Facebook has become so cluttered with the latest site redesign that it’s pretty much useless for expressing anything other than vapid, passing thoughts. So maybe the silver lining is that it will motivate me to post more on Arcadia. Like this week’s really big news:

My team, the creators of communication-related network software, formerly an odd part of Berbee Information Networks, and lately an even more poorly-understood part of CDW Corporation, has spun off to create our own company, Singlewire Software. (Yes, the press releases went out on April 1, but no, it’s not a joke.)

We’re extremely excited about this change. We can now focus all our energy on our software, and organize our day-to-day existence in a way that makes sense for a software company. And we feel more comfortable in a smaller, more entrepreneurial and collegial company, than in a large corporation. I just love the fact that suddenly I know and communicate regularly with everyone in the company.

There are, of course, a lot of challenges involved in making this new venture successful, but we have a great team assembled to face them, and are going to really enjoy doing it. Knowing that each of our efforts now has such a large impact on the direction and success of the whole company really changes how I feel about getting up and going to work in the morning. It’s truly invigorating and motivating. I’ve been missing this level of enthusiasm for a long while.

It’s also a big relief to be able to just talk about it finally! We were all brought in on the planning and preparation process at the beginning of February (during a team gathering before our annual user group meeting in Squaw Valley), and signed non-disclosure agreements because of the sensitive nature of transactions like this. As the closing date got nearer, it became harder to act as if nothing was going on—especially once we started having meetings to learn about our new benefits programs and to sign up for things like health insurance!

There have been a few bumps in the road as we transition to our new infrastructure and systems, but overall I’m impressed with how smoothly everything is progressing. We’re renting our current office space for a while as we look for our own location, and that continuity is quite helpful. There were plenty of technical, financial, and legal issues to sort out; having to worry about abruptly moving at the same time would have been a major pain.

Anyway, I’m thrilled that we’re now in charge of our own fate, and look forward to defining ourselves, striving to succeed on our own merits, and—definitely not least—to getting back to writing code and finishing off the next releases of our software!

Engadget has posted a bunch of nice unboxing shots, so I don’t have to. I will however show a nice touch I found when installing the troublesome Blu-Ray drive that failed so miserably in the dual G5 machine this one replaces. Since the new machine uses SATA for its optical bays I can now hook up the drive directly, without the flimsily-attached bundled ATAPI adapter, which seemed mostly good for causing kernel panics. (The bay also has two slots, so I can leave Apple’s SuperDrive in place when adding the Blu-Ray drive). I quickly realized I was going to need some screws to attach the drive, but before I could start tearing apart my closet in the faint hope that my miscellaneous-server-parts box might contain some that would work, I noticed that Apple had thought of this and taken care of me.

Not only does the mounting tray pop out to make it easy to attach the optical drives, but Apple supplies an extra set of screws for when you want to use the second bay:

Optical drive tray from Mac Pro showing spare screws.

I’ve highlighted the location of the spare screws, and the one I’d already used to start attaching the Blu-Ray drive. A most thoughtful and civilized solution!

Installing the second SATA hard drive for Time Machine was almost insanely easy, as you’ve no doubt read elsewhere. I thought my previous G5 case made drive installation almost as easy as possible, but this was significantly easier.

I am happy to report that the Toast Blu-Ray encoder does make good use of multiple threads, as can be seen in this screen shot:

Activity Monitor windows while Toast encodes a Blu-Ray disc.

I still can’t get over the processor activity window with its sixteen bar graphs—two for each core, since hyperthreading allows two simultaneous threads per core.

I had to rearrange the room a little, since the new LED Cinema Display shipped with noticeably shorter cables than my previous display (perhaps because it was originally aimed at MacBook users, but still somewhat disappointing). The extravagant amount of screen space was worth it, though.

The new arrangement of my desktop to accommodate both displays.

