Thoughts on the iPad

First Impressions

Like most things Apple, I think the iPad is ahead of it’s time.  It is the future of personal computing, that’s for sure.  Apple once again accomplished what nobody else before them has been able to successfully accomplish.  They’ve redefined the tablet PC.  They’ve created exactly what they set out to do, a perfect middleman between a completely handheld device and a personal computer such as a laptop or desktop.

I personally have no use for one.  I have an iPhone 3G and a Macbook Pro.  My Macbook Pro is portable enough to take with me where I need it and it also serves as a powerful primary computer that’s more than capable for what I need.  My iPhone is powerful enough to do all the things I would want to do on the go, such as check email, read RSS feeds, check Twitter and Facebook, or maybe watch a movie.  Oh yeah, it does the usual phone stuff too (and very well, might I add).    I will admit when I first got the iPhone, I was skeptical that I wouldn’t be able to adapt to the touch screen keyboard that well.  I thought I’d miss the tactile buttons of my Treo 700p.  I worried for nothing… I adapted to the iPhone with ease.  I believe this is largely due to the awesome accuracy of the iPhone’s touch screen.  It cannot be beat, as you can clearly see.

I, like any other Mac-o-phile, had several browser tabs open watching the live blogging coverage when Steve Jobs announced the iPad Wednesday at the January 2010 Apple Special Event.  The iPad itself is very impressive piece of technology, and I was mostly interested in the new A4 processor powering the device.  The A4 is Apple’s new system-on-a-chip designed in house.  Why did Apple design their own and not go with the Intel Atom?  I think the decision had to do with being able to pack the most power into such a small enclosure.  The A4 handles the graphics acceleration as well, and Apple claims is more energy efficient with up to 10 hours of battery life.  At this time, I can only hope that Apple will plan on using these processors for only their mobile product line, such as the iPad, iPhone, and iPod.  I hope they stick with Intel on their personal computer line such as their Macbook Pros, iMacs, and Mac Pros.  I like being able to run Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and even Solaris on the same hardware if I wanted.

I will admit, I was put off by my initial reaction to the iPad, which left me unimpressed because I couldn’t think of a single thing I’d use it for in my life.  It’s just a big iPod Touch, I thought.  A few days went by, then I realized… no, it’s more.  Screen real estate means everything.  Because of the larger 9.7″ IPS LED display, the Apple was able to completely redesign all of their internal app functionality.  Mail, iCal, Address Book, and Safari are all redesigned to take better advantage of the iPad’s larger screen.  These redesigns look very promising, offering better functionality and more “at-a-glance” features.  If it were just a bigger iPod Touch, there would be a lot of wasted space  So, definitely one of the iPad’s biggest features is it’s newly designed OS which is supposedly based off of the iPhone OS.  The fact that the iPad is unlocked to allow it’s buyers to use any compatible SIM card and it’s corresponding data plan leads me to believe bigger things are in store for the iPhone.  I predict by the next Apple Event, the iPhone will be unlocked at the very least.  There will also likely be a new model based on some variant of the A4 processor in the iPad… iPhone A4?

Predictions

In the Home

The iPad will probably be a big hit this Christmas as a gaming console.  The brief demos we saw at the Event were just the tip of the iceberg.  Those developers had very little time to get the demos ready for the event, so I would say to expect bigger and better things to come in that category.  Another one of it’s features is it’s iBooks application, clearly meant to get Apple’s foot in the e-reader market.  Based on the demo I saw watching the event, it is going to dominate the e-Reader market.  User experience is everything.  The experience of buying a book to seeing it on your “iBookshelf” to using your finger to flip the pages is going to blow any of the other e-Readers out of the water.  I can also see the appeal for using it in the house for things like streaming movies from your Apple TV or Mac Mini media center.  By the way, the day Apple releases the Mac Mini with Blu-Ray, I’m getting one.  Even if it means selling a kidney.

