Good Karma Computing

My first job in IT was a crap one, but it paid the bills. Fortunately, the bills were much smaller in those days. It involved setting up and running the equipment in a training centre run by IBM. Later on, the whole thing got "right-sized", then outsourced, and now it no longer exists. Which is almost what happened to IBM itself, now that I think about it.

One thing bugged me then as it bugs me now: the computers were too big and too heavy. Particularly heavy. I had to lug up to 30 IBM PS/2s between classrooms, often on a daily basis. These things were about the size of a suitcase and clad in steel, which certainly helped with their robustness, but not their portability. I hated the damn things.

Let's face it, things aren't much different today. Your PC probably still has a rat's nest of cabling shoved up its arse, and you're probably still using an operating system which is no more reliable, faster or much more useful than the various Windows incarnations installed on the PCs I was lugging around.

You might as well admit it: you've got Bad Karma Computing, where the frustrations threaten to outweigh the gains, and no matter what you achieve, you end up feeling tired and frustrated. Computing hasn't improved much, it's just learned to frustrate you at light-speed.

When I first set eyes on the new range of Apple computers like the Mini and iMac G5, I could hardly believe how compact they are, and I've been determined to get one for over a year now. Unfortunately, the bills have got much bigger recently, so I've had to wait. But my Mac Mini arrived two weeks ago, and I've turfed out my still-suitcase-sized Linux PC and its monstrosity of a CRT screen, and replaced them with a sleek 19" TFT monitor and a computer which is smaller than a small tub of ice cream.

And on the whole, I've not been disappointed. For a start, it's running Unix, which is a real kicker for an old-time perl hacker and Linux admin like me. It has a clean, eye-pleasing GUI which is fairly simple to learn and has clearly been well thought-out. Someone actually took the trouble to design this thing. Same goes for the box too — it's compact, ultra-quiet, easily portable and very stylish. If you get your kicks from PCs which sound like an F16 with the after-burners on, or graphics cards with a petabyte of RAM, this thing's not for you, but if you want Good Karma Computing you'll love it.

Yet I am only human, and so I have complaints. They're nothing major, and I'm learning to adapt to the problems. I can do this with a cheerful smile because the alternative is just too horrible to contemplate. I've set foot in the New World, and the prospect of a three-month trip back to Plymouth Docks makes me feel physically ill. I will adapt.

My first whinge is about the page-control keys. On a PC, you get Pgup, Pgdn, Home and End, which most novices could probably suss out in a few minutes. On a Mac keyboard, you get the cryptic:



which could mean just about anything. The worst of it is, they do mean just about anything, because their meaning changes according to the program you're using. So in the text editor I'm using right now, they do what I expect them to, PC-stylee. But in my web browser, they do The Right Thing when I'm browsing, but something else when I'm viewing the page source. I keep optimistically experimenting with various combinations of Command, Alt, Ctrl and Shift keys combined with the increasingly mysterious page-control keys, but the result is rarely what I'm looking for.

Which leads me neatly onto my next whiny little point: why on earth do you need four (count 'em!) key modifiers, with the bewildering variety of chords that implies? Who decided that "Empty Trash" should be invoked with the memorable combination Shift-Command-Delete? Or that "Hide others" would be most accessible given the combination Alt-Command-H? Or "Logout" is invoked with the almost completely unintuitive Shift-Command-Q? I don't doubt that there's some underlying logic to all this but I'm buggered if I can work out what it is. This sort of thing gives needless complexity a bad name.

And since I've admitted that "I'm buggered" when what I really meant was "I'm hopelessly confused", you've probably worked out I'm in the UK. Which is more than Steve Jobs could do, since he's provided what is blatantly and unashamedly a US-style keyboard. Do you know just how difficult it is to retrain your fingers after 20 years of touch-typing? Every time I need \ I get ` and just when I think I've typed an email address I have to go back and replace the " with an @ sign. Listen Steve, I'm all for of a bit of cultural imperialism every now and then but this is just spiteful.

