Kaltxì ma smuk!

Avatar
Yeah... It's good... 'ish... NOT!

I saw it 3 times and I plan on seeing it two times more just this week. I'm a total bad-ass fan. So much fan that I even started to learn the Na'vi language, as you could see in the title of this post. I don't often speak about stuff other than technology here so you might think that I'm a complete geek which is in front of the computer 90% of the time, sleep 40% of the day, eat in front of is computer to boost its computer-time/usage, listen to anime, read manga and play D&D twice a week! Well you are completely right!

BUT! I also happen to be a big fan of music, movie production and constructed language, such as Na'vi. That's why I wanted to talk about a wonderful site called learnnavi (http://www.learnnavi.org) which have a growing community of Avatar fan but more importantly Na'vi speakers! I happen to be very active on this site, if you want to talk to me in Na'vi I'm on their forum, IRC and TeamSpeak channel whenever I'm in front/side/back/near a computer.

That's it! Want to learn Na'vi? That's the place.

A new Apple in 7 days
The next important thing is Apple's latest announcement. You might remember that I was going to get a new MacBook Pro when they'll release the core i7 ones. That might very well be the day! So stay tuned on that. I'm gonna post a little resume of the keynote and might very well post a review of my next little gadget.

See you soon! Kìyevame ulte Eywa ngahu!

Every one apart me is a bloke

And you can't argue with it!
No! You can't argue with me about it and even if you want to try, and the only reason why you would want to do such a thing is that you don't have a clue what a bloke is, then first go to this link to learn what it really means.

Now more seriously. Here's the little backstory about it. I own a company based in Québec named "Centre de Solutions Informatiques Inc." or C.S.I. for short. Our team is based on developers and hardware crack that follows 63 technology related RSS feeds that publish around 1 280 news a day. We are basically pure and polished specialist in computers and we're endlessly learning and improving ourselves. Technology is everything we like, everything we do and everything we live for. We're so enthusiast that, as I said, we've started a company. Yes! That's how bad we are infected.

We've taken a big time looking at the market and I can assure you that in our current service zone, there is just no one that will do a better job than us for better pricing and better time. To do this analysis, we used the latest technology in marketing which is... ours beloved clients! We actually used feedbacks from our clients to build our price tags. Anyway, enough advertising and here comes the story.

One bloke in the see
I (not we) currently deserve personalized services to 2 company and around 25 persons. That's in fact rather good. But in the end, every single one of my clients keep on... deserting me! Yes! I have absolutely no idea why, but every time they've got a problem, they first call me, I then friendly give them consulting and they finally go off like they suddenly knows anything about the computer world, which they obviously don't, and make an ash of it.

This annoy me so much that it made me write this post just so that I could cool down instead of bashing through the head of one of them that did it an other time just a day before I'm writing this. I will not go into the details to respect his privacy but, he actually made Windows XP installed on an Intel Core i7 computer! Now, if you're a bloke about computers, which I'm not, you'll already scream at him because you know that Windows XP just can't handle a dual core correctly. And this is not a dual core, it's a quad with hyper-threading which make it even more difficult. You need at least Windows Vista or Windows 7 to handle all of that power correctly but WAIT! Their's more! This computer is actually... the latest iMac.

I'm not joking. This is true, I swear that this is true! Now I'll show you an other time that I'm not a bloke in this kind of stuff. You see, Windows XP has horrible power saving features. In fact, it doesn't support half the the power saving features that are on that brand new computer. Now you're probably already laughing at me saying that this is a desktop computer and that it doesn't need power saving features! WRONG! Let me show you my point with a simple table:

Component	Avg. consumption
CPU	85 watt
Memory	25 watt
Motherboard	15 watt
Graphic card	135 watt
Hard drive	5 watt
Monitor	50 watt
Total	315 watt

Now that look pretty normal, isn't it? Nop; This is enormous! I have a server which has a very similar configuration to that and it's doing 80. My Mac Pro is averaging 145 watts and it has 10 GB or HUNGRY fully buffered DDR2 memory and two old and not very economical Xeon 5400 series CPUs. That's without counting the supercharged 8800 GT that benchmark like a 9800 GTX!

