This post could also be titled Long respected newspaper’s good intention’s run amuck. The Washington Post’s past sunday issue, 2006.10.22 (same articles also found on their website), published five articles on the iPod and/or the overall state of the digital music business. Good timing and a dose of awareness from the Post as the iPod’s birthday was that following monday, 2006.10.23.

Two of their respected Tech columnists handled the meaty bits relevant to the coming occasion. Those two pieces by Rob Pegoraro and Mike Musgrove were much more of an insight into the current state of the iPod and greater music market while the remaining three articles dealt with, “Let’s take three average sort of people and let them regale us with their very personal experiences of this iPod phenomenon”. Unfortunately, those latter insights, while making what could (and should) have been compelling points, were undone by false assertions and assumptions.

A bit of shameless self promotion, but I thought I would take this small blog post to link to my tuesday article published by Low End Mac (LEM) dealing with the subject at hand. I will admit to taking liberty with American English spelling and grammar rules, paper bag breathing induced ranting, riding the high horse, and overall making much ado about nothing. Really, who goes to mainstream news publications to get their hardcore tech news.

There are many more issues with which to be indignant about when it comes to our mainstream print media’s coverage. Sure, there are some very good tech columnist, but the articles I reference were from a writer who is usually on the Telecom beat and two guest correspondents. Please note, I wrote the LEM article late sunday/early monday morning (it was not posted until tuesday because I don’t usually do monday content) and I had one too many home made chocolate chip cookies. I think I can speak for all of us when I say “WOO BOY!”, after partaking in one too many freshly baked circular goodies. Then again, it is the internet and I think I am about par for this binary course.

The linked piece on LEM is longish when compared to an average “blog” entry. Not Ars Technica indepth and overflowing with many savory details long, but a little bit of a read compared to an average blog post. I’m just warning people on short lunch/smoking/bathroom/my damn kids are hellish minions and I just want a few minutes to clear my mind breaks.

I don’t want to rehash my same points again, but I will add some more tidbits not in the Low End Mac thesis. MacUser’s Dan Moren beat me to the punch with a sunday and follow up monday posting on this issue. Particularly interesting was Dan Moren’s uncovering of Neal Mueller’s maybe not so objective viewpoint. Apparently, Mr Mueller’s mountain climbing efforts are in some way sponsored by Creative, the very same music company who’s music player he lavishly praises while (hyperbole warning) eviscerating the iPod’s very state of existence. The erudite and silver-tongued, err(?), dexterous fingered (that just sounds dirty) John Gruber also weighs in on the whole escapade.

Enjoy the links. Especially the one to Low End Mac (Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. You know what I’m saying, you know what I’m saying).

A SIMPLE DISCUSSION, A PURCHASE MADE
In a recent thread on the AppleSwitcher forum, I made a query into the nature of SATA cables and PATA to SATA converters. I processed an order to MonoPrice.com for two SATA data cables, two SATA power cables and an IDE ATA-133 to SATA bridge. I placed the order on a thursday and the cheapest shipping netted me a reasonable four business day turnaround the following tuesday.

I stuck the OWC SATA card, 320 GB SATA Seagate, and 30 GB Maxtor into an old Power Mac 7600. I like this old Mac for a number of reasons, but the desktop design was the most advantageous for my current needs as it allows me to either stack a monitor or other external drives on top. Not to mention, I don’t have to leave the house and dig through the many towers I have in storage 1500 miles always from my current abode.

I installed the drives as follows:
320 GB drive connected to one of the OWC SATA card’s ports and mounted in the upper 3.5″ drive bay. The 30 GB drive, partitioned into two partitions, one 24.70 GB OS 9 volume, and one 3.91 GB volume with a Panther install DVD imaged to it went into the lower drive bay. The SATA PCI card is identified to the system as the SCSI bus 2.

If that description does not read clearly enough, I will now present a visual clarification:

SATA’s MALEFICENT DESIGN ON MY SANITY
First peccadillo of my setup, because the SATA port on the PATA to SATA bridge is vertically aligned, it lines up perfectly with a wall of the 7600’s upper chassis. I tried switching the upper SATA drive into the lower bay and placing the PATA converted Maxtor into the upper bay. Wall was still in the way, but I could sort of route the cables because of the easier access. Unfortunately, the converter towers a few millimeters too high for me to replace the outer shell cover.

Some techno style computer Twister ensued and I ended up with a decently working arrangement. Pulling the floppy drive from the upper right slot and installing the Maxtor drive in its place allowed me to slide in the now sled-less (hence, shorter) hard drive into a smooth, yet reasonably stabilized slot. Because the cover has a protruding fitted border stabbing inward from the flip side of the front case, where it would fit snugly back onto the floppy drive, I had to remove the foldable kickstand on the hinged upper chassis and slide the Maxtor back a bit.

Silly beans and gummi gnomes! This installation was certainly proving more involving than I would have initially believed. Cool relief washed over me from the realization that I must have completed the most arduous leg of the installation. O’ how quickly this sweet mirage vanished after the searing realities of hacking on cobbled together ten year old computers rose with sweltering harshness again. Unfortunately, Apple’s Drive Setup application in Mac OS 8.6-9.1 did not recognize the new Seagate 320 GB drive. It literally lists the darn thing as unrecognized. I figured OS X may be able to better deal with such a large capacity, modern drive, after all when the Power Mac 7600 originally shipped we were lucky to have a drive even 2 GB in storage capacity.

Booting into the Panther DVD image on the 30 GB Maxtor’s second partition did not yield anything resembling success. The computer rebooted, scanned the busses for awhile, and then booted back into the Mac OS 9 partition.

