Apparently some MacBook Pro batteries are swelling out of their case. A while back, I've read a post by some IT hardware support guy blaming swollen battery for a MacBook with touchpad button stuck in down state. I thought the post was bogus at the time but now I am not sure.

My guess is that most of MB and MBP problems are due to the unusually high temperature pushing all hardware components into the edge of their spec. Simply put, I wouldn't expect an iPod used in Siberia or Sahara desert to last as long as one used in California. But then I've noticed that electonic goods don't last longer than a few years these days where they used to last nearly a decade with only minor problems. My first VCR lived on for a little over 10 years and was still operating (with some wise nudging and toeing) when I replaced it another which lasted only two years before breaking down completely. Expenses don't bother me much but the chore of shopping sure does.

Interesting recent photos of North Korea taken by Artemii Lebedev, a Russian web-designer (via Wesner Moise, the Undocumented .NET guy). My relatives are still living there, somewhere. Some day, probably after I retire, I'll visit to see faces like mine. Well, maybe just eyebrowses like mine…

Re North Korean missle about to be launch, I say shoot the dang thing down with laser or whatever we've been pouring billions into. What a great opportunity to see my tax dollars at work! While North Koreans are also my countrymen of sort since I am a Korean-American, a brother who points a gun at me should not be embraced now but mourned later.

Gen Kanai ping me with link to Joga Companion. Pretty cool. I have two complaints though:

1. It reinstalls Firefox and changes the firefox theme. Is there an extension only installer? I want information without the unasked for frills.
2. I have to log in to get details which is not unlike having to ask the gas station attendent for the restroom key.

Anyhow, I am looking forward to upcoming match between France and Korea.

A noise sensitive couple find themselves in the Cow Level of the MacBook Kind. FYI, Cow Level according to Wikipedia. ;-p

Referring to eBay's plan to integrate blogging, wiki, and tags, Steve Rubel wrote conversation drives commerce. Does it? I am not sure. Rather, I think it could lead to big headaches in the future unless it is controlled tightly and smartly from the start. Beware, conversations among customers can drive companies nuts. ;-p

Ubuntu 6.06 (aka Dapper Drake) is out. I think this release will impact the Linux market in a major way and give Redhat a big headache. I'll be playing with both the desktop and the server version on both Windows and MacBook, inside VMware and Parallels respectively. Free toys boys and girls. ;-p

Update 1:

Eeeks. Booting desktop ISO inside VMware Server resulted in kernel panic. As instructed in error message, I added noapic to boot option (F6 from the Ubuntu boot menu) which solved the problem. If they knew this would fix the problem, why doesn't Ubuntu try to recover automatically? Googling, looks like this is a common problem among Linux distributions. Still, this sucks for a distro that's supposed to be easy to use.

Update 2:

Getting past noapic problem got me to Live Ubuntu desktop. To install Ubuntu, I had to press the Install icon on the desktop. Silly bulls**t. Mouse was very sluggish too. Thinking it was a Live Ubuntu problem, I installed and restarted only to run into noapic problem again while booting from hard disk this time. No boot menu this time so had to press Esc to get list of configurations. Pressed 'e' to edit the configuration then, after moving down to kernel command line, pressed 'e' again to edit it, adding 'noapic' to it. Press 'b' to boot with edited configuration. Hurrah, got to the desktop. Hmm, sluggish mouse again. Not sure what is causing this. It's unusable in this state. Hmm.

Update 3:

Uninstalled VMware Server to reattempt using VMware Workstation 4 (been lazy and haven't upgraded to version 5 yet). Same noapic problem appeared but same workaround worked and sluggishness went away. Looks like that was VMware crap. Installing sendmail still behaved weirdly, hideously long delays during install and then reboot, leaving me wonding the whole thing hung. Unreasonable patience seemed to fixed the problem so far. My fingers are still crossed though.

My overall impression of Dapper Drake release is not great. I think the previous stable release (Breezy) is far more trouble free than this crap. The same goes to VMware Server.

The conversation between Tim and others about Web 2.0 trademark fiasco is a good example of how one should not deal with an angry mob. Reasons, logical or not, make poor defense against forces of emotions which has to be dealt with before they pile up.

At this point, I think O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference is ruined as a conference name yet Tim continues to argue with the crowd. Tim should just give them what they want (Web 2.0) and try to salvage what is more valueable (O'Reilly). But then he must climb over his own wall of emotions to do that.

I took the family camping at Big Basin Redwoods State Park over the Memorial Day weekend. The park itself is pretty close to where I live (Redwood Shores) but the road over Santa Cruz mountains is torturous so we took 17 to Santa Cruz then up Highway 9 along San Lorenzo river then turned left into Highway 236 at Boulder Creek.

Arts and Wine Tasting Festival was going on at Boulder Creek but we didn't stop by. After spending a good part of my youth as a street vendor every weekend, I've lost interest in such things. Other than the adrenaline rush of making a sale and the amazement over the kind of crap people can be talked into buying, nothing memorable remains from that period.

I love being in the wood because I slip into a meditative trance of sort. Gardens do the same for me. Earliest memory of myself consists of sitting alone in the family garden, listening to silences. Sunlight hummed and shadows hushed. From my parents, silence of resolves or silence that dissolves. Winds either didn't speak or I didn't hear. When my overly sensitive child's vigil of waiting passed, I would slip into my mind as I would into a peaceful pool that offered refuge. Cool and comforting, the pool is where I return to whenever I am in the wood.

Yeah, it was a good weekend.

