I had noticed that most of my Home calendar, including birthdays and anniversaries, was empty on both machines I .Mac sync. No idea why, but the data was gone.
So I decided from now on I’d put birthdays into address book and use a birthday tool to create a calendar from it. I could not find my Calendar file so I used spotlight to search for “home” and wow, it found all of my home events! Double clicking each one opened it in iCal to show it had expired 2 years ago, etc, so I reset the alarms and the ending date (to never) and synced up with .Mac.
Whew! Still need to find where those calendars are kept, as I like the idea of generating the calendar from Address Book vs. trusting iCal, but Spotlight came through for once!
So about a year ago I was using Apple’s Compressor, a video encoding application that comes with Final Cut and DVD Studio Pro. I was getting weird red blotches, glitches, skipping frames, etc.
After a week of debugging I just gave up, too much else to do. iDVD worked, so alright.
Last Thursday I was showing my friend Julie some iMovie stuff, which ended up as the now famous masturbating keyboard movie, but when I encoded in DVD SP, the video had glitches. “Oh, yeah, this issue I thought.”
So over the next three nights I messed around, reinstalling Compressor, etc. It would work, then I’d launch DVD SP and then the bad video. All the while, the people over on Apple - Discussions - Horrible quality were telling me it was bad RAM.
RAM doesn’t selectively decide that it hates Compressor. Why doesn’t it change “God” to “Dog” in my Word documents?
So after all I could think of, I pulled my RAM. I have 4 512mb sticks I got from the Mac store, all from Viking, bought with the G5 and later. The first bank is Nanya RAM, 64×64PC320016TM. The second bank is Infineon DDR64×64PC3200UT.
So I pulled the Infineon and guess what. It all works now. Every test I can run that would fail often enough to notice now succeeds.
I’ll be calling Viking to find out what RAM I really should have and what they can do about it.
For yucks, I took out the Nanya ram and installed the Infineon. Several apps crashed on boot, I could not export in Compressor and DVD SP crashed while encoding. So I am back on the Nanya ram, after having archived all of the crash logs then deleting them to see if I crash less now
Grrrr@computers!
update:
Viking is replacing all 4 sticks of RAM with memory they say is Dual G5 compatible. As they only cold swap, I’ll be sending in the two sticks known to not work first, then the other two after the replacements come. Viking does not have a hot swap policy. But it looks like I should be good to go and back on 2gb of ram within a few weeks!
Now what if you have phone numbers, emails and addresses that you don’t want to give out to the general person? Use a private vCard. First, use Preferences from the Address Book to enable private vCards:
Now, go to your card as listed above and edit it by choosing “Edit Card” from the “Edit Menu”
Notice now, that on your card only, you have some blue checkboxes. If you uncheck these, then that data will not be exported when you give someone your vCard! Notice how I have hidden private data:
Please use this as when someone gets your vCard in an email, they can simply double click it and have it installed into Address Book. also, the vCard format is standard, so it may work in other applications and even on Windows! Maybe.
P.S. A vCard is simply a standardized format for sharing the kinds of data that appear in an address book like program.
MadOnion posted a review of SUSE Linux 9.1 (site down, slashdotted) and while I skimmed over it, curious about what is going on in the Linux world, some quotes in the summary caught my eye…
“SUSE LINUX 9.1 is an excellent Linux distribution for the price. At $89.95 USD, you would be hard pressed to find a better package. Sure, you can download Linux all day long from the Internet for free, but in no way does that give anything back to the developers who innovate. You are showing support for them by running and promoting their software to others, but nothing helps keep development flowing like cold hard cash. SUSE is worth the price. For the 90 days of installation support, online and email support, as well as the plethora of packages that are included, you simply can’t go wrong”
“So many distros these days have apps that are just ‘broken’, not working, and trouble to work with. I visited as many apps as possible during my review and everything worked. This to me is a huge selling point.”
“While I love the power that Linux gives me to compile my own software from source and configure it to my liking, I am starting to realize that the time it takes to get everything running the way I like it is at a premium. I could spend this time doing other things like playing hide and seek or reading story books with my daughter. SUSE gives me these opportunities. They have built a desktop system that works very well out of the box. Almost everything is configured the way I need it to be, hardware is simple to manage, and while software management can come a long way with online updates I can live with it. Within a minimal amount of time I can have a SUSE system running with all the applications I could need, all working, and still have the power to compile and configure my own software exactly as I see fit. Gone are the days of fighting with 3D drivers. nVIDIA drivers installed easily through YOU (or from nVIDIA’s site). Everything simply worked.”
Kind of sounds like Mac OS X, doesn’t it?
Alright, so Mac OS X only runs on Macs, and not any old PC, but come on, that is one of the reasons our Macs “just work” That to me is a selling point.
