Simon Brown - apple tag

Living with the Time Capsule

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:22:00 GMT

I've had my 500GB Time Capsule for almost a couple of months now and I thought that I'd post my thoughts, particularly since I just unplugged it as a backup device. Here's why...

It's slow : I have a 802.11g network, with a whole host of devices including an Intel iMac, an Intel Mac mini and a PS3. I did perform the initial backups via a wired ethernet connection, but even subsequent backups are slow. For example, I dumped ~2GB of photos from my camera onto my iMac at the weekend and just the "backup preparation" stage didn't finish after about 6 hours. Who knows how long the actual backup would have taken. To be honest, most of time the backups were fairly quick, but then there were very few changes.
It eats bandwidth : Trying to do anything when a backup is running is hard work. Surfing the web is slow and online gaming starts to lag.
It interferes with Airport Express streaming : Every time a backup kicks in, I lose any music being streamed to my stereo via my Airport Express. Sometimes it completely cuts out, and other times it stutters in and out. Either way, you may as well stop streaming the music until the backup has completed (or cancel the backup). I've seen reports of this happening to other people.
Backups get corrupted : This is another complaint that I've seen people making and it's happened to me - the backup images on the Time Capsule can get corrupted. If this happens, Time Machine can't mount the bundle and you basically have to delete it manually and start over. And this is a pain (see point 1). I shouldn't need to backup the backups.

There's no doubt that the Time Capsule is a great device and hassle-free wireless backups are a fantastic idea, but it just doesn't work for me. I'd love to be able to upgrade everything to 802.11n, but I can't justify buying new hardware to do this. I've since switched to backing-up my iMac using a FireWire disk and everything is far more responsive (both the iMac and the network). I'm still going to use the Time Capsule, albeit not for backups via Time Machine. Instead, I'll use it as a NAS where I can at least take control of how and when it's used.

No more PowerBook

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 21:17:32 GMT

I picked up my new company laptop today, which means that after 3 years I'll no longer be carrying my PowerBook around on a regular basis. It's been a fantastic laptop, not necessarily the fastest around, but it's never skipped a beat. It's travelled everywhere with me and is still going strong with the same configuration it had when I bought it.

We are where we are, but I still don't understand why companies insist on dishing out Wintel based systems and then worry about security. Oh well, there's clearly an opportunity to do some influencing. I'm going to miss the UNIX core, expose, the simplicity and just the cool factor of having a Mac laptop. At least I'll be safe in the knowledge that once I return home, all will be good once again. ;-)

Intel iMac - the best Java development box in the world

Mon, 29 May 2006 08:44:43 GMT

Cancelling my MacBook Pro order worked out really well for me. Firstly, I'm getting a new company laptop (a big grey Dull), and the prospect of carrying two laptops around just scares me. Second, with the money I saved I was able to buy a Mac mini and a 20" iMac, both Intel Core Duos. I am going to miss carrying around an Apple laptop, but I'm really glad I've had the opportunity to buy an iMac.

For my money, it's the best Java development box in the world. Here are my reasons.

The 20" widescreen is fantastic. It's clear, it's bright and it's big. This all makes development work (lots of terminal windows, logs, an IDE, etc) a real pleasure.
The Intel Macs are blazingly fast. I'm running a 2GHz Core Duo with only 1GB RAM. IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse and NetBeans all start up quick. Java desktop applications respond like native applications. Web and application servers take seconds instead of minutes to fire up. Ant builds also take seconds. Java is fast - fullstop.
Mac OS X is UNIX based, so you get all the goodness of running a *NIX based OS and the shells that come with it. VNC, ssh, ftp - they're all built in.
Macs are easy to use and don't require much maintenance. They certainly don't require rebooting, although even that's quick!
Then there's all the other stuff - easy video conferencing with the built-in iSight, lots of connectivity, built-in wireless/Bluetooth, etc, etc. Just think of the collaboration opportunities that you're missing by not having this type of technology on your desktop. Why shouldn't everybody have access to a webcam?

I really do think that the new Intel based Macs are unbeatable. If I were running a company that specialized in Java development, I'd have very few(*) reservations in kitting everybody out with a 20" iMac. If the rest of the city felt this way, we'd have a lot of happy Java developers. ;-)

* my only reservations would be if you had to run stuff like WebSphere and other Java apps that don't work on OS X. Of course, with Bootcamp and/or virtualization this might not be an issue in the future.