East of the Sun, West of the Moon

A bit embarrassing that the first update of the year is in February, but so be it.

Since the last post I’ve had my share of fun. Aside from the usual social obligations around the holidays we were also kept busy for a week in early December by the fall-out after an ice storm that caused power outages and broke the cable used for the television signal and internet connectivity. The chopped up bits of broken off branches are still at the side of street in most of the city because they held off actually dealing with it until they had funding (from state and federal resources) which meant that people had to come in and inspect how much damage was done, etc.

The cable outage took longer to fix because the cable repair crew didn’t want to touch it while it was hanging near the electricity cable and the electricity company repair crew was waiting for us to deal with the tree that was snapped in two. Naturally the electricity company did not share this fact with us, which was a bit frustrating.

The past few weeks had also been unusual, with my MacBook Pro being shipped to the nearest Apple repair location twice within two weeks. First it was shipped there and the repair was put on hold because of a part that they needed. When it returned they had only replaced the hard drive so I assume that was the part. I received the repaired notebook on Tuesday, and on Friday evening, when I had slowly but surely gotten settled on it and I was doing the initial Time Machine run, it stopped working. The next morning I got on the phone with Apple, spent an hour talking and being on hold and another repair was initiated. While I thought the guy on the phone had told me I should receive the empty box on Monday (in which to ship the MBP to them), I didn’t get it until Tuesday, and the tracking indicated that it hadn’t even left its origin until Monday. Hrm. Then after it was repaired on Wednesday, this apparently didn’t happen in time for it to be picked up by DHL that same day. Fine, if that at least meant that it would arrive on Friday, but after a day of checking the tracking site and seeing that the box was still somewhere in or near Ohio, it didn’t arrive until Saturday!

In those three weeks I worked on M’s MacBook and were both happy to no longer have to share it after I had (again) moved and reinstalled everything on the repaired machine.

Crossing my fingers, I think the machine (and yet another new hard drive, and also new cables this time) is in better shape. This was the third and fourth repair so far, I think it’s starting to get in Apple’s own interest to just get me a new machine and get it over with. I paid for the extended AppleCare so it is covered by warranty for another year and a half at least. I’m afraid to think about how many more repairs that is going to be, all on their dime (and my time). The price you pay for using a first-generation product, eh?

You can’t make this stuff up…

How to split up: Vienna hosts world’s first divorce fair:

“If people untie the knot in good faith, it can turn out that the day you divorce is the best day of your life,” said the organiser, Anton Barz, who also arranges wedding fairs.

Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD’s Coffin:

Pressing plants are ramping up production, but where is the demand coming from? Why do so many people still love vinyl, even though its bulky, analog nature is anathema to everything music is supposed to be these days? Records, the vinyl evangelists will tell you, provide more of a connection between fans and artists. And many of today’s music fans buy 180-gram vinyl LPs for home listening and MP3s for their portable devices. <…> Because these music fans also listen using portable players and computers, Matador and other labels include coupons in record packaging that can be used to download MP3 versions of the songs. Amory called the coupon program “hugely popular.”

And lastly, this Ars Technica review is well worth the read if you’re interested in knowing what changed under the hood of OS X Leopard (10.5):

While the casual Mac user will gauge Leopard’s worth by reading about the marquee features or watching a guided tour movie at Apple’s web site, those of us with an unhealthy obsession with operating systems will be trolling through the internals to see what’s really changed.

These two views of Leopard, the interface and the internals, lead to two very different assessments. Somewhere in between lie the features themselves, judged not by the technology they’re based on or the interface provided for them, but by what they can actually do for the user.

With the introduction of Leopard also came a refreshed Terminal application, which appears to be responding to some of the complaints that have driven people such as myself to using iTerm.

• I see no keyboard shortcuts to directly go to the Nth tab in a window, for Terminal. In iTerm that is done using cmd-N (for values of N of 1 through 9).
• In iTerm you can cmd-click on a URL and launch it in your preferred browser. In Terminal you get the same effect with first a right-click (or ctrl-click), then cursor down and hit enter. On the other hand, Terminal has a few more options in its context menu, like searching in Google or Spotlight.
• Terminal has something called Window Groups. Nice, but aside from importing and exporting the data I don’t see an easy way to edit them? You can pick one of your Window Groups and start up with that. iTerm’s support for an AutoLaunch AppleScript looks more flexible in that respect. Maybe I just haven’t figured out how to do things The Apple Way?
• In iTerm you have bookmarks with which you can define combinations of terminal/keyboard settings and initial command, allowing me to set up bookmarks for the various hosts I need to access via ssh on a daily basis. I see no way to do this in Terminal.

