Technology

Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, the head of Virginia Tech‘s recent construction of a 1,100-node Power Mac G5-based supercomputer (currently tentatively ranked as the 3rd fastest supercomputer in the word) gave a presentation at the O’Reilly Mac OS X conference this week. Lots of interesting little technical tidbits in the article, detailing just how they were able to get the project up and running.

If you’ve ever sat with a TiBook in your lap, you understand that there is a further significant issue. As hot as a G4 runs, a G5 runs hotter. With a traditional air-conditioning setup, the calculations showed that instead of emptying out the air three times an hour as would be typical, they would need to empty the air three times per minute. Computers tend to each cool front to back. So the plan was to arrange the computers in rows back to back and pull the hot air out of the hot aisle. This would have required wind velocity under the floor of more than 60 miles per hour and still would have resulted in some hot spots. They decided instead to use a refrigerator-like system. Chillers cool water to 40 degrees to 50 degrees, which is then used to chill refrigerant, which is piped into a matrix of copper pipes. Effectively, you have a distributed refrigerator.

I have no idea whether or not this is a standard feature in other Unix systems, but it appears that there’s a very handy little “under-the-radar” feature in Mac OS X 10.3/Panther — automatic file defragmentation.

Everytime an application opens a file for reading, HFS+ checks if the file is fragmented and is less than 20MB in size. If so, it copies the file’s contents to a continuous region on the disk and frees up the previously allocated blocks.

What a wonderfully convenient feature. Even nicer, when someone asked if there were any official confirmation from Apple about the feature, someone else posted the source code from the Darwin (command-line only open source) version of the core system.

(via MacSlash)

Lots of interesting tips and tricks for Panther are showing up on the web now that it’s been out a few days. Some of the niftier ones I’ve run across so far:

• The Exposé blob (an on-screen trigger for the Exposé effect).
• SIPS (Scriptable Image Processing System — Panther-specific command line image processing similar to ImageMagick or NetPBM).
• System-wide inline text autocompletion.
• When you hit command-tab to bring up the application list, you can choose which application to switch to with the mouse as well as with the keyboard.
• Exposè is usable during a drag (start to drag a file from a visible window, invoke Exposè to find the target window, then drop the file into the target window).
• Easily find special characters (accents, math functions, currency symbols, etc.) by choosing Edit > Special Characters… in any application.
• Choosing your desktop picture now ties directly into your iPhoto library.
• Lots of high-powered upgrades to the text services engine, giving us professional level typography options by default.

There’s a glowing review of Apple’s new version of OS X (10.3, or ‘Panther’) in the New York Times today by David Pogue. A few things in the article jumped out at me.

First off, I love the logo they came up with to illustrate the story.

Then, in the first paragraph: “Hackers and academics have uncovered one Windows security hole after another, turning Microsoft into a frantic little Dutch boy at the dike without enough fingers.”

About the new ‘sidebar’ in the Finder, Pogue says that, “In effect, the Sidebar lets you fold up your desktop so that any two icons appear side-by-side, no matter how far apart they actually are in your folder hierarchy.” All of a sudden, I really want to rename the Finder ‘tesseract’.

And lastly, one of the last paragraphs comparing Apple’s OS philosophy to Microsoft’s sums it all up wonderfully.

Finally, surely there’s value in using an operating system that, well, isn’t Windows. Mac OS X isn’t just free of viruses; it’s also free from copy protection, “activation” (a Windows XP feature that transmits information about your PC back to Microsoft), and pop-up messages that nag you to sign up for some Microsoft database or clean up your icons. When you use Mac OS X, you feel like it’s yours; when you use Windows, you feel as though you’re using someone else’s toys, and Mrs. Microsoft keeps peeking in on you.

Wow. Apparently without any kind of fanfare whatsoever, Apple just updated their iBook line across the board — to use the G4 chip!

The world’s best-loved consumer portable gets an impressive makeover with a superfast PowerPC G4 processor, a new architecture, a slot-loading optical drive and enhanced wireless networking capabilities. Plus Mac OS X v10.3 Panther, the world’s most advanced operating system. Starting at just \$1099.

A minor but amusing goof on Apple’s site right now: in the Top New Panther Features sidebar on many of the pages, iChat’s one-line summary is “Send and receive faxes.”

A friend filled me in that you can now fax directly from any print panel in Panther, which I could definitely see as being extremely convenient. It doesn’t really have anything to do with iChat, however.

Still. It amused me.

Mac OS X 10.3, a.k.a. Panther, has finally had its official release date announced — October 24th, just a little over two weeks from now. I qualify for the Mac OS X Up-To-Date program, too, as a new G5 owner, so I get to upgrade for \$20. Go me!