Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

On Refait le Mac #11 - at the MWC in Barcelona

is your Mac running slow ? a few tricks to improve hard disk performance !

Every now and then, I feel my laptop (MacBookPro 4,1) starts to feel slow again. There are a number of ways to improve the performance of it :

- clean reinstall of the OS and all programs (yuck! takes forever) : this should take care of all those unwanted programs running

- full backup to an external disk, and full restore : this should take care of fragmentation on the disk

- replace your existing hard disk with a faster one and of larger capacity. I've never done this, although sounds tempting :) and I'm pretty sure you'll be voiding your Apple warranty... (anyone has tried this already ?)

- add more memory (unless you've reached the physical limit like me), or use some smarter memory manager (there used to be some memory defragmenting tools)

- there's another way: step-by-step hard disk maintenance:

Here's how I do it :

1) full backup of your laptop (works for any desktop too) to an external hard drive using firewire or USB. I love SuperDuper (free for a full backup, $27.95 for incremental backups - well worth it in my opinion) for this. I wouldn't miss this step, as you never know what might go wrong in the next steps.

2) boot your laptop from another computer (Mac) in target mode (press T on your laptop keyboard when you boot it, after connecting it with a firewire cable to another Mac). Your laptop has now become just an external hard disk, it's easier to work with it, and you'll be using only programs on the other computer. Make sure you use the same operating system version on both computers !!! (I'm running Snow Leopard 10.6.2).

3) run a full disk check with Disk Utility (a standard tool on OSX). Make sure you run "repair" on your external laptop disk, until there are no more errors left. These tend to occur every now and then (bad directory count, bad file count, etc.).

4) Now, let's optimize the directory structure so that the OS finds your files really fast. DiskWarrior 4 ($99,95 - a very expensive tool, but sometimes necessary for other purposes, such as a crashed disk) will do this for you. Think of it as a directory defragmenter, although it builds it from scratch.

Before:

After:

5) now let's defrag your disk. Indeed all official Apple literature will tell you it makes no difference, but indeed, the disk tends to become fragmented, and therefore add the milliseconds for reading, moving the disk head, etc. and it starts to slow down. Another utility, Drive Genius 2 ($99 - very useful, and it does other things for you too) will do that for you. 

This operation might take a long time (sometimes a few days), so make sure you won't need your laptop for that period (or otherwise plug it in several nights in a row), and that NO ELECTRICITY problem might occur...

6) (optional). Drive Genius also has an option to find useless files (PowerPC or x64 versions), duplicate files, etc. you might want to run this to free up some space, although it won't really impact performance.

7) one you're done, boot your laptop again, it should be faster and run as smoothly as before. If you get any problem after a while, just restore your backup to the previous state. If after one day everything is working just fine, then you can do a new full backup with SuperDuper to an external disk (unless you had 2 disks, then you could immediately do a new backup of your optimized laptop. It's actually a great idea to have 2 backups that you use on a rolling basis). Remember that in case your laptop is stolen, or your laptop falls and is broken (both situations have happened to me), you can immediately boot of this external backup, and start working. How much is your data and your time worth ? Much more than the small money and time spent doing regular backups I'm sure !

I know it's a chore to use all these different programs (that should have been included by default with OSX), but a proper power user should not live without them, and not have at least 2 backups of his data (in addition to a potential Time Machine backup drive for incremental versions of files). There's another program I use to undelete files I deleted by accident (mainly on my picture external CF cards, but you never know): Data Rescue 3 ($99 - save $49 if you buy it as a bundle with Drive Genius).

I'm eager to read about your power user tips as well.

Carnevale di Venezia 2010

Many more pix to come :)

testing Apple Aperture 3

The software was announced yesterday, and I immediately registered for a 30-day trial copy. During the first few minutes after the AppleStore went down and back up, the registration was not working (a glitch in a domain name...); but then I could sign up, and got my email with the download link and a trial serial number. You can get it here too.

After playing with it for about 60 minutes, I'm DEFINITIVELY BUYING this upgrade.

Now here's how I did my test :

- smooth install (500+ MB to download, 800+ MB install on your disk); I renamed my Aperture 2 program to Aperture2 in my Applications folder, and installed Aperture3 with no glitch.

- the UI looks very much like Aperture 2, although with a more "childish" / iPhoto UI look, hence you won't be lost. It looks less pro than the black version, but it definitively is the same program. You won't be lost. Apple might consider allowing people to skin their programs like their browsers ;)

- as I had no pix to play with, I went straight to an import of a previous iPhoto'09 library (I have a few, managed with iPhoto Buddy). Easy import (although a bit slow: it my MacBook Pro aging, or is it converting the pix ?). I checked the box to leave the pix where they were originally. I imported 3 libraries, no problem.

- I started playing with Faces : it actually recognized all the faces I had already tagged with iPhoto'09, and then offered a few more to add. I don't need to redo that part. Good job. Nevertheless I noticed I had to click 2 times instead of 1 in iPhoto : one to move the default view to faces instead of pictures, another to click on the faces. It should have been by default on faces view.

- I started playing with Places : very similar to iPhoto. Again, I was a bit surprised to have to click on a button to start moving a pin, it should be done immediately ? also a bit weird, I couldn't move a map around, only zoom in / out. It works fine. Although I didn't test it, I'm sure it imports previous locations nicely too.

- Next up, playing with Adjustments and Presets. Great stuff, I believe this is something that Lightroom 2 has had for a while; I look forward to be playing with my own presets from now on.

- Of course, you can't help wanting to try out the export for Facebook and Flickr (no need for me to export to MobileMe). I miss an export for Picasa (that would be nice), and an export to Twitter (a link would have been great). AND THIS IS WERE THE GOOD STUFF ARRIVES : it works great. You can set up a folder to automatically synchronize your pix between Aperture and Facebook and Flickr (well one folder each). Add a picture, delete a picture in the folder, and the web is synchronized ;) (this is what Picasa online and offline used to do well). CHANGE A SETTING on your picture, and AUTOMATICALLY the picture online will be modified TOO ! (no more need for Picnik now on Flickr). I wonder however whether the sync is automatic or whether I have to ask for a new sync regularly (couldn't find it in the preferences). I noticed captions and tags were already sync-ed. nice ! My only wish is for Aperture to manage DIFFERENT ALBUMS / SETS online : create a new album from within Aperture, upload to one or several albums / sets, and SYNC WITH EXISTING ALBUMS that already exist from pre-Aperture 3 times. (this is something Photobook does for Facebook for example). It would be almost nothing to do, since the sync part works already really great. I could then manage my 23K+ pix from within Aperture, sync with Flickr and Facebook for different things... Aperture would then become *the* program to manage all my pictures in a central place.

- as all Apple programs, I already customized the toolbar, maybe I'll need to dig into automated tasks (AppleScript?) and and need icons for scripts.

- the Metadata tag is much much nicer in this version : graphical instead of the DB form we had earlier. great work.

I'll update this post with some more testing of Aperture 3 in the next 29 days left. But I'm loving it already. And to be fair, I downloaded Lightroom 3 beta (never used Lightroom), let's see how that program works. One thing is sure : I have no more use for iPhoto '09 :)

NetExplorateur Forum 2010, at the French Senate

Private dinner with Prof. Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (2006)

Private dinner with Prof. Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (2006), originally uploaded by rsepulveda.

:)

Dinner with Prof. Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

240 pix from TEDxParis, Jan'10