Apple Mouse Not So Mighty

Not long ago I happened to get a deal on an Apple Mighty Mouse from a friend who was unloading one. Figured it would be worth a try. I'd been curious to see how the thing performed, and the only real way to test how well you and something like a mouse get along is to actually use one for an extended period of time. So that's what I did. I didn't mind the Mighty Mouse, actually. If I'd been coming from anything other than my beloved $13 dollar Logitech optical — perhaps the greatest mouse ever invented, quite possibly mouse perfection — I probably would've liked the Mighty Mouse. It feels just like the old one-button Apple optical, but has the additional convenience of three-button, scroll-wheel goodness. And the omnidirectional scrolling is quite ingenious. Unfortunately, I can't say I was totally sold. While I didn't hate the mouse as much as a lot of folks, I did find the small, nipple-like scroll-wheel, and the overall lack of physical feedback unsatisfying and at times difficult to use.

Apple Mighty Mouse: Pretty but Dumb
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But this isn't just a review of the Mighty Mouse. That's been done to death at this point. What I really wanted to talk about was design over function. And, of course, how all this relates to The lab.

Not long after my first foray into Mighty Mouse usage, we purchased a bunch of Quad G5s for the lab. These machines shipped with the Mighty Mouse. In years past we replaced our Apple mice with three-button mice (yes, those very same Logitechs I mentioned above) because many users — particularly those using Maya — really require three-button functionality. I was actually pretty excited that, with the Mighty Mouse included, this would be the first year in some time I didn't have to go buy new mice for our Macs. There was some initial confusion among users, as the Mighty Mouse is configured in one-button mode by default. So educating the students about configuring the mouse for three-button functionality was necessary. That turned out to be quite easy, and before long those folks who wanted to be were up and running. But after a month or two I got a request generated by the student body in one of the Student Representative meetings for — yup, you guessed it — new mice. The consensus was that people really hated the Mighty Mouse, preferring, like I do, the cheap but wonderful Logitech alternative.

The Logitech El-Cheapo Premium Optical Mouse: Best. Mouse. Ever.
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Let's look at this Logitech mouse for a minute. The Logitech Premium Optical Mouse lists on MacMall for $12.99 as of this writing (it no longer appears at Logitech's online store, and is becoming hard to find, sadly). That's less than 1/4 the price of the Mighty Mouse. But, while the design of the Apple mouse is beautiful, the Logitech's design is brilliantly functional (and not terribly hideous, actually). The Logitech features big buttons and a big scroll-wheel. The buttons make a both an audible and a physical click when pressed, and the scroll wheel also makes physical clicks when you move it. This feedback, and the size of the controls let you know that you're actually using the mouse in the way you intend. I'd bet the resistance of the buttons and wheel even reduce the likelihood of repetitive strain injuries, though if not they're certainly far more psychologically satisfying to me than the practically invisible Mighty Mouse controls. Do they look as nice? No. But they feel great. And how much time do you spend looking at your mouse versus holding it? The other thing I appreciate about the Logitech is that it has a great ergonomic shape. This is something I'm really picky about, and it was the initial thing that sold me on the Logitech. This basic, early-nineties mouse shape — the one with a little hump on the back where your palm rests — is ideal for me. I find it very comfortable. Feedback and comfort: two important things that the Mighty Mouse simply lacks. (Sorry, but a speaker-generated "click" sound just doesn't cut it for me.)

I think it's great that Apple finally decided to start making three-button mice. And I think they did so in some truly innovative ways. I can't even say I really hate the Mighty Mouse. It's just that there are far better alternatives for a lot less money. And I expect more from Apple. The look of Apple's mice has long been stunning, if not always very functional. Unfortunately, design over functionality just doesn't fly for those of us who use computers all day long. A mouse needs to feel good more than it needs to look good. It is, after all, a device for the hand. And while it may just be my opinion that the Mighty Mouse is bested by the cheapest Logitech mouse on the market, a whole department of staff, faculty and students agrees with me. Not at all scientific, but that's pretty damning evidence, if you ask me.

