George Sudarkoff

OS stability over time

I noticed an interesting phenomenon a couple of days ago. We all know that Windows is susceptible to rot. Things tend to disintegrate over time -- everything feels slower and buggier. That's why the accepted wisdom is to reinstall Windows from time to time. The other day a friend called from Vancouver -- she was having a problem with her microphone. It was working just fine a few days ago but suddenly stopped and there was nothing we could do to revive it. It was a fairly fresh install of Vista which came pre-installed with her new Dell laptop, so it appears that Vista rots even faster.

It is not so with Linux, though! Linux seems to be getting more and more stable the longer you use it (which at least seems natural). I installed Ubuntu Feisty a couple of months ago on my workstation at work and had been having weird audio problems ever since -- mp3's sounded as if 90 per cent of the frequencies were redirected to /dev/null. I attempted to repair the problem but gave up after a short while due to the lack of experience in this kind of thing (I am a Mac user, our people don't get much practice debugging OS problems). But I kept trying to play mp3's for the next couple of weeks on days when I didn't have my iPod on me and one day, after downloading a routine update, it just worked. Awesome!

Save up to N.aN

Save up to Na.N, originally uploaded by sudarkoff.

This is what happens when programmers forget to check their parameters and/or return values.

FileVault is not good

If you're thinking about enabling FileVault feature of the Mac OS X to secure the data on your laptop - don't. Instead, create an encrypted disk image and store your important files there. I had been using FileVault for over a year and my experience was rapidly deteriorating lately. Even though FileVault never caused any disasters or a loss of my data, I decided to turn it off a couple of weeks ago and my life is better already! My good old G4 PowerBook is significantly more responsive, it wakes up instantly and reliably (no more looking at the spinning rainbow of death), certain apps no longer "forget" that they are default providers of their services, etc. So, use encrypted disk image to store your important files, don't use FileVault. (And backup your data regularly, but more about this later.)