Posts Tagged ‘mac’

i5 is alive

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

Bought a new iMac. Stock 27″ quad core (i5), I paid AUD$2339. I then went on holiday, so couldn’t even use it until yesterday.

This thing is a fucking monster. The screen is huge – you don’t realise how big it is sitting in the shop, because all the other screens there kind of desensitise you, but when you get it home you realise how god damn huge it is. It’s almost TOO big. And it was an utter bitch to carry home.

The performance is just wonderful. I’ve become more and more frustrated with my Core 2 Duo laptop – it just seems laboured and out of breath and spins its fans up at the slightest load. That machine just seems sluggish to me these days and this was becoming a hindrance in my work – I am *often* waiting for the machine to restart a server, switch apps, whatever – it’s just slow all round.

The new machine is a whole lot faster – a rough factor of 4. It’s got 4GB of memory, soon to be 8, and can take up to 16, which should do for now. It’s got 4 slots, so I can use cheap 2GB modules – the upgrade to 8GB will cost $142.

Basically I’m totally delighted. Apple really nailed it with this machine. The thing is almost too good, since there seems to be little point getting a Pro when you can have this much capacity and performance for such a low price. Check out this review; I agree with everything that guy says.

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Posted in lifestyle | 2 Comments »

i5 or i7

Friday, November 27th, 2009

So, I’m getting a desperately needed new iMac.

I’d been planning to get the i5, but after seeing this report I think I’ll plump for the i7. It’s on sale today for AUD$2,758.01 (don’t forget the 1c).

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Posted in lifestyle | 13 Comments »

Shockingly bad memory performance under Snow Leopard

Monday, October 5th, 2009

I don’t know what caused it, but sometime after upgrading to Snow Leopard the performance of my laptop has dropped through the floor. It’s really bad, especially with video – this 2yo mac can’t play a youtube clip without CPU going to 100% and jerking unwatchably.

I’ve been busy so hadn’t had much chance to investigate, but one thing or another led me to suspect memory performance, so today I ran Xbench. As you’ll see, the results speak for themselves.

Memory Test 15.31

System 23.78

Allocate 116.31 427.14 Kalloc/sec
Fill 70.52 3428.64 MB/sec
Copy 9.67 199.83 MB/sec

Stream 11.28

Copy 10.55 217.93 MB/sec
Scale 10.50 216.93 MB/sec
Add 12.76 271.83 MB/sec
Triad 11.61 248.39 MB/sec

That is shockingly bad and a full order of magnitude lower than expected. There’s something seriously wrong here.

The ram is 2×2GB Kingston 667MHz. It was working fine before and continues to work, just 10x slower than it should. Any ideas?

update: i’m going to list some details to make it easier for others with similar issues to find this post by search.

ram details:

BANK 0/DIMM0:

Size: 2 GB
Type: DDR2 SDRAM
Speed: 667 MHz
Status: OK
Manufacturer: 0×7F98000000000000
Part Number: 0×393955353239352D3031312E4130304C4600
Serial Number: 0×160AA70D

BANK 1/DIMM1:

Size: 2 GB
Type: DDR2 SDRAM
Speed: 667 MHz
Status: OK
Manufacturer: 0×7F98000000000000
Part Number: 0×393955353239352D3031312E4130304C4600
Serial Number: 0×160AE80F

system details:

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro2,2
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.33 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP22.00A5.B07
SMC Version (system): 1.12f5

UPDATE: removing one of the 2GB modules returns speed to normal:

Results 126.95
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.6.1 (10B504)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model MacBookPro2,2
Drive Type FUJITSU MHW2120BH
Memory Test 126.95
System 145.21
Allocate 274.47 1.01 Malloc/sec
Fill 111.52 5422.41 MB/sec
Copy 124.24 2566.05 MB/sec
Stream 112.77
Copy 104.49 2158.22 MB/sec
Scale 106.87 2207.96 MB/sec
Add 121.81 2594.72 MB/sec
Triad 119.98 2566.73 MB/sec

This machine is actually only able to address 3GB of memory; previously it ignored the other 1GB without consequence. Seems it might not be without consequence anymore.

