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I booted into OS X 10.2.1 last Wednesday afternoon, and finished out the week in it, with the Thursday Thanksgiving Day break taking some of the production pressure off. Everything went smoothly, albeit at a more leisurely pace than in OS 9, until Saturday afternoon, when I began to notice that things were becoming VERY leisurely. By early evening, all functions has slowed to a snail's pace -- I mean like a lot slower than a Mac Plus running System 7.1. I started up the Process Viewer, which took two or three minutes to display anything in its window. There didn't appear to be anything unusual going on, and no clue as to what was making everything happen in slow motion. I hadn't done anything unusual other than to install a little freeware Finder utility called Desktop Rehab. However, quitting that didn't help. OS X had become literally unusable, so I shut down (which took forever) and rebooted into OS 9.2.2. On Sunday, I booted back into OS X, and performance seemed to be back to normal. However, I decided that some maintenance might be in order, so I ran the "Repair Permissions" function in the Disk Utility, which can be done on the disk you're booted from. 
The Verify and Repair Disk Permissions buttons are a new feature in OS X 10.2. I'm only vaguely cognizant of the principles and issues involved here, and I really have no idea whether permissions problems had anything to do with the mysterious slowdown, but Disk Utility certainly did find a lot of stuff to fix. The repair readout dialog ran 54 lines and 384 words. Apparently, sloppily written software installers are the culprit. Whatever, it's probably a worthwhile to do this once in a while. I didn't bother with running the Verify function. It runs slowly, and the Repair run took about five minutes to complete. 
While I'm at it, one of the things I find frustrating in OS X compared with OS 9 is the equivocal response to clicks and cursor placement, etc. In the Classic OS you get a very positive and reliable response to mouse clicking. Not so in OS X in my experience, which I can only describe as ragged in this regard. Since I'm using the same computer and input devices with both systems, this has to be an OS X issue. I mentioned "misfires" in toggling TypeIt4Me macros with keystrokes last week -- something that only happens in the OS X version. However, it is a general problem. OS X needs some attention to input device support.
Captain FTP not FreeFrom Ira Lansing Captain FTP not Free Unless I am misreading their site, beginning with version 2.0, Captain FTP is no longer free for private or educational use. There is a $15 dollar upgrade path (versus the normal $25) for users of version 1.4. I guess with 50,000 downloads for free, a fee was too tempting. It is still a great FTP client, though. --Ira Lansing
Hi Ira;
You're right. Version 1.4 (which should be very adequate for casual FTP chores) is still freeware, but version 2.0 must be paid for. I have corrected the article.
Charles Re: Scientific graphic calculator From Victor Bloomfield Charles: Your items in OS X Odyssey 212 about calculators, especially Jonathan Tyzack's problems with the Jaguar Calculator while working on his thesis, prompt me to tell your readers about MathPad, developed by Mark Widholm at the U of New Hampshire. It's available in versions for OS X and OS 9, is rock-solid, can do simple calculations and rather elaborate programming, has excellent 2-d and 3-d graphics well-conceived for scientific users, good on-line documentation, a wide variety of special functions, handles arrays and matrices, etc., etc. It's easy to learn. And it's freeware! I've used it for a number of years, and have been consistently satisfied and grateful to Mr. Widholm for making it available to the Macintosh community. http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwidholm/MathPad/
Regards,
Hi Victor;
Thanks for the tip. Check out Shareware Beat today.
Charles
The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here: Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context. Opinions expressed in postings to Moore's MailBag are those of the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or Applelinks management. If you would prefer that your message not appear in Moore's Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published. CM
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