After almost a week of getting settled and experimenting, I can confirm that this machine is a joy to use, and a most worthy replacement for the one whose motherboard died. And I’m also happy to report that the old dual G5 has an excited new owner as of this morning: a graphic designer who was expecting to repair her much slower and older machine, and who will be able to make great use of it.

I found a way to limp along without it, though. I have temporarily repurposed the Mac Mini I had been using as a voice mail system in my comm closet. By adding a 500 GiB external hard drive (which I scored for $80 at Target, hurrah), partitioning that drive to boot Intel Macs, and installing Leopard on it, I was able to boot into the migration assistant, and pull over the environment from my Power Mac’s SATA boot drive. There was some hassle with software that I wasn’t able to deactivate on the old machine before it died (not knowing said death was imminent), so I had to contact support at Adobe and Mark/Space to get my registrations moved over, and jump through a few other hoops, but now I have access to my important media libraries and other such things while I wait for Apple’s exciting announcements next year.

The Mini actually does a surprisingly good job of filling in for the PowerMac and driving my Cinema Display, although it is way short on memory by comparison having just 1 GiB shared with an on-board video controller; the tower had 5 GiB and a screaming video card. I won’t be doing any video encoding projects for a while, and if I get sick of virtual memory paging lag, I may spend $30 and some effort prying open the case to double the RAM. But I can definitely get by for a few months and save the $1,000 repair cost towards buying a new screaming machine when the Nehalem Xeon models debut.

The TiVo is back to full capability, with a Seagate-mechanism 750 GiB eSATA external drive from WeaKnees working just great. I expect it to last much longer than the officially-supported Western Digital drive did, and even though this enclosure has fans (which is a good thing for longevity), you can’t hear them. The drive mechanism itself is more audible, but it’s not an unpleasant sound. The only thing I wasn’t crazy about was the very bright blue LEDs on the front of the enclosure, but a couple of pieces of electrical tape calmed them right down. I may find a more aesthetically sophisticated solution someday, but from normal viewing distance this looks fine for now. And the TiVo Series 3 did warn me it was uncertified, but was quite happy to go ahead and use it anyway, as expected.

The friendly TiVo tech walked me through various troubleshooting steps, leading up to a “Kickstart 54” which performed hard drive diagnostics once we got it to launch successfully. Even doing that required letting the external drive power off for a while first.

It turned out that, as I suspected, the external drive was garbage. It had started to fail days after its warranty timer ran out, and was now unable to pass any of the tests other than the “initial state” which seems to just say “are you there?”

The silver lining is that the internal drive, which would be much more of a pain to replace, is just fine. So I ended up biting the bullet and severing the TiVo’s connection to the external drive. Of course that meant irrevocably losing almost a terabyte worth of the TV programs and movies I had saved, many of which I hoped to watch or burn to DVD. One advantage of the seasonally-imposed delays in getting to this point is that I had already mentally prepared myself for this outcome.

Now my TiVo is working fine again, with a quarter of the space it had before. It snagged an episode of The Venture Brothers last night, and let me watch some spooled Good Morning America while I got ready for work this morning.

I’ve ordered a replacement drive from WeaKnees. I am giving up on the “TiVo Certified” route, since they still only officially support Western Digital drives, and my experience with the last one lived down to my expectations. Happily my Series 3 will let me use an unsupported drive, and WeaKnees has a nice Seagate mechanism that is designed for DVR use, in a quiet enclosure. And I already know how to run the hard drive diagnostics if it ever comes to this again in the future, so good-bye to supported but low-quality hardware.

On the other major front, I am having less luck. It turns out that The MacXprts were not out of business, they were just having problems with their phone line (and still are). They can get calls from some places, but not my office in Fitchburg. If I call on my cell phone I can at least reach their voice mail. When I stopped in (without time to do so, really) on Wednesday, they told me that the original person who took my Mac had misspoken when he quoted two business days for me to hear a diagnosis and repair plan; the real figure was a much less satisfactory five business days.

