OSX

March 01, 2006

If Microsoft Sold the iPod...

This parody of what the iPod packaging would look like if Microsoft sold it is simply too good not to share.

Update: The original link apparently isn’t working anymore. Here’s another, but if that doesn’t work for some reason, just go to YouTube and search for ipod repackaging. There’s several copies there.

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February 09, 2006

Mail and Chax

This morning I ran across an iCHat utility called Chax that adds some features to iChat. One I was particularly interested in was auto-accept for chats. I get tired of having to hit “accept” whenever chats come in.

This afternoon Mail started crashing. After opening it up, it would just die after a few seconds. No warning, nothing. A quick look in the console showed that a crash report was being written to ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Mail.crash.log. That showed the following:

Binary Images Description:
    0x1000 -   0x198fff com.apple.mail 2.0.5 (746)  
 /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail
  0x3f9000 -   0x3f9fff com.ksuther.chaxloader ??? (1.3) 
/Users/pjw/Library/InputManagers/Chax/Chax.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Chax      
... 

So, I uninstalled Chax and Mail came up a worked for a while, then crashed again. I’m at a loss now. More later, I’m sure.

Update: So, I used the suitcase nuke option: removed the mail preferences file and rebooted. I set up the accounts again and it found my mail boxes and things seem to be back to normal. I’m crossing my fingers…

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January 17, 2006

Intel iMac vs. G5 iMac Boot Times

You Tube has a short video showing an Intel iMac and a G5 iMac booting while they sit right next to each other. The Intel G5 boots almost twice as fast. I’m anxious to get my hands on a MacBook.

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January 06, 2006

DarwinPorts is Hot

It seems like every semester something happens that causes me to do a systems scramble right before things get going. This year, we decided to move all our Web offerings in the ECLab onto our new XServe over Christmas break. It had to happen sometime and now’s as good a time as any.

One of the things I needed to get on to the XServe (running OS X) was netpbm. I’ve never used DarwinPorts before, but a google of netpbm and OS led me to it. I have to say that it totally rocks. Usually installing netpbm on a new machine is a pain in the neck because of all the dependencies. The DarwinPorts executable just grabbed them all and made them before grabbing and making netpbm. Worked like a charm.

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December 12, 2005

SSH Tricks

Linux Journal has a nice article on Eleven SSH Tricks. These, of course, work on OS X as well. If you’re an OS X user, you may not be all that interested in the first one, X11 forwarding, but skip that one and read the rest.

I’ve used SSH for years for securing remote sessions and copying operations. I’ve never used it for port forwarding, but I may play with that a little. BYU doesn’t offer VPNs for faculty and I’ve never bothered to set one up myself. Port forwarding would take care of some of the little things I worry about when I’m traveling.

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October 24, 2005

A Better Command Line Find

If you’re coming to OS X from UNIX, like me, then you’re probably comfortable with the command line and you probably know your way around the find command. I use it all the time for finding files. Since I upgraded to Tiger, I use Spotlight a lot more, but there are still times when I want to find things on the command line. Apple has thoughtfully provided a Spotlight enabled version of find called mdfind

Using mdfind is easy: just type the command followed by whatever you’d enter in the Spotlight search box. You’ll get back a list of files, just like from find, that can be used with other shell commands. The difference is that if you type mdfind “BYU Purchasing” you’ll not only find files with the string “BYU Purchasing” in the filename, but also inside the file itself.

Another difference is that mdfind searches the entire disk index by default. To limit it to certain directories, you can use the switch -onlyin followed by the directory name. Because mdfind is using the Spotlight index, it’s very fast—much faster than a regular find.

mdfind can search a file’s metadata as well. The tricky part is that you have to know the name of the metadata tags that you’re interested in. The command mdls can be used to list the metadata attributes of a file, once you know the attribute, you can use it to search for files with that same attribute in an expression. For example, the following expression finds all the HTML files in my Documents folder:

mdfind -onlyin ~/Documents "kMDItemKind  == "HTML document"    

The command mdimport -A will show you all the attributes that you can search by and give a short description of each. For example, you can use ‘kMDItemRedEyeOnOff’ to tell you whether ‘red eye’ correction was on or off.

