Red Leopard » mac

SOD: System Benchmarking Hardware

kelly — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 21:55:14 +0000

I’ve been working on and off on the next Seeds of Discontent article. This is a tidbit of an upcoming post but I wanted to push it out now since I need it published for a divergent sidebar article. It stands here bald and raw. That’s life.

This system uses most of the Rampage III resources. The two Radeon cards will completely consume the PCI Express lanes (2 x16). The 24GB DDR3 will fill the six DRAM slots.

There are 7 SATA II and 2 SATA III ports.

The two SATA III ports connect the two SSD drives as a RAID Level 0. All non-user data is served from this drive (e.g., the operating system and benchmark applications).

One SATA II port connects the DVD writer.

Six SATA II ports connect the six HDD as a RAID Level 0. The HDD were selected for their cache (64MB), interface (SATA III, though connected to SATA II), spindle speed (7200 rpm, not as fast as 10,000 or 15,000 rpm but much, much cheaper) and price (cheap).

The two video cards were selected for being current and for being cheap (sort of).

Not shown in the picture are four 1920 x 1080 LCD monitors. These monitors pivot making them nice for a development (4320 x 1920).

Item 1                                         $  60
Antec Three Hundred Computer Case
Black Steel ATX Mid Tower

Item 2                                           180
CORSAIR AX850 850W Power Supply

Item 3                                           230
ASUS Rampage III LGA 1366 Intel X58
Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
N82E16813131658

Item 4                                           880
Intel Core i7-970 Gulftown 3.2GHz LGA 1366
130W Six-Core Desktop Processor
L2 Cache: 6 X 256KB
L3 Cache: 12MB
BX80613I7970

Item 5                                           225
Item 6                                           225
Patriot Gamer Series (3 x 4GB)
SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)
PGS312G1333ELK

Item 7                                            70
Item 8                                            70
Item 9                                            70
Item 10                                           70
Item 11                                           70
Item 12                                           70
Western Digital 3.5" Caviar
640GB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s
Cache: 64MB
WD6402AAEX

Item 13                                          134
Item 14                                          134
Crucial RealSSD C300 2.5" SSD
64GB MLC SATA 6.0Gb/s
CTFDDAC064MAG-1G1

Item 15                                           10
SilverStone Bay Converter
mounting bracket 3.5" to 2 x 2.5"
SDP08

Item 16                                          185
Item 17                                          185
ASUS Radeon HD 6850
EAH6850 DirectCU/2DIS/1GD5
1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16
EAH6850

Item 18                                           11
HIS CrossFire Bridge Interconnect Cable
HCFBC4065

Item 19                                          250
Item 20                                          250
Item 21                                          250
Item 22                                          250
Acer 1920 x 1080 LCD Monitor
B243H

Item 23                                           25
LITE-ON 24X DVD Writer Black
iHAS424-98

Will it Blend?

kelly — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 23:52:02 +0000

In the previous article Seeds of Discontent, I jotted down a few benchmarks to compare OS X, Windows and Linux performance at a system level. In this article, I explore further a test built around graphics rendering engines. In particular, I was impressed by Sintel, an open source movie built with (among others) Blender.

I don’t know how long it takes to assemble the movie from source assets into a shipping product but I’ll venture it is quite a compute intensive process. I got the idea for this benchmark while reading on the sintel.org home page that the project is re-rendering the film for 4K and that it should be ready later this year (still a few months away). I didn’t know what 4K was so I looked it up. That lead me to compile a table of film formats and supported Frames per Second (FPS). I also appended three rows for HDTV of which only 720p and 1080p are real. 4320p is something bandied about as future but I couldn’t find material online that would lead me to believe it’s anything but a concept. I included it to define the upper envelope edge. (Note: different formats support different levels of FPS.)

Fomat   Width    Height    Frames per Second (FPS)
------- ------   ------  ----------------------------
2k 16:9 (2,048 × 1,152)  24, 25, 30, 50, 60, 100, 120
2K 2:1  (2,048 × 1,024)  24, 25, 30, 50, 60, 100, 120
2K ANA  (1,408 × 1,152)  24, 25, 30, 50, 60, 100, 120

3k 16:9 (3,072 × 1,728)  24, 25, 30, 50, 60
3K 2:1  (3,072 × 1,536)  24, 25, 30, 50, 60
3K ANA  (2,112 × 1,728)  24, 25, 30, 50, 60

