MidKnight Gallery

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:

I’ve spent five days with leopard now, installing it four times on three different computers, the most recent one two days ago. It’s left one heck of an impression on me. Mostly favorable. If your Mac can run Leopard, you should install it. The sheer scope of the improvements is worth it. Having another computer, or a .mac account and integration with calendar and other services on a Leopard server will make it even more worthwhile.

Other people have given their short little overviews. Others have released articles in dribs and drabs on different features. Yet others have released a veritable book on the subject. As a result, this review will be heavier on my impressions and what I went through.

I got the install DVD on Friday. The packaging was, as usual, wonderful. I chose my Macbook Pro to install it on as between the three Macs that could be upgraded, it was not only backed up (as they all were), it was the machine I could suffer the most disruptions with.

So in goes the DVD. Reboot, choose “upgrade.” So far so good. I click through the initial menus and let the install procedure start as I go off to make dinner. A while later, my son wanders into the kitchen. “Dad? Is it supposed to have a blue screen?”

Uh-oh. Try the usual precautions. Safe mode boot didn’t work. Doing a file-system check in single user mode proved that the hard drive is still in good shape. I decided it was worth some time doing tinkering. I’d have to help other people out of their troubles after all, so I didn’t want to jump the gun and do an “archive and install” or “clean install”. I may be backed up but I didn’t want to spend hours rebuilding my utilities and preferences.

A little research and I dug up a thread in the Apple Discussion Boards where people were already fighting with the same issue. About halfway down someone had decided to poke around on the premise that a set of system extensions referred to as APE was at fault. APE, or Application Enhancer was a third-party system hack used by Cleardock, Shapeshifter, and other programs that modify the appearance and behavior of the OS. Needless to say this can make the system… unstable.

The official Apple page (recommending an archive and install but giving the instructions I followed) is here. Daring Fireball also has more on the subject, including how the Logitech drivers for mice and keyboards, among other things, can install APE without your knowledge.

So I reboot holding down COMMAND-S on the keyboard into the single-user command-line mode, type in the commands needed to check and mount the hard drive, delete the relevant files, and reboot. Viola! It works.

Finally I got my .mac information set up, verified I still had my mail library and signatures (Mail predictably updated the library) and started to see what changed and testing what broke.

Insofar as the kerfluffle with the stacks and the dock… I don’t mind the new dock, but I prefer to apply the default side-dock format to the dock as it’s cleaner and easier to tell what is running. I found the new stack behavior a little frustrating at first because I had several folder shortcuts that I wanted to go and open up the folder, but most of them I used by right-clicking to get a menu of the contents anyway. So, once I recalibrated my expectations and realized I was trading submenus for easier-to click targets and a slight inconvenience in actually opening up the folders (when actually needed) I was more than happy with the effect. In a roundabout way, this is a return of the “drawers” behavior of OS8 and 9, complete with spring-loaded folders that you can drag files and documents to.

I hate the icons for the stacks. I hate them for the simple fact that as an aggregation of the icons for the contacts, I’m trading a minimum of useless information about the contents of a folder for an easily identifiable target to click on. Without wasting time to hover each one, it’s almost impossible to identify which is which reliably. While I’m not a huge fan of the new dock, and less a fan of the hard-to-differentiate new folder icons, I cannot understate how much I loathe the dock. Please please make it possible to keep a stable icon there!

I discovered to my annoyance that the calendar does not keep a side drawer open with the details of the currently selected event. I can deal with this change because it also makes it clearer when I’m looking at vs. just editing an event, and minimizes screen usage when I don’t need the details. That said, I love the “current time” bar that runs across the window. It did miff me a bit to discover that all of the subscribed folders had been pulled out into their own category from the groups I had them in.

I checked out the new syncing preferences for .mac, and decided to forego the syncing of widgets and preferences. My laptop and desktop have many overlapping uses, but they are fundementally used in different environments (field vs. office) with different tools needed at my fingertips.

Parental controls now allow for remote control of other macs on your local network. Hmmm… so now if all my future computers are macs I can administer the ones my children will use centrally insofar as web access, and get rid of the proxy server I run. I can also set hours for when they can get on online. I can also run Fusion to let my kids play some W98 games like Zoo tycoon… and probably faster than the current old Win machine they have access to.

When waking from sleep, I get to the password prompt consistently faster. The wiki feature in the dictionary is cool, and makes a program I already use regularly vice pulling down my volumes even more useful. I also trashed a “refresh finder” script I had available because Apple finally, finally made it update in a consistently timely manner when new files are added.

Spaces took some time to wrap myself around. The biggest problem was me – trying to figure out a separation of work modes that would allow me to maintain different virtual desktops. That said – if you use it as a clutter remover it works great, because unlike many variants I’d seen, you still have access to all of your apps through the Dock or COMMAND-Tab – which instantly switches you over to the correct screen. After I figured this out I don’t do any manual desktop switching – which is easy enough to do. The one hitch I’ve had is I often use CNTRL-Arrow in text editing, so I have to find another default key to switch my spaces.

Screen sharing is easily turned on if you want to use the “Back to my Mac” .mac feature or just access your desktop from across the house using Chicken of the VNC or the built-in Screen Sharing app. Like all of the network services it’s off by default. The only thing that threw me was that turning on file sharing automatically allowed guest access to the public folders – though the guest account was otherwise disabled. While it’s easy enough to stop sharing out public folders or turn off ALL guest access, it did throw me.

Actually, I like how they implemented guest access in general. You can log in as “guest” and get a temporary, restricted workspace that erases itself when you are done. The next “guest” again gets a pristine, sandboxed space to access the web. This is a great way to give my kids access to my main desktop when they’re online…

Back to screen sharing for a minute. This has a few other implications. First, those of us in tech support and consulting can now easily access the computer of any client that we can iChat with. This feature also reduces the future need to install the more flexible VINE server on many client desktops, though the jury is still out on servers, depending on security needs. This is yet another way that a user-friendly feature will also be a big help for IT folk. it alsomeans that those of us with .mac accounts have less need for a service like GoToMyPC or LogMeIn.

