So, I’m working on a netatalk build at home on my OpenSolaris boxes – both a personal project as well as a skill set builder for future opportunities. Thankfully, a lot of the pain of netatalk builds has been resolved in the 2.2 branch, and the 2.2.1 release claims to support Lion and TimeMachine. So, after 30 minutes of futzing around, I’ve got it built and installed, but I’m stuck (for the evening) on the TimeMachine flags – getting an error on the OS X side of things that I don’t have the proper “read, write and append permissions”, which is very much a netatalk config issue. When I’m a little more clear headed, perhaps over Thanksgiving weekend, I’ll see if I can built it the rest of the way. Or, I’ll turn to RHEL, which I know a lot better these days.

Apple’s web browser, Safari, is kinda funny. It’s by far the most widely deployed and used mobile web browser on the planet. It is the genesis of WebKit, which is the engine that Chrome uses for rendering and display. And on Mac OS X, Safari has become almost totally unusable.

Don’t get me wrong: the rendering is dead on, the JavaScript performance is awesome, and the damn thing color manages by default. This is great stuff. However, with the release of Safari 5.0, performance has gone through the floor. It’s incredibly common for me to open 50 or 60 tabs while browsing photoblogs. However, after opening 5 or 10 tabs, things start to bog down. Switching between tabs often causes ever other window and tab I have open to go solid white, and then reload it’s contents from the internet. Closing tabs can take 15 or 20 seconds. Scrolling is abysmal.

So, I’m walking away from the excellent UI, the integration with iCloud, and all the other nice bits of Safari until the performance returns to a level where the browser is useable again. I’m not a huge fan of FireFox anymore, so I guess it’s going to be Chrome for the foreseeable future.

I’ve had iTunes Match turned on for the better part of 24 hours now. There is some really awesome stuff in it, and there’s some not so awesome stuff that leaves me scratching my head a little. First, however, the awesome:

1. The matching is actually pretty quick
2. Playlists from the machine running iTunes match are visible everywhere
3. Playlists from the machine running iTunes match are editable everywhere
4. It appears that you can “stream” music to the other computers without saving a copy on disk

This is great. I can listen to the music I own on CD at work, without bringing the CD’s to the office (to explain to the copyright officers if something were to go badly), without saving tracks of unknown origin to my computer, etc. Even if I do download something to have offline, it has my Apple ID embedded in it, so there’s no real issue there. And it’s the dream of finally being able to edit and change playlists from multiple computers at once. iTunes Match is living up to all of it’s hype…

…other than a few, small issues. First, if you have more than 25,000 items in your library, you apparently can’t turn iTunes Match on, at all. It’s not an issue of “you can sync the first 25K”, you can’t use the service. Second, there’s a lot of hit-and-miss going on. Random tracks from the Beatles album Rubber Soul didn’t match – and have to be uploaded. (Actually, about ¹⁄₃ of all my Beatles tracks didn’t match) And finally, badly named tracks don’t get renamed. I’ve got a lot of music I ripped by hand, before the CDDB was really available. So the track names reflect my naming convention at the time. ‘01.name.of.song.mp3′ or ‘02_Name of the Song[Live].mp3′ or ‘Track 03.mp3’ are common. And none of these get cleaned up, even when they are matched by iCloud. It would be SO nice if I could get iTunes to rename them now, and give me clean ID3 tags. But, alas.

So I paid for TuneUp to do the same work for me.

I’m actually impressed with the quality of the images from my new iPhone 4S. People had been talking about how much better the camera was, even over the iPhone 4, but I hadn’t really believed them. Now that I’m in the habit of using the camera, I can look critically at the results, having taken a lot of shots in situations where I wouldn’t have bothered. I must say, I’m also delighted with the iCloud Photo Stream feature, as I don’t have to remember to sync the photos off my phone – which I rarely did in the past. Now, images just appear in Aperture. If only I could get other apps to talk to the Photo Stream, and upload/download pictures, I’d be set.

Thanks, NetworkSolutions, for ‘updating’ my MX records for dezendorf.com to point back to your own crummy webmail, and away from my Google Apps account. Sorry to anyone who tried to actually, you know, send me email in the last three or four days. I’ve reset the MX records, but it’s going to take some time before things get back to normal. Bah.

Google has delivered. Google App domain administrators can now turn on Google+ for their domains, whenever they want. They do also have to turn on Picasa and Google Talk (which are not covered inside the normal legal agreement, so some government institutions may run into legal issues if they enable Google+), but thankfully, the MX record for dezendorf.com goes to Google, and I’m the primary administrator.

So, I can now abandon my gmail.com account pretty much for good – I’m going to leave it active, as it has mail archives and things I can’t easily recreate (or don’t care to).

Let’s see how good Google+ is now.

Nest is making an electronic thermostat that claims to learn your schedule and adjust accordingly. They are $249.00, and only available for pre-order at this time, but they do look really cool, and useful. A built in ambient temperature sensor and a motion detector lets it learn, and it has WiFi to connect to your home network, so you can program it remotely via your iPhone or Android phone. I’m going to wait until I own a house to get one, but these are definitely going on the list.