How to manage office space for growth

Office Space Calculations - Joel on Software

A handy guide for anyone considering a startup.

Vista is slow. How to make it tolerable, the perfomance penalty of antivirals, and OS X rules

Coding Horror is a Windows guy. So when he says that the default configuration of Vista is substantially slower than XP, you know there's a problem. It turns out, however, that you can configure Vista to behave a bit like OS X, in which case it's about as fast as XP. Until you add anti-viral software, then it's slow again.

I particularly appreciated the comments on antiviral software. I'm surprised this doesn't get more attention, any serious geek has loathed the performance drag and bugginess of antiviral software ever since it came out. I had to retire my mother's Win 98 box, for example, not because it was too slow to run Firefox, but because it was too slow to run Norton Antivirus. One of the reasons OS X is faster and more stable than XP is because you can use it quite safely without antiviral software. Here's more from CH (emphases and annotations mine):

Coding Horror: Choosing Anti-Anti-Virus Software

... For best performance, the first thing I do on any new Vista install is this:

1. Turn off Windows Defender
2. Turn off Windows Firewall
3. Disable System Protection
4. Disable UAC

I've had friends remark how "slow" Vista feels compared to XP, but when I ask them whether they've disabled Defender or UAC, the answer is typically no. Of course your system is going to be slower with all these added security checks. Security is expensive, and there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. [jf: I'd say OS X is still a free lunch. For now.]

You might argue that three out of these four security features wouldn't even be necessary in the first place if Windows had originally followed the well-worn UNIX convention of separating standard users from privileged administrators. [jf: I'm amazed that some people run OS X as an admin. There's no reason I can think of to do that. It's just dumb.]...

... If you're really serious about security, then create a new user account with non-Administrator privileges, and log in as that user. This isn't the default behavior in Vista, sadly. Post install, you get an Administrator-But-Not-Really-Just-Kidding account which triggers UAC on any action that requires administrator privileges.

...Vista is probably the first Microsoft operating system ever where you can actually work effectively as a standard, non-privileged user. As a standard user, you get all the benefits of UAC, Defender, and System Protection.. without all the performance drain. [jf: This is how OS X works, except escalation to admin privileges is available when needed at the cost of entering a username and password. It's no bother, I rarely switch to my admin account.]

... Speaking of retrograde, band-aid, destroy all my computer's performance security, the one security feature Vista doesn't bundle is anti-virus software. And nothing cripples your PC's performance quite like anti-virus software. This isn't terribly surprising if you consider what anti-virus software has to do: examine every single byte of data that passes through your computer for evidence of malicious activity. But who needs theory when we have Oli at The PC Spy. Oli conducted a remarkably thorough investigation of the real world performance impact of security software on the PC. The results are truly eye-opening:

Percent slower: Boot CPU Disk

Norton Internet Security 2006 46% 20% 2369%
McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8 7% 20% 2246%
Norton Internet Security 2007 45% 8% 1515%
Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006 2% 0% 1288%
ZoneAlarm ISS 16% 0% 992%
Norton Antivirus 2002 11% 8% 658%
Windows Live OneCare 11% 8% 512%
Webroot Spy Sweeper 6% 8% 369%
Nod32 v2.5 7% 8% 177%
avast! 4.7 Home 4% 8% 115%
Windows Defender 5% 8% 54% [jf: Microsoft's product. I bought this on the theory Microsoft would be most likely to limit performance hits]
Panda Antivirus 2007 20% 4% 15%
AVG 7.1 Free 15% 0% 19%

The worst offenders are the anti-virus suites with real-time protection. According to these results, the latest Norton Internet Security degrades boot time by nearly 50 percent. And no, that isn't a typo in the disk column. It also makes all disk access sixteen times slower! Even the better performers in this table would have a profoundly negative impact on your PC's performance. Windows Defender, for example, "only" makes hard drive access 54 percent slower...

...I've never run any anti-virus software. And Mac or Linux (aka UNIX) users almost never run anti-virus software, either. ..

I don't agree with removing antiviral software from an XP box, though I do disable antiviral realtime software when I need to do major database work. Sooner or later some goof-up happens, and before you know it the machine is a spambot. I do think that Windows 95 or 98 users might be able nowadays to go without, a lot of viruses won't run on such old machines and OSs.

I may end up switching my Parallels Win2K VM to Vista Lite if I can get a cheap license, so it's nice to have this recipe at hand.

StuffIt Expander: A parasitic spawn and hideous evil

My new MacAlly keyboard came with stuffit compressed drivers. I almost returned it. StuffIt, once a respectable product, became a scourge under new ownership. It's buggy, adds no value to native solutions, can break the native OS X zip archive, and the distribution process requires one to sign up for spam.