Speaking of big help – Time Machine. This is possibly the biggest single reason to get Leopard – so that you can have effortless, consistent backups. I’ve lost count of how many clients do a poor job in maintaining backups. While it won’t help with keeping copies offsite, this feature will save a lot of headaches where it comes to “oops I deleted my file” or “oops, my hard drive died” in shops where we don’t have our hands on Retrospect enough to make sure that the users files are regularly backed up. Time machine makes this process almost effortless. One thing to beware of – If you have any Paralells or Fusion windows images, you may want to make them exceptions or back them up separately unless you’ve got a much, much bigger backup drive than your main drive. Aperture also has some issues with Time Machine

When installing this on my desktop, I noted a few other things. First of all, while the Sharepoints prefpane was still available, all of the SMB and Appletalk share configuration data had been wiped out. instead, those share points now were in the Apple sharing preference pane. Also, after opening Cronnix, I noticed that ALL of my scheduling CRON scripts were gone that I used for mounting my backup disks. Not much of a loss since I’ll be using time machine anyways, but you may want to back up your Crontabs if you’re geeky enough to use them. (I was using CRON to schedule applescripts and other scripts that I only wanted to run on my desktop instead of through iCal).

Insofar as most of my programs, here’s the rundown:

Mail improvements. Here’s where I got hurt the worst. While I don’t mind saying good bye to mail.appetizer (it can be obtrusive), Mailtags and Mail act-on effectively don’t work. The good news is that the creator is already making it Leopard-compatible, and the “Leopard” beta of mailtags is available. I’ll just hold off for the final version. That said, the note-taking ability is useful, the contact-data sensing is just phenomenal, and it can now indent without quoting! The templates are fluff, but slick fluff, and very well implemented. mail has always been great about letting you pick an alternate outbound server if you can’t reach your default, but now you can also choose a different outgoing server as you compose your email.

Inquisitor, an app that gives me instant search results as I type in Safari doesn’t work. It may never be updated as it relied on access to parts of the Safari WebKit code that Apple has severely restricted access to. I will miss it.

Transmit and Quicksilver seem to work fine overall (with updates) though the “open all files with this tag” feature of the tagging module needs updating. The growl notifications are working just great.

Chax has disappeared, but most of the features it provided were rolled into iChat anyway. As it is I’ll still be using Adium except when I need the new “theater” and “screen sharing” modes.

I haven’t run mine yet, but apparently Photoshop works, though may “crash” upon closing out the program. I know Adobe has posted some other issues but apparently the main graphics programs all work OK.

As noted previously, APE is (very) broken.

LiteIcon, an App that allows you to change the default system icons is broken. We’ll have to wait for an update on that or Candybar (from the iconfactory).

Desklickr doesn’t change the desktop out.

Google Earth needed me to reinstall/download the latest version on my laptop.

My Cisco VPN settings were wiped out. I am not sure yet if simply reinstalling will fix this. I WILL get a Time Machine backup first….

Tinkertool says that it is not fully compatible, but shouldn’t break anything, even if some effects are unexpected.

The Wacom drivers needed to be replaced with a new version.

Internet Explorer 5 (OSX version) still works as well as it ever did, for what it’s worth.

Other things that apparently still work:

• Bonjour Browser
• MagiCal
• Aleph One
• MythII
• MS Office
• FlickrUploader
• Synk (with an update)
• Canoscan drivers

Stuff I still need to test:

• Blender
• Emulators
• Freeciv
• Handbrake
• Lingon
• NeoOffice
• nethack
• Pic2Icon
• Picasa Web Albums

That’s it in a nutshell.

My initial impression upon looking at Apple’s 300+ features page was “Good Lord!” The second was “A lot of these are pretty minor.” Remembering that Apple has built its success on making the little stuff work so well it completely changes how you do things, I dug deeper, and came away impressed. When I get around to reviewing it the review will end up being a long one.

Many of the features are actually minor ones, small usability enhancements such as doing a Google maps search by clicking the address in the address book, or the ability to add a new contact to your address book by clicking on an address in the mail body even if they didn’t send you a vcard. Each of these is minor. Each of these nevertheless saves you time by minimizing the jumping around needed to do each task. That way you get back to your work quicker.

In other cases, it’s the combination of features that’s the big deal. Sure, 10.4 had parental controls in place and workable whitelisting that made similar controls built into Windows look anemic and weak. Apple didn’t rest on its laurels, and made improvements. I’m not impressed by “dynamic” filters, but they are now available for filtering web pages if you want. What really blows my mind is that on top of whitelisting allowed websites, email contacts, chat contacts, etc. you can also now control when certain users are even allowed to be on the computer at all. You can also do this from a remote computer across the house so you can centrally manage your parental policies.

For parents geeky enough to be using these features in the first place: whoah.

The biggest deal to me is that Apple, in conjunction with their iWork update, has taken one more step towardsa replacement for Exchange/Outlook/Office that many workplaces rely on. The iCal server integration features offer what 90% of Exchange users use shared calendars for. Now if we could get shared address books (a real one that can be easily updated like Exchange, that LDAP schema doesn’t count) and a Access-like database program integrated with iWork…

The long and the short of it is that it looks like a number of the small features may be small, but they can change how you work in ways that going back will feel like being crippled. Other features work together to be a really big deal. To tell the difference, as well as which features really are just fluff, will take time. To explain how this could  affect you or improve your computer usage will likely use a lot of space.

Don’t expect a full review from me anytime soon.