Apple is king when it comes to combining function and aesthetics. You see it in the iPod. You see it in their computers. You see it in their software. Their monitors are heaven to look at. Their products usually work the best and look the best, in my experience. But they always seem to blow it when it comes to mice, and unfortunately, the Mighty Mouse is no exception. While Apple made the right move supplying its users with a true three-button mouse solution, I'm afraid they blew it on the implementation. Here's hoping they keep at it, though. I'd love for Apple to produce a mouse I can love.

Networked Home Accounts and The New RAID

We recently installed in our machine room a brand-spankin' new RAID for hosting network home accounts. We bought this RAID as a replacement for our aging, and horrendously unreliable Panasas RAID. The Panasas was a disaster for almost the entire three-year span of its lease. It used a proprietary operating system based on some flavor of *NIX (which I can't recall right at this moment), but that had all sorts of variations from a typical *NIX install that made using it as a home account server far more difficult than it ever should have been. To be fair, it was never really intended for such a use, but was rather created as a file server cluster for Linux workstations that can be easily managed directly from a web browser, as opposed to the command-line. It was really built for speed, not stability, and it was really completely the wrong product for us. (And for the record, I had nothing to do with its purchase, in case you're wondering.)

What the Panasas was, however, was instructive. For three years we lived under the shadow of its constant crashing, the near-weekly tcp dumps and help requests to the company, and angry users fed up with a system that occasionally caused them to lose data, and frequently caused their machines to lock up for the duration of a Panasas reboot, which could be up to twenty minutes. It was not fun, but I learned a lot from it, and it enabled me to make some very serious decisions.

My recent promotion to Senior Systems Administrator came just prior to the end of our Panasas lease term. This put me in the position of both purchasing a new home account server, and of deciding the fate of networked home accounts in the lab.

If I'd learned anything from the experience with the Panasas it was this: A home account server must be, above all else, stable. Every computer that relies on centralized storage for home account serving is completely and utterly dependent on that server. If that server goes down, your lab, in essence, goes down. When this starts happening a lot, people begin to lose faith in a lot of things. First and foremost, they lose faith in the server and stop using it, making your big, expensive network RAID a big, expensive waste of money. Secondly, they lose faith in the system you've set up, which makes sense because it doesn't work reliably, and they stop using it, favoring instead whatever contingency plan you've set up for the times when the server goes down. In our case, we set up a local user account for people to log into when the home account server was down. Things got so bad for a while that people began to log in using this local account more than they would their home accounts, thus negating all our efforts at centralizing home account data storage. Lastly, people begin to lose faith in your abilities as a systems administrator and lab manager. Your reputation suffers, and that makes it harder to get things done — even improvements. So, stability. Centralization of a key resource is risky, in that if that resource fails, everything else fails with it. Stability of crucial, centralized storage was key if any kind of network home account scenario was going to work.

The other thing I began to assess was the whole idea of networked home accounts themselves. I don't know how many labs use networked home accounts. I suspect there are quite a few, but there are also probably a lot of labs that don't. I know I've read about a lot of places that prefer local accounts that are not customized and that revert to some default state at every log in/out. Though I personally really like the convenience of customized network home accounts that follow you from computer to computer throughout a facility, it certainly provides a fair amount of hassle and risk. When it works it's great, but when it doesn't work, it's really bad. So I really began to question the whole idea. Is this something we really needed or wanted to continue to provide?

My ultimate decision was intimately linked to the stability of the home account server. From everything I've seen, networked home accounts can and do work extremely well when the centralized storage on which they reside is stable and reliable. And there is value to this. I talked to people in the lab. By and large, from what I could glean from my very rudimentary and unscientific conversations with users, people really like having network home accounts when they work properly. When given the choice between a generic local account or their personalized network account, even after all the headaches, they still ultimately prefer the networked account. So it behooves us to really try to make it work and work well. And, again, everything I saw told me that what this really required, more than anything else, was a good, solid, robust and reliable home account server.

