Doc Oc has his new OS and apps loded. Yahoo! In this entry, I’m gonna try to capture the things I’ve modified/augmented, so next time I have to do this, I can deal with it from a documented position.

My basic plan was to keep things clean, only installing things I use, and trying hard to avoid importing settings and drivers from the old boot drive, which takes the Migration Assistant out of the mix… generally.

• >Documents and Stuff : I have loads of this kind of thing… ya know, Apple commercials, some images (not my photo library; that’s on another spindle), genealogy stuff, etc. Migration Assistant seemed like it would move all this, but I really wanted to do it myself, as I’m not comfortable with Migration Assistant’s scope, and knowing just much it would copy.
• Mail : Mail is a biggie for me. I archive waaaaay too much mail in my mailboxes, and it’s always been one of those things I’ll fix “one of these days”. Today is not that day. So how to get my mail setup manually? I copied /Users/me/Library/Mail and /Users/me/Library/Mail Downloads to the newly installed OS image. I also copied /Users/me/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist, and after getting everything over, I opened Mail, and there was everything. The only thing that wasn’t in place was my passwords, which isn’t a big surprise.
• Adobe Applications : I fully expected CS3 to bark about being reinstalled on the same machine, but apparently it was smart enough to figure it out. I saw several other apps that somehow knew their license serial numbers, and worked well. In fact, the only app that I had to “deactivate” and “reactivate” was Genuine Fractals 6.
• iTunes : I have had challenges in the past with moving my iTunes library around. This go ’round though, I had no problems. I use an alias to point to the library location, and once I repointed that, iTunes was all smiles.

At this point, Doc is happy again, although I’m sure I’ll run into things here and there that aren’t quite as they were. However, all things considered, I’m happy with where things are right now… Especially given all the “learning experiences” that were part of this!!

After spending most of the day trying to diagnose what state my MacPro was in, and continuing to wonder how I got there, I think I may have an answer.

Long, long ago, I had a Quad G5… (ok, so it wasn’t that long ago) and I believe my 1TB drive was created/installed there first. An apparently, it wasn’t partitioned as a GUID drive, but as an Apple Partition drive. All well and good, except that you allegedly cannot boot an Intel-based Mac from it. Empirically, that doesn’t seem to be the case, as I’ve been doing it, but I think that’s why so many things have been scrambled — extended attributes on system files, zero-byte system files, and loads of other really bad things. As I said before, bad juju.

Now, I had I not skrogged the original boot drive, I’d be sitting pretty — just repartition the 1TB drive, re-clone, and I’d be set. But, sitting where I am, I figured I’d try a reinstall of Leopard over the top of my current installation, and that’s when I discovered the partitioning woes. So, with no good, usable source, and no way to reliably fix the myriad system problems I’ve introduced, I’m left with the unattractive option of doing a fresh install.

I’m not totally against fresh installs. I mean, it’s pretty easy to accumulate loads of junque installed on the OS, so freshening things ain’t a bad thing. I’d just rather do it under better circumstances. I’ve been carrying a lot of these apps, data and stuff around ever since my first iMac G5 about four years ago. Badly quoting Adama from the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, “Don’t underestimate the power of a clean start.” I’ve gotta agree.

So tonight, it’s a clone back to the original boot drive. Tomorrow, I’ll entertain myself with a fresh install, and then begin to re-install my power apps — Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. — after letting the crazy machine do a boatload of updates.

Hopefully, I’ve learned a few things. This recovery? It’ll be fun. Really.

The answer “not well” comes to mind.

So all the copying and cloning appeared to go well. The new 2TB drive is in place, the O/S has been moved to the 1TB drive, and the most persnickety apps — iTunes, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom — all seemed to still have their marbles intact.

And then I noticed the time in the menubar. It was wrong. By several hours. I opened the system preference panel for the clock, and noticed that I was on GMT. Permanently. No matter where I clicked on the little world map, I always ended up with my timezone set to GMT.