4k 16:9 (4,096 × 2,304)  24, 25, 30
4K 2:1  (4,096 × 2,048)  24, 25, 30
4K HD   (3,840 × 2,160)  24, 25, 30
4K ANA  (2,816 × 2,304)  24, 25, 30

4.5k WS (4,480 × 1,920)  24, 25, 30

720p    (1,280 ×   720)  24, 25, 30, 50, 60
1080p   (1,920 × 1,080)  24, 25, 30, 50, 60
4320p   (7,680 × 4,320)  24, 25, 30, 50, 60

From this, I build a spreadsheet table of “Gigabytes per Second” of uncompressed data and converted the table into a set of data files compatible with gnuplot. Below are plots for 24 and 60 FPS for three formats.

I chose 24 FPS since it is a standard film frame rate. I excluded 25 and 30 FPS since they were so close to 24 FPS that they didn’t add any additional insight into designing the test. (25 and 30 FPS happen to be half of 50 and 60 FPS, which I discuss next). One datapoint to consider is that Blu-Ray supports 1080p at no greater than 24 FPS.

Just as the world is split between driving on the left or right hand side of the road, the world’s electrical power is split between 50 and 60 Hz. Neither is right or wrong but they are different and the two don’t mix well (like people driving on both the left and right side of the same road don’t mix well). I currently live in a 60Hz world so I biasedly chose the familiar but I could have easily chosen 50Hz. They are so close to each other in context of this exercise that the differences are negligible.

I chose two HD formats (4320p and 1080p) plus one film format (4K 16:9). The film format file size falls between the two HD formats. Note that 4K doesn’t support a frame rate obove 30 FPS and isn’t included in the 60 FPS graph.

Note that I haven’t included compression in this test as I believe it to be a different strain on the system.

My thoughts for the blender test was to establish a benchmark that would be inherently obvious and understandable to anyone, especially to those without any previous knowledge of video rendering or video formats. It’s more intuitive to say, “This system renders the video 1000 times slower than real time.” It also makes for a nice roadmap chart. Consider time on a linear x-axis and rendering ratio on a logrithmic y-axis.

A second roadmap milestone map could be what format/fps combination(s) achieve real time rendering status for a specific system on a specific date.

It would be interesting to see the performance of an ad hoc office cluster vs. a 40 foot shipping container of specialized hardware. If this sounds crazy, juxtapose any of the recent systems from Tom’s Hardware System Builder Marathon against the original IBM PC. (Or the ENIAC ;^)

In the conclusions section, I’d want to see analysis/conjecture about the test results regarding system bottlenecks. In an attempt to compare the systems, I’d also want to see the individual system price divided by the performance ratio. For example,

System A
Cost         $1200 USD
Ratio        0.0005245  (1830:1)
Cost/Ratio   2,196,000

System B
Cost         $1153 USD
Ratio        0.0005736  (1735:1)
Cost/Ratio   2,021,209

Cost Comparison
System A  : System B
    1,200 : 1,153
    1.040 : 1  (A is 4% more expensive than B)

Ratio Comparison
System A  : System B
    1,830 : 1,735
    1.055 : 1  (A is 5.5% slower than B)

Cost/Ratio Comparison
System A  : System B
2,196,000 : 2,021,209
    1.086 : 1  (A is 8.6% more expensive to
                to finish the same job as B)

If one starts to compare operating environments (Windows 7, OS X, Ubuntu, Fedora) on the same system and then repeats those tests across various systems (Dell, Apple, Whitebox), we start to get an apples to apples comparison in price, performance and price/performance ratios.

Note: the spreadsheet (numbers, exported to excel), data files, gnuplot scripts and images are available for download.

[update 2010-10-05: I just read at thenextweb.com that rendering Avatar requires 1 petabyte of drive space. That's in 3D but it still makes me wonder why there's a wide gap between my calculations of a hypothetical 2 hour movie and that of Avatar. The article at information-management.com gives a reference of 17.28 gigabyte/minute. At 166 minutes, this is 2.8 terabytes (a long way off from a petabyte). Perhaps there are a lot of intermediate stages for each frame which must be saved? Nevertheless, I believe the test is still interesting.]

Seeds of Discontent

kelly — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 03:10:48 +0000

I like reading Tom’s Hardware Guide. I liked it better in the site’s early days when it wasn’t so javacript and flash heavy and the articles were idomatically ‘German-English’. A lot happens in twelve or so years. Still, Tom’s is the best source of information on the web.

