I have been checking out the different Dashboard widgets available and installed one that monitors CPU usage. It showed a high utilization, so I ran top -ocpu -O+rsize -s 5 -n 20 in a terminal and it told me that Firefox was the culprit. It was using about 25% CPU, which I thought was excessive. I killed a few tabs and the usage dropped to aout 2-4-%, which made more sense.

The crazy thing is that when I click-scroll with the mouse the CPU usage for Firefox jumps to about 60%! Holy shmoke!

There’s a significant delay in processing the mouse requests too, which makes me wonder if it’s the processing overhead of Bluetooth or if it’s the Microsoft implementation in the hardware. I remember it being slow on the PC all those years back.

I wonder if another brand would have the same problem?

So, is the romance still strong? Yeah, it is. The Honeymoon period is in full swing.

I messed around with Parallels yesterday, along with Virtue Desktop. It gave me a really cool “movie-style” desktop with 3D cubes sliding virtual desktops in from all sides. Highly sexy, but maybe not 100% practical.

I had Ubuntu running full-screen in one of the four virtual desktops, and could Apple-tab between Ubuntu and Mac OS X. There’s talk on the forums that it runs at near native speed, but I’d be stretching the truth if I said I agreed with that. It’s fast, I agree, but it’s clearly a virtual machine. Maybe more RAM would help out, but it has 512MB allocated (half of the system resources). I would have thought a gigabyte would have been enough…

I’ve attached my Bluetooth Microsoft mouse which has given me three buttons (the two side buttons - back and forward under Windows - don’t do anything). Having right-click is nice, and I love being able to highlight and scroll/middle-click. Coming from Linux this is something I didn’t want to give up. Two finger-scrolling on the pad is kinda cool too.

I had a brain-wave earlier. Mac OS X is UNIX, right. It has an X server which I hear isn’t too hard to get going. So… I could have my Ubuntu virtual machine running in Parallels, and I could SSH into it from the Mac and export my X display, meaning that I would have “remote” applications (like gnome-terminal… see where I’m going with this…) running locally. It would remove the need to be “in” Ubuntu.

Alternatively, I might look into modifying my little workterm.sh script which opens a couple of terminals and connects using screen, rather than opeing one terminal with several tabs. We’ll see…

Welcome to the Cult of Mac. I present the two latest members:

We bought the Apple MacBook Pros a day earlier than expected.

So far, and it’s only been a few hours, we’re both really happy with them.

Admitedly we’re only “playing” at the moment, and haven’t had to do any real work with them, but it’s a good indication.

I really, really like the gnome-terminal that ships with Ubuntu, so I may keep on using Ubuntu (from within Parallels) for development. My workterm.sh script has been invaluable in the past, and it will “just work” in a virtual installation of Ubuntu. If I find a native OS X terminal that I like as much then I will probably switch off Ubuntu as a desktop operating system… maybe.

Everything looks so nice. I now understand why these machines are so popular with artsy-types.

The hardest part so far is getting used to the keyboard shortcuts. We have an extra key that wasn’t on the Thinkpads (Apple key) and the lack of a nipple pointing device means that I’m using the keyboard more than ever. I think in the end this will be a big bonus for my keyboard productivity, including my typing speed.

So, my first thoughts are very different to when I hired the Mac last year - the keyboard is nice to use (probably now as nice as the Thinkpad) and it looks so damn sexy.

Oh, and as you can proably guess, the built in webcams (iSight) are fun to play with :)

… MacBook Pro ownership. 2.0GHz, 1GB RAM. Booyah.

Watch now as the ThinkPad become completely unusable out of protest.

Yesterday I decided it was time to get a big TV.

I went to Harvey Norman in City West and saw a mate of a mate, who was able to give me some great advice, and get me a really good deal. It retails for $3,999 and they were selling it on special for $3,799.

I bought the Panasonic TH-42PV60A which is a 42″ high definition plasma set. I did some research before hand and found that plasmas have a “better black” than LCDs and are generally better value for money. That suits me!

Sitting in the living room, the thing is massive.

I don’t have a high-def receiver, so it’s getting a video signal from the VCR, which is not ideal. Channel 10 looks good, and SBS is acceptable so I’m happy for the time being.

I’m wondering if I can write it off for tax, seeing as I’ll be using it for client presentations *wink wink*.