So, that's what we tried our best to get. The new unit is built and configured by a company called Western Scientific, which was recommended to me by a friend. It's called the Fusion SA. It's a 24-bay storage server running Linux Fedora Core 5. We've populated 16 of the bays with 500GB drives and configured them at RAID level 5, giving us, when all is said and done, about 7TB of networked storage with room to grow in the additional bays should we ever want to do so. The unit also features a Quad-port GigE PCIX card which we can trunc for speedy network access. It's big and it's fast. But what's most important is its stability.

Our new RAID came a little later than we'd hoped, so we weren't able to test it before going live with it. Ideally, we would have gotten the unit mid-summer and tested it in the lab while maintaining our previous system as a fall-back. What happened instead was that we got the unit in about the second week of the semester, and outside circumstances eventually necessitated switching to the new RAID sans testing. It was a little scary. Here we were in the third week of school switching over to a brand new but largely untested home account server. It was at this point in time that I decided, if this thing didn't work — if it wasn't stable and reliable — networked home accounts would become a thing of the past.

So with a little bit of fancy footwork we made the ol' switcheroo, and it went so smoothly our users barely noticed anything had happened. Installing the unit was really a simple matter of getting it in the rack, and then configuring the network settings and the RAID. This was exceptionally quick and easy, thanks in large measure to the fact that Western Scientific configured the OS for us at the factory, and also to the fact that they tested the unit for defects prior to shipping it to us. In fact, our unit was late because they had discovered a flaw in the original unit they had planned to ship. Perfect! If that's the case, I'm glad it was late. This is exactly what we want from a company that provides us with our crucial home account storage. If the server itself was as reliable as the company was diligent, we most like had a winner on our hands. So, how has it been?

It's been several weeks now, and the new home account server has been up, without fail or issue, the entire time. So far our new home account server has been extremely stable (so much so that I almost forget about it, until, of course, I walk past our server room and stop to dreamily look upon its bright blue drive activity lights dutifully flickering away without pause). And if it stays that way, user confidence should return to the lab and to the whole idea of networked home accounts in fairly short order. In fact, it seems like it already has to a great extent. I couldn't be happier. And the users?... Well, they don't even notice the difference. That's the cruel irony of this business: When things break, you never hear the end of it, but when things work properly, you don't hear a peep. You can almost gauge the success or failure of a system by how much you hear about it from users. It's the ultimate in "n o news is good news." The quieter the better.

And 'round these parts of late, it's been pin-drop quiet.

Apple's Response to the iPod Virus was Tacky

Period. And here's why: Anytime someone screws up and even makes the tiniest attempt to try and shift the blame, it's tacky. It's poor sportsmanship. It's poor form. Since everyone is spouting analogies, here's mine: Let's say I throw you a can of Coke. You know, you're thirsty, and I go, "Here's a can of Coke," and I throw it to you. But you're not ready. You're not expecting that can of Coke to be flying across the room at you, and you miss it. You miss the catch, and you get conked on the head by my flying can of Coke. Now, if my response is, "Dude, I'm so sorry I hit you in the head with that can of Coke," that's appropriate. We'll probably remain friends, you and I. But, if I say something like, "Sorry I hit you on the head with that can of Coke, but you really should have caught it," well now, that's just plain old tacky. And you're probably going to remember that, and it will probably fester in your mind, perhaps for some years, until it finally comes out in some fit of rage that ultimately ends our friendship. 'Cause, basically, I'm an asshole for saying that, and I probably said a whole lot more stuff like that, and by now you probably have every reason to hate me. But I digress.