I read a CPU benchmark this morning which got me wondering if there were a possiblity to benchmark on any operating system but Windows. I concluded for the kind of benchmarks seen on Tom’s–not really.

Many (most?) of the benchmarks rely on software only available on Windows. The platforms are varied while holding the software and operating system constant. This makes sense as Tom’s Hardware is, well, primarily a hardware site.

But what could we could we learn by holding the hardware constant and vary the operating systems? A lot, I believe.

One point I’ve noticed in reading Tom’s benchmarks over the years is the increasingly predictable nature of the results. Motherboards often perform within a few percentage points of each other. THere is some variance in different CPUs but rarely unpredicable. The conclusions often center around cost-performance comparisons to see if the premium parts are justified.

What really motivated me to write this blog entry was a video card benchmark. The two major vendors (AMD née ATI, NVidia) have been long locked in fierce battle. The benchmark seems to keep the software constant and only varies the video card hardware but the lines are not so cleanly drawn. Each video card has a unique architectural philosphy and design. Software modules are written to detect and take special advantage of these differences in video cards.

I argue that a systems approach might make for an interesting benchmark and would likely yield surprising results. Furthermore, such a benchmark would spark the desktop religious wars that have subsided in recent years (e.g., 68000 vs x86, PowerPC vs x86, IPX vs TCP/IP, RLL vs ESDI, Word vs. WordPerfect, Microsoft vs. Novell …). It seems the good fight has now moved on to smartphones and tablets. The desktop market has become docile.

My aim is to whack the hive. This is my vision.

1. This benchmark has a name: “Seeds of Discontent”

Why this name? It fits. How?

Ah. A little about me. My first job out of college was writing assembly language graphics routines used in medical imaging. On a 12MHz 80286. This introduced me to graphics hardware leading to a job at National Semiconductor (yes, National once developed graphics chips) and a deeper understanding of PC architecture. In the late nineties, I moved on to a small consumer electronics startup and eventually into pure software. I’ve seen the industry from several perspectives.

The early PC days placed importance on CPU speed for better performance and hardware integration (combining many chips into a single chip) for lower cost. The early days are gone and the funeral was the death of Comdex which happened a few years before the last Comdex. Those last few Comdex shows were zombies and those of you who were there know what I mean.

Nowdays, the big advances in hardware don’t spur the kind of religious fervor of old. It evokes a semi-interested “Oh, that’s kinda cool” response. (e.g., PATA to SATA, HDD TO SDD, dual core to quad core to six core). Interesting but not controversial.

This isn’t to say the hardware designers are sleeping. They are not. It’s just that hardware advancments alone won’t produce the kinds of dramatic performance improvements year-over-year that we saw during the eighties and nineties. The kinds of hardware advances we now see require specialized software to take advantage of those advances. And the industry knows it.

The greatest potential for seeing surprisingly results in a benchmark are not in swapping out CPUs or mainboards. The greatest potential lies in swapping out the operating systems. If there is one scrap of religiosity left in the industry, it’s in operating systems. As it happens, the OS is also the component that now has the biggest potential to influence the industry.

Which brings me to my point. I believe the right set of benchmark tests could pit OS vs OS and spur the kind of religious spat that leads to real progress. But with peace breaking out all over the industry, whipping up a bit of OS hooiganism might just whip up a real revolution. As David W. once told me, “Man’s best friend is his dogma.” Today, there is nothing more religious in the industry than operating systems.

2. “Seeds of Discontent” has a mission: I see you, OS

Chicken and egg.

Mulitcore CPUs and graphics engines both require specialized software to take advantage of the hardware. But today’s changing hardware is a moving target. It’s hard for a small software firms to write specialized hardware for an ever changing platform. But without software running on a platform (e.g., graphics), there is no “tie down” for a hardware vendor to stick with a stable API (I’m looking at you Nvidia, AMD).

In the multicore CPU arena, it takes a partner in the OS vendor to take full advantage of the multicore architecture. This isn’t to say mutithreaded software is held back by today’s OS but rather todays OS don’t do enough to create a furtile ground for multithreaded/multicore software development. (Yeah, the penguinistas are going ape-shit about now but I stick with my proposition.)

The real problem, as I see it, is that it takes a coordinated effort to make the necessary software development changes. No body wants to spend their money first. Nobody. Especially those with no money (the solo developer with no resources other than time.)

Disclaimer: I am a macinista.

