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June 30, 2007
An end to my Mac frustrations?
Readers of this blog know that I've had something of a struggle with my last two computers -- a Powerbook and a MacBook Pro. I've found them far more prone to crashes, slowdowns, and erratic behavior than I expected from Apple machines. Several visits to the Apple Store were totally unhelpful -- they either ran the standard diagnostics (which I'd already tried), or gave me advice like not to load new applications.
With a little help (thanks, Liz!) and some trial-and-error, I think I've discovered and resolved the two biggest problems. The first was causing my Internet connection through my cable modem to run with glacial slowness. It turned out to be the Mac client for Mozy, an online backup service that was too slow to be usable in any event. Uninstalling that (which took some doing) returned the network connection to normal speed.
The bigger culprit which was Spotlight, the indexing and search technology built into OSX 10.4. I move my computer every couple days between home office and work office locations. I have external hard drives at both offices, which I use for backup. Whenever I connected my machine, Spotlight was trying to re-index the external hard drives. The fact that they are mirrors of my laptop hard drive probably exacerbated the problem, since Spotlight saw lots of duplicate files. A simple preference change in Spotlight to stop indexing these drives made my machine's performance improve dramatically.
I'll keep my fingers crossed that things continue to work well. It would be nice to have a laptop that I don't have to restart constantly, and curse at frequently. That was, after all, one reason I switched back to the Mac two years ago.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:55 AM | Comments (1)
June 25, 2007
A Note of Note
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my 1994 note (student article) in the Harvard Law Review is among the most widely cited by academics and judges. Professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA Law School, the author of a well-known book on academic legal writing, identified 110 law review citations and ten cases that refer to it, more than any other note he found.
In case you're curious, the article is about how the Supreme Court uses dictionaries in statutory interpretation, and the implications for its jurisprudence. It was great fun to write.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:55 PM | Comments (0)
June 16, 2007
Supernova Blur
My friend Jeff Pulver, one of the tech conference producers I really respect, talks about the "VON blur" he experiences in the days leading up to his VON conference. I have something similar with Supernova -- things start whizzing by, and I don't return to normal perspective until afterwards.
One consequence is that I'm rarely able to blog before and during the conference. Hence, the absence of posts here. But please check out the Supernova Conversation Hub, where you'll find lots of great content related to the conference, from me and others!
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:54 PM | Comments (0)