The point in time when you royally screw up — like Apple did by releasing iPods with viruses on them — is not ever a point in time when you want to be pointing out someone else's flaws. I don't know what it is about the social human mind that recoils at such behavior. It just does. And that's why most of us think Apple's response to their screw-up was just plain... Uh... Right, tacky!

Maybe they need to release another press release that says, "We're sorry we screwed up, and we're also sorry we tried to shift the blame." A-la, "I'm sorry I hit you with that Coke, and I'm sorry I tried to blame you for it after." That might help. Might.

Apple, Wonka, Steve and Willy

At this point I'm surprised no one's ever made more of the analogy, but a quick (very quick) Google search reveals few comparisons to Apple and the mythological Chocolate Factory of Willy Wonka fame. And yet, the similarities are striking: a large, secretive, highly prestigious company that produces the best, most innovative products almost as if by magic, and that is heralded by an eccentric but extremely charismatic leader. In fact, substitute computers for candy and you'd be hard pressed to tell the companies apart. You start to wonder if, perhaps, Jobs was, himself, a big fan of the 1971 Mel Stuart masterpiece in his youth.

Today's presentation is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. A big, huge media event, shrouded in mystery and hyped so expertly that candy lovers can barely contain their excitement. What will today's announcements bring? The Apple-faithful crowd around the virtual castle doors for the answer to that question.

The first thing on today's agenda was new iPods. Is there a more candy-like Apple product? I think not. Why, the shuffle was once even compared to a pack of gum, though the new model is now too tiny for such a comparison. And now we have colors — candy colors you might say — for the nano. Again. Whoopee. But I know a lot of people will be thrilled — literally thrilled — about this update.

The iTunes application itself is also apparently getting a facelift, both visually — in the form of multiple views, including a cool-sounding cover art view — and functionally — in the form of synchronization between computers. Can I just say? Finally! This has been the major reason I've never used an iPod. I may just have to start. Video in iTunes is now apparently higher resolution, which would seem to compliment the new iPod's brighter screen. And the "One more thing..."

Which would be, of course, movies. Movies are now available for purchase and download from the iTunes store in the new iTunes 7. Currently, Disney, Pixar, Touchstone and Miramax are the only studios offering movies on the iTunes store, but I'm sure more will follow. The image is purported to be "near-DVD quality" and audio is Dolby Surround Sound. Nice. Movies are priced in the $9.99-$14.99 range, which ain't bad.

Perhaps not as Wonka-esqe as one might have hoped, but still, I'd say these are some pretty exciting and even significant advances for Apple's push in the consumer electronics and entertainment market. It's a gradual push that seems to come incrementally — probably never as fast as anyone would like — but Apple is great at this stuff, and they only seem to be getting better. And today is another baby step in the right direction. I'm still looking forward to things like an Apple-crafted cell phone. Or a media center — which, it now looks like, is in the works for release in the first quarter of 2007, and which would be about half the height of the Mac mini (wow!) and feature "wireless component video" over 802.11, optical audio and HDMI ports, and analog RCA audio ports, and which will work with Mac or PC, according to a very rare sneak peek at today's event. Now that's pretty exciting.

Codename: "iTV": Apple's Sneak Peek at Their Upcoming Media Center Hardware
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So yeah, I'm still looking forward. But if there's anything that Apple makes me do better than any company out there, it's just that: look forward. And that really is half the fun.

Now let's let those Oompa-Loompas get back to work, shall we?

UPDATE:
I just got done watching the stream, and today's event was, really, one of the most impressive presentations from Apple I've seen in a while. Not only were there a plethora of exciting and significant product updates, but we got a rare glimpse into a product that's still under development, and that looks quite ingenious. I wanted to quickly share some additional observations on what I saw in the broadcast, particularly with regards to iTunes 7 and "iTV".

On iTunes 7:
Some quick thoughts on what is probably the most important development in Apple's media — nee music — manager.

