Soft Arts

My wife bought me Salmon of Doubt awhile back, a collection of articles and shorts written by the late Douglas Adams. It is a wholly remarkable book and lends itself well to rereading.

The first time I read it, however, I was a bit put off by some of DNA’s essays on computers and technology. I felt (for some reason) like he was complaining about things that he really didn’t understand and honestly got a bit irritated by it.

I think that I might have just been in a bad space myself. On this read, I was surprised at how strongly I identified with some of the problems Adams talked about in his articles. One of them, Frank the Vandal, touches on the issue of synchronizing data between one’s laptop and desktop computers.

This one really hit home with me. My workstation is a dual processor G5 Powermac with a 23″ Apple Cinema display. I also have a 12″ Powerbook that I use when I am away from the office.

I’ve had the Powermac for awhile now, but the Powerbook is a fairly new acquisition. We’re hiring some new people, so I had originally lined up all of our assets and tried to figure out what I would use, what the new employees would inherit, and what we would have to buy.

For awhile I tried just using the 12″ Powerbook with the cinema display, a keyboard, and mouse. This addressed a few issues in that it let me use the same computer in the office and away from work, was terrific from a usability point of view, and freed up the the dual processor G5 for Aneayu (”A new employee as yet unnamed”).

Unfortunately, to be blunt, a G4 Powerbook is not ideal for doing large builds with Ant (note to self…set up jikes!). Since I do the bulk of the development here and kick off some pretty large builds I wanted something with some horsepower to it.

Since we hadn’t hired anyone yet, I tried running the G5 Powermac headless on the other side of the office and using it as a build machine that I’d ssh to from the Powerbook. This worked but was cumbersome.

Once I’d settled into cozy crapulence only one problem remained:Finally I decided to play the “complete avarice” card. Lee gets both the Powermac and the Powerbook. We have to buy hardware for Aneuyu and his or her future coworkers.

Douglas’ original complaint : How to synchronize the data?

Well, I spent a considerable amount of time pondering this. My friend Ray and I got pretty interested as such a utility might be useful to other whiners that have too many cool toys for their own good. We spent the better part of a day outlining what this utility might look like and how it would work. It might still be worth looking into at some point.

Apple, however, had apparently heard Mr. Adam’s complaints and had solved the problem rather elegantly.

Shutdown your Powerbook. As it reboots press the ‘t’ key. After a few seconds a FireWire logo will appear on the screen of the Powerbook.

Plug one end of a FireWire cable into your Powerbook and the other into your Powermac. The Powerbook’s hard drive will appear on your desktop as a regular FireWire drive.

A little playing around with NetInfo and my user directory was set to /Volumes/Powerbook/Users/lee.

What happens now is pure, unadulterated joy. When I come in to work I boot my Powerbook as described, place it on top of the Powermac and plug in the FireWire cable and power supply. Then I log onto my Powermac and start my day.

I use the hard drive of the Powerbook, and the vastly superior RAM and CPU power of the Powermac together. And it Just Works.

When I’m done I log off the Powermac, unplug the Powerbook and take it home. If I need to check my email or do work away from the office, I simply take out the Powerbook and get to work.

Everything is the same. Bookmarks, email, draft emails, and documents, my source code directories are all there. I can do whatever work I want on the Powerbook and it will be there on my desktop at the office in the morning. Fantastic!

Douglas Adam’s summed it up well when he said “Let me make one thing clear. I adore my Macintosh, or rather my family of however many Macintoshes it is that I’ve recklessly accumulated over the years. I’ve adored it since I first saw one at Infocom’s offices in Boston in 1983. The thing that has kept me enthralled and hypnotised by it in all that time is the perception which lies at the heart of its design, which is this: ‘There is no problem so complicated that you can’t find a very simple answer to it if you look at it the right way.’ Or, to put it another way, “The future of computer power is pure simplicity”.

This is a fantastic solution, and I wish that I could send Douglas Adams an email and tell him about it. Maybe he already knew about it. Damn, I wish he was alive. What a great man. My wife and I lit a candle for him the night he died

Well, I’ve depressed myself now. But before I sign off I’d like to point out that while this works effortlessly on the Mac this will never work with Windows as long as they continue to use a centralized registry. On the Mac all of your user settings are stored in the file system under your user directory, which follows you from machine to machine in this set up. Not so with Windows.

Bye for now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 24th, 2005 at 10:49 pm and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.