Apple’s Snow Leopard (I have no information on Lion) arrived with much fanfare about Grand Central Dispatch, LLVM, OpenCL, blah blah blah and other multicore magic. I love the candy-coated icons for Core-X. But how has that translated into better software support for modern hardware? You don’t hear much about it (even if it has or hasn’t happened).

“Seeds of Discontent” is a set of benchmarks to provide an adequacy gap for each OS to buck up and meet the challenge of each other. Really. Can anyone name a benchmark today by which one OS can embarrass another? No.

The real value add an OS can deliver is hardware abstraction. (Unless you are the dominate OS -Microsoft–software developers are undermotivated to deliver software cutomized for specialize hardware under the OS.) I want OS vendors motivated to deliver better performance with cost-effective effort for software vendors. Not exlusively but in a multi-vendor environment.

Benchmarks give a measurable performance comparison between operating systems. And the operative word here is “System”. Given a fixed hardware platform, how do the various system’s perform. It’s not which comes first “chicken or egg,” what comes first is the benchmark and the “gap of shame.” Nobody wants to be last. Nobody.

3. Who?

To compare various Operating Systems presupposes a fixed hardware platform, (I say.) It also presupposes running the same software on all systems. Technically, that is impossible. Well, impossible except in a systems perspective.

Software makes OS calls to handle many functions. Mostly this is to abstract the hardware details from the OS. What’s needed then is software that has been compiled for each of the target systems. Since I’m interested in system performance (i.e., what you see when you use the system), I don’t care about how the software is written. If a package is not opitimized to use the special benefits offered by the OS, I don’t care. In my world, the experience is diminished.

So the one thing that is constant in a benchmark is the hardware. This isn’t such a problem for Linux and Windows but does present a problem for OS X. I want OS X included. Here lies a fork in the road. Does the benchmark use an Apple computer and install all OS on that machine? Or does the benchmark use a white-box PC and install all OS that machine?

I vote for the latter. This means that only way to make a proper benchmark is to build a hackintosh. This presents a problem since Apple forbids it. I recommend, then, including a “Brand-X” OS. Of course, the people actually performing the benchmark cannot comment but I would want Brand-X to be OS X, ostensibly the latest shipping version at the time of the benchmark. Of course, Brand-X could be anything. Maybe even Solaris ;^). But what about the other operating systems?

Brand-X
Windows
Ubuntu
Fedora

4. What?

Operating systems alone do not a benchmark make. What software applications could be used for the tests? Tom’s uses software that’s only available on Winodws so those won’t work. I give here a short candidate list. This isn’t a definitive list but a starting point for discussion. All packages are available for compilation and execution on all platforms.

4.1 inkscape: complex vector graphics generation
4.2 gimp: complex bit image manipulation
4.3 blender: complex 3D image manipulation, rendering. (Could we get the raw sources to render the entirity of Sintel?)
4.4 aqsis renderer: another rendering engine
4.5 brl-cad: yeat another rendering engine
4.6 handbrake: DVD ripping
4.7 ffmpeg: audio transcoding
4.8 R, rgl: converting data into visualization (e.g., httpd logfiles)
4.9 activemq: build with unit tests (requires java, maven)
4.10 tesseract-ocr: OCR convert scaned text to text files
4.11 nanoc: convert text file + gutenberg to static HTML site
4.12 nginx: file server of a static assets (see 4.12)
4.13 quake (II, 4, spasm): compile, performance benchmark

Conclusion: Will this go anywhere? I hope so. But I believe for it to come alive requires a large community to care about it. For them to care about it requires a benchmark that defines a tangible result. The difference between 63 and 68 frames per second in some game that only runs on one platform is largely irrelevant; it only says that if you spend a few hundred dollars more, you get a few more frames per second.

What would make sense? Well, for example, how many frames per second could one render raw source files for the short film Sintel at HD 1080p? My guess that right now that is under one frame per second. That sets a milestone. I really don’t know. Maybe it is greater than 1 FPS on a desktop machine running a quadcore CPU and some sort of GPU acceleration. Then again, maybe not. But there will be a price point for that. So maybe a better benchmark is $US/FPS or €/FPS (that is, cost of the system over frames per second.)

Another benchmark that puts pressure on the OS could be quake (pick your poison/version). If the only objective were FPS, then I’m confident that all OS versions could (with effort) come out about the same when running on the same platform. However, a benchmark which relied upon the OS (e.g., OpenGL, DirectX) for rendering would provide a more apples-to-apples comparison. The astute reader would immediately recognize that DirectX has an advantage in games. That’s the point. If non-Windows hopes to compete, they have to compete with the experience of games on DirectX.