Please correct me if I’m wrong regarding any of this.

I received the Leopard DVD on Friday, shortly after noon, and almost immediately put it to work. Twenty minutes DVD-verification and 45 minutes of actual upgrade time later I’m running OS X 10.5.

Here are my notes such as they are:

• The default netatalk package in Debian/Etch does not cooperate with Leopard. You can either compile it yourself, if you can figure out how to do that, or fetch it from debian.jones.dk (which appears to be unreachable right now). The actual package lives at /dists/stable/misc/binary-i386/hykrion/netatalk/netatalk_2.0.3-5.0.0jones2_i386.deb. The reason is that Leopard no longer puts up with clear-text passwords and the default package in Debian/Etch doesn’t include uams_dhx.so that implements Diffie-Hellman eXchange, which Leopard will accept.
• After I carelessly upgraded to Tunnelblick 3.0b5 (I was using 3.0b4) I found that something in 3.0b5 doesn’t play nicely with Leopard, causing it to not set up a default route after creating the OpenVPN tunnel, so I’ve downgraded for now. Maybe later.
• I am happy to be using Spaces and have already made a list of applications that by default open in specific virtual desktops. Occasionally switching between applications seems to interact a bit quirky with Spaces, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
• Thankfully all of my regular applications (Adium, iTerm, Firefox, Thunderbird, Moneydance, MiniBatteryLogger) seem to behave well after the upgrade.
• I must not have been using cronjobs when I upgraded to Tiger, because I don’t remember that upgrade nuking any crontabs, but I hear that that’s standard procedure. So if you have any, make sure you keep a copy somewhere and restore them again afterwards.
• I like what I’ve seen of the Time Limits feature in the Parental Controls. It takes fast user switching into account and pauses the countdown when the time limited account is not actually the one in focus so to speak. When you’ve reached your daily limit it still lets you log in but almost instantly kicks you back to the login prompt. When you try to log in outside of the allow time frames it simply doesn’t let you. When you’re logged into an account with a time limit it warns you 15 minutes in advance and shows a countdown. At 1 minute before you run out of time it also gives you an audio warning. All in all, not bad and I’m looking forward to putting it to good use on the family Mac Mini.
• The Fan Control setup was removed in the upgrade process but a new version was released that is Leopard ready.
• The Time Machine doesn’t seem interested in my network mounts and I’m pretty sure that in earlier builds that did work. I guess I’ll continue my rsync + Bacula based backup setup for the Macs for now, then.
• I like the new iPhoto based screensaver, although now I’m tempted to set one up similarly with a network mount that includes all the photos in was-there.com. Something to try another day.

So far I’m happy with the improvements and there are a few things I haven’t even tried yet (the new iChat for instance, although I know in advance I’d never fully switch to it). I briefly glanced at Photo Booth but the backdrop tricks seem to expect a certain kind of background that I don’t have, so the results are less than perfect.

More testing fun tomorrow!

Update: Instead of a non-mainstream netatalk package it’s also possible to re-enable the cleartext passwords with this magical command line incantation:

    defaults write -g com.apple.AppleShareClientCore -dict-add afp_cleartext_allow -bool true

Update: There is a newer version of Tunnelblick, 3.0b6, which appears to work better with Leopard.

Update: Another magical command line that I applied pretty quickly, which turns the 3D dock back into a 2D one:

    defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

Yesterday Apple finally announced when the next version of OS X (10.5, also known as Leopard) will be released, Friday October 26, and within an hour of finding out I’d pre-ordered a so-called family-pack (since we have 4 machines running OS X in the house). Nothing stops anyone from installing the single user version on multiple machines, Apple didn’t put checks in their code to stop you from that as far as I know (and have noticed, ahem), but I guess I wanted to do The Right Thing ™

When the previous version came out I waited much longer with the switch, I was holding out on 10.3.9 while Apple was already at 10.4.6, but this time I’m eager to try out things like the built-in backup software, proper support for the iPhone Notes and various other of the 300 new features (obviously not all of them as exciting as that). I’m also curious to try out the improved Parental Controls on the family Mac and hope the Guest Log-In Accounts will be useful for the occasional visitor (right now I have an account that’s locked down using parental controls for that). Browsing through that list I also notice that Terminal finally has tabs! Not that I expect to be convinced to give up my iTerm just yet.

