MidKnight Gallery

I’ll be up front here.

Spaces is a feature I rarely use. One reason is that I’ve got some excellent programs for web development like Coda that keep me from having to keep five windows in five different applications open all the time. Secondly, when I park my laptop at my desk for serious coding, etc, I always hook up a second monitor, giving me a lot more real estate for keeping windows open to monitor progress, etc. without having to shuffle and find them. I also learned to get by without it before they made a couple large improvements to it.Â

That said, it definitely has it’s uses. To get the most out of it though, you need to be able to categorize or organize your computer usage in some meaningful way. If you can’t break up your usage into two or three different areas, it may end up being more trouble than it’s worth.

So here goes….

To get to Spaces, you can open up the System Preferences application which is in the dock by default, and select “Expose and Spaces,” then click on the “Spaces” tab if needed to hilight it. If you removed it from the dock, you can also get to it from the Apple menu in the upper left corner of your menu bar. Lastly, if you have already enabled spaces and checked the “Show Spaces in menu bar” option, you’ll get something similar to this:

The first option you see is to enable spaces. Check this. I also recommend you check the “Show Spaces” checkbox as well.Â

The black area underneath the checkboxes is where you set how many “spaces” are available. There always has to be at least one row and one column, and you cannot have partial rows and columns.Â

Underneath that is where you set application assignments. This is where “how do I want to organize my programs” becomes vitally important. Here is where you select which programs open in which space, for when it matters. For any program you add here, you have two choices: Either define which (one) space that program will exist in, or if it will exist in all of the spaces.

If you assign a program to exist in space 1 for example, then switching to that program, especially opening up a new window in it, will shift you over to the space that program is assigned to. If you assign it to all spaces, then the program follows you. Set Safari to be in all spaces, and switch to space 2. The existing Safari window will follow you to space 2.Â

The one major piece of inflexibility here is that it only allows you to be all or nothing. Either a program can be used for one type of work, or all of its windows follow you. Which is why Apple added the last checkbox. If it’s checked, opening up a program like Pages in space 2 “anchors” it in space 2. Switching to that program while in another space brings you back to space 2 as if it had been specified in the list. If it’s NOT checked, you lose the auto-switching, but now you can keep separate windows for Safari, Word, etc. in their own separate spaces, and they won’t follow you around.

Let’s say you might have a space you want to use for school work and research. You have another one you want to use for web programming or organizing family photos, and another space for web browsing or music or emailing or….. You can see the beginning of a problem. You may want to have Word, or Pages, or Safari open in two or more of these spaces without all of the windows following you.

So the solution is to uncheck the bottom checkbox, and NOT specify a space for any program that a) can have more than one window open (most of them), and b) you may use in more than one context. In short, programs like iPhoto which only ever have one window open you will usually specifically assign to one space. iTunes can have more than one window open, but is usually used single-window, so either assign it to one space, or have it  ”follow you” if you keep it minimized. Then open up all the Word, Safari, etc. windows where you need them based on the kind of work done in that space instead of based on what program you are using. Of course, now YOU have to remember what space 3 is for, etc.

As long as you keep track of what space is used for what purpose, you’re golden.

I’ve had backup means in place before Leopard came out. Specifically, a snapshot based setup using rsync and hard links on my linux box. Nonetheless, it hasn’t been half as useful as time machine – if for no other reason than the ability to do bare metal restores.

I’ve had to do them twice now.

The first time was when my laptop was dropped shortly after closing the lid while still writing out. The drive had to be replaced and restored from an external TM backup. I’m writing this on it now, as a matter of fact.

The second time was the other day – discovering my desktop hung up (which has effectively become a household media server and sandboxed surfstation for the kids). Turns out the boot drive was suffering from a string of communications errors, though the diagnostics and file repair programs said everything was fine. One trip to Staples and a few hours later and I had a restored desktop.

I’ll say it now. It isn’t perfect. Super Duper would have allowed me to have a bootable replica of the entire drive that I could have switched to and continued to work off of.  It would have been just as effective for a bare metal restore if that had been needed. I’m a huge fan of super duper.

What SD doesn’t do is snapshots. Changes in files overwrite old files. Deleted files are never erased and just accumulate. There is effectively no way to go back and recover the email, file, picture, or system state that existed at time x before you accidentally made the wrong change and hit “save”.

Ideally, I’d use both.

edit: cut down next-to-last paragraph to save space and clarify meaning.

The compatibility of the text editor with Safari has simply grown by leaps and bounds.

One of the best known SF acronyms outside of Science Fiction is TANSTAAFL, from Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It means “There aint no such thing as a free lunch.” more to the point, it means that there is a price for everything in time, money, sweat, or effort.

This to me holds true in the Linux world, and with many of the often brilliant “free” programs that are available.

You can probably see where this is going.

I’ve been trying to set up proxy services on my G5 running Leopard, so I can get rid of the Suse box that currently has no purpose in life outside of acting as a network proxy server for controlling web access. Running one less computer is good, even if the toaster-box doesn’t add much to my electric bill, and the G5 is becoming less and less my primary workstation anyway – my MacBook Pro is.

Getting squid installed – the proxy software – was pretty simple. The problem? I wanted to run it in conjunction with some filtering software called Dansguardian. This is the part where you shake your head, tsk, and say “ahh… foolish mortal.”

OSX launches background programs in a whole new way from traditional Unix/linux methods. The package I installed was fairly up to date and had a proper startup entry in it. or so it seemed.

The long and the short of it is I have the proxy working, but not the filter, and I’m spending much time on this simply because I want to figure the puzzle out, not because it’s cost-effective.

