Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

Cocoa developer Craig Hockenberry wants you to file a bug report on the OS X license restrictions that prevent desktop virtualization:

How can you develop new products for Leopard when you need to have Tiger installed for supporting your legacy applications? How easy is it to test a new feature on Mac OS X 10.4.11 when you’re running 10.5? How quickly can you reproduce a bug on 10.4.10 if you’re running 10.4.11? Can you run Xcode versions 3.0 and 3.1 at the same time from /Developer?

We all know the way to get Apple’s attention regarding our issues is to submit bugs. So now is the time to vote for virtualization. If you agree with the following, please copy and paste this bug report and submit it so that it becomes a duplicate of Bug ID# 5812840.

I agree with everything Craig is saying, and I can’t wait to see OS X virtualization available. As a developer, the benefits to testing software without switching computers or rebooting to a different operating system are enormous. The only downside is that virtualization will never allow me to emulate PPC processors along with Intel. Until I decide to cut support for PPC entirely (it will probably be a few years before I even consider this), I’m going to have to keep my old PowerBook on a side table for additional testing.

The iPhone SDK has finally landed, bringing with it real Exchange support, WPA2 and other goodies. You can watch the announcement event here, or read highlights and commentary at Daring Fireball.

Although I don’t own an iPhone (yet), I did download the SDK and look forward to playing with it. My feelings about the price structure seem to be about the same as what most other developers are thinking. The $99 listing fee is no big deal. In my experience, even semi-popular freeware applications can earn back more than that through donations. The 30% Apple commission is high, but at the same time the iPhone is opening up an additional revenue source that will augment existing sales. It’s also a really neat, fun platform to develop for.

As a user, I am a little concerned about iPhone applications that are built off of their desktop alternatives. For example, if I buy a license for Delicious Library 2, will I have to pay an extra $20 for an iPhone version (assuming one is eventually released)? Will the iPhone version be free, but intentionally crippled so you need or want the full desktop version? It would be great if the iPhone version could be unlocked with a desktop serial number, but it seems like this won’t be possible. Maybe developers will be able to create coupons that will work in the iTunes store, but I haven’t heard anything about that.

I’m going to buy an iPhone eventually, I’m considering holding out until the next revision. It seems like it June would be a perfect time to release a second generation iPhone along with the new firmware update.

The new MacBook Air looks like an great machine, and I wish I had a need for one. I don’t have a desktop at home, and I doubt I would be happy with the Air’s performance as my primary workstation, so planning on sticking with my MacBook Pro for the foreseeable future.

What’s exciting to me (besides the multi-touch and other new features that should eventually make their way to the MBP) is that it seems like a great reason for Apple to push bluetooth data tethering on AT&T in a future software update or revision to the iPhone. Steven Frank mentioned this in a recent blog post, and I tend to agree. For a laptop that’s designed for portability, it makes sense to have some other option for network connectivity, and without an ethernet jack or ExpressCard slot, bluetooth tethering would fulfill that role nicely.

Bluetooth data tethering is one of the big reasons I haven’t seriously considered buying an iPhone yet. Although it’s slow and I rarely really need it, it’s invaluable when I need to get some work done and I can’t find a reliable WiFi connection. I’m sure AT&T won’t be quick to get behind it, but I still have my fingers crossed.

DroboShare is an add on to the Drobo storage device; giving you the ability to access your data over a GB network connection. It’s neat, and lack of network sharing has always been a valid criticism of the Drobo compared to some of its competitors, but given the price I can’t see much of a reason not to buy an AirPort Extreme or some other USB NAS device, which should work just as well.

Chyrp blogging engine:

Chyrp is a blogging engine designed to be very lightweight while retaining functionality. It is driven by PHP and MySQL (with some AJAX thrown in), and has a pimpin’ theme and module engine; so you can personalize it however you want.

I like the philosophy behind Chyrp; it seems clean and lightweight without sacrificing a good user interface. Unfortunately the current version (I tried both the 1.0.3 and the latest from SVN) has some bugs left to work out, mainly dealing with URL redirection (“clean URLs”) and search, at least on my hosting provider. I’m definitely going to keep and eye out for future releases.

Since I’ve been using VMware Fusion a lot recently, I’ve started looking around for performance tips (both to get the best results from inside Fusion, and avoid slowing my MacBook Pro to a crawl when it’s running in the background). Besides buying more RAM or a faster Mac, here are a few things you can do when setting up a new VM that may not be immediately obvious:

• Install the 64bit version of your guest operating system. See this post by a VMware software engineer for the technical reasons why. The big drawback to running 64bit Windows is lack of driver support, and since drivers are provided by VMware, it’s not a huge concern in the VM world as it is with physical hardware.
• Use SCSI rather than IDE hard disks; the VMware SCSI driver is faster. Since the Windows XP installer doesn’t won’t recognize SCSI disks without an additional driver, you might want to use Fusion’s “easy install” option.
• Don’t use more than one CPU per guest. Emulating two CPUs will lead to horrible performance in my experience.
• Use fast, external hard disks if possible. The goal is to reduce contention between the host operating system or other VMs, especially if you’re on a notebook with a slower 5400rpm hard drive.