After a bunch of Googling, I was led to some information about the symbolic link that dealt with the timezone. I was just gonna force it by creating a new link, but that’s something I don’t do everyday, and decided I should look it up. But after typing man ln, the machine proceeded to tell me it couldn’t fulfill my request. And I thought, well who does it think I am? A quick whoami, and I was told permission denied. Another quick su, followed by a more trepidatious whoami, and was told again permission denied. WTF?

I took a look at the ownership of whoami and others, and found that either (and sometimes both) the user and group were numeric rather than the expect root, wheel, etc. This was really bad juju, and I decided it was time to repair permissions through the Disk Utility. It told me it had found some things, and would have that taken care of in 12 minutes. Cool.

It’s now been well over three hours (with the utility expecting it’ll take another two hours), and filenames are streaming by (largely files in /Library, so far), with complaints about user, group and permissions, apparently all being repaired. I’ve gone to Terminal, and confirmed that it appears to be fixing things, so I’m inclined to let it do its thing. However, I really wonder what went south in the simple disk cloning. I used Carbon Copy Cloner (which has never failed me), and things appeared to work well — although the cloning took about three hours, which was unexpected.

The bad news is that I’ve already skrogged my old boot disk. Things looked like they were working, and I had planned to move my iTunes library over there, so I blasted it in preparation for its new purpose in life. Potentially, this may have been a bad move. It shouldn’t have influenced what’s going on now, but it would’ve been a lifeline that is now unavailable.

Stay tuned for more on the ongoing progress of Doc Oc….

Let me start by emphasizing that disk space is the perpetual bane of my electronic existence. Back in the pre-dawn of time, I can remember taking whole afternoons to format a box of bulk of floppy disks, in preparation for stuffing somewhere from 360KB to 1.44MB of goodness grabbed from BBSes via PC Pursuit. (Okay, so that should put a date to some of my exploits… for some of you.) Nowadays, it’s nothing to have hundreds of GB of photos, video, audio, etc. And as the envelope has been pushed for the size of magnetic storage, it seems my needs have grown just a little bigger.

Recently, I’ve felt like a 21st century Lucy, moving a folder from one drive to another so I had enough room to put something else on the first drive. Lots of spinning of plates, and not so much adherence to my own storage strategies. It wasn’t exactly keeping me up at night, but it was bothering me to encounter iTunes or some other app screaming at me ’cause I was down to my few MB on a TB drive.

Today I took a step in the direction of solving that little problem. Enter a new Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green SATA HD! I surely hope that will be enough space to last me for a while. I moved to a 1TB drive a little over two years ago, and I’ve gotta hope that it’s at least another two years until I need to double my storage space again.

And after 4.5hrs spent copying 900GB of data to the new drive, it’s time to start moving data around the drives in the big ol’ machine, hopefully with the goal of using the old 1TB drive as my boot drive, my 320GB drive as a festering cesspool for iTunes, and still using my twin 750GB drives as external backup drives for the important data.

Terabytes…. Whodathunk we’d be shoveling datasets this large around!

Jack Frost, that is!

With Fridays now being part of my regular weekend routine, I’m finding time to look at the world through some fresh eyes. Darla gets up for work around 6am, and that leaves me a little time to slowly wake up, eat some breakfast, and await the sunrise.

This morning it was about 19 degrees, with frost all the surfaces. And not the crazy thick stuff, just a layer, with all the intricacies of the frost fingers visible. Way cool!

I took the camera, trike, new lens and new flash (watch for some retroblogging about some of that) out on the deck, and shot frost on my favorite glass table. This MP-E 65mm is just flat amazing! Most of what I shot was at 3x life size, with the 580EX flash handheld at various angles. Seeing that frost so close was a great way to energize me, wake up my brain, and get me moving this morning.

I still think I have a long way to go with shooting frost and other frozen objects, but if this morning’s any indicator, I think I’m on my way. The bad part is that there’s not too many more frosty days in store for us this season — spring is almost here, and then I switch to flowers and birds again!

