Today, I confess: I am a Mac user.

These days, it seems that the pendulum of Apple product and service love is swinging slightly more towards the negative side, at least in the community I work in. Partly, this has to do with the never-ending discussion on freedom and beer, which seems to be affecting mainly scientists for some nebulous reason—but I digress. Since yesterday, I have to admit they might have a point.

I wouldn’t consider myself being an Apple Fanboi, but have to admit that, over time, I locked myself into the Jobs prison, and so far, it was a pretty productive experience: The long and arcane enchantments for *NIX that I once had to commit to long-term memory in order to do things that, from today’s perspective, were not all that impressive, slowly dim away, and in the closed, non-free (neither as in freedom nor as in beer) universe I live in since 2005, things tend to just work. Of course, each paradise shows cracks if you poke things long enough, and it turns out that my rite of passage realising this for the fruity universe was installing Windows.

Normally, the process of doing this is rather simple. Mac OS X provides a tool, called Boot Camp, which takes your Windows installation media, and more or less without any user interaction, repartitions the disk and prepares everything for rebooting into the well known Windows setup process.

Now I own a very nice MacBook Air (late 2010 model), which I use as my main computer. The CPU is fast enough for whatever I do (for everything else, I have a bigger machine), it has a very decent SSD, and–most importantly–lacks an optical drive. And here is where my Boot Camp began.

For some reason that’s better left to imagination, Boot Camp requires to insert a DVD into your computer to be able to run the installation. Technically, there is absolutely no reason for this: Windows provides tools for installing from USB flash drives, the Mac uses EFI for ages to manage its boot process, and booting from USB is working perfectly well in this setting. Or I thought so.

It turns out that it is impossible to convince my computer of doing an USB installation of Windows 7. Although I didn’t try, I am pretty sure that Vista, XP, and 2000 fail accordingly. A search on the net yields several tutorials how to do this by using additional software (namely, the very decent open source EFI implementation called ”rEFIt”), but none worked for me. I fiddled around a while, looking at the EFI specs, had some interesting discussions with my Mac in what is usually known as single user boot (yes, that’s possible), and eventually gave up.

The canonical solution to the problem, though, is rather simple: a call to Apple support enlightened me in that I should buy a highly overpriced MacBook Air SuperDrive, which I finally did. And trust me: the pain from the stab your computer scientist/engineer ego gets eventually fades away, just like the invocation semantics for awk and `sed did.