I kept the keyboard, because it's about 10 times better than the egregious junk Apple ships, but I did pass on my concerns to MacAlly. Alas, they didn't seem to get the problem.

All of which is to say I found this blast from an ex-"Apple Genius" very validating:

ungenius - Third Party Apps

... I have some special words about StuffIt Expander, though. StuffIt Expander is a scourge upon our industry and should be viciously and stubbornly squashed, mashed, neglected, and uninstalled from all encountered computers at every opportunity. With the prevalence and openness of ZIP, up to and including its status as the default archiver for OS X, and The Unarchiver there is absolutely no reason to inflict this hideous evil upon another soul. Expurgate it from your repertoire and don't hesitate to call upon the services of a licensed exorcist if necessary.

If you ever see .SIT on a file you download, send the vendor this link or a link to the Apple Genius site. If you can suggest better links please add them in the comments below. We need to get vendors like MacAlly to see the light.

Google maps and traffic: includes MSP

I was playing with Google maps on my phone the other day, and I was surprised to see it included traffic flow data for the twin cities metro region. I just checked, and now it appears on the standard google map for the twin cities as well.

Official Google Blog: Stuck in traffic?:

.... I'm happy to tell you about a new feature on Google Maps that can help. For more than 30 major U.S. cities, you can now see up-to-date traffic conditions to help you plan your schedule and route. If you're in San Francisco, New York , Chicago, Dallas, or any of the other cities we now include, just click on the traffic button to show current traffic speeds directly on the map. If your route shows red, you're looking at a stop-and-go commute; yellow, you could be a little late for dinner; green, you've got smooth sailing....

The Google integration is very nice, but I'm most impressed with how it works on my phone. The MN DOT provides a similar service with integrated webcam views.

MacBook: won't startup unless plugged in

My MacBook sounds rather grimly like all of these. I wonder about those MagSafe adapters ...

Here's how it went:

1. Went to use it and it was shutdown! Surprise.
2. Pressed power, it started to boot, I heard the optical disk spin up, then nothing. This is the same behavior one sees when a battery is completely depleted -- the Mac starts on its internal battery, recognizes there's insufficient power to continue, and shuts itself down.
3. Attached adapter, glowed green, booted.

I went through a few of these cycles. Sometimes it would start unplugged if I pushed the power button a few times, sometimes on one push, but, after much back and forth, nothing would start it if unplugged. No response at all. At that point I'd drained the machine's internal battery.

Along the way I reset the PRAM and PMU to no avail and uninstalled Parallels RC 3.

Tonight I mirror the drive and tomorrow it goes to the Apple Store. I'll try leaving the battery out overnight for the heck of it. I assume it's a hardware issue. I certainly don't need this, but then, who does?

Update: Now the apple menu battery icon has a black X through it, and the drop down reads "No batteries available". The 'about this mac' profile showed "no battery".

Sounds like this is a common MacBook battery flaw. Sometimes it's a defective battery, sometimes a defective motherboard. I hope it's the battery of course, but when I push the battery charge button all five indicators light up.

Update 2/27/07: I work about five minutes from an Apple Store, so replacing the battery only took a few minutes. That did the trick. So what happened? Well, the battery might have simply been defective, but I wonder if there's not more to it. These LiOn batteries have internal computers and embedded operating systems that work to keep them on the right side of spontaneous combustion. Maybe that monitoring system detected some 'out of spec' behavior and shut down the battery -- for good. In other words, the noble battery terminated itself to save the mother ship. Mechanical apoptosis, in other words.

Or maybe it just blew a fuse.

Update 4/22/07: Rumor has it there's an association between battery death and running Parallels. Perhaps coincidence, but worth watching.

kw: apple, macbook, battery, adapter, adaptor, power, startup, start-up, bootup, boot-up

Building a PC: a recent quick review

I have built my last few PCs, and I've been happy with how it worked. I may never build another though; all but one of the household machines are Macs now. Still, it's good to get a quick summary of the current state of the art. I'm surprised to learn that the 10K rpm Raptor boot drive made such a big difference, but I'll buy it. For what I do the onboard video, however, is not really an issue. It would be different if PCs, for example, made use of the video card for RAW image rendering (maybe under Vista?).

PS. I like Coding Horror, but he really doesn't know much about OS X or Macs. Contrary to his recurrent postings, for an expert user OS X is a much better computing experience than XP. I think it's a better experience for the novice user too, but both OS X and Vista are lousy options for novices. For the novice OS X wins primarily because of Apple's hardware and the absence of the antiviral software hassle, not because it's enormously better than XP. No comments on Vista, I've not used it.

Update 7/24/07: CH has a cumulative summary and a set of suggested configurations.

A technical guide on designing a privacy friendly web application

footle: Protecting Your Users’ Data with a Privacy Wall