Naturally, mdfind can only find things in the index and Spotlight doesn’t index the entire harddrive or even every file type. If you want to put something in the index that Spotlight doesn’t do normally, you can use the mdimport command to do that. The other command used to control indexing is mdutil which can switch indexing on or off for a volume, erase and rebuild an index, and show the status of indexing.

For some things, I suspect, I still use the comfortable old find command, but as fast as mdfind is, I’ll be turning to it more and more often.

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October 07, 2005

Powerbook Surgery: Upgrading the Hard Drive

It seems like I’m always running out of space on my hard drive. All those digital photos and trips to the iTunes Music store, I guess. At any rate, when I got a new 17 inch Powerbook a few weeks ago, I wanted more than the 100Gb that is offered by Apple. So, I downgraded it to 80Gb to save a little money and ordered a 120Gb drive (5400 RPM, Seagate). When the new PB arrived, I didn’t even turn it on—just cracked the case and put in the new drive. There’s a great site, called PBFixIt that has step-by-step instructions with photos for replacing almost any part on your Powerbook. They also sell parts. Their instructions for replacing the hard drive were excellent.

Once the new hard drive is in, you have to partition and format it. The installation disks that come with the Powerbook have an option, that I’d never noticed before, to do all of that using OS X’s excellent GUI-based DiskUtility. Just boot from the CD and then select DiskUtility from the pulldown menu. In a few minutes, I was installing OS X from the disks and had 55Gb of free space. Now to find something to fill it with…

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August 04, 2005

Building Darwin Projects (OSCON 2005)

Kevin van Vechten’s talk was billed as “Customizing Mac OS X Using Open Source.” Instead it was more about making your software buildable on OS X. That’s OK. One tool he talked about was darwinbuild, a tool for managing software builds on OS X. Typing “darwinbuild” bash, for example, downloads the bash sources from the OpenDarwin Web site and builds it. Darwinbuild grabs just what you need and sets it up for the OS X build you have on your machine—or any release you choose.

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July 14, 2005

Apple 30" Cinema Display Problems

Every once in a while, my Apple 30” Cinema Display freaks out and it takes me an hour or so to fix it. I’ve got it attached to a 15” Powerbook with 128 Mb of VRAM, so the set up is OK, and it mostly works, so there’s nothing structurally wrong as far as I can tell. The problem exhibits itself in one of two ways:

1. The display is only recognized as having a maximum resolution of 1280x800 (see see picture)
2. The display creates two 1280x800 bands top and bottom that are duplicates of each other. (see picture)

Putting the Powerbook to sleep, rebooting, hot plugging and unplugging, shutting down, restarting, and various combinations of these only serve to toggle between these two modes most of the time. Selecting “detect display” from the Monitor preferences pane has no effect at all. If I play around with it enough eventually I can get it to work and then it will work for weeks. This behavior happens on both OS X 10.3 and 10.4. My 23” Cinema Display at home works flawlessly.

I’m convinced that there’s something wrong with either the Powerbook or the display since there’s nothing on Google or Apple’s support forums that I can find on it. If I’m the only one having the problem, then its likely a hardware problem. The trouble is how to diagnose and fix the problem. I’ve not been able to find any consistent way to fix it or any clues that tell me why its happening.

I’ve called Apple support and they want to walk through all kinds of scenarios like “do you have another Powerbook/Display you can try” etc. Without some kind of concrete diagnosis, they’re answer is to take it to an Apple Care center.

I hate the thought of that because (a) I’ve got to lug that huge monitor there and (b) the problem only turns up every once in a while. I’m not sure they’ll be able to diagnose it.

Any ideas anyone?

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June 22, 2005

Printing PDF from the Command Line

I had about 20 PDF files I needed to print out on my Powerbook and I didn’t want to open each file in Preview and then tell each one to print, so I went out looking for ways to print PDF from the command line. I found this handy chapter about Unix-style printing in OS X (from an O’Reilly book) that told me that the lpr command on OS X just knows about PDF. So, in the end it was no more complicated than this:

for f in *.pdf
> do lpr -PCSOffice $f    
> done

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June 09, 2005

Where's My Stuff?

Jon Udell says, referring to OS X’s Spotlight that “desktop search feels like an anachronism in 2005.” I have to disagree—at least a little.

