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	Tuesday, September 16, 2003

Made the Move to Mac This post (and this weblog) has a new home. After the hard drive in my otherwise faithful Thinkpad T23 died a couple of weekends ago and the recent rash of Windows viruses, I decided to leave Windows behind and move to Mac OS X running on a 17" PowerBook. (I first resurrected the Thinkpad; see below.) As a NeXT user from 1989-1994 and owner since 1991 (slab, turbo slab, color turbo slab, and a turbo cube at various times), I felt a combination of deja vu and nostalgia when I saw the rainbow-colored spinning disk and recognized the names and sounds of the system beeps from NeXTstep. (It's funny to see the spinning disk still present, considering that almost no one remembers the optical drives from the early NeXT cubes that the image represents.) Now, if only it came in a black magnesium case... So far, I'm impressed: everything is simple, and everything works. For example, Mail doesn't have the vertical preview pane of Outlook2003, but it is multi-threaded (so that I can still edit an email while it runs rules) and includes a reasonably good bayesian SPAM filter. The overall migration from the ThinkPad wasn't difficult at all, in large part thanks to a little tool called Outlook2Mac that took care of exporting my 5 years and 10Gb of Outlook information from Office2003 beta to formats for Mail, iCal, and AddressBook. (Outlook2Mac does not migrate Notes or Tasks, but that's not a big deal considering that it only costs $10.) I simply copied most of my files across a local network connection, and that was it. There are some minor annoyances, and if someone knows better, I'm happy for the correction. The one-button mouse is an anachronism at this point, originally introduced by Apple to ensure that users couldn't push the wrong mouse button. (Seriously, and this was part of the design philosophy that went into the old-school Macintosh. Another example is that no control key and no escape key appear on the old-school Macintosh keyboards in an effort to make computers as friendly, even on a semantic level, as possible.) There is a control key on the PowerBook, which oddly enough is the modifier to get right-click behavior. Keyboard navigation is sorely lacking in terms of use of application menus and super-sufficient in others, since Emacs keybindings for navigation work in most textpanes; I like to be able to do most of my work without taking my hands off of the keyboard. (There may be some way to accomplish this through AppleScript?) The fact that I can't tab onto drop-down controls in web pages is particularly frustrating. Third, there is no docking station available for the PowerBook, and that's a little inconvenient for me since I treat a laptop more like a portable desktop. (The form factor of the 17" makes it comfortable to use as a desktop replacement without a dock.) Note on Hard Drive Failures The best way to deal with a drive failure is to have run a backup recently... Unfortunately, this is usually not the case. The recipe for poor-man's data recovery is: a new 2.5" (laptop) IDE drive, a copy of Ghost (or the equivalent), an extra IDE interface on a desktop machine, some laptop IDE to desktop IDE connectors (like a QVS CC2200), some jumpers so that you can make one of the drives a slave, and several hours of free time. The several hours of free time is necessary for the formatting (low-level) the new drive, integrity checking the old drive, and the disk-to-disk copying process. With the hardware issues in this particular case, the copying process worked but required almost 15 hours to complete. 11:26:20 PM

Web Services Transaction Framework Updated This post (and this weblog) has a new home. An update from the Cover Pages: A revised "Web Services Coordination (WS-Coordination)" specification has been published by Microsoft, BEA, and IBM, together with a new "Web Services Atomic Transaction (WS-AtomicTransaction)" document. The Atomic Transaction coordination type is used when strong isolation is required until a transaction completes. A third "Web Services Business Activity (WS-BusinessActivity)" document will be added to the Web Services Transaction Framework. Pluses include integration of WS-Policy and a focus on WSDL, but I'll continue to hold my breath until there is a specification of a reliable network protocol in a WSDL-suitable form... 10:45:51 PM