BrianJarrett.com

I love my iMac.  I’ve written about that in the past.  I still love my iMac.  However, something just didn’t feel right about the mouse.  At first I thought it was just getting used to a new computer so I gave it some time.  (Of course I use Linux and didn’t have the problem.) Then I thought it might just be the wireless Mighty Mouse’s weight or drag across the desk.  So I put the mouse pad back which didn’t make a difference.  I also removed one of the batteries to make it lighter.  None of this helped.  Then I thought it might just be the Apple Mighty Mouse itself.  I replaced it with another mouse I had at home, then with another.  No luck.  My arm and my wrist began to hurt.  I felt like I had a depth perception problem or I was just crazy.

After about two months I finally just looked on Google.  I searched on something vague, like the mouse didn’t feel right or something like that.  Lo and behold the answer to my question was there; it was the mouse acceleration curve.

Turns out, somewhere along the line between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.5 Apple decided to quietly change the acceleration curve on the Mac.  The result is an acceleration cliff; the mouse moves quickly and then, right before the target it slows down…to a crawl.  Normally the mouse would slow down incrementally, gradually, allowing the person to place the pointer directly on the target.  Once the mouse slows down it creeps across the screen.  This was causing me to overcompensate and making my arm ache after a while.

Turns out I’m not the only one who has problems with this.  Traci, on the other hand, can’t seem to notice a difference and has no problem at all.  Some Mac heads will defend this behavior because of an undying allegiance with the almighty Apple.  That’s bullshit.  Linux does not suffer from this problem; the acceleration curve provided by X is just right like *gasp* Microsoft Windows.  Turns out Microsoft got this right.  They’ve done a lot of work on pointer ballistics and have put a lot of thought into the mouse on their systems.  I’m not part of the Apple cult; I love my Mac and I’m fond of Apple but they screwed this one up.  They don’t even offer a way to modify the curve, just the cursor speed.  Those are not the same thing.

Fortunately after some searching I found …read more »

I finally pulled the trigger; I’m now a Mac user. About a year ago Traci’s laptop’s video card mysteriously died so we bought her a replacement desktop computer. We were tight on cash so we bought a low-end Dell running Vista. I’ve lamented since then on my frustrations and disappointments with Vista and Traci absolutely despised it. It was then I began to think once again seriously of moving to Linux and avoiding an upgrade to Vista, but I found that Linux still just wasn’t quite there on the desktop yet. It was closer than it had been in the past but still not what I needed.

As a result I decided to take another look at the Macs. It had been a few years and since then OSX had been released and the prices had dropped some. Long story short, I began to think seriously about a Mac and began researching what it would take to switch from Windows. I found that it was easier than ever to make the switch.

So after about a year of Vista Traci finally had had enough. We decided to pull the trigger about two weeks ago on a new iMac for her. We received it on a Friday and had her completely moved over to the Mac by Sunday morning. After spending the weekend with her Mac I decided it was time to make the switch myself and ordered mine.

I originally thought I wanted the 24″ display but after working on Traci’s I decided 24″ might be a little too large. I instead opted for the 20″ display but increased the hard drive to 750 GB and the memory to 4 GB. I also bought the wireless keyboard and mouse …read more »

The server is now upgraded from Fedora 5 to Fedora 8. I normally don’t trust upgrades (thanks to Microsoft) but I decided to chance the Fedora upgrade. It’s been about a week and so far all is well.

Getting Spam Assassin Working with Procmail and Postfix on a Fedora Core 5 Server

I bought brianjarrett.com in 2003, set up e-mail there, then kept it spam-free for three years. Then, it came. It was slow at first, only fifty messages a week maybe. It wasn’t long until it turned into fifty or a hundred a day; hundreds and hundreds by the end of any given week. On the client side Thunderbird did an okay job with it and Outlook 2007 did a better job with it but it was still a major pain in the ass, sitting there and waiting while Outlook churned through message after message promising pre-approved loans, penis enlargement, cheap Viagra, mini-RC cars, and messages about how some girl starting dating this guy but his “member” was too large for her mouth and she practically choked.