I have a Netgear WGR614 (version 1) router that I had upgraded to beta firmware to allow WPA encryption. I could never get my TiBook with its Linksys 802.11g card to connect however.
I also wanted to look into using my G5 as a router. So I bought an Asante PCI 10/100 card and went to town.
A day later, I gave up. Here is why:
I had two issues. I wanted WPA from the wireless and my Vonage voice over IP phone would skip and be unusable when uploading files. The solution to the first was to get Netgear to fix their router, but they never did. It might be the chipset, who knows. The solution to the latter was packet shaping, ie some software or hardware that would give the phone priority when it was in use.
The only packet shaping software I could find on the mac was throttled, but I never got it to help much, and sure not dynamically, ie only when the phone was in use.
Apple’s built in Internet Sharing never worked between the built in ethernet and Asante card, no idea why. I could use brickhouse to enable that, which worked, but I still had not DHCP server.
I thought about using an Airport Extreme card in my g5 to be a access point, but apple does not support wpa, does not let you hide the SSID nor do they do cool stuff like block access everyone except specified MAC addresses.
So, what a pain.
Solution to the WPA issue
Netgear is selling their WGR614s for $89.99 with $40 in mail in rebates. I picked up a v4 (the latest chipset). You can tell which one you get by looking at the blue side panel where it says “Package Contents” The model number will have V2-V4 next to it. No V number means it is a V1.
Anyone wanna buy a WGR614 V1?
Solution to the Vonage packet shaping issue
I have not done this yet, but all reports are good. You can call Vonage and request a swap of your cisco ATA-186 with a Motorola V-1005. This box is not only a telephony adaptor, but it also has DCHP and NAT and packet shaping. So you’d create your network like:
You would disable DHCP on the Netgear and let the Motorola handle it, while the Netgear would be the firewall to your local area network.
To do this swap, Vonage charges you $100 for ground delivery (about $120 for 2-3 day) and they disable your phone. When you get the Motorola, you plug it in and your phone works again. You mail back the Cisco and get a $40 credit.
A little pricey, but if it works, the price to pay for being on the bleeding edge.
You can apply comments to the wrong photo by accident by doing the following:
Select an album or Last Film Roll that has more than one photo
Drag your photo zoom slider all the way to the right so you see just one photo
Select photo 1
Type in some comments for photo 1
Now Click on the down arrow in the photo pane (or scroll down with your mouse scroll wheel)
Notice the comments box still has the comments for photo 1
Click in the blank area around the photo
Photo 1’s comments are now applied to photo 2
Solution
If you edit comments this way, edit the comment and then click in the blank area to get iPhoto to save the comments before you scroll to a new picture.
If you are having problems getting iPhoto 4.0.1 to update your thumbnails, check the permissions on your Pictures and iPhoto Library folders.
In my case, both folders had a group of “unknown” instead of “staff” Changing that allowed me to update my photo library!
And no, using Disk Utility’s Repair Permissions did not fix this, nor did Disk Warrior, nor any of the other of myriad of fixes.
I am still not able to rebuild my photo library by holding down shift-option while launching iPhoto. the rebuild gets to the end and then iPhoto crashes.
So I made a movie in Final Cut Express and went to burn it in iDVD.
Two days later, four kernel panics, 100 failed burns, crashes, etc, iChat getting corrupted and crashing when sounds were played, I have done a Archived Install from the G5 discs, installing jaguar, then upgraded to panther, and now I can burn in iDVD just fine, iChat works, all is happy.
I have not reinstalled the MS MOuse Driver nor Keyspan yet, plus I have not moved in a lot of my library prefs, but the only thing that fixed iDVD was a reinstall from the G5 Jag disc. I tried everything, believe you me.
After the Apple Store Grand Opening, I had to move some photos from the laptop to the G5 and I wanted to preserve my comments. So I broke out the trust Caption Buddy, which gave me errors.
After some wasted time, I found that on a system using FileVault, “/Users/yourname/Sites/index.html” as posix file becomes “:yourname:Sites:index.html” whereas on a non-FileVault system, it becomes “Macintosh HD:Users:yourname:Sites:index.html”
I plugged my stalwart 3G iPod into my g5 dock yesterday, iTunes launched and then gave me a -36 error and failed. Ok, so now my song list on the iPod was hosed. I tried again, same thing.
I tried to restore the iPod but that locked up - even Panther. I had to hard reboot the mac. Several more attempts at this , and several hours later, I took my iPod to Comp USA to replace it under my TAP warranty.
I got home with a new 40 (and new accessories too!) but this iPod behaved like the last one. What the hell?
so I mounted my iTunes library over the net and plugged my iPod into the laptop. It synced fine. ok, great.