One final point about the keyboard before I move on: it has a key which is helpfully labelled "help", but only sometimes does it actually provide help when you press it. Full marks to the Firefox developers, who clearly thought to themselves "Hey, when someone presses a key marked 'help', they probably need help, so let's give it to them!" And nul pointes for the Apple developers who allowed their help key to remain stoically mute when invoked from (of all things) the Finder, surely the one application where a novice might be tempted to look for a little guidance?

Oh — the final, final thing about the keyboard (honest). It has a £ key to denote UK currency (occasionally handy) and even the € symbol and a little loopy thing which I'm not sure how to pronounce. But no # key. That's a hash key, which I use far more frequently than those others put together (since # is used quite often in perl, and I do a lot of perl). The fact it's there right in front of you suggests I did eventually find it, and I feel now is the time to divulge the secret: it's Alt-3. But maybe you guessed that already.

You might think that's the end of my rant, but when it comes to irrational, pointless ire I've got staying power, so stay with me here.

Unfortunately, a standard Mac Mini comes with only 256Mb RAM. Now I know old-timers will be muttering that (back in the day) they sent rockets to the moon on 16Kb RAM and still had enough left over for Tower of Hanoi solutions, but nowadays it's not nearly enough. What should be a zippy, responsive machine will often sit for five seconds or more before responding to a menu click or Command-Tab to switch to another application. This just looks bad and gives me cold-sweat flashbacks to the days when I tried to run PageMaker 3 on a 286. I see that Apple has just reduced the cost of a RAM upgrade on purchase but for some of us, it's a bit too late. Two weeks too late, to be precise.

Still with me? Excellent. Well, you know that fancy new Spotlight thing Apple has been touting as a Big Innovation in Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger), the widget that helps you find things? When I sat down at my new Mac, all happy and excited, I simply couldn't find the damn thing. Just how ironic is that? I searched all over the place, even checked the built-in documentation, but nowhere could I find a reference to Spotlight. "Gee," I thought, "What we need here is something to make it easier to find stuff like this. Maybe we could call it ... Spotlight or something ..."

Turns out, I didn't have Tiger installed. It was included on a CD-ROM which I had to run to upgrade. What kind of rubbish is that? I'm sure it's a major advantage that you don't have to spend hours patching Mac OS X to make it secure after you start it up for the first time (as is alleged with a certain other vendor's products) but if I have to spend an hour upgrading the OS from CD, doesn't that amount to almost the same thing? I paid good money for my Mac and naturally, I expected everything to be installed. I felt like I'd just bought a Bentley only to find I had to fit the wheels myself.

Finally, that age-old cry: where the hell are the manuals? All I got was a little leaflet explaining how to switch the Mac on, and how to connect it to my monitor and other trivia like that, but I'm interested in learning to program the thing. I keep finding tantalising references to AppleScript and "Configure folder actions" and "Attach folder actions". Unfortunately, all this goodness remains hidden from me since nowhere did Apple think what they should have thought, that this knowledge is not much help if they don't share it with potential developers. It's quite an oversight.

I've been whining on for many paragraphs (but no-one was forcing you to read it, OK?) and you might now be thinking "Jeez, I'm glad I'm not like that poor loser. I'll stick to my PC. Thanks for the warning." But believe me, it's not like that. People often criticise Apple and its admirers for being something of a cult, and I can see what they mean. But my Mac Mini is a seriously nifty computer, something which does all that I want, running everything from Apache and MySQL to Adobe Creative and NeoOffice. It doesn't do many games, but I've got an XBox and some PCs for that kind of thing. The Mac is also quiet, compact and powerful, with a built-in suite of genuinely useful tools rather than the rag-tag collection of discontinued crap you get with many PC bundles. It's excellent in all but a few minor respects, and I hope to be using my Good Karma Computer for years to come. So just give yourself a break and try it too.