Habemus Tigris!

This is a post unrelated to the usual topics haunting this blog (not that there's been many of those lately), but since so many people on the net are searching for information on upgrading to the latest Mac OS, "Tiger", and since before my upgrade I (a) found a lot of very helpful infomation, but (b) still took a bit of a blind leap because very little of what I found pertained to my specific setup, I'd like to contribute a report of my experience with ze Tiger.

This post should be of particular interest to people with a setup similar to mine, which isn't a very unusual one, but most information out on the web right now deals with upgrading newer, faster machines. Hopefully this will help people with slightly older machines who are doubtful about upgrading.

I use a Powerbook G4, bought back during the short-lived titanium-chassis era (yes, the paint is chipped):

• Specs: 667 MHz, 1 GB RAM, 400 Mb/s Firewire, 16 MB ATI Rage Video, CD-RW drive, original IBM 44 GB hard drive.
  
• Peripherals: Advueu flat-panel external monitor, HP 3570c ScanJet scanner, LaCie d2 200 GB external Firewire drive, Altec Lansing speakers, Logitech Cordless Mouseman Optical, Epson C80 inkjet printer, and HP LaserJet 2300n printer.
  

First of all, unless you want your hair to fall out in frustration, do not even consider anything but a clean install. No, I do not mean the "Archive & Install" option provided by the installer, but a true-blue, bona fide, wiping-out-your entire-hard-drive-before-you-do-anything install. It sounds dangerous, but it isn't if you take the right precautions. It will make your computer run faster and better after the upgrade, it will be an opportunity to get rid of a lot of the crud accumulated on your drive over the years, it will force you to make sure all your applications are up-to-date, and it will prevent over 90% of the problems people have been having with their installations.

I wouldn't suggest installing any other way. All reports so far suggest that Tiger is a complex beast with many unresolved issues of compatibility with third-party software. More than just an upgrade, it is a philosophical redesign of the system, and this is a fact that bears many technical consequences. Your system, even if it is just a few months old, has by now accumulated thousands of preferences, settings, drivers, and configuration files. Because of the changes deep down in the system's core, many of these files are guaranteed to clash with the new environment. They will make your machine groan, crawl and crash, instead of growl, pounce and dismember.

The good news is that if you erase and install, the upgrade will be safe and painless. It might take a long time, though—it took me three nights of leaving the machine up, backing up stuff. Note that you'll also need a big external Firewire drive to do it properly, or at least a big networked drive on which you can store your files during the installation. My advice if you don't own a Firewire drive is to get one before you upgrade: it'll be worth it for other purposes, too, because these drives are enormously useful for regular backups (which everyone should be doing anyway) and for storing ever-bigger pictures, movies, and iTunes libraries.

So, in short, what you should do before you install is:

• Make sure your main and your backup drives are both healthy using a utility such as Apple's Disk Utility, Norton Disk Doctor, or Alsoft Diskwarrior.
  
• Burn a copy of all your important documents, pictures, audio files, etc. onto CDs or DVDs. You don't need to do this for audio files for which you own the original CD, but all downloaded music you care about should be backed up.
  
• Make a bootable clone of your entire drive (if you don't know how to do this, see below) with a utility such as Carbon Copy Cloner. Many backup applications can do this as well—I used Intego's Personal Backup X3.
  
• Boot from your external drive and use it for a little while to make sure you can work from it just as you can from your internal one.
  

More thorough instructions on the above procedure can be found here. Once you've carried it through, you can erase your installation drive knowing that if anything goes wrong, you have two backups of all your important documents and one backup of your whole system. Make sure, however, before you click on that "Initialize" button, that you have written down all the registration codes for software you've purchased. You'll need to re-install them later on.

The next step, once your drive has been wiped clean, is to install Tiger itself. The process is simple and self-explanatory, and not much different from installing any application. Since your drive is clean, it'll also be fairly quick (it took 30 minutes on my system to install everything from the core sytem to X11 down to the Chinese version of the OS).

I've heard good things about using Migration Assistant to re-create users and import their data. It seems to work very well for all Apple apps. I actually created new users with the same usernames as before and imported all files manually (synchronizing Mail with my IMAP account to create my mail folders afresh, instead of importing them with the Assistant, took the longest), but from all reports I've read, the easier approach seems to work well too.

