August | 2014 | Lonely Joe Parker

The time has come, my friends. I am upgrading from 10.6.8 (‘Snow Leopard’) to 10.9 (‘Mavericks’) on my venerable and mistreated MacBook Pros (one is 2010 with a SATA drive, the other 2011 with an SSD). Common opinion holds that the 2010 machine might find it a stretch so I’m starting with the 2010/SSD model first. Also, hey, it’s a work machine, so if I truly bork it, Apple Care should (should) cover me…

Availability

At least Apple make the upgrade easy enough to get: for the last year or so, Software Update has been practically begging me to install the App Store. Apple offer OSX 10.9 for free through this platform (yes! FREE!!) so it’s a couple of clicks to download and start the installer…

Preamble

Obviously I’ve backed up everything several times: to Time Machine, on an external HDD; to Dropbox; Drobo; and even the odd USB stick lying around as well as my 2010 MBP and various other machines I have access to. As well as all this, I’ve actually tried to empty the boot disk a bit to make space – unusually RTFM for me – and managed to get the usage down to about 65% available space. I’ve also written down every password and username I have, obviously on bombay mix-flavoured rice-paper so I can eat them after when everything (hopefully) works.

Installation

Click the installer. Agree to a few T&Cs (okay, several, but this is Apple we’re talking about). Hit ‘Restart’. Pray…

Results

… And we’re done! That was surprisingly painless. The whole process took less than two hours on my office connection, from download to first login. There was a momentary heart attack when the first reboot appeared to have failed and I had to nudge it along, but so far (couple of days) everything seems to be running along nicely.

Now, I had worried (not unreasonably, given previous updates) that my computer might slow down massively, or blow up altogether. So far this doesn’t seem to have happened. The biggest downsides are the ones I’d previously read about and unexpected: e.g. PowerPC applications like TreeEdit and Se-Al aren’t supported any more. Apparently the main workaround for this is a 10.6.8 Server install inside Parallels, but I’ll look into this more in a future post when I get a chance.

I was a bit surprised to find that both Homebrew and, even more oddly, my SQL installation needed to be reinstalled, but a host of other binaries didn’t. Presumably there’s a reason for this but I can’t find it. Luckily those two at least install pretty painlessly, but it did make me grateful nothing else broke (yet).

So what are the good sides? The general UI is shiny, not that this matters much in a bioinformatics context, and smart widgets like Notifications are pretty, but to be honest, there aren’t any really compelling reasons to switch. I’ve not used this machine as a laptop much so far, so I can’t comment on the power usage (e.g. stuff like App Nap) yet, although it seems to be improved… a bit.. and I haven’t had time to run any BEAST benchmarks to see how the JVM implementation compares. But there is one massive benefit: this is an OS Apple are still supporting! This matters because stuff like security and firmware updates really do matter, a lot – and release cycles are getting ever shorter, especially as Macs get targeted more. In short: I couldn’t afford to stay behind any longer!

Update [5 Oct 2014]: Given the Shellshock bash exploit affects both 10.6 and 10.9, but Apple aren’t – as yet – releasing a patch for 10.6, while they rushed a 1.0 patch for 10.9 in less than a week, the security aspect of this upgrade is even more clearly important…

Update [23 Oct 2014]: Nope, I won’t be upgrading to Yosemite for a while, either!

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I’ve done a lot of volunteer sail training over the years. This mainly involves taking young people and kids aged about 11-20 out on a boat in the big ocean, chucking weather at them in various guises, and helping them to realise that a) they can do more than they imagine individually, and b) they can do even more than that as a team. It’s loads of fun (have a look at OYT South, an award-winning sail training charity, if you’d like to get involved), but successfully running a watch of challenging young people to efficiently change a sail at 4am in a storm requires some rewiring of your psyche.

Luckily I’ve often found that these experiences come in handy in all kinds of odd situations: turns out looking after a colic-y baby is one of those. So here’s my Brief Guide To Treating Feeding A Baby As If It Were A Sail Change:

Everything takes longer than you think, especially at night and in bad weather (read: fractious infant). A mainsail reef that takes 10 minutes to do in the day and a flat calm can take an hour in a squally night. Equally, if you try and rush a feed our baby definitely picks up on it, and she doesn’t like that at all..
Do it early. If you’re thinking about doing it, it’s probably time to… neither hungry babe nor rising gale give a shit what you were ‘planning’ to do with the next hour, so get on with it while you have some leeway. Rushing if you leave it too late will only result in a balls-up.
Make sure your team are well briefed so everyone can prepare in full. OK, the ‘team’ in question refers to you and the baby, and at least half of that team isn’t going to be very helpful, but it still pays to plan ahead.
Have a routine and stick to it. On the boat we have standard operating procedures for a lot of good reasons, such as ensuring team members can swap in and out without compromising or missing critical safety steps, and ensuring everyone knows their job, even in the middle of a filthy storm when they haven’t slept properly for days. Guess how that helps with newborn care…
Tidy up the work area after you. There’s nothing more annoying than coming on watch, starting a task, and finding all of the ropes in a tangled mess. In an emergency it can even be dangerous, as everyone fumbles for their kit instead of finding it quickly and efficiently. Equally, tidying up my changing area and making sure all our bottle-feeding stuff is clean and ready – and supplies of consumables like cotton wool, formula powder and nappies are adequate – makes life easier for the person doing the next feed. Which might even be me – cheers, myself!
Have a cup of tea when you’re done. Or write a pointless blog post. Point is, take five minutes to relax and have a quick review over how the task went, when you might need to do it next, and finally get out of those soaking oilskins / vomit-sodden boxer shorts you’ve been wearing for the last six hours.