Now as sorry as I felt for this girl I just couldn’t stand the e-mails anymore. I thought about changing my e-mail address once again …read more »

So, why a Mac? Well, I’ve done a fair amount of thinking about this decision and have come to a few conclusions. I need to upgrade within the next two years. My current box, although still quite snappy, will continually become slower and slower as software and operating systems (Vista, in particular) become more processor and memory intensive.

First of all, I had to consider my options. I have three options really; Windows, Mac, or Linux. I know there are other operating systems out there but for my personal machine at home none of the other options make sense. Given these three options I first needed to identify what I really wanted. Part of me, at least the non-conformist in me, wants to buck Microsoft completely. Sorry to disappoint all you Linux apologists out there but Microsoft is and will continue to be a major force in the computing world for some time to come. There is no escaping Microsoft completely, especially if you’re coming from a Windows world and have already come to use some Windows-only software.

But I still want to …read more »

For the past 8 years I’ve been toying with the notion of switching from Windows to either Linux or Apple. I consistently dismissed the idea either because Linux wasn’t quite capable of supporting the switch or because Apples were just too damn expensive. Granted, Microsoft has made significant improvements in Windows stability (and even security) over the past several years so the impetus to switch isn’t quite what it was in the Windows 98/Me days. Windows XP was actually a pretty decent attempt at Unix by Microsoft, all things considered, but it’s still Microsoft at its base. Security sucked in XP and doesn’t seem to have improved drastically in Vista, unless you call nagging the end user to death security.

Speaking of Vista, that’s really what’s sparked this whole thing…again. My wife’s laptop decided to burn out its video card so rather than fixing it immediately we came across a good deal on a new Vista desktop for her. After we got it home we ended up replacing the printer (incompatible with Vista) and bought two new copies of Outlook. My scanner won’t work with Vista either, but that’s a bridge we’ll cross another day.

After spending some time …read more »

Several months back I had a catastrophic system failure on my webserver. I was, at the time, running Mandrake Linux and I was using tar to archive all my file, then backing them up on my fileserver. I noticed one day that I was getting core dumps and segmentation faults all over the place and when I tried to reboot the system it died completely. I wouldn’t even boot.

My first thought was that it was a memory problem. I ran a program to test all the memory and it all checked out. I then thought maybe it was a motherboard problem and maybe it was somehow corrupting files. After moving the site to a totally separate box I noticed that the same thing occurred. This time, however, I received a message from cron telling me that there were segmentation faults during my archive job.

Turns out that I was exceeding the max filesize limit for tar. According to the documentation tar can only handle a file up to 2 gigs. My file was 6 gigs. tar handled it okay until the file grew to over 6 gigs, at that point things went very wrong and important system files were …read more »

[Update: I've since discovered you can actually do this on the Windows version when you set up your instance.  It's just a checkbox that needs to be set.]

I recently had a problem with not being able to browse uploaded files in Wordpress after uploading. In Wordpress when writing a page or a post you have the ability to upload files to the webserver and include them (as full-size originals or thumbnails) to the post.

I was able to upload the files without issue and Wordpress created the thumbnail as well. However, I never received the “Browse” tab that would allow me to add the images to the editor (an subsequently to my post).

After some Googling I discovered the issue. I’m running …read more »

I think I might have solved the problem with my server. I was using tar to backup the site and the tarball had swollen to 6 gigabytes in size. Apparently tar can only support tarballs up to 4 gig so I think it was puking segmentation faults all over the place and brought both my original server and my backup server down.

I’ve restored the old server manually (opting out of using tar) and …read more »

If you’ve visited this site within the past week or so then you’ve probably noticed a few outages. Last weekend my server crashed. I thought it was an error with the OS but then, after I installed Fedora Core 5 instead of Mandrake 10, it crashed again with similar errors. I ran memory checks on it and all appears to be well in that department. So I threw in an old, small hard drive and did a base install of the OS. So far everything is performing as expected so I’m betting it’s the …read more »