So Lenovo is picking up my ex-laptop, T60p, tommorrow. I got it for a great price but, because I have a powerful desktop with large screen and buckling-spring keyboard, ThinkPad was just sitting there most of the time staring at me. It sort of felt like how I would feel if I had two wives. LOL

I realized that, since I usually work at home and visit my clients once a week for a couple of hours, what I really needed was a small personal notebook for communication and light reading/writing, not a powerful desktop-replacement. Yeah, MacBook Pro is out too. And no, I don't need to play a game nor run Vista on the thing.

So the new plan is to get a MacBook soon and, when Vista comes out, replace my desktop with a high-end machine (Merom, DX10 GPU, the works). As to which MacBook, I think the low-end MacBook (white, 1.83GHz, $1099 $999 with $100 rebate at Amazon) with 2G memory ($225) and 120G drive upgrade ($159) is attractive. As I've pointed out in the comment to my previous post:

1. 1.83GHz is less likely to have heat issues. Since Apple has chosen to address heat issues by slowing the processor down and turning the fan on more actively, I think the performance difference between 1.83GHz and 2GHz MacBooks will be minimal. Checkout the results in MacWorld's MacBook performance test.
2. Black is more sensitive to scratch and grease and costs more for no reason. I think grime on white can be easily wiped off until scratch builds up. At worst case, I'll just put stickers everywhere as distractors. ;-p

I am not sure if I'll get AppleCare though because third-party memory and drive upgrades might void the warranty. $249 service for a $1099 laptop notebook seems rather steep too. It's cheap enough for me to just get a new one if it breaks after a year. I am gonna give myself some time to consider. Not all the tools I need are ready yet anyway (Parallels, Eclispe, etc.).

BTW, I don't expect them to cut the price when Intel cuts the Core Duo prices end of this month. I think Apple priced the MacBooks and MacBook Pros with the price cuts in mind already and cut a deal with Intel to get enough Core Duos at the upcoming prices to supply the Apple Store with MacBooks but delayed shipment to sellers like Amazon until after Intel official drops the price. Yeah, MacBook will again look more expensive than equivalent Windows laptops. All I can say is LOL.

Update:

I've just cancelled my Amazon MacBook order after reading some first-hand stories of people having a fairly wide variety of problems. It doesn't seem to be just bad units because many of them have gone through 2-3 MacBooks, each exhibiting minor to major problems. Here are some of the problems I've read about:

1. excessive heat – this problem seems to be a mix of design and quality control problems. Design problems led to MB running at hotter temperature than other equivalent machines. Quality control problems led to fairly large (my guestimate is ~15%) number of machines with higher temperature than the already hotter than average temperature.
2. whine – probably a mix of design and QA problems impacting audio sensitive people (not an insignificant number I think).
3. mooing – apparently MB and MBP fans are not variable speed so when heat builds up, the fan switches on to full speed then off. When Apple released fix to stem the tide of temperature problems, the fix apparently attempts to start up the fan more proactively. That's good except I think they neglected to make it smarter (i.e. fuzzy logic) so when temperature is at some threshhold, fan comes on and off repeatedly, leading to mooing. Bad hardware and software design.
4. leashed CPU - when temperature is high, CPU is slowed down. On good machines, this happens only sometimes. If your machine is one of the bad ones, it happens most of the time which means you end up with 1.5GHz Core Duo, not 2GHz.
5. LCD plus sleep – apparently screen sometimes doesn't lightup after waking and PRAM has to be reset to get it working again. Most likely a software bug.
6. dead touchpad – could be a software or hardware problem, maybe static build up leading to software confusion.
7. graphics corruption – some think it's GPU acting flaky under high temperature.
8. sudden death with battery - not sure what to make of this one. Problem used to limited to computer shutting down suddenly with 30% battery life. After recent update, some are reporting this happens at 80%. Pretty odd.

The good news is that one recent strawpoll seems to say at least 75% of the MB users are not reporting any problem with their lap cough notebook. The bad news is that 25% are. Given the level of loyalty and naivetty of Mac users, I think that's pretty aweful.

Regardless of whether what I wrote above has any substance or not, I think the wise thing to do is just wait. I am bored with Windows but not excited enough with MacBook to dive into a hotbed of problems. Maybe Apple will fix the problems, maybe they won't.

Update 2:

Add discoloration to the list of problems. Yikes.

T60p was sitting on my desk when I woke up. It sure looks menacingly dark and prettily thin but damn it's surprisingly heavy like a gun.

I spent most of the day loading it up with the usual software. While at it, I also started breaking in the battery (which doesn't fit tightly into the laptop for some odd reason) by charging it fully then draining it to near empty. Supposedly, I need to do it a few times but never got around to doing it more than once because the damn thing took forever (5+ hours) to drain (/cheer T60p).

While the laptop was very solidly built, I don't see why people were raving about ThinkPad keyboard. I normally use buckling spring keyboards (put on your earmuffs, I am about to start typing!) so I guess I am spoiled. ;-p

I am pretty happy with T60p but I am going to visit an Apple store this weekend to spend some time with MacBook and MacBook Pro to make sure I wouldn't be happier with one of those. I think MBP weighs about the same as T60p though. Plain MacBook is lighter but not by much, like a saturday night special.

Choosing T60p over MacBook Pro is so sane though. I could use a bit of insanity to cut the lousy taste of reality. Sure, I'll be pulling my hair out because nothing I use everyday will work on OS X without a lot of grunting and searching but, hey, babes will dig it. LOL.

It's crazy how Mac loving folks think some beta products mean they can run Windows on Macs troublefree when it's difficult enough trying to run Windows software on Windows. Just look at all the layers of firewalls and VPNs one ends up with these days. Trying to get simple things like file sharing working means hours of fiddling and scratching like I did today. I have 3 layers of firewalls plus one built into VPN client (which I hate the most because I can't change it's security policy), none of which has easy to use UI. Running all that inside Parallels Workstation VM means adding to the suffocating firewall avalanche.

All I can say is, Oy.