I ran DiskWarrior on the G5 and it fixed some disk errors, but the iPod issue remained.
So I unplugged the iSight and usb hubs (I have two, daisy chained) and now it worked! Ok, hmm. I plugged the iSight back in, still worked. Then I plugged the two hubs in, crash. Hmm.
I then plugged in just the first hub and it worked. OK. I plugged in the second hub and it still worked, but the updating would do three songs quickly, pause for two seconds, then three more, etc.
I unplugged the iSight and the Mac kernel paniced. Hmm.
So I went and checked everything and sure enough, the power brick for the second USB hub had fallen off the end of the power strip it was plugged into!
I plugged it back in and the iSight and now my iPod is syncing just fine.
So, at least on a dual g5, the power draw of the USB bus affects the power draw of the firewire bus, and can cause an iPod to lose enough power to cause the hard drive to shut down, which then locks up Panther.
As I have used Panther, here are some things I noticed that are new to those of using OS X for awhile:
Finder
Delete files system owns: You can now select a folder you don’t own (say system owns it) and delete it in the Finder. The finder will ask for your admin password. This is the Unix equivalent of sudo rm -rf ./
Built in Zip: You can now zip files using the Finder’s contextual menu. Control/Right click on a file or folder and choose Archive… The Finder also encodes Mac files so they decode properly.
I archived a jpeg photo that I added a resource icon to with Graphic Converter and moved it to my PC, then unzipped it. What Panther does is encode the resource fork (and other meta data) into a folder named __MacOSX Inside there is a file for every file in the folder, with the filename prefixed with ._ So yes, you can unzip Mac archives on windows and the users will get the data fork (jpeg) files normally!
So I then made sure I had a data fork only jpeg image and archived that. I then unarchived it on Windows. You still get the __MACOSX folder but it is empty. Too bad Apple could not optimize out that folder if it was not needed.
I also took a 587 megabyte disk image and did some tests against Aladdin’s DropZip 7.0.3 and Stuffit Expander 7.0.3:
Compress
Expand
Finder
9m 14s
1m 30s
DropZip
25m 54s
N/A
Stuffit Expander
N/A
5m 25s
Exposé
Exposé is Apple’s cool new window management tool. Once you have used it, you’ll wonder how you lived without it. Those engineers deserve a year’s bonus pay.
Anyhow, it is great, just press F9, F10 and F11 to see it in action. F11 is the most useful for those of us who download to the Desktop. If you chat a lot, say with iChat, F10 is super nice. Hear a bleep that someone messaged you, but their window is occluded? F10 to the rescue. And the windows update live while Exposed, too.
Yes, you can use mouse buttons and screen corners - I happen to prefer the F-Keys.
Speed
Panther is much faster. Disk access is faster. Applications launch faster. The User Interface is snappier. Everything is faster. Even help is fast - It is usable for the first time! RAM helps too - When I was importing 2 gigabytes of email into Mail.app, I was using a lot of virtual memory (my G4 has 896 megs of ram) and you could see the performance hit. Once that was done and I quit mail, it freed up the VM and the machine became super speedy once again.
Mail
Mail is much improved in Panther. I was able to import over 597,000 messages into Mail with one crash. I was trying to do the import over the network and I think it didn’t like that. Once I moved the email (2 gigabytes worth) to the local drive, the import went fine. About 14 hours to import. I did lose the unread status of all mail. Every message came in as unread.
Mail is much faster. Very zippy looking up address names and deleting messages.
The new threading is very nice, allowing you to see threads of conversation grouped together, instead of sparsely laid out in the mail list. You can toggle this behavior.
Addresses now become these cool objects that you can easily select to delete or move around. If you want to edit them, just click the little triangle and choose Edit. This is really cool, as it turns a textual representation of a person into a real object.
Searching in mail is pretty quick. Not as fast as Eudora 6, but fast enough. Searching all 597,000 emails for “lmgetm” in Eudora took 1m 45s, wheras in Mail it took 3m 33s. I rarely search all 600K emails though, so the extra time is not an issue.
The mail (on disk) for Eudora was 1.9gb. The size was the same for Mail.app. The indexing (which took 24 hours) added only 350mb to the size. Not bad at all!
Mail will now show the picture of the user you are emailing if there is one in your address book.
Mail now allows you to load images for HTML email if you turn off HTML loading by default, so be sure to uses the Viewing preferences to disable HTML. You want to do this so spammers cannot track you. You can then load images for known, good HTML email.
Mail now has a “Send Again” option under the Message menu!
