What a long week. I am glad it is over. I feel like I have been sitting at this desk all week.

I decided to unwind tonight by installing Snow Leopard on my laptop. None of the apps I use on my laptop are on the list I found at this forum, so I think I am safe. We will see though. If all goes well, I am going to upgrade the Mini tomorrow.

I am going to hold off on my main Dev machine until more apps get fixed. I use CS4 pretty often and sometimes I fire off Word. I still have Snow Leopard on a partition on that machine so if I need to run it, it is only a reboot away.

I did take one break today and we snapped some pictures to commemorate the day. I'd post them, but I am having problems finding my SD card reader.

Interesting flick if you are not expecting an all out action fest. A lot of the same themes have been seen in other movies about World War II. This one is with a Jewish flavor. Even the director and producer were drawn to the story because they didn't think many Jews fought back as a community during World War II. And here is a story where the actions of one family helps save 1200.

I give it 3 out of 5 stars.

Yay! It took all week but yesterday afternoon (Friday) I got my Snow Leopard bug fixed.

At the first part of the week, I tried to debug the crap out of the library trying to find out why this one line of code was causing me all of this grief. No dice. What ended up helping me fix the problem was a brute force approach. I created a test command-line application. I then threw all of the appropriate calls in the test application a little bit at a time until I got the crash to happen. Tedious, iterative, and time consuming, that's programming sometimes.

After a full week of using Snow Leopard I am on the fence wether to upgrade right at release. I didn't have any problems with any application that I had installed and the performance increase (especially of Xcode) might justify the risk.

Wow! All these years I have heard about this movie from James Cameron and finally the general public gets to see an extended look at it:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/avatar/teaserlarge.html

I have to say up front that it wasn't exactly the movie I envisioned when I first heard about the concept of this movie right after Titanic came out. I guess back then I was thinking it was more of a Tron type of movie.

Way back in the 90s, Cameron said he had to wait for the computer technology to catch up to make this movie and from this little bit he has teased I can only imagine what he has in store, especially in 3D.

I have watched the trailer a few times now and what I love about it is that it really hasn't given much away. I realize teasers aren't supposed to give stuff away, but for a trailer that is over 2 minutes long that's amazing. The less spoilers the better.

I shot myself in the foot today at work.

I was doing a massive rename of one of the components I am working on for work. That meant I not only had to rename things in UIs but I also had to rename a bunch of files and file references in our main development tree.

So I reluctantly fire up svnX and go start doing svn moves. All of a sudden there is a new folder entry in the svnX list called ".". Not thinking, I scratched my head and said "What the heck is that?" and clicked the delete button. About 30 seconds in I realize my mistake. svnX interpreted the item as the current folder and started doing a svn delete at the root of my whole dev tree! I kill the svnX app and then go look at the logs at the damage. The problem is my log scripts are getting errors left and right because my dev tree is in such crappy state.

So I go to the root of the dev tree and try a svn cleanup and svn revert. No dice. svn keeps on complaining about every framework bundle being locked for some reason. After about an hour of dinking at the command line I determine my sandbox is just hosed. The only way I can think to get things back to the way they are is to do a clean checkout. It took 45 minutes to download the dev tree. I run my log scripts and find out the damage isn't as bad as I thought. Luckily I am back to where I started.

I spent a couple hours last night playing with Snow Leopard. I have to say that it really makes it hard to go back to Leopard even after a couple of hours.

Look-wise there still isn't that much different. I bounced around the OS looking for differences and couldn't find too much. Context menus on the dock have a black translucent background. That's pretty nice. The general OS look itself is sharper. I am not sure if it is just a different font that they are using in the Finder, but it really is much more visually appealing than the Leopard Finder.

The one feature I am really starting to like is the new Expose "click-and-hold-on-a-dock-icon" to see all open windows for that application. I know that this is a blatant rip-off of Windows 7, which of course is a rip off of the original Expose, but it is very well executed. I have a tendency to have multiple Xcode windows going and it really makes it a snap to find the correct dev window.

The new QuickTime UI is a little disconcerting at first. It feels almost like a Quick Look window not a real app. I am sure I will get used to it though. Half the time I was just using Quick Look to watch downloaded video snippets anyway.

Speed wise is really where there is no turning back. Most apps just fire off instantly. Startup and Shutdown is jaw-dropping compared to Leopard. When I went back to using Leopard, I got that feeling of slow down. I am not sure if that was just a perception issue or reality.