Re-installing your applications is a little trickier. Dragging and dropping them into the Applications folder won't work for all of them, and you should make sure, via the user manual or the manufacturer's website, that dragging and dropping is the appropriate installation method for the application before you attempt it. In some cases you might have to go back to the original installer so that the app is properly grafted onto the new system. In all cases, check for updates which the manufacturer may have released to ensure Tiger-compatibility.

At this point you should be done, and Tiger should run glitch-free. Make sure upon first boot that you allow ample time—one or two hours—for Spotlight to build its indexes of your drives. Your system will run slower during this period. After that, it should feel at least as snappy as it was before and Spotlight should be very fast.

My results so far (2 days):

• Even though it is an older model, with relatively little video RAM and without the Velocity Engine, the machine definitely runs faster on Tiger than on Panther. Whether this was accomplished through the purging of my three-year-old drive or the new system itself I can't tell. Most likely it is a result of both.
  
• No conflicts so far on the apps I use most, besides the Apple apps: Microsoft Word v.X, Excel v.X, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Dreamweaver.
  
• I would have purchased this software just for Spotlight and Dictionary. Not having to rely on Sherlock for dictionary searches makes the whole thing usable at last. Besides, dictionaries are supposed to be authoritative, not present you with a myriad different results from different sources the way Sherlock did. And after getting used to Spotlight (takes about 15 mins), you may never use the Finder again to open a file or launch an application.
  
• Printing to the Epson and the LaserJet both work fine.
  
• Dashboard is nice, and I think many people who think it is just eye candy haven't understood it well. Imagine having a bunch of useful little applications to do things like checking the weather, tracking stock market changes, and converting live between currencies or offline between units. Now imagine having all those little apps filling up your Dock and your screen. If they're not on the Dock, though, it is a pain to find them and launch them every time you need them (although less so now that Spotlight is around). Imagine also having to switch from one to other every time you want to, say, check the weather and and your big market winnings. Dashboard takes all the little apps, renames them widgets along the way, and provides something like a parallel desktop for them. You keep using the Dock to launch massive things like Excel and Photoshop, to actually edit documents, and you switch to the Dashboard quickly when you need to check the time in Mumbai or look something up in the dictionary. It is very convenient.
  
• My experience with Dashboard is that it is not slow or as much of a memory-hog as some reports claim. Then again I have 1 GB RAM. Then again that's hardly unusual these days. YMMV.
  
• Both Safari and Mail feel faster. I, too, am not to thrilled about the new Mail interface, but the program feels more solid, somehow.
  
• No noticeable problems with the Powerbook fan running all the time, as some people have reported. Again, YMMV.
  
• Mounting external volumes has worked fine so far for both samba and NFS protocols.
  

Pending testing:

• The HP scanner. Need to download about 200 MB worth of drivers and utilities from HP first.
  
• Burning CDs.
  
• Re-installing and testing unix utilities using Fink.
  
• Adobe Illustrator.
  
• Automator.
  

(As soon as I posted this, Sofware Update jumped out of the Dock to announce the first update to Tiger, 10.4.1.)
 
[Tags: Apple, Mac OS X, Tiger.]

Y es que acaso... ¿no era eso lo que querían?

¿Que no funciona la extradición? ¿Que no fumiga la fumigación? ¿Que el Plan Colombia nanay cucas? ¡Al contrario!, si lo que está es funcionando a las mil maravillas:

Bogotá, Colombia (AP). Un alto funcionario de una agencia antidrogas de las Naciones Unidas predijo que los precios de la cocaína en los Estados Unidos y Europa subirán el año que viene, reflejando los frutos de una campaña de seis años financiada por los EEUU para erradicar la producción de droga en Colombia.

(Taducción al colombiano: el año entrante más plata para armas y sobornos.)
 

El último capo

Hace cinco minutos se fue, extraditado, Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela para Estados Unidos. El último capo, el verdadero capo di tutti capi, el que sobrevivió –comercial y militarmente– a la guerra contra el Cartel de Medellín de Pablo Escobar, el que en algún momento suministró 80% de la cocaína consumida en EEUU, el que por su colaboración a la campaña Samper Presidente desató el proceso 8.000 y reventó al Partido Liberal, llevándonos a elegir a Pastrana, cuya campaña también había financiado, llevándonos al fallido proceso de paz con las FARC, que también se lucraban del impuesto que le cobraban a sus laboratorios, llevándonos a elegir a Uribe, quien no lo capturó pero sí armó la maraña legal para que se queden con él los gringos: Rodríguez y su Cartel de Calí torcieron la historia militar y política del país de los últimos diez años.

