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:
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.
Backed up everything via Time Machine, and double backed up my important files to a firewire drive.
Installed Snow Leopard to the ExpressCard Drive, making sure to exclude extra language files and printer drivers.
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.
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.
Move your user directory. You don’t need to store all your music and videos on your solid state drive. Instructions here.
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.
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.
First thing’s first. Don’t play the lottery. It’s a tax on people who are bad at math. Spend your money on something else that brightens your day, or put it in a savings account and go on a vacation every few years on what you will save. However – if you feel pressured into joining an office lottery pool, or if you just cannot resist the urge for some low risk gambling, here are the ONLY ways you can help your chances.
You cannot increase your chance of winning. Period.
This important. The numbers you pick, no matter what they are, have no better or worse chance of winning, no matter what they are and no matter what numbers came up last week. But you can increase the amount you will win, if you do win. Many lottery jackpots are shared between multiple winners, and many smaller prizes are determined by the amount of winners at that level. In both of these cases, you have the opportunity to choose numbers that are less likely to be chosen by others. How many people will choose the numbers 20,21,22,23,24,25,26? Most people tend to think that it would be super unlikely for those numbers to show up. But the truth is that they have just as good of a chance as any combination.
The fact is that a lot of people use “quick pick” options to choose their numbers, but many office pools choose their own numbers, and use them every week. Also, many superstitious people like to pick their own number. The key is that those numbers are very often related to numbers that have personal meaning. Like dates. This is key. The numerical range of dates does not have the same distribution as the possible lottery numbers. There are no months with 32 days – 32 is a good number to start with when picking numbers for the lottery.
So. If you must play the lottery, pick high numbers, and group them in ways that look like they would never be picked.
There are lots of way to recovered from being burned out. Physical activity is near the top of my list, as is a beer and a hockey game. Another good way is to direct your brain in a different direction for a while. Reading about something new works great.
I’m always torn between reading a book about a new technology that could potentially further my career and a book about something totally cool and fascinating, but unrelated to my field. There are many times when I find a book that satisfies both criteria, like some of the books I’ve read on cryptography (The Code Book, by Simon Singh is fantastic). I’ve also been reading a lot of books focussed on Biology lately too. I find it fascinating that the process of natural selection, by definition, can always find the best solution to a problem, given a specific toolset, and enough time. Often though, the books I’m interested in reading have nothing to do with my field.
I often fall into the habit of reading programming book after programming book, and I find that after a while I start to skim, just trying to finish the book as quickly as I can, which is a terrible way to learn. It’s not a lack of interest in the subject matter, but a desire to let a different part of my brain take the reigns from time to time. It’s been shown that sleep can actually help your brain learn a concept more than staying up all night reading about it. I think that letting your mind switch gears for a little while does the same sort of thing.
My Conclusion? When you feel burned out, find a book that totally fascinates you. Read a bit of it every day, even in the time you set a side for work. It will rejuvenate your mind and make you work harder.
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:
If your great-grandmother would not recognize it as food, it is probably not food (squeezable yoghurt tubes, for example.)
If it has more than five ingredients, it is likely processed to the point where it is no longer food.
If it has any ingredients that you have never heard of, or cannot pronounce, it is probably not food.
If it contains high-fructose corn syrop, it is most definately not food.
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. Continue reading →
I’ve hated almost every CSS framework I have come across. I’ve always viewed CSS as something very unique to every site. Since every single view of your content involves parsing a CSS file, I feel it really needs to be as optimized as possible. CSS frameworks have always added a bunch of code that would never be used. Continue reading →
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.
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.