Stylus

I think one of iPad’s strongest points doesn’t necessarily exist yet:  the ability to take notes via some sort of stylus.  I know what you’re thinking… “a stylus??  what is this… 1995?”  Hear me out.  The stylus as we know it a-la Palm Treo was a useless and cumbersome tool.  It was used to point and select things, and also had a very rudimentary handwriting feature that required special strokes on a designated area.  Apple successfully replaced that stylus with the human finger, and then some.  The stylus I’m thinking of will be an additional tool to the human finger.  The iPad would be able to tell the difference between the stylus and your finger, and be able to accept one input while ignoring the other.  It will be able to write or draw anywhere on a given application, with perfect accuracy.  It’ll be a Wacom tablet and a computer all in one.  You could possibly even plug it into your iMac and use it as a Wacom style writing tablet as well.  I know that will be a feature added either by a 3rd party application or by a future OS release from Apple themselves.  This is such an important feature, and will make the iPad one of the most dominant electronic devices of the future.  This single feature will change the way we do personal computing.  Why?  Think of the iPad as a notebook and think of all the places you take or use a notebook.

Business

In the business world, the iPad will replace the steno pad everyone takes to meetings.  It’s not practical now, because typing is too much of a distraction from the meeting.  A person can almost always jot down notes on a notepad faster than they can type, drawing symbols or diagrams to of ideas or to help them remember what went on in the meeting.  Doing this via keyboard and mouse/trackpad just doesn’t work in a meeting environment.  Keyboard and mouse/trackpad input represents a world of limitations.  Freehand writing has no limitations.  I’ll take that prediction a step further and say that Apple will also find a way to take that handwritten text and convert it to a typeface font.  Think of it as OCR for the next century.

Art

That stylus input will also benefit the artist, who will buy the then available Photoshop for the iPad.  They’ll take the iPad with them to their favorite place of inspiration, and begin to draw or paint directly onto the device.  Their large array of artistic medium consolidated down to one device.  They will love it because it represents a medium without limitations.  The accuracy and precision of the stylus will give them all of the creative freedom they would desire from a sketchpad, and then some.

Healthcare

I can see the iPad taking the healthcare industry by storm.  One day, every doctor will have one.  The doctor will use it when walking into a patient’s office to pull up patient records via an application that talks to the local hospital patient database such as EPIC.  Then even possibly prescribe and sign a prescription that automatically gets sent to the patient’s preferred drugstore so by the time the patient gets to the drugstore, it’ll be ready.  Radiologists will be able to view and dictate medical images directly from their iPad.  The iPad could also possibly be used as a monitor to hook up diagnostic devices.  The possibilities there are endless.

Education

I think the biggest potential impact the iPad will have will be in education.  The iPad will replace textbooks altogether, and will be required for every student in every classroom.  Each grade will have their own curriculum pre-loaded on each student’s iPad.  They’ll be able to use additional features like searching through their textbooks, using the stylus to highlight important text, as well as take handwritten notes on the side of each page.  These notes and highlights will be indexed and bookmarked, making them easy to search for and reference back to.  In math, the student will be able to write out equations that the iPad will be able to recognize and provide help with if needed.  The possibilities here are endless.

Wrapping it up

A lot of the first impressions of the iPad were comparing it to the iPhone.  “The iPhone can already do this”, “There’s no camera”, etc.  I learned very quickly not to look at the iPad for what it can do now, but for what it will very likely be able to do in the future.  The best is yet to come, and it will come.

Sharing with Family

First off, I don’t think anybody in my family reads my blog.  That’s why I can get away with this post.  :)

I’m having a bear of a time sharing photos with my family.  They’re still on the train of emailing photos to everyone.  Yes, I have explained to them how that just doesn’t work when you have 50 5mb photos.  Yes, they have sent 50 different emails with one photo each attached.  :facepalm:

I use Flickr, and it works great for my purposes.  It creates awesome photo galleries, I have unlimited storage with my Pro account, I can order prints via SnapFish and have them ready for pickup at my local walgreens or mailed to me… the options are endless.  However, some of those things only I can do.  Others cannot order photos (yet), nor can anyone download a full set without using some 3rd party hackery tool.  Not good.

Thinking back to my “hosting my own website” idea, I wonder if there’s some 3rd party WordPress plugin that will allow you to embed Flickr into your site and also possibly download entire sets?  This would probably be at the expense of my bandwidth, but that’s something I’m willing to deal with to make this an easier process.