Now, I understand exactly where Jon’s coming from. In San Jose a month ago, we discussed his approach to workstations at some length over dinner one night. Jon’s trying to move to a world where as little of his data as possible lives on specific machine and his tools are platform agnostic. Hence he uses Firefox to access Gmail, del.icio.us, and other network based tools. Jon’s not alone: the next day I was talking to Steve Gillmor and he’s trying to do the same thing.

This is a worthy experiment and one I’ll continue to follow with some interest, but I’ve taken a different path, at least for now. My Powerbook is my only workstation. I take it with me everywhere. I don’t even use a PDA since my laptop is almost always within reach. My development environment is on my laptop as are all of my files, email, etc. Sure, I use things like del.icio.us and other network tools, including my blogging software and my wiki, but I’m not going out of my way to avoid my Powerbook. Right now, I don’t think either of these approaches is wrong—they’re just different. I will concede, however, that Jon and Steve’s approach is more forward looking and indicative of behaviors we’ll all move to in varying degrees over the next few years.

Given my approach, Spotlight has changed the way I use my computer in a more fundamental way than anything I can remember since I first started using X Windows 18 years ago. I simply no longer worry about navigating directories. No matter what I want, I type it into the Spotlight search window and it’s found. Period.

I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I don’t even use folders, but it’s possible. You all know at least one person who still doesn’t understand folders and keeps every document they create on the desktop, right? Spotlight will save them; at least if they use OS X.

Spotlight is more tightly integrated into the OS than something like Google’s desktop search since the OS ensures that every data operation automatically updates the index. To see this in action, type a word into the Spotlight search box and then click on the “Show All” line. With that window open, do some things like saving a new Word file containing the word, sending an email with the word in it, or almost anything else. They’ll immediately show up in the Spotlight window. Delete them and they’re gone from the window just as fast. No need to wait for the next indexing operation.

OS X contains hooks that applications can use to interface with Spotlight and we’ve yet to see what things developers will come up with to make use of its features.

Tiger contains some other new stuff, but I could do without all of it. I can’t imagine, however, going back to a computer without Spotlight. It would feel just like going back to DOS did after my first taste of X Windows on Unix—unbelievable crude.

Now, Spotlight’s not perfect. In fact, Jon hits its biggest limitation smack on the head: it doesn’t know anything about network-based data. Even with my approach to workstations, I still have a lot of data on the net in the form of my blog, Gmail, del.icio.us bookmarks, photos, and so on that I wish Spotlight would show me. I’m not interested in searching my desktop or the net. I want to be able to search my data—wherever it is. We’re not there yet.

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May 27, 2005

Moving to OS X

Winn Schwartau, a columnist for Network World, writes about moving his entire company from Windows to OS X. Why? Security.

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May 04, 2005

Why Doesn't My RSS Feed Show Up in Safari

If you’re using Safari and wondering why the nice blue RSS icon doesn’t show up for your blog, the answer is that you have to add a <link/> tag to your header. This is the same solution as for Firefox. As an aside, I like Safari’s default action upon clicking the icon better than Firefox’s. Firefox subscribes you to its own, pretty cheesy, RSS bookmark folder where as Safari nicely popped the subscription right into NetNewsWire.

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Tiger Update

I upgraded to Tiger yesterday. I knew I was going to be traveling and its always more thrilling to update right before a big trip. I did the smae thing with Panther. Go figure. I used Synchronize Pro to make a bootable copy on my firewire drive (Carbon Copy Cloner would work as well) and then did a straight upgrade. I heard about an alternative after I was done: do a wipe and install and then use the OS X feature that transfers your data and applications from an old machine to get them from the bootable copy. That’s a good alternative if you’re someone who likes to start fresh.

The update went flawless and I haven’t noticed any big show stoppers. As usual a few applications needed updating (like Quicksilver). If you’re having problems, this list of incompatibilities and workarounds might help. Also, you can take some comfort in the knowledge that Apple has said their freezing much of the API aftger Tiger. Until now, every major update changed the API in significant ways and that’s not a recipe for application reliability.

One thing that annoyed me: Tiger came with a trial version of Office 2004 and whenever I opened a Word doc, it used the trial version instead of the copy I own. I blew away the trial version and reassociated the Word documents with the application and now everything is cool.

So far, I’m most excited about Spotlight. I’ve been trying to use it as a replacement for Finder and it does a pretty good job. I also found this article on using smart folders to be helpful as well. Smart folders are enabled by the same index that runs Spotlight.