Classic
If you happen to use Classic, open up the System Preferences, choose the Classic panel and check the box to show the Classic status in the menu. This is cool. You can now easily start and stop classic without opening the System Preferences.
iCal
Info Drawer: The tabbed palette of the old iCal is gone and is replaced with a really slick drawer. Inside the drawer you can set the calendar, item text, alarms (more than one), repeating schedule, etc. The repeat is nice - If you choose custom, you get an integrated modal dialog to set the event up, which fades away when done.
The one thing about the drawer that iCal does wrong is that it does not resize the window if the window is too wide. This means if you have iCal zoomed to fit your screen, choosing “Show Info” does nothing, as the drawer is offscreen.
Alarms: The alarms in iCal are much improved. When an alarm goes off, you are given buttons to dismiss it, snooze it or find it in iCal. If more than one alarm goes off, you get a scrolling list of alarms, vs. multiple dialogs.
Address Book
The Address Book brought some much needed changes. You can now specify a card as a company with a simple checkbox. You can easily add friends and spouse fiends for example. There are preferences to control how phone numbers are formatted (yay!) and even a new privacy option that when turned on for your card, allows you to check off which fields you do or do no want exported when you send someone your vCard.
File Vault
File Vault is Apple’s answer to us powerbook users who have sensitive data on their laptops. File Vault can be used on a home machine as well, but it is more useful on the road.
Even though you have a password on your laptop, if your laptop is stolen, the thief can remove the hard disk from your laptop and attach it to a new computer, thus accessing all of your files. File Vault counters this by encrypting every bit of data in your home folder.
This means as you read and write files, they are decrypted and encrypted on the fly. You can only do your entire home folder, which is a bit of a bummer - I’d like to specify a list of folders, including those on my keychain drive, to keep encrypted. Maybe in a later version?
When you set up File Vault using the Security System Preference, you must specify a master password. This is nice, especially if you have multiple users or are a consultant setting up a client’s machine. This “backdoor” password allows you to decrypt the data should someone forget their password. Forget the user password and the master password and your data is gone, forever.
File Vault seems to encrypt into a new file system and then after verification, replaces your old data with the encrypted data. This is good news should something fail during encryption.
Apple System Profiler
Apple System Profiler is now simply called “System Profiler” and is still located in /Applications/Utilities/
Console
The console is an application in /Applications/Utilities/ that lets you see the logs applications print messages into. Now there is a really nice “Logs” button that can show you all logs, such as crash reports, system logs, etc, and especially cool, delete logs. No more hunting for them on your disk!
Activity Viewer
The new Activity Viewer is incredible. You can see a pie chart of memory use, or a CPU usage graph over time. You can sample an application that is sucking up CPU time and send that report to the developer, helping them figure out what is wrong. Activity Viewer is your friend when your machine seems really slow.
Application Crashes
Now when an application crashes, you are given a chance to send a crash report to Apple. Yay! Maybe they will be able to fix OS bugs faster now or at least report to developers with very buggy applications.
Well Panther is finally out (early, too! This guy got his) and I must tell you, Panther is amazing! You’ll find Panther to be much, much faster and more streamlined. There is so much to talk about!
If you are the kind of person that likes to upgrade ASAP, you’ll find Panther incredibly useful. I have not run into any software yet that does not work, however some third party extensions may need touch ups.
If you do upgrade or archive and install, be sure to run DiskWarrior first to fix any date or disk issues. Reformatting the disk is the best choice, but you do lose all of your data, so be careful and backup properly.
Panther started out as a ho-hum upgrade, but the speed and Exposé along with all of the polish to Mail, Address Book, etc has made this a worthy upgrade.
I keep a album of photos at http://www.geeksrus.com/albums/ and I have been using Transmit to sync my local photo folder, which is generated by Simeon Leifer’s wonderful BetterHTMLExport. I’d noticed that transmit was not doing a proper job, and was slow!
So having recent learned how to use rsync over ssh, and learning how to use public/private keys with SSH on my web server (which also runs Unix, the same as Mac OS X) I was able to make a simple script to keep my web album folder in sync with the one on my hard disk. not only does it work, it is lightning fast!
If you have set up a ssh key on your Mac, and put the public key on your server, then you can just run this script and wham, you’re synced! You can learn how to set up your ssh passwords by issuing the following command in the terminal, pressing space to get all of the text, then search for “password”
man ssh
here is the text that is important:
ssh implements the RSA authentication protocol automatically. The user
creates his/her RSA key pair by running ssh-keygen(1). This stores the
private key in $HOME/.ssh/identity and the public key in
$HOME/.ssh/identity.pub in the user’s home directory. The user should
then copy the identity.pub to $HOME/.ssh/authorizedkeys in his/her home
directory on the remote machine (the authorizedkeys file corresponds to
the conventional $HOME/.rhosts file, and has one key per line, though the
lines can be very long). After this, the user can log in without giving
the password. RSA authentication is much more secure than rhosts authen-
tication.