Hoy lo vimos en la base militar de Palenquero, canoso y regordete, de camisa azul y pantalón gris, rodeado de un enjambre de Rambos, caminando lentamente por la pista, subiendo la escalerilla de un Learjet de la DEA, rumbo a Miami, rumbo al abogado de oficio que le escojan allá porque al igual que a su hermano Gilberto, extraditado hace tres meses, le prohibirán pagar un abogado con su enorme fortuna, producto del narcotráfico.

Es el fin de una era, como dice el cliché.

Digan lo que digan, pero este es un gran triunfo –mediático, claro– para Uribe. Y para Bush.
 

Tildes

Siempre quise tener nombre con tilde, pero la tecnología me ha quitado de encima el peso de esa insatisfacción. Un nombre como –por decir algo– 'Sócrates', por ejemplo, con énfasis visual en alguna sílaba. O al menos uno con diptongo, como 'Eusebio'. Pero en esta era de comunicación digital menos mal que no lo tuve. En Colombia –no sé como sea en otros lados– los mensajes de texto por celular todavía nos tienen sometidos a la tiranía del alfabeto gringo, ortográficamente hablando:

"Quieres ir a cine ma#/ana?"

Y eso que mi celular es Nokia. En finlandés se utilizan algunos caracteres bien raros. 'Ministerio', por ejemplo, se escribe 'ministeriöön'.

On the avoidance of sainthood

Sent to me by my friend E. From an essay by George Orwell about Gandhi.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

The five percent nation of porn spam

[A remark inspired by The Art of Porn Spam on this blog]

Just got a message from one Paltriness G. Truckling. Subject line: Has your cum ever dribbled and you wish it had shot out?

Portacuchillos vudú

Contagiado con la manía de admirar artefactos curiosos cuya utilidad es directamente proporcional a mi propensión a comprarlos. Aquí este utilísimo aparato que permite almacenar cuchillos y torturar al mal amado en una sola operación:



¿Será que por una vez logré adelantármele nada más y nada menos que a Margarita, la "gadgetolady" de La Coctelera? Todo un honor...
 

Y el Oscar es para...

A petición del Wall Street Journal, el economista Andrew Bernard ha desarrollado un modelo estadístico que calcula la probabilidad de que una cinta nominada gane el Oscar a mejor película. No es la primera vez que Bernard, quien enseña Economía Internacional en la Escuela de Negocios Tuck de Dartmouth, utiliza estos modelos para predecir el futuro. En los Juegos Olímpicos de Atenas en 2004, un modelo de Bernard logró un pronóstico casi perfecto del palmarés de medallas de 23 entre 34 países.

Bernard seleccionó variables que pudieran mostrar alguna correlación con la obtención del Oscar. Algunas de estas eran de sentido común, como el número de nominaciones y el número de premios ganados en otros concursos. Otras tenían que ver con el contenido o las características de la cinta: ¿Está basada en una novela u obra teatral? ¿Es una trama de guerra? ¿Un amor imposible? ¿Un drama lacrimoso? ¿Una comedia? ¿Una historia real? Y las más abstrusas se preguntaban si el personaje principal era un genio o un discapacitado; si los personajes eran "felices pero pobres"; si el protagonista venía de un país del Commonwealth; y si en algún momento el héroe monta a caballo.

La mayoría de las variables no exhibieron ningún poder de predicción. Casi la misma cantidad de películas originales que de películas basadas en novelas y obras de teatro han ganado Óscares. Lo mismo sucede con cintas que narran una historia real; no parece influir en las probabilidades de ganar que la historia o los personajes de la cinta hayan existido. Otras variables irrelevantes al Oscar incluyen si la película tiene una trama deportiva; si la trama es de guerra; si el protagonista es un discapacitado; si es un pobre feliz; y si la cinta contiene escenas fuera de Norteamérica y Europa.

Por otra parte, las cintas cuyo protagonista es de un país del Commonwealth (los Estados Libres Asociados que pertenecieron al Imperio Británico, como Inglaterra, Trinidad e India) tienen el doble de probabilidad de ganar que las que no; como ejemplo, El paciente inglés (The English Patient, 1996). Si Escocia no hubiera pasado a ser parte del Reino Unido cinco siglos después de la rebelión de William Wallace, es posible que Mel Gibson no hubiera recibido el Oscar por su cinta sobre ese héroe medieval, Corazón valiente (Braveheart, 1995). Pero tal vez tampoco lo hubiera recibido de no haber sido Wallace jinete: 30% de las ganadoras en el universo de Bernard, que comprende los dos decenios entre 1984 y 2003, tenían un héroe que en algún momento de la trama se monta en un caballo. Y 20% de las ganadoras tenían como protagonista a un "genio" como el Profesor John Nash de Una mente brillante (A Beautiful Mind, 2001).

