this at your own risk!). Surprisingly, this reduces the size of native Apple applications significantly – sometimes 70%. Saved over 3GB doing this.
8. Start dumping redundant files on the 200GB drive, removing system files and everything you don’t need. Do this carefully!  Organize your drive well. Leave your user directory intact, as it is still your main user directory.  I moved my web root over as well (copy your web root, and update Apache to point to it – if you’re into that sort of thing).

At this point, I had used 20GB on my solid state drive, leaving me almost 30GB for new apps. I flirted with the idea of putting a Parallels virtual machine file on the SSD, but I’m not sure I want to fill another 15-20 GB there, and I’m not sure the speed improvements would be worth it. I’m going to try it briefly, and I’ll update this post if it’s worth doing.

The next steps are optional, but since this is a new way of doing things, I wasn’t sure I was ready to trust the drive completely.  I created the 50GB partition so I could have a clone of the drive on my old HD. This way, if the card fails one day, I won’t be screwed. I cloned the drive using Carbon Copy Cloner and I now have an exact copy of my initial installation. You may want to do this every so often, so your clone is up to date. Point your user directory to your other partition for consistency, and you should be able to boot into either one seamlessly.  If you want to free up that 50GB eventually, you can put a boot drive on a firewire or USB drive for safety.

If you want to get all hard core about it, you could even buy multiple ExpressCard drives, and swap between them, loading Windows or Linux on the others.

And now for the results

This thing screams. Seriously. You would not believe how fast this machine is, and it was already a very fast machine.  Safari opens instantly. It was quick before, but now it opens in about 100ms. Most native apps are the same – opening in less than a second. Photoshop opens in four seconds – practically blew my mind.  I’m not going to bother running benchmarks, since those depend so much on other factors, and I’m satisfied that the machine is faster, and significantly so.

I’m not counting on much as far as battery life improvements, since the hard drive will still be doing a lot of the work, but I do notice that the drive does not spin up much at all, and I like the silence.

This has nothing to do with programming, ColdFusion, JavaScript, or things nerdy. It’s far more important that that.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That’s the “seven word summary” of the book, In Defence of Food by Michael Pollan, and it should be required reading for all people who eat. It’s a relatively quick read, and it covers our history of eating from an evolutionary perspective, to the way it has changed in the past hundred or so years. His premise is that most of the things we eat are not actually food. He does not advocate vegetarianism, or any specific diet at all, or the eating of any specific food. He takes a holistic approach to eating that focuses on a total diet of foods that are fresh, unprocessed, and when possible, local. When you eat fresh plants and animals that come from a natural source, it is difficult to go wrong.

He ends the book with some good tips for picking out things that are, in fact, food, and are therefore, good to eat. In summary, they are:

1. If your great-grandmother would not recognize it as food, it is probably not food (squeezable yoghurt tubes, for example.)
2. If it has more than five ingredients, it is likely processed to the point where it is no longer food.
3. If it has any ingredients that you have never heard of, or cannot pronounce, it is probably not food.
4. If it contains high-fructose corn syrop, it is most definately not food.

Read it. It’s only 15 bucks.

I’ve been using Billings for about a year now. It’s a great OSX application for managing clients, projects, and invoices. It’s currently $40, and for the price, it has saved me enough time to be worth it. On the downside, I’ve found it to be less than intuitive on occasion, and I’ve often had to search for a function that really should be apparent. It allows me to create custom invoices, and generate them based on project work, or even monthly invoices for hosting or maintenance.

All that is great, but I’ve begun to expand my use of the program.
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This is for Mac people only – sorry Windows friends. I’ve been looking for this for a while.  Now, I’m pretty hard core, but I’m not hard-core enough to use the command line for all my interactions with MySQL.  If you’ve been using the MySQL Query Browser that can be downloaded form mysql.org, you probably know that it will crash if you breathe on it. I’ve looked at a few of the clients that have come out for MySQL, but none have made me want to shell out money to replace what I had.
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I read a really cool book recently. OK, I listened to it. I’ve recently discovered audio books, which are an awesome to be able to read during a commute, or in my case, while painting the house.

The book is Brain Rules by John Medina. It’s a great introduction to the way the human brain works. It covers the biology of the brain, and much of evolutionary origins of its physiology, and human behavior. It’s fascinating enough by itself, but it really gives some good insights on memory and learning that are very applicable to programmers.
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