Well, even that has more than elapsed now, and I have received no communication from them whatsoever. I left a message expressing concern and dissatisfaction yesterday, and they have not called me back. So, I have to report that their customer service, speed, and general business is leaving me highly unimpressed. I should not have tried to support a local business, it seems. At least not this one.

Now that it is clear I will be without my Mac for several weeks, I am being forced to find ways to cope without it. Last night I dealt with the most pressing issue, migrating Quicken, my data files, and the Treo syncing software over to my laptop. I needed to do this in order to record the past few weeks of transactions, adjust balances, and pay some bills that were very nearly coming due.

At some point I may well conclude I can limp along without the desktop machine until Apple’s new line next year. But there are some things I won’t have space to migrate over to the laptop, and some that will be hard to deal with. So I hope it doesn’t come to that.

If I don’t start hearing from the folks at The MacXperts soon, I am going to go and demand my hardware back and dispute their charge on my credit card. Very disappointing.

First my Treo’s antenna fell off somewhere during a workday. Luckily, I had his as a spare, and it did not take too long to migrate my software, data, and Bluetooth trust relationships to it. Then our TiVo started rebooting with increasing frequency. I have started jumping through their support hoops but won’t have time to get to the bottom of it until after this weekend. And the best-case scenario is that my external drive (barely out of warranty) is defective, and I will lose almost all my recordings in replacing it. I really didn’t like the fact that the only TiVo-approved drive was a Western Digital, and it has lived down to my expectations.

My car had a low tire last week, and the compressor I keep in my trunk for such situations is dead.

This kind of thing did not previously happen to me with such frequency. And there have been other minor annoyances… But the pièce de résistance is this: My dual G5 Power Mac, which has been out of extended warranty for a year and a half, which I want to replace early next year when the new powerhouse Intel chips make it into the Mac Pro line, died on Thursday. I hoped it was just an NVRAM battery or memory, but no such luck.

So I took it in for repair Saturday. The MacXprts had moved to a new location very conveniently close to my home, so I decided to support a local business rather than dealing with the zoo at the official Apple store. They seemed friendly, there was stuff on the shelves, they asked good questions and wrote up a repair order. I expected to hear back Monday or yesterday. But nothing yet, so I just called them back.

Their number “has been temporarily disconnected.”

At this point I don’t know if they are a victim of the credit crunch, just flaky and forgot to pay their phone bill, or running a scam. And I do not have time to deal with this. I have questions racing through my head like “will the police help me bust in and look for my Mac?” “Will my homeowner’s insurance cover this?” I know that’s premature, but this is very unsettling. I need to use some of the software on that machine soon, and won’t have time to even really pursue this until Monday. Augh!

Thank heavens that I at least had the foresight to remove the hard drives before dropping it off.

I needed to be able to use my G5 tower this weekend, so I took out the new Blu-Ray drive and put the factory DVD burner back in. This yielded an instant and total restoration of system stability.

Out of curiosity, I pulled off the jury-rigged SATA to ATAPI adapter they shipped the Blu-Ray drive with, and tried hooking it up externally using my NewerTech USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter (a veritable “swiss army knife” of drive attachment which I have found very useful on occasion—they are selling a newer version with more blinky lights and a slightly higher price today.)

In this configuration, I still had the exact same error trying to burn a BD-video disk using Toast 9, but the drive otherwise worked perfectly. I was able to burn and read all different kinds of media with no issues, and my system remained completely stable. So it looks like the drive itself works fine, but the card they taped to the back to connect it to my older Mac is garbage.

I expect them to do something about this, because I would really much rather have it work internally. And even if I can’t get to that state until I upgrade my Mac, I can’t have it sitting naked on the floor with lab wiring running to my computer every time I want to work with Blu-Ray media. So if they can’t get me a stable internal adapter, I want a working Firewire or USB enclosure. And I want a response from their support teams, and an apology for the delay and silence so far.