I read this article in disgust on the front page (above the fold) of yesterday's newspaper.

The two telling quotes:

Ratatouille, WALL-E and Up have all been critically and commercially successful movies. But each is built around unconventional characters — a French rat, a nearly wordless robot and an elderly widower — that don't necessarily lend themselves to rides, shows and souvenirs.

"We definitely have a hit on our hands. But Up is not the kind of movie that's going to generate the kind of multiplatform-franchise success of movies like Cars or Toy Story or other movies that we have in the pipeline, like the princess movies," Disney Co. Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger said during a recent conference call.

Princess movies? All I can say is cookie cutter crap. Where is the diversity in characters? Oscar the grouch lives in a frickin' garbage can. Sponge Bob is a SPONGE for chrissakes. In the Czech Republic, the equivalent of Mickey Mouse is a mole called Krtek. I am guessing the Marketing folks at Disney are just lazy and want the product to sell themselves.

I know I am not the demographic they seek, but the first Blu-Ray disc I bought was Ratatouille. The question I ask is which movie is going to have staying power over 10-20 years? A Pixar flick... or the last franchise-able turd of a Disney movie that come out, G-Force.

It is this exact corporate thinking that shows the Hollywood is not just dead, it is becoming a fossil. The suits think that it is better to come out with a movie like Transformers or GI Joe, because if at least the movie sucks they can still sell toys to the kiddies. Where is the creative soul in that?

The second time was the charm. The install made it all the way through. It took about 45 minutes in total.

Installing it onto a 40 GB partition, I was left with over 32 GB. That really isn't representative of the OS size because I had the installer migrate over stuff from my Leopard partition automatically. It was really cool. I had my user accounts, preferences, and even applications migrated over. It was really neat. I have never seen a Windows box do that for a side-by-side install. Apple really makes things easy.

I have to admit when Snow Leopard finally started I knew that the OS was different, but it really felt comfortably the same. My Dock was migrated over as well so that looked like exactly the same. Stacks looked different at first when it was loading my stack info into the cache. At first glance the completely re-written Finder didn't look different at all.

Apps fired lightening fast. For almost all I tried it was click-boom. Obviously part of that is a virgin OS, but still it was pretty neat. The big clunker was MS Word. It took 15 seconds or so to start to a blank page.

I duplicated my crashing bug pretty quickly. The slightly redesigned crash reporter already gave me a big pointer. The app is crashing in a dealloc call in the open source networking library I am using. Hopefully it should be an easy fix.

I am going to spend more time tomorrow going through the OS. I looking forward to digging deeper.

I changed my mind about the USB key to do the Snow Leopard install. I got to Best Buy and they seemed to do the 'ole bait and switch. The advertised price for the USB Key I wanted was $20 more. I ended up getting DVD R+ DL discs to do the install. It really makes me question whether the store should have a question mark after it in the marquee. That would be a great Fight Club homework assignment. :)

So far I am not too impressed with Dual Layer DVDs. This was my first attempt to burn a DVD using them and I already made a coaster. $1.50 down the drain.

The second attempt seems to be going a little better. The install starts off with a progress bar which starts at 30 minutes remaining. However, I seem to be stuck at 29 minutes for the last 5 minutes yet the progress bar is moving.

I am in the process of downloading what is rumored to be the last seed of Snow Leopard (10a432) -- aka the GM build. The download is 6.13 GB.

I have to fix a Snow Leopard-only bug for our software and it will be the first time I have setup a single system with two Mac OSs. On my Mac Pro, I have a Boot Camp partition setup alongside my Leopard install, but to me that doesn't really count. Apple took all of the complexity out of the Mac/Windows dual boot equation by making the Boot Camp Assistant. I am curious to see how a side-by-side installation will go.

I've already done the research on the best way to do it. Even though I have a dual layer DVD burner, I think I am going with the USB key install that I found on this blog. DL DVD media is just way too expensive. I could spend the exact same money and go get a 8 Gb USB drive for the amazing low price of $29.99.

I've already created a 40 GB partition on my main drive for the new OS. I want to keep it lean and mean since I don't plan on doing much except fixing this bug and maybe play with the performance. I am hoping to be wowed. I played with Snow Leopard at WWDC, but seeing it run on my year old hardware will make it a reality that the OS is coming soon.