Overall, I’m very happy with the upgrade. More details after the jump.

Installation

While I won’t say it went flawlessly…

… it was pretty painless once I got it right. If you’re like me, and you install a lot of third-party extensions, especially those that link in at the kernel level, do not choose the default “Upgrade” option when installing Leopard. You’ll end up with what I’ve come to call the “Blue Screen of Discontentment”. But, you’re about to say, I was never given an option! Yes, you were. It was hidden behind the “Options” button on the dialog where it asks you which hard drive to install to. Pick “Archive and Install” and don’t look back.

Once I figured that much out, installation went flawlessly across all three of my Macs (yes, I bought a “Family Pack”).

Features

Like I said, the flagship new features in Leopard, while cool, aren’t as mind-blowing as you might think. But they’re still pretty cool.

Time Machine

Alright, in the grand scheme of things, Time Machine is pretty awesome. While technologically, its barely a step above rsync and a cronjob, I genuinely think this is the first backup solution that will actually get the masses to back up their data regularilly. It does, dare I say, make backups sexy.

However, a couple gripes about it:

• Despite the product announcements to the contrary, it doesn’t seem to support backups to AFP drives not hosted on another Leopard machines. This is quite annoying to me. I have 2 terabytes of gigabit ethernet-accessible storage at my fingertips, but I can’t use it for Time Machine, since it resides on a Linux box. Luckily I recently purchased a 250 gigabyte Firewire 800 drive which is now happily accepting my Time Machine backups. That doesn’t, however, help me with my older PowerBook, which I rarely plug into a hard-line ethernet connection or Firewire drive. Since I never do any multimedia work on that machine, it would be perfectly reasonable to perform Time Machine backups over 802.11g wireless, since I’m backing up nothing but ASCII text (source code and blog post drafts, primarily).
• The complete inability to do something as simple as forcing Time Machine to take a snapshot at a particular time. I want to say “Hey, Time Machine, I’m about to do nasty things to my home directory, save me from myself”. But unless it happens to be an hour since the last time it backed up, I’m out of luck. Boo! At least give me an AppleScript hook (I looked…).
• While the Time Machine UI is very very slick, there’s no way to get it to simply dump out a visual “diff” of all the files that have changed between versions. So if you just want to see how many files have changed in each backup, you’re out of luck.

Cover Flow and QuickLook

Alright, fine, cool gimmick. I’ve come to like it a lot, especially for browsing images and PDFs. Its a nice application of technology, and it’s quite cute.

But, honestly, it is really only good for browsing images. It really doesn’t break from the normal file browsing paradigm, and it doesn’t make the task of browsing deep file hierarchies any easier. In fact, its only really useful if you have a very flat file hierarchy, which my hard drive has never seen.

Spaces

It’s strange to say, but I almost feel like Spaces is the most finely refined “feature” of Leopard. So what’s the big deal? It’s nothing that new. Virtual Desktops have existed in one for or another for probably two decades, so the concepts behind Spaces are nothing new.

The best thing about Spaces, in my opinion, is that it simply gets out of the way. Once you have it set up right, it simply gets out of the way. I have Spaces trained to keep my Textmate instances in one “Space”, my Safari in a second, and my chats in a third. Using motions you’re familiar with, you can simply tab between apps, and it jumps you directly to the proper Space without any fuss or muss. It is really, really, really nice, to see virtual desktops finally done right, especially under MacOSX.

Overall

I haven’t had much time to play with the other features, like Mail and iChat, but I’ll say that the most compelling thing about Leopard is not the big headlining features, but the OS as a whole. Overall, it is a snappy, fun to use OS.

For some reason, it just plain feels faster. Its hard to explain. I was expecting it to absolutely crawl on my old 1.5 Ghz 12″ PowerBook G4, but to my surprise, it made my old laptop feel young again. In fact, this entire entry, as well as most of the screenshots presented in it, were created on my now three year old PowerBook. And let’s not talk about how much faster it made my new MacBook Pro feel.

And the new, unified look tightens the whole experience. All the apps mesh together to create a more consistent experience, where the OS simply disappears from view.