Thanks to Tony Arnold and various online forums for this information.

Last week the inevitable finally happened, and one of the drives in my RAID-0 array (attached to a PC I keep pretty much just for file serving) started to fail. Since I built it a few years ago the RAID has pretty much been temporary, until I could find some sort of redundant storage system I liked at a good price point. I never really reached the point where I found something I loved, but since I was forced to choose I ended up purchasing a Drobo from Newegg.

The Drobo is pretty simple. It’s a USB 2.0 storage enclosure with room for 4 SATA drives. Although the Drobo doesn’t use a traditional RAID, it’s fully protected storage. It doesn’t matter what size or type of drives you use with the Drobo either; the firmware makes the best use of whatever mixed drives you put in, and you can add or upgrade drives at any time.

I considered several options before settling on the Drobo, including the ReadyNAS NV+, G-SAFE RAID, and many types of external drives, enclosures and RAID devices (as well as building another, low power file server using Linux or Windows Server). The problem with the ReadyNAS and most other RAID enclosures was price; most of the ones I was considering cost between $600 and $1000, not including drives. Building a Linux server with used hardware would have probably been the cheapest option, but part of the goal was to reduce my power bill and have something that didn’t take up a lot of room or make a lot of noise (and although it wouldn’t take much time to setup and administer a new server, it’s also something I could do without).

At $500 the Drobo isn’t cheap, but it also comes in below the cost of most alternatives. The lack of network support was disappointing, but I’m only really using my MacBook Pro these days, and I wanted direct attached storage for bootable Time Machine support, so that wasn’t a big deal. Looking at other reviews, the only real downside to the Drobo is the performance. The Drobo is USB 2.0 only, but from what I’ve read even if it had a faster FW800 bus the firmware itself would still limit performance as it mirrors data across drives. I haven’t done any real testing, but I did try playing a movie in VLC while doing several file copies to the Drobo. There were no performance issues, which is good; most of what I’m using this for is media storage. Resuming and suspending a VMware Fusion virtual machine on the Drobo was noticeably slower than my MacBook Pro’s internal drive, but once started the VM’s performance seemed fine.

The Drobo looks nice too, unlike 90% of other external enclosures out there. Other than being a little long, it’s a small box and doesn’t take too much room on my desk. The LED indicator lights on the front panel were a little bright, but that was easily solved by taping some paper underneath the removable front panel, over the LEDs themselves (and it’s easily removable if I ever sell it or change my mind). The Drobo is also quite, it’s internal fan is variable speed and makes very little noise under normal operation.

Since I’m using the Drobo for Time Machine backups I decided to create two partitions. The Drobo will report 2TB of available space regardless of how much actual storage is available (in order to dynamically increase storage when you add additional drives), and Time Machine will happily eat away at it until it goes over the available space or there’s no room left for other files. To solve this, I just created a 256GB Time Machine partition and a second 1.75TB partition for storage. Using Disk Utility this is easy, but you do have to be careful to select the correct partition scheme. See this tech note for more information.

From TidBITS Networking:

Leopard includes more information about Wi-Fi networks in the vicinity of your computer than meets the eye. Mac OS X 10.5 updates the AirPort menu in the system menu bar after you select, which is a neat feature and provides more accurate results. It also shows a lock icon next to networks protected by some form of encryption. But you can extract more information by holding down the Option key while selecting the menu.

Neat trick, although it would be more useful if it showed details for all the networks in range, instead of just the connected network.

I’ve been a fan of Pandora Internet Radio for a few years, and one of the few things I dislike about it is that it can be annoying to keep the flash-based audio player open in your web browser. It turns out though, that this is a perfect fit for Leopard’s new WebClip Dashboard Widget. Just turn off “Only play audio in Dashboard” in the Widget’s preferences, and you have the perfect Dashboard mini-application. And I thought I’d never find a use for WebClip!

From Ars Technica:

Steve Jobs today announced that Apple is working on a software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone and iPod touch so that third-party developers can build native applications for the devices. The SDK is on track for a February 2008 release, after the annual Macworld Apple-fest takes place in January 2008.

As to why Apple is taking so long to release an SDK, Jobs detailed the complicated position the company feels it is in: “We’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc.,” Jobs argued in his announcement.

This is pretty close to what a lot of people suspected back when the iPhone was first announced; it’s going to take a lot of effort to build a stable iPhone development framework, and creating it in time for the launch would have taken a lot of resources away from other things if it would have been at all possible. I wonder if the reason it’s being announced now rather than ini a year or two is in part because of all the news about third party iPhone hacks.