Glog

I had been wanting to take Snow Leopard for a spin for some time, but software availability at home and time constraints in general had prevented me from doing it. I picked up a copy during my last visit to California, so all that was left was finding some cycles to install it and get going with it. Friday just sort of came up from nowhere and enabled the forcing function: disk.dieByClickNoise(). New drive, some minor surgery, and voilá: ready for Snow Leopard.

It has been running pretty well minus a couple of annoyances: it doesn’t seem to get along with my wireless at home all time and iPulse now asks for an admin password upon login (which, admittedly, I don’t do all that often, so it’s not enough to be obnoxious). Everything else so far works rather well. Having been running on the same Leopard image for nearly two years, I felt it was time to start from scratch (i.e., discarding old apps I no longer use, rearranging some things in my home directory, fully switching to Xcode) and, along the way, verify that things work as expected. I’d say I’m about 80% done, but even at that level, I’m fully functional for work (and blogging, but of course).

Given the starting point, I did push MobileMe a bit by having it sync most of the items it supports (mail accounts and rules, the dock, etc). Everything worked as advertised, so a lot of that work was fairly effortless (and contributed to the cleanup). I also went ahead and updated most of the seed files I keep on the server at home (i.e., the bare baseline of apps, configuration and initialization files, and other data that I share across all the systems I use, which, at last count, was too many). Yes, I do eat my own dog food, and at some point I will polish what I have written about said dog food and publish it.

Once the laptop is 100% done and I’m satisfied with it (say, a couple of weeks of heavy use of most of the work/photo/video stuff), the desktop will follow, although I am thinking that the Mac Mini at home will probably happen soonish given its primary purpose in life is to deliver media into my living room. Alas, this is the end of the line for the trusty PowerBook G4, which turns four in a couple of months, although its current user will continue to enjoy everything Leopard has to offer for quite some time (until the system dies of Leopard is no longer updated or usable in it).

Courtesy of bstreiff: Enabling Remote Disc on not-Airs:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true

Context: we have an older MacBook with what appears to be a busted DVD-ROM drive, preventing a clean install of the newly arrived cat. After enabling CD/DVD Sharing on the “server”, nothing would show up on the “client”. After tweaking the above properties and restarting the Finder, it’s all good now. Install in progress.

I’ve been a lite Dropbox user for some time (since I first read about them via Rands) and while I do use it more these days for more typical file sharing tasks, one of the most interesting uses I have for it has been that of sharing application state. Cloud and all, I am very much a desktop user, and while some of the applications I use do have cloudish counterparts, I find that have a tendency to enjoy my local apps far more than their cloud counterparts. Take ecto, a fantastic blog editor for the Mac. I find myself starting blog posts often, leaving them for “later” from time to time. Given I share time between my desktop and my laptop, it hasn’t always been easy to match available time slot with in-progress blogs.

Enter Dropbox: a simpe symlink from

~/Library/Application Support/ecto

to

../../DropBox/Shared/Library/Application Support/ecto3

and my wherever-whenever-ecto-blogging is a go (something that, by the way, did not work with iDisk, which seemingly failed to sync more ofthen than I was willing to accept). I suspect instant switching from one system to the other might probably confuse ecto, but I never do that anyway, and I can probably add some glue before the app starts to check on Dropbox’s status.

Snow Leopard is still a rare-to-find species in Spain (at least in Valencia). No luck in four separate (and unrelated) stores this morning.

Yum: Apple to Ship Mac OS X Snow Leopard on August 28.

I recently noticed that my system.log was collecting these messages fairly constatly.

Jul 14 04:08:01 boxname kernel[0]: unknown SIGSEGV code 0
Jul 14 04:08:31: --- last message repeated 3 times ---
Jul 14 04:08:41 boxname kernel[0]: unknown SIGSEGV code 0
Jul 14 04:09:08: --- last message repeated 3 times ---

It turns out the problem lies with Adobe’s license manager, and they provide a fix. All is well now.

I don’t really have the time to try this out, especially with all the gotchas, but it is nevertheless interesting. I may give it a try once some version of OpenSolaris goes into 2010. For now, I’ll keep watching out for Karim’s experience and see how it pans out. No, not giving up on Mac OS X; just curious about the possibilities.

Along with the system I picked up yesterday, I bought a HP Color Laserjet CP1215, which isn’t particularly Mac friendly. Many thanks to Ryan Ridge for his very helpful write-up on how to get this printer to work with a Mac. I still can’t get color, but I’ll settle for B&W for now. Thanks again Ryan!

Luv Macports. Luuuuuuv them.

The word vista, which was probably imported into English from Spanish, means a pleasing view, esp. one seen through a long, narrow opening. This is most ironic in the context of the latest offering from Redmond, which I had seen here and there but never actually used.

I recently picked up a no-name (well, it does have a brand, and a popular one at that, but the hardware manufacturer has nothing to do with this particular gripe, and I will appreciate being spared the install Linux diatribe) for a friend. This friend, who is not a computer whiz, speaks Spanish, so I wanted to switch the language in the OS to Spanish. Sounds sensible, right?

Asides from the horribly busy interface (discerning input boxes and even windows on the screen was a challenge, and giving up something like 35% of the browser’s useful real state, i.e., actual content, in the name of title bars, menus, plugin messages, search bars, tabs and frames annoyed me in extremis), I was unable to configure the thing to display menus and such in Spanish. In the process, I learned about LIPs and MUIs, I read a few [useless] threads on how to activate the Spanish translation (I apparently needed to install an undownloadable LIP, but only if I’m using something or other edition), and ended up nowhere. Ironic as well the whole Genuine Advantage gig. I gave up. Time’s valuable.

Compare this to the PowerBook I gave my Mom a while back: System Settings -> International -> Language -> Spanish. Log out. Log back in. Heck, I’ll trow in a reboot just to try and even things out a bit. Done. Move on with life.

I’m glad a lot of people find Vista useful (and pretty, I suppose) enough to endure it. I’ll spare you the expletives. Perhaps I’m getting too old to tinker like in the good old days, tho language installation (really, it should simply be activation) doesn’t qualify as tinkering in my book. When I tell people I last used Windows in the mid 90′s (I did use NT for about 4 months at Systemhouse), they sometimes look at me funny. But then again: I don’t have to endure my operating system. I use it and be done with it.