The latest update of Mac OS X, i.e., version 10.5.1 is apparently the most unstable releases I ever experienced. It all started with syslogd taking up too much CPU cycles. Each time I restart my MacBookPro, the first thing I do is to stop syslogd by issuing sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist from a terminal. But that did not stop rest of applications crashing occasionally. I am now seeing crashes with Safari, Firefox, IntelliJ etc. After a few application crashes, the OS crashes sometimes. I may have upgraded to 10.5.1 too soon!

The first five days of the new year went by very quickly. I am very excited to say that very soon, I will be launching one of my pet projects publicly. This project is about managing and sharing logs and statistics for recreational cyclists. Over the past few days, I had a chance to learn and play with quite a few things like Ruby on Rails, Garmin browser plugins, YUI, and so on. The project is not quite ready for public consumption but I have most of the key peaces in place and working, and I am planning to share it with a few of my bike buddies over the next week or so to get some feedback. I have another personal goal for this project - that is to test some of my ideas about building RESTful applications. Talking REST is easier than doing REST. I have a few more issues to tackle before I can conclude!

In the midst of all this, my MacBookPro kept crashing over 5-7 times a day. As I installed too many new things recently, it turned out to be difficult to isolate the problem. After a lot of frustration and lost hours, finally, this solution worked. Syslogd was the culprit.

No need to explain. Each picture can speak a thousand words.

Here are two screenshots of the same feed. First one is from Safari 3.0.4 on Leopard, and the second is from Firefox 2.0.0.8. See some characters missing in Safari.

Yesterday evening I succumbed to the Leopard temptation, and picked up a family pack from a local Apple store. This is the first time I ever tried to upgrade a Mac software. I upgraded an old Mac Mini and my 10 month old MBP. In both cases, the upgrade went extremely well. All software and settings that I had prior to upgrade are working flawlessly after the upgrade.

I got a new MacBookPro at work this morning. I open it up later in the evening, and here is how the screen looks.

Hmmmm.

Here is an excellent post titled Don't ask employees to be passionate about the company!. Management of a number of companies value loyalty to the company/team/group (i.e. passionate about the company) more than the employees being passionate about work. This post makes a comparison between good companies and good UI.

May be, just may be, the likes of Microsoft, Dell, HP and Gateway have given up competing with Apple. May be Apple has the set the standard so high that others are just ignoring whatever comes out of Apple - both at hardware and software levels. Apple is not perfect, and the MacBook Pro has room for improvement, but when compared to plastic-feeling Dell laptops and the weekly-patched M$ Windoz - well - the comparision is just meaningless and futile. My old Dell notebook could be compared to, may be, a HP notebook, but not to the MacBook Pro. The MPB is worlds apart from those. That's what I feel after using the MBP for a week.

Here is my new productivity companion. It is lovely.