Sucks to only have 2GB of memory but the system is now so much more responsive it’s actually a huge win. I’ll continue like this until further information emerges.

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Posted in lifestyle | 3 Comments »

What’s holding open that port on OSX

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Since I always, ALWAYS forget this, here’s the command to find the process which is holding open, say, port 1900 on osx:

$ lsof -i -P | grep 1900
uTorrent  50937 sho   13u  IPv4  0xaf49b10      0t0    UDP 10.1.1.8:1900

Fucking uTorrent, why the hell is it sitting on 1900? That’s the SSDP/UPnP server-side port, ie. the router should be listening on 1900. Unless it’s planning on advertising SSDP services it can provide, it doesn’t need that port. Wonder what it’s doing.

Oh btw it only shows your processes, sudo if you wanna see ‘em all.

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Snow Leopard only has Ruby 1.8.7

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

A bit of a disappointment – I’d been hoping they’d go with 1.9.1.

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Posted in lifestyle | 2 Comments »

Back to the Future with Apple’s new pricing

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Excited about the new Mac Pro ‘09? You will be if you live in Australia, where Apple offers the thrilling possibility of paying almost $6,000 for the base 8-core model:

New Mac Pro Pricing

But that’s the lowest speed CPU option, with two 2.26GHz CPUs. How about if we want the faster option, with 2.93GHz processors? Let’s configure that:

Mac Pro 2.93GHz

Over $10,000 dollars. No extra RAM, HD or indeed anything else – this is the emptiest box you can buy with the high-speed CPUs. And in fact a prudent buyer would expect it to be about $11,000 once he upgraded to the sweetest nearby spot, getting rid of the useless 1GB DIMMs which come with the “base” model, and adding a couple of other necessary items best factory installed, like a wireless card.

How many people do you know who spend $11k, or indeed even $6k, on a computer, in 2009?

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couchdb: switching to experimental branch

Friday, October 12th, 2007

Current CouchDB development is progressing in an experimental branch named “interface-changes”, and it’s not in trunk yet. As the name implies, the interface is changing and it’s very useful.

To switch your svn checkout to this branch, do this:

svn sw http://couchdb.googlecode.com/svn/branches/interfacechanges/
./bootstrap && ./configure --prefix=/opt/local && make clean && make && sudo make install

You can then have a look at the “documentation” to see some of the new changes.

While still alpha, it’s still a very interesting project. The prospect of getting something like Map/Reduce capability natively in a database is almost too exciting for words, if you’re a data nerd like me. Well, figuratively speaking, Map’s there, but Reduce isn’t yet – still, it’s great to get your hands on what seems sure to become a Big Thing so early. Oh, and in case you were wondering, COUCH stands for “Cluster of Unreliable Commodity Hardware”.

Imagine GFS and Map/Reduce, baked into a single databse, with JSON in/out, pluggable query language, and native REST .. what’s not to love?

Laika’s ThingFish is a Ruby-based competitor. You might think I’d be more interested in that, since it’s in my favourite language! Not so. The very thought of a Database programmed in Ruby actually gives me an instant waking nightmare along the lines of running through treacle, gulliver in lilliputia, 80286SXs with 12MB of RAM, etc. And using mongrel server for a database!

UPDATE: it’s been merged to trunk, so just forget that interface-changes stuff.

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Posted in development, technology | 10 Comments »

Installing CouchDB on MacOSX

Monday, October 8th, 2007

If you, like me, have been keeping an eye on the extremely interesting CouchDB Project then maybe you’ve thought about playing around with it a bit on your Mac. This turns out to be very simple.

I assume you have macports w/ subversion (and XCode, of course) installed already. Most of this comes straight from the Readme but I hate reading those, I just want someone to write what I have to do – maybe you do too, so here you are!

UPDATE: 11th October

Reinstalling after noticing 60 commits in 3 days .. now that’s active development.

(more…)

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Posted in development, programming | No Comments »