Post-honeymoon review of the black MacBook

By popular demand I will write the follow-up on my old post.

To make a long story short: 5 months later I am still in love.

I compile xmms2 and c++ code so much faster, make -j 2 really makes your day on a dual-core system. The overall speed is still great, but I have also understood by talking to other macbook owners that you should put in as much memory as possible. Using less then 1Gb in two sticks seems to be a waste of CPU. This might not be true for other OSes then MacOSX, but I don't know since I never installed anything else.

The glossy screen doesn't really create any visible problems. The widescreen is of course great for movies and I don't really have anything negative to say about the screen in whole.

Some of the things that I have had a problem with, the airport in particular has been corrected with macosx updates. The current version 10.4.8 seems to have fixed all things I have been irritated at. The heat was a issue until recently when they released another update to the firmware and it has gotten a lot better.

The battery-time is about 4 hours which is very ok for a powerful laptop with a big screen like this.

The only negative thing I have noted is a quirky sound when I move the screen, it seems to be related to that the whole thing is in plastic :-) But I don't really mind.

Haven't noted any discoloration or any high-frequent sounds. I take it that the black model doesn't have the same problems as the white one with discoloration, and the sounds might just be me that is deaf, but I can't hear anything that is annoying.

All in all, the macbook is a very fast and nice laptop. It's a tad to big for laptop-on-airplane but otherwise I happily trade the extra size for the nice screen. I have also been blessed and have not encountered any of the "normal" problem for this line. I recommend anyone that want a mac computer to go for the macbook. The only reason I see you would like a pro over a macbook is that you want the better graphics card for games, for everyday use it works just fine.

blogger beta

So I upgraded my blogger profile to Blogger Beta, seems to include a lot of features I have missed.

But it also reseted my RSS feed, sorry to all that is following it.

More from Mountain View #1 - Summer of Social Integration?

One thing that really struck me when I was at the mentor summit in Mountain View was that Summer of Code is really more about social integration and contact making than I ever imagined. When I carried out the project within XMMS2 I saw it as a way to get cool features incorporated into XMMS2 and some kick-ass code. After spending some time with other mentors (and former students) I realized how this is only half the truth.

GSoC is really about bringing bright people and coders that have not been exposed to open source into our communities, this is where the long time benefit is getting realized. If we get some new non-FLOSS coders into our little group and can keep them there we have the real benefit of the program.

For my part I will surely look at the students in a very different perspective next year.

I would like to say that GSoC is 70% about social integration and 30% of code. Maybe it's time to rename it to Summer of Social Integration?

Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, Mountain View, CA

For the last week I have been in California for some work and now for the Summer of Code Mentor Summit. If you don't know what Google Summer of Code is you should probably look here. Google wanted a follow-up on their program and invited two people from each successful organization to Mountain View, CA to discuss between mentors how we can improve this to next year.

It has been a wonderful day at Googleplex with lot of sessions, meetings and cold soda. We really got to discuss all the problems that we encountered during the program and made some real progress on how we want to work it out next year. It's funny how much energy it gives you to discuss open source things with open source developers. I am really looking forward to mentor students next summer and I really think I can be a better mentor by really treating the students as students and not "yet-another-opensource-developer".

Apart from discussing the SoC program I found some really nice guys that I got the chance to talk code with. Me and Seb Ruiz (from Amarok fame) had a very productive talk on how we could help each other and share code / standards between XMMS2 and Amarok. Great things might come from this. And I had a lot of time to spend with Ralph Giles from Xiph talking about everything from an XMMS2 ogg-demuxer and the future of vorbis.

All in all I had a wonderful time and I am really happy that I had the chance to be here with all of you.

p.s. Chris DiBona uses XMMS2, cool :-) d.s.