This extends to the other benchmarks as well. Apple’s (remember, I’m a fan) deployment of Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, LLVM in Snow Leopard was exciting but I want to see it make it’s way to real software. I also use CentOS in my servers so I have a vested interest in the evolution of Fedora. Since I’m interested in Fedora, I’m interested in the other major linux OS, Ubuntu. And since OS X, Fedora and Ubuntu are minority players and these benchmarks set a bar, I’m interested in Windows. In the end, a battle for tangible system level benchmark performance benefits all.

I don’t believe the desktop is dead. After all, software written for consoles, or smartphones or tablets (or even other desktops) are written on desktops. The industry is asleep. I want to whack the hive.

“Breakin’ the law!” –Beavis

Ten Apple Announcements That Would Not Disappoint

kelly — Fri, 28 May 2010 00:24:58 +0000

There are a lot of haters out there but I’m still rooting for Apple. I want Apple to succeed. I’m not going to WWDC 2010 (tapped out of conference budget).

I wish I were going.

Job’s “you won’t be disappointed” promise has my head spinning. I like surprises. I hope Apple doesn’t disappoint.

So, what would I like to see announced? Here’s my top ten list of wishful thinking.

1. CloudWorks

I liked iTools until it became NotFree and then MobileMe. It just seemed regressive in the age of free online calendars and email. I guess I’ve never gotten over it.

I’d like to see MobileMe move to CloudWorks, a name I made up to describe the mythical Apple Cloud.

iLife

MobileMe backs iLife right now. There are a few issues to solve when iLife is backed by CloudWorks.

2. iPhoto backed by CloudWorks

A Freemium flickr-like model with auto-connection to iPhoto (and Aperature). Some base level service at no charge then additional service levels at a competitive cost.

3. iMovie backed by CloudWorks

A vimeo or viddler like service with auto-connection to iMovie. Some base level service at no charge then additional service levels at a competitive cost. The real advantage is HTML5 video streaming.

iWorks

iWorks is, ummm, okay. Except for Numbers. I cannot yet replace Excel with Numbers.

4. Super iWeb backed by CloudWorks

I know, I know. iWeb publishes to MobileMe now. I would like to see a tiered pricing plan. iWeb isn’t a web application authoring system. It’s a kinder, gentler DreamWeaver or FrontPage. Not everyone want’s to create the next twitter of foursquare. Sometimes a simple website is appropriate. Maybe $1.99/month for the basic service (charged to the App Store). Bandwidth and storage overages are competitive.

I’d like to see iWeb extended as a client editor for WordPress and/or MoveableType. Even better, a deal with one of these vendors to provide the service on CloudWorks.

5. Pages backed by CloudWorks

I use Pages to write papers for school (which I must export into Word format for online submission). Pages is more pleasing to use than Word so long as I don’t need to do much formatting. Besides, I do most of my draft writing using a combination of BBEdit and Scrivener. This blog article was drafted in BBEdit, for example. However, I’d like to save my Pages documents to CloudWorks with revision control. When I grant someone permission to pull the document down, they can select one of three formats: Pages, Word or PDF.

While we’re at it, I’d like to see a repository in CloudWorks for templates. CloudWorks users can submit templates to the repository and other members can rate the template. Like a APA compliant template.

6. Keynote backed by CloudWorks

Keynote is love/hate. It too is more pleasing to use than PowerPoint but almost nobody I interact with uses Keynote so I have that extra export to PowerPoint step. My favorite presentation tool is OmniGraffle. It’s a joy to work with and I like the way it looks in presentation mode. However, there is only one person I share presentations with who has OmniGraffle. Just one. I end up exporting to PDF.

I’d like to save my Keynote presentations to CloudWorks with revision control. When I grant someone permission to pull the document down, they can select one of three formats: Keynote, PowerPoint or PDF. Additionally, there is an HTML5 presentation feature that allows for online slideshow viewing.

Fix Things

There just two things I’d like fixed. They may seem small but it’s my blog and I’m making a statement.

7. Fix iTunes U

Maybe no one but me uses iTunes U and therefore no one will be disappointed if there are no improvements here. Except for me. I’ll be disappointed. For example, the ability to sort the lectures within a course. That would be nice.