So, not only does he's iMac now require a nuclear power plant to run, it also require an earth-sized power supply; which it hasn't. The 2009 iMac has only a 365 watt power supply. Now you're still laughing at me saying that 315 is smaller that 365. Well... Yes it is... But, this PSU only has 85% efficiency which move its maximum output to 5 watt less that the average needed. This could cause a problem.

Windows XP will basically kills my client's computer. That's how simple it is. By the way, if you're interested, putting Windows Vista in it would decrease the consumption to 175 watt which is 45% less. That's without saying that the performance would increase as Windows Vista is much better at handling multiple CPU cores.

The result
Not only this guy had an horrible services that will rot is computer on the mid/long run. It will also cost him 100 $ more to run his computer at the end of the year that it costed him if he installed Windows Vista in the first place. And here's the interesting part: I didn't even mentioned OS X yet. And here's why: I'm not talking about dual booting or anything. The guy actually removed OS X 10.6 and put Windows XP in place claiming that it was a much lighter and faster operating system!

That basically means that my client, who decided to bought a Mac to give it a try, will not even see what OS X look like. Not to mention that OS X has even better power management capabilities than even Windows 7. Running Slow Leopard, that computer actually get down to 95 watt on average use which would save him 160 $ a year just in electricity.

The point
Every single one of my clients do that every single time. They always end up in my office begging for help to solve the issues that caused the idiot that they went to in the first place. And they do that, even when they are old friend of mine. I have absolutely nothing agains competition, in fact I even found it sporty, but when all the competition there is is that... I'd prefer to kick them in the face with a very, very big hammer.

Conclusion
That's exactly why me and two of my friends started this company. We are so sure about this that we're planing, building... no... it became hand-crafting, swinging and then throwing that hammer to their faces ourselves the best we can possibly do. We believe that average computer knowledge here in Québec sucks and we think we might just be what the province need to get up on its feet an finally learn how to appreciate that latest gadget that came out without having to ask the vendor how to turn it on.

Getting back... In force!

SSD Benchmarks
I have a surprise for you. Ho well... It's not really a surprise since I've put that in the title and google analytics told me that there is about 91.89% of chances that you got here by googling "Apple SSD Benchmark". Anyway, I've run a couples of test and the results are just astonishing. Here they are:

And that's it, they're already gone! That's just how fast it is. I think the only way it could get faster is to boot directly from RAM! (Ho! That's giving me an idea...) No seriously here is some figures:

Boot time is just under 17 seconds on OS X 10.6.2 and under 25 for Windows 7. This is blazing fast. But that's just uninteresting suff. You see, when you boot your computer, you can go get a coffee or anything while it work. So this is hardly a time saver. On the other side, that next one is going to be of big help.

Safari's startup time is so small that you don't even care. In fact, I couldn't time it by hand. So, I went lazy and just didn't done it. You'll have to do with some words. There is simply no differences between opening Safari 4 and opening a new tab. That's how fast it is.

Photoshop CS 4, on the other side, is a bit slow. You have to count up to 4 before you can work in it. In fact, this is the slowest application that I've tested. There is just nothing slower than that. I think it pretty much guarantee a 4 seconds or less for just about anything.

Conclusion
If you can, get one... don't. As fast as it look, the Apple SSD cost a lot and has not much to offer. It doesn't support TRIM nor does it have a garbage collector. That means that it will keep on slowing as you use it down to half it's original speed. That's very bad for a $ 600 option (MacBook Pro 13") or even a $ 200 one (MacBook Pro 17").

By now, you've also realized that there is no way to get one in the Mac Pro without getting it out from a MacBook which mean it is now a $ 2000 upgrade. This is extremely costly, specially when you can get the Vertex for around $ 350.

That's it! See you next week for some other great news.