It’s fun, in a way, but usually I spend too much time fixing other people’s computers to want to have “fun” tinkering.

Just discovered another upgrade “gotcha” with Leopard related to Thursby Software’s “DAVE.”

DAVE has been around a long time. Before OSX it allowed Macs to access windows shares and networks with the same credentials/etc. as windows machines. Even when OSX allowed access to Windows file servers and limited Active Directory compatibility Dave and AdmitMac were a much more complete solution, especially when it came to home folders, authenticating to a domain, etc.

Of course, such an extensive system hack intercepting all of the Windows-related CIFS/SMB traffic is likely to break on a major system upgrade, and sure enough it did. If you remembered to remove this before upgrading to Leopard, or first installed the update to version 7, then all was well, and you could still access Windows servers. if you didn’t, your computer would fail to connect.

Fixing this isn’t that tricky, but is non-obvious unless you are paying for an upgrade. In all cases the best way to remove DAVE is to use the removal package (DAVE is one of the few programs on a Mac that really needs an uninstaller). The issue is that the same incompatibility that prevents DAVE from working prevents the version 6 or earlier uninstaller to shut down the services. In this case, download the trial for version 7 (don’t even bother filling out hte form, just download it), and run the uninstaller for version 7. After a restart, your Mac will get back onto SMB servers as reliably as ever.

I’ve been more a fan of the VMWare Fusion virtual windows solution than Parallels, usually because Fusion has had less stability issues (especially relating to one client’s Quickbooks needs) and was just a little more polished. Well, sometimes you find rough spots.

Apparently Fusion assumes the hard drive size never changes. After installing the new HD in my MacBook pro and recovering from backups, everything else worked great, but Fusion couldn’t run the Boot Camp parition. While the error told me it realized the partition map had changed, Fusion would not give me the option of pointing to the new drive.

It was not a difficult fix – I found where Fusion stored the virtual machine file that pointed to the Boot Camp partition and deleted it, allowing Fusion to create a new one.  Nevertheless, VMWare should not assume that people will never change disks or partition maps, and should have provided an option to reset where it should find the Boot Camp partition.

… has got to be Time Machine.

Last week I was at a clients’ office and had my laptop drop off a counter just, just after I’d put it to sleep.

The good news was that the MacBooks and MacBook pros all have sensors that, upon sensing an impact can park the heads on the hard drive before they have a chance to crash into the platters and kill the drive.

The bad news is that right when you put it to sleep, the laptop writes out the contents of RAM to the HD in case the battery dies/is removed, but the sensors are not functional.

So I had one thoroughly dead hard drive.

After finagling around with Disk Utility and discovering I could create a partition big enough for all of my files that avoided the damaged areas and was thus usable, I restored the computer from my Time Machine backups and a few hours later was back to work. Most of this time was spent figuring out what parts of the drive were usable.

Then I ordered a new drive which I installed this weekend. Not ridiculously difficult (say… like a Mac Mini) but I’ll never complain about pulling apart a Toshiba or Compaq again.

Anyway. The point is that I had my computer back in full running order within hours in what was effectively a bare metal restoration. All my programs worked, and all of my settings were in place. All of this as part of the backup system that came with the OS.

Side note. I hate Torx screws. Why do manufacturers insist on using Torx screws on top of the mini-phillips (and even regular phillips) sized screws? The good news. Lowes has a nifty Kobalt-brand multi-head Torx screwdriver that includes T5 and T6 heads for about five bucks.

It’s been over a year since Apple shifted over to using the intel chipset in their machines, and every end of he computer product line now uses them. Adobe finally got an intel-native version of their apps out (only to be delayed in making CS3 Leopard-compatible.), and I could play EVE online if I only had the time.

I said a while ago that time would tell, as it wouldn’t be easy.

Apple sure made it look that way though.

It’s been (just over) a month with Leopard. I’ve used four different installs (including a troubleshooting install) on five separate computers, three of them mine.

All and all, I love it. I’ve got my Mail Act-on back up and running for easy mail sorting. Inquisitor works again in Safari. Candybar has been updated and replaced Pixadex, including dock modification for those not happy with the default dock. EVE online works great on my MBPro, though I just don’t have the time. Quicklook is absolutely indispensable. Spotlight searches work quicker, and searches make more sense. Back to my Mac and the built-in screen sharing work well as can be expected across various networks.

I love it. Don’t regret it for a second.

That said – there are a few issues (other than my initial blue-screen – thanks again Logitech) that really annoy me:

1) Groups and Permissions on updates. In Tiger and earlier versions of the Mac OS, every User had a group created for it of the same name. When updating, Leopard does not change the existing user group or any related permissions in your home folder. So far so good, this makes perfect sense. What doesn’t make sense to me is why this group didn’t get entered into the groups available to Leopard when it was busy wiping netinfo, so that every file in my home folder was associated with an unknown group, instead of staff. Fortunately it’s much easier to change groups and home folders for a user account than it used to be.

2) ACL’s. Two of my machines had rogue ACL’s creep up out of nowhere, one of them twice, that would not allow me to delete files without authenticating first to get root privileges. Of course, this prevented things like calendar updates through iSync as well. Worse, the man page didn’t get updated to reflect the new ACL commands available that allowed removal of ACL’s without having to isolate ACL-infested files from those that aren’t.

3) Stacks targets – with a set of drawers icons and some creative sorting I’m now working around this, but *shrug* I shouldn’t have to work around this to get a stable visual cue.

Well.. first of all I now have IMAP access to GMail.Even cooler though, is this. I was doing some poking around in various settings and quickly realized that the standard “display this set of photos” screensavers had a new option for display mode. One mode is collage. The result is as follows: