TV Squad did a post about stars in commercials before they were stars. This one was to highlight Kevin Costner in an Apple commercial. This one advertised the Lisa, the first computer with a GUI to hit the market.*

Two things strike me about the commercial. When it came out in 1983, a computer on an executive's desk was inconceivable. There might have been a dumb terminal on a desk in specific situations, but not something that we would recognize as a modern computer. But the image is quite familiar here in the twenty-first century. Going into the office (on a bike no less!), and working on a personal computer on your own desk.

The second thing? It's freakin' huge! compare the big box/small screen of this thing to a MacBook. Wow. I know things improve, but it is still quite amazing.

I totally missed the Silver Anniversary of the Macintosh, which was yesterday (January 24). I confess I'm an enthusiastic late-comer to the world of Mac. The modern Mac probably has more in common with NeXT than its previous incarnations. That means UNIX under the hood.

That's perhaps what I really dig about them--that I can go to a prompt and be as geeky as I want to be, but, when I just need to deal with e-mail or edit an Excel spreadsheet, it just works.

Many folks are familiar with this commercial, which aired, as a commercial, just once nationally:

Some people are Civil War re-enactors. Others get into Steampunk. I've decided to take up historical Information Technology re-enactment. I'm calling it Web 0.2. I confess this was inspired, in part, by watching "Wargames" the other evening. Like Steampunk, it may involve using historical techniques in a contemporary setting. I wrote a command-line utility to update Twitter, for instance.

Another angle is historical reproduciton. Like Civil War or Renaissance re-enactors, it would involve finding relatively historically accurate reproductions--for instance, emulation of historical technology (I'm not about to build my own data center for this, after all (my wife probably be concerned). One tool I found to do this is GLTerminal. It's been out for a while, but someone put up a pretty good port of it for Leopard. It is a terminal program for OS X--basically, a program to give you a command prompt.

For the basic enter-commands-at-prompt functions, it really is no different than the terminal program that comes with OS X--in fact, there may be a few odds and ends it lacks. However, the Web 0.2 angle comes in with the "Classic Terminal" setting. Here, it will emulate some of the visual quirks of older dumb terminals. My job at Miami was, in part, supporting a system fed by these.

Visual quirks--a "fisheye" screen and noticeable flicker is one thing. To really get the feel of working on a VAX late at night from your dorm room, there is "baudrate simulation." Where our contemporary DSL connections give us 763 Kbs, you can pretend you are working with your system at 2 Kbs (or less). Here is a screencast of GLTerminal in action.

ITunesFS

My iTunes library is something on the order of 12 GB. This includes iTunes Music Store purchases, things I ripped from my CDs, etc. For the most part, this is synced to my older 30 GB iPod. Though there are some ways to get the data back to a local drive, I never bothered to look into them.

However, backups have been on my mind. We got a MyBook World Edition, to provide some RAID-protected space for backups and archiving over my LAN. Still, given that I regularly copy my iTunes library to my iPod makes it frustrating to me to give up the space and develop a process to back up that library.

Mounted iPod

This week, coincidentally, a blog pointed me to iTunesFS. This is built upon Google's MacFUSE. What it does is allow you to mount your iTunes library as a file system.

On its face, it doesn't sound that impressive--you can browse your iTunes library, after all. However, it build it based on the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file. Cool things happen. For instance, playlists, normally just a list of songs, show up as folders. I can drag all the files to another media en mass.

The other cool thing is that the iPod can be mounted and copied from. Again, this is something normally not possible. And, again, things can be copied around. Like, say, from a live iPod to a resurrected MacBook.

This is something that probably fairly specialized applications, and is read only. But my solution to backing up my iTunes library (without being redundant of existing processes) is found!

I was doing pretty good this year of posting fairly consistently. This week made it difficult. In part, I blame my MacBook (for decent reasons).

Work and illness have also kept me down. Without having to go into detail, a major project is at risk because commitments weren't kept. Now my team is scrambling to make things work. At this point, all we can do is shake our head.

When I bought my MacBook, I wasn't sure what I'd think, so I went cheap, and regretted it. I upgraded the RAM after just a few months. I discovered that I love Macs, and also that I can do a lot more multimedia stuff. This may be due less to the Mac as it is to the fact that the hardware and software overall are easier to work with. Media takes a lot of space. X-Plane takes a lot of space. For Christmas, I asked for a new hard drive. My wife got me a 160 GB drive--up from 60 GB.

The box said "professional installation recommended." It still strikes me odd that I can legitimately claim to be one of the professionals they are talking about (not that it really takes a professional). It's been years since I've been professionally installing hard drives--I now worry about where we put the computers.

The installation of the drive itself went well, however, I discovered that my DVD-ROM drive was failing. Everything I put in it was said to have errors. I pulled out a an old DVD drive and an IDE-to-USB cable, and was able to install Leopard from one of the "bad" DVDs. This convinced me that it was a drive issue. I talked to Apple--since my comptuer was out of warranty, it would cost $300 to fix it, it would have to be shipped in, and it would take a few days. This is for a relatively cheap part.

I found instructions and a replacement drive on the internet (in fact, upgrading it to a SuperDrive (DVD-RW)), and got the part on Tuesday. I confess I was nervous--laptops are a lot more delicate than desktops. Even if you didn't "break" anything, there was the risk that something wouldn't get together right, and there would be a gap in the case or something. I took out about twenty screws, installed the drive, and spent time trying to distinguish between a 3mm and 3.5mm screw (seriously).

The laptop came together--I was afraid something wouldn't be quite right--and everything worked...except I left out a bit of shielding foil. This is the sort of thing that, for the most part, wouldn't cause a huge problem, but the problem would be a quirky, very-hard-to-diagnose thing. I took the case apart again (keeping better track of my screws), and had it together again.

Through a rewards program at work, I got a copy of iLife '08, which was my test--the drive works great. This cost less than half of Apple's estimate.

At this point, I've replaced practically everything that is an "option" on the MacBook order page. I have one of the most-after-market-upgraded first generation 1.83 Ghz MacBooks out there. I'm actually rather proud of that.

The next day, I got kinda sick. Bad enough that I was miserable, not so bad I felt I could stay home from work. I'm getting better. However, I haven't had a chance to play with iLife '08. I was hoping to pull together a new video. Perhaps this weekend (or next) there will be a video-blog post...

I just installed Darwine on my OS X laptop. Most unholy.

For those who don't know, Darwine is an API that allows Windows applications to be run on Intel Macs. Though I couldn't get anything to complicated to run, I was able to pull a few simple applications an run them. For instance, here is the (in)famous MS Paint:

MS Paint on My Mac