I saw a snow flake

And it's bad new
I have three very big project going on at school and the only thing I want to do next is kill myself. The bad new is not that I'll die, it's that I will not be able to write on my blog! I already switched to a 1-time-per-2-week schedule but it's still not enough. So, don't be surprised if you don't hear about me for a while.

On the bright side
Do you remember, about 4 months ago I did some benchmarks of the samsung in my MacBook Pro? If you don't, take a look here as it is like seeing the god of awesomeness. Anyway, here's the big new: In that post, I said that I'd try to move the SSD in my Mac Pro to see how it stand aside the RAID. Well... It's not going to happen today BUT... The SSD is now securely plugged in the Mac Pro with a handmade adapter built from the original Apple 320 GB HDD.

So as everything couldn't get better, I'll give you some early eyes-taken results that will make you lick your floor: safari open in half the time it was doing on the laptop and iTunes even faster. But wait! There's more! My iTunes library is stored on my server which leverage the old RAID array and is connected using a gigabit link and it is STILL faster than the RAID alone!

Anyway, I'll give some results when I'll have some time to do the benchmarks. Now, I've go to go coding...

Snow Leopard, yes but...

.. it's not that good
Hi everyone, I'm sorry if I let you in the dark for two weeks but I had a lot to do recently and didn't had much time write. Who knows, it might even get worse as time goes on. Anyway, I'm here to talk about Apple recently released operating system. Snow Leopard, as it is called, is a very nice OS. It does have a lot more punch than his predecessor 10.5 but I'm not here to talk about stuff that you already know.

Core upgrade
Apple rewrote a very big part of the os with snow leopard and that's nice for performances but, they also introduced an incalculable number of bugs. Nothing major but all of those things just keep on bothering you until you want to kill yourself. That's what I'm going to talk about. The way Apple bunched 10.6 to release it before Windows 7.

First, Exposé. They did a lot with it and the new version is gorgeous; if you don't have a MacBook. If, like me, you do, well, you'll want to punch yourself in the face each time you use those wonderful 4 finger gestures. There's a glitch with them that cause Exposé to stick and render it unproductive. If you bring Exposé and close it using your trackpad without lifting your hand of it first, shit will happen. It will get stuck in the mode you activated and the only way to get your windows back is to do the inverse gesture! It's a very easy thing to solve and could take about ten minutes to fix but it look like it didn't make it in 10.6.1 released just one week after the official release.

Next, Stacks. Finally, we can walkthrough a folder hierarchy without open a finder window. This was a long awaited feature but... It's buggy too! It work very well until you have a stack of a network volume. Here's what happen. First if the volume is not available and you click on it, it will display a transparent interrogation mark which is great but, if you click on it a second time, they stack up! Indefinitely! If the volume finally came online, they'll stick there! They don't even go away! Well that's most of a graphical problem and is indeed pretty minor. But still, it's just the start. As you'll use this stack, you'll realize that some obvious feature doesn't work. Deleting a file for instance. Yup, you can't delete a file from a network volume stack. Don't ask me why but dropping them in the Trash Can does nothing.

Finally, Upgrade. OS X was always stated for it's upgrade capability. I decided to test it, just for fun. I installed 10.5 and then upgraded to 10.6. No change in the settings, no app installed. And guess what. After one week, half of my icons doesn't appear, VMware fusion icon display as 512x512 pixel of garbage, spotlight sometimes refuse to listen to my keyboard, and I'll pass over random freeze (not kernel panic, just complete computer lockup) and random application crash.

Ho, I just forgot! There's also a keychain issue with the clean install that can get you locked up from your own computer. The only solution, if it is a solution, is to make your way to the keychain application and reset your keychain password.

Moral
OS X 10.6 is a great operating system. It does work faster and has some new interesting stuff. On the other side, don't, ABSOLUTELY DON'T try to install it as an upgrade. You'll want to punch yourself so bad that you'll actually do it before doing a clean install.

