DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’ve finally migrated to the new G5. There were a few hiccups, but I’ve worked through them, for the most part.

• The Macally mouse driver wouldn’t survive a reboot. This problem magically went away after I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver.
• The StartupSound.prefpane setting also doesn’t survive a reboot. Have yet to reinstall.
• Despite working the first day, Firefox has forgotten all my site passwords. Not sure what’s up with this, but I have records of them elsewhere, so it’s not a big deal to re-type them all once as needed.

Impressions that must be noted:

• The G5 is quiet. This is a huge deal for me. My G4 was a 500 MHz unit, upgraded to 1 GHz. The upgraded CPU came with a high-pitched whine that I never fully habituated. I’m really happy it’s gone. Having two drives instead of three also helps. Having variable-speed, temperature-sensitive fans in the G5 (note: I assume that’s what they are) means the computer is nearly silent most of the time.
• It’s faster, but it doesn’t feel 4x faster. It boots probably 8x faster, and apps open quickly, but overall it’s not obvious from the performance that it has 4x the raw CPU power plus a faster memory bus, more RAM, and a faster disk subsystem. I’m not complaining, really, because it’s pretty snappy, but there was a bit of a reality check when I got all my apps installed and the machine appeared to lose about 30% off its out-of-the-box responsiveness. This impression is entirely subjective, though.
• QuickSilver kicks ass. The Firefox plug-in actually works — it never did for me under 10.3.9 — so I can access bookmarked web pages by typing the first few bytes of the name. This is no minor feat; I need to reach intranet pages whose URLs are 70-100 bytes long, but which share the first 30-70 bytes, dozens of times per day. Prior to QS I’d need to type big parts of the URL manually (for I have not used the Bookmarks menu for anything in years; it’s too cumbersome, and I really hate using the mouse that much). It may only be 2 seconds per instance that I save, but given that it usually happens when someone has just asked me a question that I’m supposed to know the answer to, those are long seconds.
• MailSmith is still a dog. I want to love this application, and I definitely like most of it, such as its designed-in scorn for HTML email and its tight integration with SpamSieve, but the performance on a dual G5 is just embarrassing, e.g. a one-word text search against my 2004 mail archive takes over 10 seconds.

(As a comparison: I wrote an inverted index search engine that can do full-text searches, with stemming, orders of magnitude more quickly than this. Against a corpus of 1.5M documents (37M total indexed words), matching either subject or body, it returns results in about a tenth of a second. The server in question is not significantly faster than this dual 2.0 GHz Mac.

While it’s true my 2004 mail archive has a lot of messages in it, there are a whole lot fewer than 1.5M in there.

Fortunately, thanks to the BSD goodness underlying OS X, I could actually run my inverted index database app on my desktop machine and do my mail searches in MySQL. The UI would suck, though; maybe it’s time to learn RealBasic or Cocoa.)

Anyway, a recent MacWorld article promises Secret shortcuts. Hidden helpers. Mysterious menus… insider power-user tips for OS 10.4, aka Tiger. It’s worth a read. Nothing earth-shaking there, but a few potentially useful things.