It seems as if Apple has conceded K-12 to Windows. I would like to see the Mac emerge as strong leader in online education. That’s just me being selfish as I like school.

8. Fix the Cocoa Finder

I was happy to hear Apple moved Finder from Carbon to Cocoa… until I used it. There are subtle annoying quirks that showed up in the new Finder. For example, when I tab between desktops in Spaces, the focus is wrong when I get there. Even when the application has the focus (in the menu) upon arrival to a new desktop, the actual window doesn’t have focus.

Two More Things

9. iPhone on Verizon

I know this is a very United States centric request but this is where I live. ATT service at my house sucks. I’d immediately switch to Verizon. I don’t much care for Verizon but they do have great coverage (including my house).

10. Full CSS3, HTML5 Support in Safari

Whatever that means. I’d be happy if Safari reached functional parity with Chrome (except for the audio/video elements, cause that’s just not going to happen.) Safari is not far off.

Will any of this emerge at WWDC 2010? Who knows? Maybe what’s coming is so stunning that it eclipses any of my current desires. <-- grin -->

Sepia MacWorld

kelly — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:06:49 +0000

I’m reading the news of Apple pulling out of MacWorld with a touch of sadness. MacWorld Boston is long dead. It was only a matter of time before MacWorld San Francisco ended, too. It makes sense to me.

Consider the history of COMDEX. In it’s heyday, COMDEX rocked. There was excitement, drama, confusion. I attended my first COMDEX in 1991, my last in 2003. Fall COMDEX reigned supreme but I also have fond memories of Spring COMDEX in Atlanta. (Never made the Chicago show).

That last COMDEX was a week of the living dead. Sad. Like the last moments of an ailing pet.

COMDEX was a dealers expo. The conference tracks had more to do with channels than with end user training. It was a time of the backroom demo, of systems companies meeting with component suppliers, of mom and pop shops meeting with distributors. That time is past. Or, at least, has moved offshore.

MacWorld outlived COMDEX precisely because its focus, its purpose was different. Look at the conference tracks. MacWorld is less about refining the channel and reshaping manufacturing supply chains. Its more about the end user. And frankly, MacWorld is Apple’s big show, “Look at me.”

I felt MacWorld 2008–while interesting–was unnecessary. The Apple booth was packed but it was the SAME APPLE BOOTH. Adobe was noticeably scarce. Macromedia had been assimilated. Microsoft was promising big advances in Office 2008. Thankfully, the number of iPod skin vendors was down. It was a nice show. Like a nice visit with your favorite Aunt.

I would rather Apple bow out now at a pleasant MacWorld 2009 than drag out its inevitable death. I would have rather remembered COMDEX 1999 as the last hoorah than witness the emphysemic COMDEX 2003.

The world is changing. Computers are increasingly a commodity product. In the ’80s and ’90s, each year brought amazing new advancements to the relatively crude PC. The ’80s more so. I am lucky to have attended SOG in ’87. That event wasn’t a show, wasn’t an expo. However, the people who attended were the living soul of personal computing… and the revolution. Everyone I talked to was a gift. Every conversation a revelation. The big shows never had that.

There will still be Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference. Microsoft has the Professional Developers Conference. Adobe has an analogous event for designers/developers with Adobe Max. Intel has Intel Developer Forum. But the PC pioneer days are over.

If you really, really have a need to join La Revolución, there’s still some life left in the penguinistas. But you better hurry. Even Linux World is changing. It’s now OpenSource World. Still, it’s not the same as a computer show. It’s more of a movement.

The era of big shows is past. The personal computer industry has grown up. We now have smaller developer-focused shows. It’s the times we live in. It’s just this way. For now. Who knows what 2020 will bring.

iMac on Loan

kelly — Sun, 25 May 2008 17:14:54 +0000

Last summer, I retired my old Titanium PowerBook G4 (800MHz) as the Company bought my a shiny new MacBook Pro (2.4GHz). Sweet!

A year later, the latch on my laptop stopped latching. I sent it in for repair. In the interim, I Carbon Copy Cloned my hard drive and am using that hardrive to boot a 20″ iMac on loan from the office. I love it.

One thing I do miss: I really do use my laptop as a lap top. I can lean back with feet up on the ottoman and work with laptop on my lap. Sometimes, I need a book under the laptop. It gets hot.

I get my laptop back next week. I will miss the iMac but not enough to switch back to a desktop.