I'm sorry but we have to ban money. That's just the way it is.

A call for help
I decided to wrote this post, even if it goes out of the range of what this blog should talk about, after reading the enclosed article (click on the title) which propose a "poor" solution about the problem that appeared recently with 30 sec music preview that are on various online music store. Everyone talk about it since one week and I think it's the perfect time to reply.

The "poor" solution
The solution proposed by CrunchGeer is to simply ban music. As it is a solution, it is more temporary and risky than anything else. But still, Nickolas Deleon did risked to propose a solution and that's what important. Unfortunately, this ban would only cause the same thing to happen with the movie industry where previews would need to be bought. I don't even want to talk about software demos and other kind of consumable that could be "previewed".

One people did offered a more realistic solution. You can see his comment on the same post under the name "Mika" where he say: "[...] promotion of music for commercial purposes by anyone other than the performers themselves is banned [...]". It is a better solution than the total ban as it will not create what I call the "Fahrenheit 451 Effect". If you know the book, you know what I'm talking about. You can resume it by "banning any form of expression is bad and might get the humanity to it's end".

The good solution
What can be banned to solve this problem that is not considered as a form of expression? To answer this question, you must know why you need to banish something. It's not the fact that people want stuff that cause this issue. It's not the fact that people want it to be free. It's not the fact that creators want a reward for their product that cause the issue. It's the fact that people NEED a reward to live.

In this case, the reward is money but it could be anything else. I'd like to quote a talk between two fictional characters that live in a world where this issue doesn't exist :

- How much does this thing cost?
- The economic of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century.
- No money? You meen you don't get paid?
- The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in ours live. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.

You might have recognized Lili and Jean-Luc Picard from the "Star Trek - First Contact" movie that was released about 13 years ago. Believe it or not, this is the only solution to those issues. It will not only solve music issues but poverty and starvation too. That's without saying that it would rectify our justice system and could prevent many wars.

I know, I know, everyone can dream but. Isn't there a saying that if many people have the same dream, it will come true? Well if there is, that make at least two: Me and Gene Roddenberry.

Long silence, a lot of good stuff

News
Sorry for the long silence. You might have been wondering what where happening here since the release of Snow Leopard. If you where, the answer is "A LOT". If you weren't, the answer is still the same! Take a look at what is coming and you'll certainly like it.

Snow Leopard
I'm pretty sure that you can't take anything more about this new release of OS X but still, I want to add my word to it. I'll try to work out a new screen-cast to compare Windows 7 and OS X 10.6 file management systems. I think it will be a nice follow up to the last one which was about networking. It should be on YouTube in about one or two weeks.

Server
As some of you might have heard, I decided to build a nice file server for my home. But, if you follow this blog since its beginning, you know that I can't stand cheep stuff. So... I might have overkilled it a bit. Look forward to a little how to build your own core i7 based enterprise class server! I'll also stitch to that my little 4 days adventure to build mine.

School
I hear you already. YES! I'm STILL going to school. College to be exact. My 5th session in software development started about a month ago and I'm starting to have less and less time so you should expect that the 1-week-1-post formula could be a bit... stretched?

For those interested, my current classes are "Advance C++ Programming", "Software Testing Basics", "Advance Database Programming" and "Advance Computer Network". If you ever have questions about any computer subject, I should be able to answer them.

Company
That one is a bigger subject. It's been about two years that the idea first popup with my friends. We finally decided to go on with it and it's now official: We're working for an early 2010 opening. We are posted in Québec/Canada, more precisely in the Saint-Jérôme City, and we're aiming big. The company is named "Centre de Solutions Informatiques" (or "Computer Solution Center" for all of you non-french reader) and we're doing exactly what the name says. We're building all-in-one solutions for people and enterprises from low end hardware running Windows up to custom made high end hardware running custom made softwares.

More to come
I know that this is more of a teaser than a real post but, it's not like I have much time to write right now. You should expect the server story in about a week if nothing goes into my plans.

See you next week!