At this point, Dashboard is largely underwhelming. Maybe I’ll get into it, but its not nearly as useful as, say, Expose has turned out to be.

Some people have complained about the new look for Mail, but I like it. I think its an improvement. I did take the time to customize the buttons. I like the delete and junk buttons to be separate and separated by some space so that I don’t hit the wrong one by accident.

Also, finally, you can swap the control and caps-lock keys without installing some patch that breaks everytime Apple updates the OS. Just go to the keyboard preferences and voila!

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May 02, 2005

The Strange Pleasure of Upgrading Software

Apple’s release of OS 10.4 (aka Tiger) inspired an editorial in the NY Times on the pleasure of upgrading.

Like many Apple computer users, I’m in a pleasant state of expectation. I’ve ordered Apple’s updated operating system, but it hasn’t yet arrived. I have housecleaning to do before I can install it: deleting dead programs in my applications folder, for instance, and backing up my hard drive. Then will come the almost visceral pleasure of installing new software. This is one of the most pleasant tasks I know, vastly easier than straightening up the barn or taking the truck in for service.

Somewhere at home I have the floppy disks of many previous upgrades, including versions of MS-DOS - the first Microsoft operating system - that date from the early 1980’s. They are reminders of how strange the idea of software seemed to me at the time. It did not occur to me then that such strangeness was part of living in a hardware world.

The only way to upgrade the refrigerator or the vacuum cleaner is to buy a new one. I can think of nothing I owned at the time that was capable of taking in new instructions and using them to improve its operation substantially. The only thing that could do so was not a machine at all. It was a human being.

From The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial Observer: The Strange Pleasure of Upgrading Software
Referenced Mon May 02 2005 11:14:12 GMT-0600 (MDT)

The cynic would say that their vacuum cleaner usually worked right when they unpacked it. That isn’t usually the case with software, even software much less complex than an OS. Still, my old 1GHz TiBook got noticeably faster with each new version of OS X. I’m in the process of installing 10.4 on it now. I’ll be surprised if that’s not the case this time as well.

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April 29, 2005

Detailed Review of Tiger

Ars Technica has a detailed review of Tiger available. I haven’t upgraded yet, but I plan to upgrade at least one system over the weekend.

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April 18, 2005

Tiger Rebate

If you order Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger [DVD] from Amazon, you can get a $35 rebate. Not a bad deal. I ordered Panther online and it was shipped to arrive on the date of release, so I got it the first day. Apple’s got a list of 200 new features in Tiger. I heard from Glenn Fleishman today that the Tiger edition of his Take Control of File Sharing ebook is available for pre-order, to ship on April 29th, when Tiger ships.

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April 09, 2005

Chad's Under Attack!

InfoWorld’s Chad Dickerson has the nerve to question the practicality of supporting OS X in a small shop and the Mac faithful took him to task. Give me a break guys! The fact is that getting all the pieces to work together in even a relatively small IT environment can be difficult. Legacy systems, PC-only applications, and even IE-based Web applications all take their toll. There’s only so much money and so many hours in a day.

Making a Mac work in a PC-friendly world is doable, but there are pitfalls all along the way. A small example: just the other day, my research group nearly missed a meeting with our sponsor because they sent out the invitation from Outlook. Yes, iCal can read them, but a glitch, the details of which are unimportant, caused it to hiccup. I think the benefits of having my research group using Macs outweighs the problems, but there are problems and you have to be pretty hearty to make it work.

Attacking Chad as “not pure enough” isn’t going to advance the world of Macs and pointing out to him the obvious solutions that he already knows about won’t help either. What will help? Continue to make the Mac compelling and then adapters will be created for legacy apps, more applications will be built for both platforms and fewer IE-only Web applications will be deployed.

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March 21, 2005

Using Your PowerBook as an Input Device

If you weren’t aware, the new PowerBooks contain motion detectors that are used to shut down the hard drive in the event the machine is suddenly dropped. That’s not particularly innovative, but what is is the fact that there is a user accessible interface to the motion sensor. Amit Singh has released software that allows the computer itself to be used as an input device. Check out the movie should someone using their PowerBook to drive Google Maps.

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April 01, 2004

Sick and Tired of Doing Things the Hard Way

Jeremy Zawodny’s switching.

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