Marketing Matters

kelly — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 04:32:48 +0000

This is a must read. Title is ‘The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story’

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

I tried to use CUPS from my Mac. Crikey! I don’t know HOW it happened but I can now print to my laser printer over ethernet. Of course, it has one of those [not supported on OS X] ethernet dongle thingies from NetGear.

But I can now print And it wasn’t CUPS either. I really don’t know if I’m printing through CUPS or over AppleTalk. Of course, I can’t print from ALL applications. Office-yes. PDF-yes(slow). Illustrator/Photoshop-no.

The fact that I can’t understand what the heck is going on means I can’t fix it.

What this guy didn’t say, and I mean this with all the conviction of Morpheus, the failure of Open Source to enter the mainstream (much less world domination) is a direct consequence of the movements anti-marketing mindset. Maybe I’ll bring this topic up at the local Linux User’s Group. ‘OSS sucks because it needs marketing’.

Better make sure I do that after free pizza.

But this anti-marketing bias (and subsequent chaos) is not limited to the OSS crowd.

Consider the response I got from Market Circle on the public mailing list.

I asked them to open up their marketing contact for customer feedback. Some months later, the issue came up again (on the list) and I commented that the only voice Market Circle had was technical support and doubted a marketing department existed.

It was in a thread in which I advised a Zen approach of lowering one’s expectations until the product did what you expected. OK. So, I was snarky. But I’ve paid my money. I bought the software. All I wanted was a marketing contact to hear my voice. This is their reply.

In terms of Marketing, even with the minimal
marketing that we do, people have built up
unrealistic expectations. What would happen
if we turned on the hyperbole?

Speaks Volumes.

Market Circle’s product (DayLite, available for OS X) is conceptually great. A contact manager built around relationships. The implementation is appalling.

Consider this (proud) solution proffered by tech support (de facto marketing).

Customer One: Another problem I have is the apparent inability to link a note from a contact to a related organization so it can be see there.

Tech Support: It is possible to link a note which is already linked to a Contact to a related Organization so it can be seen there.

Create a note for a Contact.

Type info in the subject and details.

Click on the gear pop-up button in the Notes tab.

Select Link Note from the list.

The Linking objects to Note sheet will appear.

Click on the Organizations radio button.

Search for an Organization you would like to link the Note to as well.

Select the Organization from the list.

Click on the ‘+’ button.

The Organization will now appear in the Link list.

Click on the Link button.

Close the Contact card.

Go to the Organization list and open the Organization card.

Look at the Organizations notes.. you will now see the note you linked viewable in the Organizations notes.

Customer Two: ….Which is 14 steps !!

This is not atypical. Fourteen non-obvious steps. The product, as defined and developed, is a real bear to use. Let me back up. It is easy to use as a simple replacement for Address Book. It is a bear to use as a customer relationship tool. I’ve been stopped cold on several occassions trying to use DayLite in a way consistent with the features/benefits presented in promotional material.

I will commend the support staff. They honestly respond with ‘DayLite doesn’t do that’.

It’s not that the support staff is bad. They are pretty good software guys. But they just don’t *get* it. Sometimes I get the feeling that Market Circle feels we [Mac OS X] customers are damn lucky to have them write software for us. And that is a MARKETING problem.

What bothers me is the increasingly defensive tone out of Market Circle. Here is the BIG argument for marketing.

Absence a marketing department, the usual tension that exists between development and marketing, now exists between development and customers.

Consider this little gem published to the customer mailing list:

For instance, we cannot add a feature because 5 or 6 vocal people ask for it. Some of these things take a lot of time to develop.

Because one of our features is not as deep as you like it, doesn’t mean that we aren’t listening or that we have no clue in terms of ‘product development’. (I’ve been doing software development for over 14 years – I know how to get stuff done within budget constraints)

Just two months earlier, I wrote that I’d like to see more marketing at Market Circle.

Good marketing (operative word, ‘good’) puts together a whole product beyond that of the application. Whereas the support team helps customers with the product, marketing helps customers with the product collateral (including dealing with the company).

Marketing manages customer expectations. I truly don’t expect I’ll get everything I’m wishing for in DayLite. I don’t need to as long as I can get my work done and no other better alternative emerges. In this regards, another ‘heavily technical’ company that gets good marks is OmniGroup. Marketcircle gets better marks in support. OmniGroup gets better marks in marketing. In my book.

