I use the excellent Menu Meters to view some important system information, including network traffic. I noticed this in the popup menu tonight: 
That’s right. It’s 30% faster than my wired network. I never thought the cable would be the bottleneck. Time to purchase some gigabit ethernet cards for stuff…
With my new machine, it’s time to consider how I’m going to store data, and how I’m going to back it up. One thing I’ve wanted to do is have most of my data stored within an svn repository, so that I can have revision control on all of my documents. I’m not too sure how well this would work, since I’d have to remember to keep checking stuff in and out. Perhaps I’ll wait until Leopard with Time Machine arrives. Then I should be able to have revision control on all files, automatically, each time I save. In the meantime, I’ve set up a folder inside my Home directory that is called .SVN, and I’ll put all of my subversion repositories for my coding projects into there. Have considered having an external svn server, and might go this route. That way, I’d only be able to check changes in when at home, or over the internet. Might not be too useful, since I’m planning to spend lots of time coding in local Cafés, where I only have port 80 access. Perhaps I should make an ssh tunnel through port 80 at my home, so I can access my network anywhere, regardless of this restriction.
Love this image. 
It looks like she really wants to, as well… (Flickr, via Limbicnutrition)
Well, my MacBook Pro finally arrived. Sorry for not blogging about it earlier, but I had to play with it, and get a heap of stuff installed. I’ve found a heap of cool things to do with Laptop specific things, but nothing is cooler than this: MarcoPolo, which automatically chooses the Location (an OS X specific method of allowing you to have sets of settings which change depending on, well, your location), according to a user defined set of rules. Not only can you change the location, but you can also have user defined actions. So, for instance, I can have it set so that it mounts my school home directory when I get to school, and automatically mount my iTunes library server directory when I get home. You can use more than just WiFi signals to determine ‘where’ you are, such as what other devices are connected, what IP address you have, and what Bluetooth devices are nearby. The only thing I haven’t figured out is how to automatically change the Firefox proxy, which I can do with a manual action, but not yet automatically. This is why I love OS X.
Well, since I got off my arse and finally downloaded what I thought was the Burning Crusade update, but just turned out to be the original client, I’ve played about one hour, which got me to Level 6, and I’m fairly bored. I’m waiting for the extra 1.1G to download with the Burning Crusade content, but I don’t think I see myself getting back into it. Especially as most of my guild has also given it up…
Well, I’ve been sitting on the 10 day demo of the Burning Crusade for a month or two, and have just started downloading the client. 3.5GB, which, maxed out will take a couple of days to download. I have to use the Blizzard Downloader program to get it, and I just discovered that turning off Peer-to-peer Downloading dramatically increases my throughput. I went from 6K/sec to 25K/sec. I wonder if this is to do with p2p shaping thatGoTalk, the people who bought out WildIT, apparently do.
I’m still in the process of deciding which is better out of Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion. I’ve just started playing with the beta 4 of Fusion, and I’m liking Unity over Coherence from Parallels Desktop for one reason: bringing one Windows window to front doesn’t automatically bring the others. Parallels still has one cooler feature: the ability to open a Windows file in a MacOS X application. That is pretty neat. So, my mind isn’t made up yet…
I’ve noticed a whole lot of missing messages from eBay recently. It turns out that Gmail’s Spam filter has become somewhat overzealous, and has been munching on some emails that are legitimate. Not very cool, when this is communication I need.
Just spent about twenty minutes trying to transfer a file from a computer to my iPod. Errors, input/output from the Finder. Lockups when transferring via the Terminal. Occasional disconnections of the device. Thought it might be to do with the fact it was a 2.7G disk image. Tried splitting it into smaller chunks. Unplugged it, and plugged it in without the extension USB cable. Transfer of file was successful first time. Either the cable, or that USB port was damaged!
That’s right, it’s up to around 4 weeks now, and I’m still waiting for my laptop. Getting fairly annoyed, if I say so. Still, I’m using a Dual CPU/Dual Core (therefore, 4 cores!) Mac Pro at work, with 5 Gig of RAM. Which is kinda cool. Except that trying to work from my iPod seems to be locking everything up. At least unplugging it restores everything. Looks like I won’t be able to use the iPod to take the disk image of Fedora 7 home. Might have to use a real DVD-R.