I could possibly do the same for YouTube, as I know you can download the MP4 using a javascript hack.  This is something I need to look into, but my quick search results for the past hour or so haven’t really turned up anything.  The YouTube part would be easy enough… the Flickr part is stumping me.  I’ll keep looking and hopefully figure it out soon.  This idea is acceptable though, as all the hackery will be done by me and will seem to “just work” for everyone else.

Something else I want to consider is privacy.  The majority of my photos, I don’t mind being viewable by the world.  That’s the point of Flickr.  However, there are some that I would rather keep private to my family and friends.  I do know there are permission levels you can set in Flickr, but the problem is none of my family or friends are actually members of Flickr.  I don’t want to force them to register for a Yahoo or affiliated account just to get their photos.  Goes against the whole “it should just work” idea.  Again, this might be a good argument for hosting my own website.  In theory, I should be able to lock down privacy settings on certain sets but still make them viewable and hopefully downloadable via my website.  It’s basically just security by obscurity, but my website will be less likely to be viewed by some random passerby than my page on Flickr would.  I could probably even have a password on the sets.  Something to look into.

It actually looks like SmugMug would satisfy some of my requirements, but at the cost of $60 a year.  I still wouldn’t be able to download entire albums I don’t think.

I realize bandwidth is expensive, but come on… we’re in the 21st century.

So, what’s stopping me from starting up my own site?  I can’t find a domain name I like.  Yes, I’ve said that before.  It’s just something I’m really picky about.

Hosting my own website

A few weeks ago, I saw that Dreamhost was offering a free two week trial for it’s hosting services.  Creating my own website has been something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while now.  I thought it would be a good idea to pull everything I do all under one domain.  So ideally I’d like my site to host my blog, pictures/movies, etc, etc, so I thought the free trial would be a good way to test this out.  I quickly realized it’s probably not such a great idea.

I’m not a web developer.  It’s a hobby of mine that I am not very good at.  So I thought, can I provide a better photo experience than Flickr, or a better movie experience than YouTube?  Probably not.  So, I’d have to integrate those services.  While doable, at best it would serve to be a proxy to all of my other hosted-for-free services.  I guess that would make it easier for people to keep track of everything.  Hmm… I didn’t think about that until I just typed it.  My fingers are smarter than I am.  :)

Upgrading…

I remember back in the days where migrating to new software was anticipated by most.  People looked forward to getting the newer code that likely meant a more stable experience.  Stability was the primary reason for desiring the change, it seems.  They didn’t care that they would have to re-learn the changes incorporated into the software, as long as it meant that it would crash less and that they wouldn’t have to worry about losing data as a result.

It seems that since the days of Windows 2000 and Office XP, software reached a level of stability that most users became comfortable with.  Even to this day, Windows XP and Office 2003 seems to be the key choice among the corporate world.  The migration from Windows 2000 to Windows XP was relatively painless.  Everything pretty much worked the way it did from a users standpoint between the two systems.

Windows Vista and Office 2007 didn’t bring much to the table in terms of stability.  In fact, some could even argue that Vista is a step backwards in that area.  Office 2007’s main argument to use it over 2003 was that it’s new interface would increase productivity with the redesigned UI and Ribbon toolbar.  Of course, users would have to be re-trained, so it might be some time before that “productivity” starts to show.  :)

Then there’s the security argument.  A valid argument at that… for those who understand it.  Unfortunately, this ventures in the world of being something people don’t care about until it directly affects them in a largely negative way.  Kinda like your doctor telling you repeatedly to exercise, and you ignore it until you have a heart attack.

Forget the fact that Vista was poorly done.  Office 2007 wasn’t, yet the push to it was not nearly as urgent as 2003.  Why is that?  Software companies such as Microsoft are starting to become more aggressive about expiring support for older products.  One could argue their motives are financially driven.  Microsoft is just itching to pull the plug on XP, so they can begin to recuperate their losses from Vista.

Software has been coming to this point for quite some time now.  The kinds of things you use a computer for hasn’t drastically changed in the past decade or so.  If anything, they’re attempting to shift the focus into the cloud, but only to accomplish the same task.  Whether or not cloud apps will ever be able to overtake local apps is another argument.