Los factores con mayor incidencia en las probabilidades de victoria no incluyeron ninguno de los anteriores. Fueron otros tres. La adición de cualquier otro factor una vez tenidos en cuenta esos tres no mejoró la capacidad de predicción del modelo. Los primeros dos no sorprenden: el número total de nominaciones al Oscar y el número de Globos de Oro ganados. El tercer factor, en cambio, es más revelador y su contundencia es lapidaria: el hecho de que una cinta sea una comedia tiene una correlación negativa perfecta con la probabilidad de ser escogida como ganadora. Dicho de otra manera, ninguna cinta clasificada como comedia ha ganado el Oscar a mejor película en los últimos veinte años. Según los resultados de Bernard—lo que equivale a decir: según las preferencias de la Academia sugeridas por la historia reciente del certamen—la probabilidad de que mañana triunfe Entre copas (Sideways, 2004) es cero-coma-cero por ciento.

Los tres factores son usados en una función cuyo resultado es el Índice de merecimiento del Oscar, un número del cero al cien que califica la cinta dentro del universo estudiado. Luego, los índices de las películas nominadas cada año son comparados entre si para calcular la probabilidad de victoria de cada una ese año. De haber sido aplicado a las últimas 20 entregas de Oscares, el modelo de Bernard habría adivinado correctamente 18 ganadoras—pero, por supuesto, el modelo no existiría sin la información recopilada de esas últimas 20 entregas. De acuerdo con el índice la película más meritoria del Oscar en los últimos veinte años es Titanic (1997), con 99,7. De todas las ganadoras, la peor calificada—y uno de los dos desaciertos del modelo—es El silencio de los inocentes (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991), con 3,0.

¿Cuál film ganará este año? Con una probabilidad de 85%, que la aleja bastante de las demás nominadas, será El Aviador (The Aviator, 2004), la cinta de Martin Scorcese sobre el pionero de la aviación, magnate de Hollywood, excéntrico billonario y playboy internacional Howard Hughes. Golpes del destino (Million Dollar Baby, 2004), de Clint Eastwood, quedó en segundo lugar con solo 13% de probabilidad de victoria.

Iraq as an enemy is apparently useful

From philg's article on Israel. I could just link to the site, but then I wouldn't be able to (a) point to the exact passage, and (b) quote Phil out of context.

...consider George W. Bush and his constant talk of a "war against Iraq". Militarily the term "war" does not make much sense. Using 5 percent of the American nuclear arsenal, Iraq could be wiped off the planet in 5 minutes. Limited to conventional bombs, the U.S. Air Force could reduce every Iraqi city to rubble within a few months, at little greater expense or risk to American lives than is currently entailed in the Air Force's training missions over Nevada. It doesn't make linguistic sense to talk about a "war" if there is no possibility of losing but it does make political sense. If a president is in the middle of a war it is difficult to mount political opposition to that president without appearing disloyal and unpatriotic. Focusing media attention on a war prevents reporters from asking questions such as "How come William T. Esrey and Ronald LeMay, the two top executives at Sprint, deserved to get paid $311 million for their services to shareholders when the company's business and stock are in tatters? And then why is it fair that Joe Sixpack has to pay income tax but Esrey and LeMay didn't have to pay tax on their $311 million income? Would it have been fairer to divide the $311 million--equal to half of Sprint's 2002 profit--among the 13,000 workers that these guys laid off--$24,000 per worker--or possibly to the shareholders(!)?" [These gentlemen did pay a few million dollars to the accounting firm of Ernst and Young to participate in a tax shelter that the Internal Revenue Service is currently investigating and considering disallowing, in which case presumably Esrey and LeMay will join the folks in the February 7, 2003 New York Times story "Wealthy Suing Accountants Over Rejected Tax Shelters"] After the U.S. military crushes Iraq, a country that in 1990 had the same gross domestic product as West Virginia, George W. Bush will get a big boost in popularity for winning the war. Having Iraq as an enemy is apparently somewhat useful to the American people and very useful to America's leaders.

 

Camiseta

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