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Our crossgrade version of FinalCut finally arrived this morning. It took exacly one week after we have sent the application papers along with old version DVDs to Apple. Not lightining-fast, but pretty fast I'd say, as it took 1.5 days x 2 for transit alone between Nagoya and Tokyo.

So.. I have finally have a version I can use on my Intel Mac at work!!

The install tooks quite a bit of time though. 2 hours overall!! But oh well it was almost 30Gigs installed so…

The overall experience? I didn't touch anything much except for Motion. And Motion is BLOODY fast! Of course I'm comparing to my old PowerBook G4 1.25 with only 1Gig of RAM, but man.. you can really feel the difference and the sound of software crunching numbers like there's no tomorrow :) Nice.. All that being set, what do I need to become an absolutely happy Intel Mac user? Oh right.. Adobe's software! Dreamweaver and Photoshop. But both of them at a looooooong time to wait. Next year…

Yesterday I guess the hell froze over, AGAIN :) Apple have released firmware update, AS WELL AS special utility to help in installation of Windows XP SP2 on Intel-based Macs. The new firmware is said to add support for BIOS (originally only EFI was supported), and the utility called Bootcamp allows you to painfully make Windows partition on your Mac as well as burn a CD with all required drivers to run Windows (including full support for graphics drivers!!!)

Now to the installation.. I tried to install it yesterday, but didn't have any luck yet. There were some problems with the Bootcamp repartitioning my hard disk. Some files could not be moved, as I was told. Seems like the problem is with some big files for which the utility can not find enough free continuous space (or something like that??). I tried to boot into safe mode and login as root, as well as moving as many files as possible to my external 80Gb disk, without any luck. So today I will be backing up my whole disk contents to another harddisk (of my old PowerBook connected in target mode), and will try repartitioning again. Hopefully it'll work this time because I have F.E.A.R. waiting for me and I don't want to make it too lonely ;)

Well I don't know about where the NetApplications.com gets its data about popularity of various web browsers, but I wish this data would be correct, as according to it the Firefox browser increased its marketshare to 2-digits' 10.something percents.

Personally I use Camino on my Mac most of the time, which uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox but is faster and has way better UI (although doesn't support extensions)

Anyways, I'm happy Firefox with it's standards-compliant rendering engine is (although pretty much slowly) gradually earning more and more users. IE 7 is in beta, but already has lots of complaints about (oh of course) its standards-compliance. I don't think Firefox will ever take more than may be 30% of overall marketshare, as AT LEAST 70% of users will have IE preinstalled on their machines and be too lazy to explore alternatives EVEN if you hit that with Firefox on their lazy heads. But anyways, good news are nevertheless good news. Way to go Firefox team!

We have sent the application form for the crossgrade to the Universal binary of FinalCut Studio 5.1 today! Not only papers though - all 4 install DVDs had to be included into the package. As I was told it will take about 5-7 business days for Appe to return us the new version. Can't wait :)

If you don't know, the Windows XP SP2 was hacked to work on Intel Macs. I was really going to install it ASAP, mostly to play games (I have already got FEAR!!!!!!). But.. there are probs.. still not all the hardware is supported, and most notable, there are no working graphics drivers for X1600 yet.. So I'll wait a bit I guess

Today Rosetta was using 3Gigs of virtual RAM on me :) Cool :)

Today I discovered one very fantastic compression utility, called 7z. That's a compression technology similar to Zip or StuffIt, but the compression ratio is fantastic.
Not that it is a brand sparking new compressor, but it's rather me being slow again ;)

So as a test, I tried to compress something with it just to try how good is the software. The place of "something" took Mac OS X's standard Mail.app (I guess it's because it sits on the top of my Dock..). To compare compression ratio with more widely used compression technlogies, I compressed the same file with OS X's Zip archive, as well as .tar archive bzip2'ed at highest compression level (bzip2 -9).

The results are on the picture below:

Compression times are the following:
- Zip: about 5secs
- bzip2: about 11 secs
- 7z : about 18 secs

7z shows to be the slowest, but there are times when you'd better wait for a file to compress better :)

More info and download

My new Intel-based iMac should arrive today. I've ordered a customized version of 20-inch model - specifically maxed both RAM and VRAM to their limits (2Gb and 256Mb). I wonder how the new machine will perform, especially in comparison with my good old PowerBook G4 (1.25MHz, 1Gb RAM and tiny-weeny 32Megs or VRAM)

Unfortunately, Aperture didn't launch this time for me. The main show stopper is that it doesn't support movies which I took sometimes with my camera. The other thing is that.. well, the proggy is not that slow but, not fast and also a big drawback is that it stores images in some weird format when I just can't get access directly to an image file in an easy way (well, one can always travel down thru Aperture's library packages ;)

I took a picture of my workplace yesterday. Complete mess just the way I like it ;)