It all comes down to what the end user wants.  It used to be stability.  Most people feel that software reached an acceptable point in stability on that timeline a while ago.  Their willingness to try something new just because of it’s prettier UI or couple of quirky new features they’d probably rarely ever user is just not enough anymore.  Security is not a good enough reason for them, and it never will be.  People will never be proactive about doing their own backups.  We’ve reached the point to where we, as IT professionals, have to start pushing end users to move forward, catching hell for it along the way.  Unless something changes in the world of IT, it’s only going to continue to be harder to do our jobs… not easier.  That sucks.

SSD Upgrade

I finally have a solid state disk in my unibody Macbook Pro.  I can, without a doubt, say this is the single best upgrade I have ever done on any personal computer… ever.  Forget RAM… get an SSD.  I used to have to wait ~30 seconds for my Mac to boot completely, login and all.  Granted, I have quite a few things that get started up at login.  Now, it’s maybe 10 seconds if that.  Apps launch instantaneously.  Decompressing large files is much quicker.  Everything is just faster… much faster.

Where I work, we are constantly dealing with large medical imaging datasets (such as MRI), which contain tens of thousands of smaller individual files.  So, as you can imagine, disk I/O is very important when cycling through these files for analysis.  At the rate SSD seems to be evolving, it won’t be long before our data processing workstations will all have one.  So, I needed one to test.  :)

I chose an OCZ Vertex 250G Mac Edition.  I did extensive research on which drive would be the best candidate to test, and OCZ seems to come out on top quite a bit.  Anandtech’s frequent reviews helped a lot.  The new Indilinx controller has been getting rave reviews, so my decision was easy.  If Intel had a 250G option, it would have made my decision much more difficult.

I’ve been using MacAuthority to source all of my Apple parts lately, and I’ve been extremely happy with their service.  I would even go as far to say it’s the best customer service I’ve ever received.  Next time you need something, give them a ring.  You won’t be disappointed.  So, I let them know what I wanted.  They didn’t carry that specific drive, but it seems all I had to do was let them know I was interested, and they got it for me.  I like that.  :)

So, the drive came in, and I wasted no time swapping it with my old 5400RPM disk.  I hooked the old drive up to a SATA to USB controller, booted from it, and proceeded to use Carbon Copy Cloner to image it onto the SSD.  Unfortunately, halfway through, the SSD disappeared and the clone failed.  ”Don’t do this to me… not with my new toy.”  So, I opened Disk Utility.. no SSD.  I rebooted, tried Disk Utility again… no SSD.  Tried ioreg -l -w 0 | grep OCZ, nothing.  Checked OCZ’s forums, and found another guy was having a similar problem and they recommended to remove the drive for 30 mins.  So I did, reinstalled it, it showed up!  The forum post recommended doing a firmware upgrade.  Downloaded the ISO, burned it, and rebooted.  It didn’t recognize the disk.  ”I can’t believe this”.  So, I contacted MacAuthority to let them know what happened.  ”OK, we’re sending you another one right away.”  Wow, am I a VIP or something?  :)  So, the new one comes in 2 days later.  I immediately check to see if it has the latest firmware, and it does.  I try the clone again, and it works fine this time.  Looking good!

Then I rebooted.  Wow.  I mean Wow.  I know I said it above, but wow.  I’m hardly ever wowed, but this time I was.  WOW.

I did before and after benchmarks using XBench.  If you search the Xbench submitted results for “SSD Upgrade“, you’ll see mine.  I titled both sumbissions the same, but I misidentified the Macbook Pro the second time so rest assured, they’re both me.  :)

Pretty definitive results:

• Pre-SSD – 37.02
• Post-SSD – 225.84

So, get one if you haven’t already (from MacAuthority!).  Sell a kidney if you have to.

I’m also looking forward to the next firmware upgrade, which is supposed to configure the drive to self-optimize with a garbage collection function and support for TRIM.  A beta version is on the forums as of this posting, but it seems that Mac owners are having problems with their Macs not sleeping properly, so I’ll wait.  :)

Social Media and Productivity

I’m a late bloomer in the whole social media scene.  I remember signing up for Twitter when it first came out, and thinking “I’ll never use this…”.  I still don’t use it very much at all.  I think I average ~5 tweets a day.  On facebook, I let my friends know what I’m doing maybe twice a month.  If you compare this to those who actually get paid for this stuff, there is NO comparison.  I’m a spec of dust in the twittersphere.  I still like doing it though.  I think it’s a great way to meet people, and branch out.