All in all, I think that Leopard is a worthy upgrade. While I think I’d still be pretty happy with my old Tiger installation, I’m very glad I upgraded. Overall, I’m getting more done, in less time, while having more fun doing it, than I did before Leopard. Well done, Apple, well done.

The IVR Cheat Sheet: This “QuickBase” from Intuit has instructions for how to cut through to a real person when you call a company and get an IVR system — Interactive (or Integrated) Voice Response. You know, the computer system that tries to solve your problem using stacked menu systems so they don’t have to pay a real person to talk to you? Even though you know what you want can’t be solved by the machine and you have to talk to a human? This site will tell you what you need to do to get the human on the phone.

The Intuit IVR Cheat Sheet.

Have you ever had one of those days when you realize that there are forces in the world that refuse to make things easy for you?

… Well I just had one.

I was called in earlier tonight to help get some work I did for Red Team earlier this term as we get ready to deploy and test our part of the system. I had my laptop sitting on the hood of the vehicle (a robotic Humvee) while I worked and I stepped away for a moment.

Just about then one of my teammates ran by to hop up on the robot to fix something and inadvertently knocked my laptop from off the hood about 5 feet to the hard concrete floor.

I have less than a week before my practicum project (effectively my masters thesis) must be completed.

The screen, as you can see, is absolutely destroyed. The lid is actually bent enough that it does not close without being forced.

But the machine boots and the disk checks cleanly. If that’s not a testament to the quality of IBM Thinkpads, I don’t know what is.

I’m not angry at the teammate who knocked it off. We all make mistakes. Insurance should cover its replacement (hopefully I’ll get a Powerbook out of the deal). Its just an extremely inopportune time to lose full use of my laptop.

The problem has been solved so hopefully it won’t be an issue anymore…

Today I went over to the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix. I was volunteering at the Red Team booth but I also managed to take some snapshots of one of the races before the thunderstorm hit.

Top Gear. I recently acquired the first season and I’m hooked! A simply awesome car show produced by the BBC. Like your standard car show they include lots of coverage of the latest supercars and luxury vehicles, but they also tend to try insane stunts like jumping over rows of motorbikes in double-decker buses.

And its all done with that special kind of wit that only the British can pull off successfully.

Overall, the switch went fairly smoothly. I chose Ubuntu “Hoary Hedgehog” (its development branch), which is based on Debian “Unstable.” I switched my apt-get sources over to the Hoary repository, launched “apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade” and crashed on the couch to watch a movie. An hour or two later (after fixing one minor upgrade snag), it was done. With the exception of a few core packages left over from Debian and probably wayyyyyy too many config files, my laptop is an Ubuntu machine now.

Ubuntu is pretty nice. It feels a bit more “polished” than Debian, and now I’ve got Gnome 2.10, which is kind of snazzy. But there’s something I miss about Debian. Its kind of like when I traded in my old Jeep for a brand new 4Runner. Its slick and smooth and has lots of gadgets, but there’s something about the sharp edges on that old reliable you miss. Its like my laptop has lost that rock-solid Debian feel that made me feel like I could slam my machine repeatedly against the desk without doing damage. Time will tell how I finally feel about Ubuntu.

Update: I’m also very concerned with the overabundance of the color brown throughout all of their default themes. Muddy, ugly, painful to look at brown.

Update: There seems to be a fair amount of interest in how my experiment turned out. Well… it turned out badly. I wasn’t very happy with Ubuntu and I ended up reinstalling Debian. True, Ubuntu has newer versions of many packages than Debian has, but without that level of quality and reliability that Debian packages usually have. My machine lost that robust quality that Debian brought.

Mark Jen, a blogger whose candid comments about life on the job at Google sparked controversy last month, has left the company. “Mark is no longer an employee at Google,” a Google representative said in response to an inquiry Tuesday. Efforts to reach Jen for comment were not immediately successful. Jen’s departure comes less than a month after he joined Google as part of a wave of new hires and began recording his impressions of his new employer, including criticisms, in his blog.

I’m talking to him about it now. Maybe I can help shed some light on the whole situation.

Update: Mark’s posted the whole story in an entry on his blog.

• Thomas Jefferson