And speaking of birds… I think this is the year that I can catch the killer hummingbird shot I’ve been stalking for years. With the 580EX, I think I’ll have the light to do it, and I’ve already been able to prove out slaving my crusty 420EX off it (the 420EX won’t work connected to the camera, but wireless off the 580EX, it seems to work fine — go figure), so I should have two angles of light. One longish PC cable, and I think I’ll be able to sit in the house with the 100-400mm lens, and never disturb the little guys.

Watch this space!

After what has seemed like an eternity — especially in dog years, which is a fairly common unit of measure at the Deauxmayne — Apple has *finally* solved the dilemma of how an ’08 Mac Pro crosses the road to get to Mini DisplayPort monitors. The answer is in the cards.

Along with a gazillion hardware announcements, and more than a few software updates, Uncle Steve’s kids announced some love for my beloved Doc Oc. There is finally an option to hang a 24″ LED Apple display off my now-defunct Mac Pro.

The path is through an ATI Radeon HD 4870, which would dent your wallet to the tune of $349. From everything I’ve read, this card is very fast — much faster than the card currently in Doc Oc. However, it won’t ship for 5-7 weeks, and will only work with OS X 10.5.7 (any bets on when that might be released? ).

The cool thing is that the card supports both DVI and Mini DisplayPort, which means I can tackle the upgrade in phases, rather than all at once. Buy the card and gain the speed upgrade (in some instances, anyway), and then upgrade the monitor.

Funniest thing about the description on the Apple store?

“ATI Radeon HD 4870 includes two video ports: one Mini DisplayPort and one dual-link DVI port. This allows you to connect both the 24-inch Apple LED Cinema Display or another Mini DisplayPort-based display, and a DVI-based display such as the 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display.”

Another Mini DisplayPort-based display? There ain’t but one out there, and that’s the aforementioned Apple 24-inch display. I guess that’s future-proofing, but in March of 2009, that reads like humor!

In the new Mac Pro machines, there’s another DVI/Mini DisplayPort card available — the NVidia GeForce GT 120 — but the Apple store doesn’t list that as an upgrade option for the ’08 Mac Pros. ‘Tis a shame, as that card is only $149. For folks wanting to upgrade monitors, but not really needing the extra speed, it seems like this would be a good option. These are also 5-7 weeks out, so maybe that’ll change between now and ship time.

In any case, I’m thrilled that my now-obsolete Doc Oc has been included in the the No Mac Pro Left Behind program in this round of annoucements!

(And BTW, there’s some good analysis of the new Mac Pro, both its shiny and ugly bits, at the websites of digilloyd and Bare Feats.)

CORRECTION: It looks like you only need OS X 10.5.6 to run the new cards, either on the new Mac Pros or old. I guess 10.5.7′s date is still a bit of a mystery.

With the Apple Store down, and the rumors running wilder than Girls Gone Wild yesterday, it appears that there is some movement afoot at the House Steve Built.

New MacMinis, iMacs, Time Capsule, Mac Pros, Airport Extreme… who knows what’s in the bag of tricks this morning. It’s like Christmas in March!

I’d like to see a video card solution for my Mac Pro so I can use the new Mini DisplayPort LED monitors on Doc Oc. I’ve just gotta think there’ll be a solution… aside from “buy the new machine!”

In a few hours we’ll know what up Steve’s sleeve, the anticipation will be over, and I’ll know if I’ve still got something to be grumpy about.

Today marks a new phase in my day job. I begin working 4×10 this week.

For me, this isn’t really much of a change. Up to now, I’ve generally arrived around 6:30am, and started trying to leave around 4:00pm (with mixed success). Now, it’s 6:00am to 5:00pm, Monday through Thursday.

Aside from occasionally being able to sleep late on Friday, this should buy me an extra shooting day each week, along with time for post-processing. This is key, as I have trouble finding time for post on weeknights or once the crush of the weekend starts. Friday will be somewhat insulated for me, with few folks roaming around in the places I’d like to shoot, and nothing at home to distract me from post work.

In theory, anyway…!