However, something alarmed me recently.  I do not get any monetary gain from posting to twitter, facebook, friendfeed, or my blog.  It is not a part of my job.  What alarmed me was, I’ve noticed I get a sense of accomplishment for doing these things.  I don’t think I should, as there is no real value in these things.  It’s a pasttime, a hobby, something to do when there’s nothing else to do.  What I’ve also noticed is, I have a tendency to try to squeeze these things in-between doing things I’m supposed to do.  This is bad when those things have a tendency to take longer than expected.  It’s all about your train of thought.  How easy is it for one small task to explode into an hours worth of reading?  It’s happened to me before many times.  I’ll click a bit.ly link on Twitter, which takes me to someone’s blog which I’m interested in, so I read the article, which also has several links that I invariably must read to fully encapsulate the purpose of the article, but then someone makes an interesting addendum or criticism in the comments along with their own links which must be read as well.  The next thing I know, I’m 50 years old.  Ok, that’s exaggerating, but you get the point (time flies).  I’ve easily wasted entire days engrossed in absorbing information, that I’ll look at the clock “5 minutes from when I sat down that morning AM” only to see hours have passed.

However, I feel like I accomplished something by doing that.  I learned something I didn’t previously know.  The question is, will I ever actually use that knowledge?  Does knowledge always need to be 100% useful to make it worthwhile?

I try to keep my information inflow trimmed to the bare minimum, which is already too much as it is.  Is this an acceptable way to spend time?  I hear a lot of “you just have to manage your time”, but I think that falls more along the line of “you just have to eat healthy”.  Everybody knows they need to do it, but very few actually do.

I’m not sure that makes sense, or if I accomplished everything I originally meant to say.  Too many distractions.  Gotta go.

RAID Mirror on OS X Server

We have two production Tiger servers, and I decided I wanted to get RAID1 set up on the Server HD itself.  Apple tells you this isn’t possible without reformatting/reinstalling.  AFP548 tells you otherwise:  http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=20040827122302975

However, I spent several hours trying to get this operational with no success.  If you look in the comments of that article, I’m not the only one.  I was probably leaving out an important step somewhere, but after a few tries of reformatting, etc, you get a little brain fuzz.  I’m sure being there at 2am wasn’t helping either.  :)

I decided against doing this for now.  Instead I opted for a nightly incremental clone using Carbon Copy Cloner to the second HD.  In hindsight, this is probably going to serve me better.  Let’s say an update goes awry and renders something unusable.  I still have yesterday’s clone to boot to!  Hardly anything changes on the server HD itself, since these servers are just file servers, so that works out well.  I can see this not being a good setup for some depending on what kind of server you’re running and where the important data is actually stored.  In my case, we have 3 Apple RAIDs at ~17TB total (older, but still running), and just bought an Active XRAID 16TB to compliment that 17TB we already had.  All configured in at least RAID5, with the Active XRAID set up with 2 dual parity RAID6 slices.  Plenty of protection there.  And of course, RAID is NOT backup!!

When our next server comes in, I’ll probably set up a RAID1 mirror with a CCC clone to a single 3rd drive, or maybe use the 3rd drive as a hot spare.  I’m liking the idea of having an operational 1 day old backup, so the first is more appealing.

On a side note, I’m interested to see what RAID storage offerings Apple will be offering now that Snow Leopard Server will do ZFS*.

*Apparently, Apple seems to have removed ZFS from it’s Snow Leopard page.  Say it isn’t so!!

OpenSolaris 2009.6 in VMware Fusion

To install vmware-tools:

ln -s /usr/lib/vmware-tools/configurator/XOrg/7.1 /usr/lib/vmware-tools/configurator/XOrg/7.4

or if you’re using 64-bit:

ln -s /usr/lib/vmware-tools/configurator/XOrg/7.1_x64 /usr/lib/vmware-tools/configurator/XOrg/7.4

Taken from here:  http://communities.vmware.com/thread/212833

**Edit**

This fixes the installation problem, but the tools themselves still do not work properly.  I haven’t found any other solution yet.  I’m going to try open-vm-tools next.