On a related note: Apple announced that it will have an actual iPhone (and iPod Touch, or iTouch as I see it being called) SDK in February 2008. Were they just waiting to see how easily hackers would break through their defenses first, or are they really not quite ready? Having seen the things that developers created without an SDK, I’m looking forward to seeing what they’ll come up with with one.

Counting down now, 9 more days until Leopard…

I’ve had an unpleasant week of unpredictable behaviour from my MacBook Pro where it would simply power off while the battery still looks like it should have enough charge (typically over 10% and under 40%), several attempts to fully and utterly drain and then recharge the battery, resetting the SMC (System Management Controller) data to make sure there is no anomalous data there. This forced me to draw the conclusion that after 476+ cycles it may not be entirely unexpected that the battery is due for a replacement!

The MBP has been here since July last year, so nearly 15 months now. If you’ll do the math with me you’ll see that I’ve had the battery go through at least one cycle per day, on average. To have the next one last a bit longer I’ll have to try and keep it on the adapter, I guess. I was already trying to do the drain it fully, once a month thing, but will also try to do that more consistently.

Any other suggestions?

It’s for M’s birthday, but of course something that’ll be used for the entire family. We got her a Panasonic GS80, a handy camcorder. It’s a bit of a starter model, as we’ve never owned one before and I didn’t want to buy something entirely too complex or overpriced.

So far she’s done some recording with it, had some fun feedback loops while recording straight through firewire into her MacBook, etc. Once it’s been on the initial 24 hour of charging for the internal battery she’ll no doubt test to see how long the rechargeable detachable one will last, and do some recording around the house and such.

The kids are of course enthusiastically planning videos of the rats to be posted on YouTube, but I hope to stop them from that for a little while longer.

Update: I almost forgot to list that I also, while I was ordering from Amazon anyway, picked up the Snakes on a Plane album. Ladies and gentleman, snakes are slithering… carry on!

So what’s happened in the last few weeks, around here?

I upgraded our MythTV setup from 0.18.<aging> to 0.20.2. This was required in order to still get any TV guide information. See, MythTV was getting its information from labs.zap2it.com, which provided that service for free, where free meant answering some survey questions every 3 months. The last few times the number of questions had been 0, which was amusing, but apparently a sign of things to come because a few months ago the fine folks there announced that they were going to discontinue this service. Some open source folks cooperated to work out a solution, now known as schedulesdirect.org, where we can continue to get this data. Initially at $15 per 3 months, but if enough users get on board that price should drop quite a bit. The amusing part is where they get their data from TMS (Tribune Media Services), the people that run zap2it.com, so I guess their biggest deal was that they didn’t want the hassle of dealing with payments and now only have to deal with one contact. Good for them, and now that we are paying real money for this data, there is also a better chance of complaints about missing or faulty data being dealt with, which is definitely a bonus.

My MacBook Pro was sent to Texas for the second time, 2 months after the first repair. This time they replaced the hard disk, which took a little convincing because it doesn’t show any errors when you merely verify using Disk Utility. The TechTools Deluxe software that Apple provides to AppleCare customers has a Surface Scan option which did, however, so I used that as leverage.

Unfortunately my timing was less ideal than last time. I called AppleCare on Wednesday, got a box to ship the laptop on Thursday, had it out the door within 5 minutes because the DHL delivery guy was kind enough to stick around so that he wouldn’t have to make an extra 2 hour trip just to pick up that same box again, and after it arrived on Friday it was marked as done and shipping out again within hours. But then “2nd day shipping” or whatever it was called turned into something slightly slower because the weekend got in the way, plus the extra holiday on Monday (Labor Day for non-US-ians reading along), so I got it around noon on Tuesday.

First thing I did was verify that I had a different hard disk, which I did, and run that Surface Scan on it. Thankfully there were no problems, so I moved on to restoring my home-directories and give M back her MacBook which I’d claimed for the past week.

I will cross my fingers that I don’t need to talk to anybody at AppleCare for a while!

As far as I can tell I can only send text messages (SMS) to one contact at a time. I see no way to send to groups, nor do I see any way to add more contacts after the first one.

What the heck does the little “auto” icon mean, the one in the Google Maps application?

In the Recents section of the Phone menu, I can only clear all calls, not individual entries. Thankfully I don’t think this device is going to run out of space anytime soon, but what’s wrong with cleaning your caller-id history, so to speak, and only keeping the ones that you care about?

… using the iPhone a lot lately when you do the two-finger scrolling on your Apple laptop of sorts in the wrong direction.