ExpanDrive

After about 3 weeks of using Vista RTM as my primary windows development environment, I’m officially downgrading to XP.

The reasons for this are many:

1. Driver issues; Mouse, firewire controller, power management, to name a few.

2. Nothing works without about 10 extra installation steps. VMWare Workstation and Visual Studio are the two key components of my development environment. Visual Studio needs a custom patch, needs to be run as administrator, yet still doesn’t fully work right with some plugins I rely on. VMWare Workstation doesn’t run or install correctly without modifying Vista security settings. I’d love to run the 6.0 beta [which has amazing Visual Studio integration] on Vista - but Visual Studio wouldn’t start because it could not “acces the log file”. That’s awesome.

3. Vista has been out in beta in one form or another for quite a long time now, but the level of changes made during the final 6 months created all sorts of issues that are similar to this. SftpDrive has had Vista support throughout this process, only to have various aspects of it broken and require various fixes for release. The latest 1.6 beta now works with RTM.

4. UAC is really annoying. The first thing you need to do is turn it off. You would hope some basic sanity would have resolved a few of the issues, such as using control panel. You can’t do anything in the control panels without re-authorizing priveledges on practically every click.

5. Everything covered in here: The 5 sins of Vista. #1 and #5 really bother me. #1 is truly asinine.

Overall - I’m left trying to figure out why Vista is better and why it took 5 years to make it happen. The start menu is new, I guess. The windows have translucent borders if you spent over $1500 on your machine. Give me a break.

The lesson I’m taking away is that developers can only sell upgrades and “new” revisions based on features. It’s truly poor form to roll 5 years of bug fixes into a $350 package with more regressions than new features.

I’m going back to XP.

The Gulag Orkestar by Beirut is one of the most fantastic albums I’ve heard in a long time. It might take a bit of time to really get into the operatic indie sound they’re putting together, but if you [like many] enjoy Sufjan Stevens, chances are good you can find a place for these guys. The band is largely driven by a 19 year old highschool dropout that spent a couple years traveling eastern europe. The sound is totally outside the box. No guitars [other than a ukeleilei here and there] and a great horns & percussions section. Like many reviews say — this CD sounds like what you imagine you might hear at a gypsy carnival somewhere in the Balkans. It is fantastic.

For the past year I’ve been splitting time between a truly wonderful Thinkpad T43 and a MacBook. The Macbook wasn’t ideal for my primary machine. Screen resolution and size were among the bigger issues. The ThinkPad doesn’t run OS X.

The MacBook Pro finally felt like it is the sweet spot of the product cycle. All of the major platform issues with the MBP [whine, heat] have been largely been worked out. Additionally, nothing too big is on the Intel roadmap for the coming 6 months. This machine is a a 15″ 2.3ghz Core2. It is VERY fast. Noticably faster than my 2.0ghz Core duo iMac. Also, it can run 64 bit code, when the time comes. Since this machine is my primary Windows and OS X environment, I knew I needed to finally make the leap and move onto Vista for day to day Windows development. Getting Vista to run was a bit of a pain — here is where I turned to get it going…

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Another open source project working on a SFTP filesystem for the Mac can be found at:

http://mac.pqrs.org/sshfs/

While it’s certainly not production quality yet, it is certainly encouraging that other people feel that the lack of an SFTP filesystem is a rather obvious pain point.

Amit Singh over at Google has ported FUSE to the Mac. Good Work!

FUSE is popular user space framework for Linux, and now the Mac. What this means is that it is much easier for filesystem developers to create and test new filesystem implementations. Filesystems run, usually, as extensions to the kernel of the OS - like a device driver. When code runs in the kernel, it is much more difficult to develop and debug. When code crashes in the kernel, your machine crashes. It’s hard.

FUSE tries to abstract away some of that pain for developers, by providing a “general” filesystem driver that communicates with a service in user space. Then you can write an extension to the FUSE user space service, much like normal application development, and have it extend the power of the general purpose filesystem driver. This is a real boon for programmers.

Also cool — Google has a patch for SSHFS, a fuse module, so that you can mount an SSH/SFTP server using MacFUSE.

It’s no secret that we’re working on SftpDrive for OS X, it’s nice to see other people out there are trying to get some innovative work done on OS X network filesystems. SftpDrive:Mac is our number one dev priority, and along with that iMac, we’ve got a half dozen other Macs that we’re using for development and testing. I’ve gotten quite a few emails and IMs today about MacFUSE. We’re excited that it is being done. SftpDrive for the Mac will be released as a very polished product with robust reconnect support, a simple user interface, and the a great overall experience - just like our windows client. Having SSHFS is great, but beachballing finder when your wifi connection drops or you hop to a new AP isn’t very fun.

We’re not bashing FUSE by any means - but this example illustrates certain virtues of commercial software, developed by people that really care about what they are doing. Software where developers spend an inordinate amount of time solving edge cases, so that the experience doesn’t have gaps. When you plunk down $39 for SftpDrive, you get software that effortlessly hops between wireless access points and has intelligent caching to provide a good experience while using poorly behaving applications. And just like free software, you get developers who really cared about what they are doing.

That last 20% of functionality really does take 80% of the effort.