No problem, I disconnected the CD drive, I needed that extra power connector in order to install my old test OS 10.3.9 SCSI drive (the 7600 only has 3 power cables and two drives bays, sort of three if you perform the floppy drive surgery I described in the preceding paragraph). After powering up the 7600, I was overjoyed to see that Mac OS 9.1 recognized both the two Maxtor partitions and the new OS 10.3.9 volume. I selected the new SCSI drive in XPostFacto and rebooted.

Mac OS X loaded normally, but when I look for mounted drives neither drive connected to the SATA card appeared. Not in the Finder, not in the System Profiler, and not in the brief digging I did with the Terminal. The only recognized drive was the SCSI 10.3.9 drive on bus 0, ID 2, which contained the single 10.3.9 volume. I rebooted a couple times and I never did figure out how to make the drives appear while booted into Mac OS 10.3.9. Not a total waste of time as it made me realize that the failure to boot into my Panther disk image on the Maxtor drive was a probable relation to this same SATA PCI card quirkiness.

I tried booting into various Mac OS 9 system utility CDs and install disks with the 320 GB Seagate SATA drive as the only hard drive connected. The Power Mac 7600 would boot fine, but the Seagate SATA drive would not mount and neither could Drive Setup, TechTool, or Norton Utilities make heads or tails of the what this alien technology was supposed to do. Here’s a hint my software compadres, store my files. So please format the darn thing! Again, the only message to me was that the Seagate SATA drive was unrecognized. I tried playing technological Twister again: swapping ports on the SATA card, SATA cables, and everything else my spinning brain told me to do. In hindsight, the only hardware configuration I didn’t do was remove the jumper on the Seagate, which is in place to limit transfer to the 1.5 Gbit/second speeds understood by older controllers. My SATA card and cables are not rated for SATA II speeds so I left the jumper on. Maybe I should tried removing the jumper? If anyone else has experience with these things, please let me know either in the comments or the original forum thread.

A WORKING COMPROMISE, BUT STILL NO FIX
I don’t think the Seagate drive is DOA, but maybe its new fangled perpendicular technology could be to blame. Perhaps I need better cables? The OWC SATA card is labeled as compatible with Mac OS 8.6 or later (and Windows if you sway that way, hey I rhymed). I don’t think the card is incompatible with my system, but maybe something in newer SATA drives places different demands on the operating system or hardware. After all, the OWC SATA card works well enough with my old PATA Maxtor bridged to the SATA channel and that setup seems more complicated than a straight SATA drive to SATA PCI card connection. I’m thinking the drive is either bad, less likely, or not compatible with the OWC SATA card, more likely. Again, suggestions on possible solutions are most welcome either in the blog comments or in the original forum thread. Registration is needed to leave comments or participate in the forum and I believe separate logins are required to both (sorry).

For the time being, I’ll have to make do with my 30 GB PATA drive and 2 GB SCSI drive. Sigh.

Parallels Desktop for Mac is the bee’s knees. I can switch from Mac OS to Windows XP in one second flat when I want to check a page in Internet Explorer 6. I can also develop .NET applications with Visual Studio, which is the origin of a bit of income this month.

All on one machine. Bliss.

It’s a not-insignificant $80 — or currently $71.99 at Amazon — but that’s not a bad deal to get rid of an ugly, inefficient, bulky PC under your desk.

See my Parallels Desktop for Mac review for more.

Has it really been FIVE years since Jobs released the iPod?! Was it 4 years and 10 months ago that I used one for a whole hour, marveling at the 5 GB capacity, the sheer smallness of the iPod itself, the ease of navigation through my buddy’s collection of 120 albums worth of music?

I remember thinking can the interface to something like this really be this simple? This is great. (Has anyone really read an iPod user manual?)

That hour blew my mind. (The price would have blown my paycheck though, so I didn’t own one until the third generation came around.)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod on Oct. 23, 2001, saying “With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.”

Has any CEO ever been more right than that? I’m an admitted fan of Jobs, but even Apple haters have to admit Jobs and Apple hit the bullseye with the iPod.

Almost everybody I know has an iPod now, or two, and the sales of the iPod — responsible for much of the beleaguered Apple’s incredible comeback — is now driving sales of the product line that predated it by almost twenty years, the Apple Macintosh.

Here’s to five more years, and ten after that.

Discuss the Apple iPod’s fifth birthday.

Because you read every AppleSwitcher blog, you already know what I like about my new MacBook. How about the bad stuff?

• Going from keyboard to the trackpad means the cursor is hidden, and it takes a little bit of trackpad input to get it back.*
• Photoshop is kinda slow because it’s not a Universal Binary. I know, this is Adobe’s problem, and it will be fixed sometime in the next quarter or two.
• It gets hot. When the cores are pegged for more than 10 seconds, you’ll get some heat. Surfing and email won’t peg them.
• 2 GB ram limit. With Aperture 1.5 and Photoshop open, you need every electron of that 2 GB ram maximum. I know this is a built-in limitation to bump people up to the pro machines, and when I say 2 isn’t enough, I’m asking for something Apple will never give me. I know all this. Still, I’m sayin’ it.

Other than that it’s a great machine. Battery life, screen, keyboard… all good.

* It’s just an instant of unresponsiveness, but it bugs. Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Trackpad -> unchecking Ignore accidental trackpad input seems to have fixed this, but now my input suffers from accidental trackpad input :-). It’s a better trade for me; I just have to watch that my thumbs don’t brush the trackpad while I’m typing. I think the cause of all this is the MacBooks’s extra-wide trackpad, a shape that mimics the screen’s aspect ratio.