I’ll also need to open a ticket with Roxio support to sort out the Toast issues burning BD-video when I get back from my trip.

The results so far have not been encouraging.

Getting it installed in place of the factory DVD burner seemed physically pretty easy, but I could not get my Mac to recognize it at all. I took it out and reseated it a few times, and finally realized the problem seemed to be with the daughter board mounted very loosely on the back of the drive. This board was evidently added to convert from the drive’s native SATA connectors to the ATAPI cable that is in my three-year-old Mac. The converter board is only held on by the SATA connector itself and a stack of foam mounting squares (the kind I used to use to put up pictures in my dorm room). Carefully reseating the adapter board and reattaching the drive finally allowed my Mac to realize it had a optical drive again.

My first test was to be burning an HD video disc, since I want to be able to save things to be watched on my TV in its full digital glory. Unfortunately, although Toast 9 (with its HD/BD plug-in) is supposed to be able to do this, I had no luck. Toast took a really long time to encode the program, and I suppose that should not surprise me—I only have two 2.5GHz G5 processors. So if I can get the drive working as it should, it will probably motivate me to finally upgrade to one of the new crazy 8-core Intel towers. But after hours of encoding, as soon as Toast started trying to burn it would immediately fail with an error about an invalid block size. So I need to hit up the Roxio support people about that issue.

But I wanted to see if the drive itself was the problem, so I erased the disc using Disk Utility (worked fine), and tried burning a huge file in the Finder. The first attempt failed, but with a different complaint: my machine was too busy and had not delivered data in time. This I could believe, because by then I was also working on rendering another movie. So I erased again, quit my other tasks, and tried burning the 8GB data file again. It worked just fine, and I was able to mount the resulting disc in the Finder. Great—basic functionality confirmed.

But I was not out of the woods yet. I went back to my other projects and my Mac kept locking up, requiring me to hold down the power button to force a shutdown. At first I thought DreamWeaver must be to blame, but then it happened somewhere else. Tired and frustrated as I was, I thought to check the console logs, and I saw errors being reported about the ATA bus being wedged. Huh, could it be because I had the Blu-ray disc mounted? I tried ejecting that, and suffered no further lockups. Grr, I can’t live with that. So now I need to talk to the tech support at MCE as well. I want to try with a few other media types first so I can give them a detailed problem report, but that will take a lot of time, with an intermittent problem like this. Argh.

And then through the rest of the weekend I noticed a few times that the machine failed to successfully go to sleep, even when there was no disc in the drive. This is a problem I definitely did not have previously.

Man, I hope there is an easy way to sort out these problems. I’d really like to have a drive like this, but I can’t put up with an unstable system, not when it has been working great for years. And I know troubleshooting something like this could be a royal pain.

So, it does appear that Blu-ray is still very bleeding edge. The delays in shipment of both the drive and the media suggest that this is an industry-wide issue, not just a Mac problem. As for my instability and inability to burn HD video, I’ll write an update when I’ve had a chance to hear from the two companies’ support teams.

Well, the new edition’s been out for a few weeks, and I am happily making my way through it. The wait was painful, but a worthy update has been the result. So far the best major new content has been the chapter on Generics. I really wish I’d had this two years ago, it would have saved me hours of pain trying to figure out some of the subtleties for myself, from scattered sources and cryptic compiler errors.

So, definitely, pick up a copy of the new edition and read it all again, making up for lost time.

It looks great! My only disappointment was that I received just one copy. I know things have been scaling back since the Swing book (when all three revision authors got ten copies each). Upon finishing the Developer’s Notebook I got five. But one copy? I want one for reference, of course, and I’d always like to be able to send one to my parents. Well, maybe more are on the way later, or I’ll just have to buy a copy out of the vast royalty stream I can always dream of…

But really, I’m thrilled to have the book, and hope many people will find it interesting and useful. It was definitely fun working with Tim and Ryan to put it together.