Search

Lots of news on the Search front lately.  Wolfram Alpha released their computational knowledge engine.  Microsoft announced their upcoming Bing search engine which is supposed to replace Live search.  Do any of these pose a threat to Google?  I think no.

I don’t think Wolfram Alpha ever intended to challenge Google.  I won’t use that search engine for anything other than if I need a scientific explanation of something, or maybe a graph plot of some mathematical equation.  If anything, I can see Wolfram Alpha being a huge compliment to Google.  Do I smell a buyout?  That would actually be pretty nice!  Considering Google’s stance on education, a Wolfram partnership would go a long way.  Unlike Microsoft, any company or product Google buys actually flourishes.

Bing is trying to be more of a direct threat to Google.  It’s no secret that Google is one of Microsoft’s biggest competitors.  The reason being is typical of Microsoft history.  They tried to take someone else’s idea and make their own version, and assumed people would prefer that version just because it’s made by Microsoft.  In this case, they took too long to come out with something comparable to what Google had.  That’s why Google is synonymous with the term “search” now… “Just Google it”.  What do you think would happen several months from now if somebody said “Just Bing it”?  I would laugh.  Google is already the search king, and has been for over a decade.  People associate the term “search” with “Google”, and that is why it will stay on top.

Since then, Microsoft has been playing catch-up with Google, copying idea after idea… trying to offer a comparable product and some competition.  I personally don’t know anyone who uses Microsoft Live anything.  I’ve signed up for most of their stuff, but only to check it out.  I never use it.  It’s just not cross-brand compatible.  True to Microsoft’s corporate identity, they make it easy to use their stuff with their own products… not so much with anything else.  Google is pretty much brand independent.  They have the luxury of being so because everything they offer is the same.

I have no idea if Bing is actually better than Google.  From the reviews I’ve been reading, it seems like it is.  <conspiracy_theory_alert>That is, of course, assuming the people reviewing haven’t been paid off by Microsoft!</conspiracy_theory_alert>.  This isn’t going to matter, for three reasons:

1. Bing is still made by Microsoft and for that reason alone, most people will not like it due to Microsoft’s corporate identity.
2. Google’s search engine is due for a major update.  They announced Wave, but that’s not it.  I have a hunch something else is coming.  Something big.
3. Google=Search.  That will be very hard to overthrow.  For the same reason that for the longest time, Microsoft=PC.  Also, I don’t think Google will make the same mistakes Microsoft did.

The only thing Microsoft has going for it is it’s market share.  While still at a staggeringly high 87.90% as of this posting, it has been declining and it should be noted that it’s at it’s lowest percentile ever.  It will be interesting to see how Microsoft uses this influence to roll out Bing.

I really hate those market share numbers because most people aren’t given a choice or would use whatever they were told to or taught on.

Evolution

I have no intention of pissing off anyone, and I don’t have anything against anyone’s choice for their sexuality.  It’s their choice, and they should act however they feel.

I think the purpose of life is for it to continue (or one of it’s purposes anyway).  Species have evolved over time to adapt to survive in their environment.  I can’t think of a single instance where this adaptation was brought upon by the species’ choice… can you?  Some species can reproduce on their own, others require a mate of the opposite sex.  Humans require a mate of the opposite sex.  A human male cannot naturally give birth to offspring.  A human female cannot impregnate herself naturally.  So, how does homosexuality play a roll in the continuation of the human race?

Let’s assume the human race as we know it today gets “reset”.  All technology and science as we know it is lost.  We have to resort to living off of the earth.  What would become of those “choices” people have made regarding their lifestyles?  Would we, as humans, adapt?  If homosexuality is really engrained in DNA rather than a conscious choice, would it die off eventually?

Homosexual couples adopt, which I think is a great way to start a family.  I don’t really have any good arguments against that, except that in my “reset” scenario, I don’t think adoption would be a choice.  Adoption should not exist, IMO… I mean, it should not be needed.

There’s also surrogate birth, but I can’t see that playing into the “reset” scenario either.

Yeah, that “reset” scenario’s a long shot, but it could happen.  I try to break down every question as far as I can, because I usually find that the simplest answer is almost always the right one.

I don’t disagree with homosexuality because it disgusts me or it defies my beliefs.  I disagree with it because it’s not natural… it’s not life’s way.  I’m sure I’m wrong, so tell me all about it in the comments.