The irony is, OmniGroup didn’t get higher support marks because I didn’t need support for their products (OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner). I’ve had chance/need to contact OmniGroup since and they rate world class.

As Market Circle’s marketing image sinks lower in my eyes (as I continue to lower my expectations), so does their support image.

I’m hoping Microsoft’s upcoming Office 2004 for OS X can fill the gap. People gripe about Bill but, hey, Microsoft is a marketing machine. I’m starting to raise my expectations.

Favicon

kelly — Mon, 09 Feb 2004 22:12:42 +0000

I got a message from Dan last week asking about favicons. See, we both are on Mac OS X. It seems anything that comes from the Windows word requires an extra level of understanding when it’s in the Mac world.

After a bit of googling, I found the no non-sense answers I needed.

Some of you may see the redleopard favicon. Others may not. Why? Who knows. I ran a little experiment.

First at Greg’s blog

    http://www.scarysharp.com/

and then my blog

    http://www.redleopard.com/

The two favicons are similar in size.

5,046 bytes Scary Sharp

5,174 bytes Red Leopard

Did they show up in the browser? (SS:ScarySharp, RL:RedLeopard)

Browser OS SS RL

OmniWeb 4.5 OS X N N

OmniWeb 5.0 Beta OS X Y Y

Safari 1.2 (v125) OS X Y N

IE 5.2.3 (5815.1) OS X N N

Mozilla Firebird 0.7 OS X Y Y

Mozilla Camino 0.7 OS X Y Y

IE 6.0.2800.1106 Win98 N N

Greg sees the favicons from both ScarySharp and RedLeopard. He’s on Windows NT and XP.

I gave my home linux box to my nephew last summer so I don’t know if any of those browsers show the favicon.

The significant linux browsers fall into two camps: Konqueror (KHTML) and Mozilla. OmniWeb and Safari are based on KHTML while Firebird and Camino on Mozilla. IE is end-of-life on the Mac so who cares. Windows 98 has the bulk of the home market, but is on the decline.

I then found a gem. How to create your own favicons using Adobe Photoshop on OS X. Sweet.

First, a plug-in for photoshop to create your own favicons.

    http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/

I discovered it through the a site that walks you through creating a favicon (on OSX no less).

    http://www.golivein24.com/tips/favicon/

I downloaded the plugin and could save a file in .ico format. Seems straight forward.

Pay close attention to the note:

    ’Do not be alarmed if the Finder shows
    an unexpectedly large file size for
    ICO files saved out of Photoshop. The
    ICO itself is stored in the data fork
    and is as small as possible.’

I created a 16×16 favicon. Finder reported it was 40K bytes. After I ftp-ed the file up to my linux account, the file was ~1K.

In a subsequent conversation with Dan, I learned that his browser Safari 1.1 (v?) didn’t show my favicon but then mysteriously started to. Huh. Go figure.

Why is it that something so goofy, useless and non-standard as a favicon can demand so much time? I don’t know. But it does.

Not Gonna Upgrade

kelly — Sun, 29 Jun 2003 03:53:45 +0000

The cool thing about Open Source software is that folks world-wide are constantly working on it. That means continual updates. However, I’m not gonna update for a while. Here’s why.

I wanted to make my laptop into a DAMP system (Darwin, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/PythonMac OS X already comes with Apache and PHP. Old versions. And no MySQL.

I updated my system with the really straight forward downloads from Aaron Faby. He packages up Apache/MySQL/PHP into installer packages. Click and load.

However, I’ve decided I’m not going to update ‘AMP’ packages until the ‘D’ upgrade to Panther. Besides, my laptop is ahead of my web host’s versions.

Software On My Mac Available

Apache 2.0.44 2.0.46

MySQL 3.23.52 4.0.13

PHP 4.3.1 4.3.2

Right now, my focus is on (a) writing content for my company’s site, (b) improving my Flash skilz [you'll see it here on the leopard], (c) upgrading the leopard to MT 2.64, (d)making money. Heavy emphasis on ‘making money’.

That is, unless someone has a convincing argument otherwise?

Browser	OS	SS	RL
OmniWeb 4.5	OS X	N	N
OmniWeb 5.0 Beta	OS X	Y	Y
Safari 1.2 (v125)	OS X	Y	N
IE 5.2.3 (5815.1)	OS X	N	N
Mozilla Firebird 0.7	OS X	Y	Y
Mozilla Camino 0.7	OS X	Y	Y
IE 6.0.2800.1106	Win98	N	N