I've been waiting for the new release of OS X to come out to buy my new computer from Apple. Well, it finally came out last week. I heard news that there may be new hardware coming out last tuesday, so I waited longer.

Nothing new came out last tuesday, so I went ahead and purchased a Mac Book Pro. It was delivered today.

It's not a bad little system. It's way faster than my old system, and it's a laptop. I purchased the 17" model with the high resolution screen. Almost 2000 pixels across. It's actually bigger than my old 20" screen. But the fonts are a bit harder to see since they are so small. I'm going to have to figure out that way to enlarge everything.

So today I transferred everything over to my new system. I didn't want to just copy over everything using the migration assistant. I had my old system for almost three years, and a lot of cruft can build up in that amount of time. I didn't want to end up copying over all that junk to my new system. Not only was it cruft from my old system, but from the system before that.

I just manually copied over the things that I needed. I'll use the system for a few days just to make sure I got everything. So far so good. We will see how it goes I guess.

So I'm trying to convert a bunch of photos grabbed from a data feed, but It's just not working in Rails for some reason.

I first tried RMagick, then ImageScience, then using back-ticks to run the command line ImageMagick convert. All of them end up generating corrupt images.

I run the command line from the command prompt and it works fine. I run it from the console, and it still runs fine. It just won't run from my model.

The command line is:
sudo -u www /usr/local/bin/convert -geometry "1024x768>" -strip -quality 90 o-1.jpg l-1.jpg

I have removed the path for my blog. o-1.jpg is the original photo, l-1.jpg is the large size preview.

The errors I get are:
convert: Premature end of JPEG file o-2.jpg'.
convert: Corrupt JPEG data: premature end of data segment `o-2.jpg'.

It makes a jpg with the bottom half chopped off and all gray.

I'm thinking that Ruby or Rails is running out of memory while processing the image... maybe.. I don't know.

So I tried and tried to reinstall Mac OS on Jane's MacBook, but it would not work. Finally after a few tries I ran the Apple Hardware Test. It wouldn't even pass the first test. Said memory was bad.

So Jane took it to the Apple Store to get it fixed up. They have it now, and it will probably be a few days if not a week to get it back.

But... lucky for me, I was able to get a full backup of her home directory before it went south. Any I hope this fixes the random problems she has been having with it.

Today Jane broke her laptop. Well, it's not physically broke...

She told me that her laptop wasn't working. Firefox would not start. So I tried it and sure enough, FireFox would not start. So I tried Safari. That worked for about 10 seconds. Then I tried to open the Finder and it would not open.

So I tried to run Disk Utility and repair the hard drive. It would just crash. Then I rebooted the system into single user mode and ran the fsck command to repair the filesystem. Nope. It was really corrupted.

So I asked, "You do have backups of everything, right?" Nope.

So for the past 4 hours I've been trying to backup the data from the drive. There is 53GB in Jane's home folder. I'm trying to copy it to the backup server. I tried using the terminal, but no go there. I tried using a few backup programs, but they wouldn't work.

So I rebooted the laptop into target firewire mode and plugged it into my system. All the backup software I tried to use would not do it. So I'm running rsync from the terminal to my backup server running rsync in server mode. So far so good. I'll find out in a few hours.

I did a little bit of work on Wicked Zuk today. I managed to get it to 19.5" belly clearance at full compression. That's close enough to where I wanted it. That should get me about 23.5" to 24" at ride height with 4" up travel. No bad. The only thing is that I had to stretch the wheel base to 107". I was looking for 105", but 107" is not too long.

Anyway, I'll get some photos tomorrow of it.

Well, I loaded up the latest beta of Omniweb yesterday and used it for about 24 hours.

It ran a lot better than the previous versions but it's still dog slow. That's one of my biggest peeves about Omniweb that it's so, so slow.

Safari has pretty much caught up with Omniweb in usability and features. With the plugins that it has, like Tidy, Safaristand, and Adblocker, Safari is much better than Omniweb.

Omni really dropped the ball on Omniweb. Not only has it been in development for over five years, it also doesn't have anything that I can't find elsewhere.

If only Firefox had the side previews like Omniweb and SafariStand, then I'd probably use Firefox. But, Firefox seems a bit bloaty and slow compared to Safari. That's too bad because there is still many things that don't work in Safari and I have to launch Firefox to use them.

The Mighty Mouse is a great concept, but the scroll ball gums up very easy. Usually twice a month I have to fool with it to get it working again.

It will usually stop scrolling down, and that's what it did the other day. So I tried to clear it by the usual means. Turning it upside down and scrolling it around violently on the mouse pad didn't help. Blowing it out with the air compressor at 90PSI didn't help. Even taking it apart and cleaning the rollers didn't help.

So looks like I can't scroll down anymore. Time to get re-used to the keyboard scrolling again. What a PITA.

I can't wait to get my new Mac Book Pro next month. The track pad should be way better than the mouse.

I started taking apart the buggy I purchased from Aaron. I have most of the upper half done and next week I'm going to pull all the lower parts off.

After getting all the stuff I want off the buggy, I'm going to start building up the Wicked Zuk. I think it should only take a few months to finish it. I have everything now, and the hard parts are done.

Check list: Skid plate, lower link mounts, shock mounts, attach axles, drive shafts, complete missing items on chassis, wiring, interior, and exterior sheet metal. Then paint it and I'm ready to rock and roll.