• This is a significant overhaul of the iTunes application, but still — in true Apple fashion — appears to leave all the things that make iTunes such a great media player and manager.
• Both album view and cover flow are wonderful implementations of a concept that's been brewing for sometime – the visual searching of media. Such a basic idea, and just the kind of thing that has made Apple synonymous with ease-of-use. And it's beautiful, of course.
• iTunes 7 allows any user with an iTunes account to get free album art, even for albums not purchased via the store. This is great news for folks like me, who tend not to buy via the iTunes store, and it's great for the Apple/iTunes/iPod brand. One more reason to go with Apple products, even if you don't use the store.
• The "Music" has been stripped from the iTunes Music Store. It's now just the iTunes Store. One wonders if they'll somehow figure out a way to get rid of the "Tunes" in iTunes without mangling the brand. Can you say MacBook?
• Video purchased from the iTunes Store is now at a resolution of 640x480, which I realize I mentioned before, but I feel that's quite a significant improvement. And probably necessary to convince folks to fork over $10-15 bucks for movies.
• iPod synchronization and management looks much, much smarter and includes sync-management and software/hardware management. Nice! It's good to see that Apple doesn't let their significant market lead in this area keep them from adding great new management features. As long as they keep up like this, they'll remain on top.
• iPod Auto-Sync also looks immensely cool. I only hope it works for tracks ripped from CD as well as those purchased from the iTunes Store.

On "iTV":
Thoughts on the newest Apple non-computer electronic device. Possibly the most exciting thing since the iPod.

• This looks like another great implementation of a really interesting idea.
• I was surprised that they chose to go with a connector box that ties your computer in to your TV, rather than a separate box, but after the presentation, I really think that's the way to go: integrating existing components, tying it all together. Brilliant!

iTV Concept: This Graphic Says it All
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• It also looks like it should be fairly easy to set up.
• Video trailers are streamed live off the internet, thanks to 802.11 wireless connections on the box. Neat-O!

"iTV" Data Ports
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• And sent to the TV via a variety of video port options.

"iTV" Video Ports
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• It begs the question, though: Is this a cable killer? Or will the reverse happen?
• But for $299, it'll be hard not to get one.

"iTV": A Bargain at $299
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On Steve Jobs:
A couple quick final thoughts on the man himself.

• Mr. Jobs looks healthy again, at least compared to how he looked in the Developer's Keynote. His presentation was as riveting as ever. Nice to see.
• Jobs thanked quite a few people, including his software, hardware and development teams, and, of all things, artists. Also nice to see.
• Jobs, at one point in the presentation used the term "The Sexy." Which was just a little weird to see. For me anyway.

So anyway, some pretty exciting stuff, I must say. One of the best Apple presentations I've seen in a long time. And three (count 'em, three!) "One more things..." Ya gotta love it.

Bugs! Everywhere, Bugs!

Last week I wrote about our purchse of Quad G5 PowerMacs and the theoretical problems with buying Mac Pros for our lab. In that article I wrote:

New Mac hardware tends to have "growing pains" — usually minor, but still sometimes troubling bugs and problems — that I'd just as soon avoid.

Little did I suspect that bugs would also haunt our G5 purchase as well. After unpacking and building our new PowerMacs, we noticed tiny insects crawling around many of the new keyboards. On Thursday, I went to check on the latest Mac we'd built and noticed what appeared to be dirt on the mouse. Upon closer inspection, this "dirt" turned out to be several tiny insects — some very small bugs, and some even smaller "babies" — crawling about the Mighty Mouse. These same bugs could be found swarming all over the Mac's case. Truly disturbing!

I have no idea what sort of bugs these things are, nor from whence they came. Did they come from the manufacturing plant? From the distributer? I couldn't say. But a few hours after discovering the latest batch, they had altogether disappeared. While I wish I'd had a chance to take a picture for reference, I can't say I'm sorry to see them go. Here's hoping they don't reappear in a few months, giant-sized and man-eating.

Just when I thought my job couldn't get any weirder.