The Adventures of Systems Boy!

Systems Boy has moved! Redirecting NOW...

2009-05-05T13:34:00.002-04:00

Here we go!

Meet the New Systems Boy!

2008-08-30T10:38:00.006-04:00

Hello everyone! I'm back!

Things have been going extremely well at the new job and the new home, and they're finally settling down to a pace at which I find myself able to write. And, what with the new job and all, I've got about a jillion things to write about. But I've been holding off because I finally decided to move the site to my own hosting provider. Using Blogger for the past three years has been great, but there are certain limitations to the platform that I'm starting to feel, and certain advantages to self-hosting that I think I'm ready for.

So, the new site can be found at the exceptionally sensible URL:
http://systemsboy.com

Meet the New Systems Boy; Same as the Old Systems Boy, Basically

The site is live and active, and all the content has been easily ported over to Wordpress, thanks to some terrific reader feedback. Though all the old content remains available on the new site, I will also maintain a complete (though unsearchable) archive of the old site (everything including and prior to this article) at:
http://systemsboy.com/bloggerarchive

You know. Just in case.

Finally, sometime in the near future (possibly by the end of the week), any Blogger URL on this site will redirect to the new front page. And, of course, following this article, all new content will be posted there as well.

Please feel free to let me know what you think of the new look in the comments, if you're so inclined. And do check back soon for new articles, which should start appearing very shortly.

Cheers!

What's Going On

2008-06-02T13:16:00.013-04:00

I've attempted this post twice now, and it never seems to come out right. It's one of those future-of-the-blog type posts that everyone hates so much, but it's kind of a biggie. So here goes attempt number three.

MIA
Regular readers may have noticed the blight of posts lately (with the exception of the pre-programmed Anniversary post). Also, uncharacteristically, comments have gone unanswered. And the missing scripts and site banner have surely been a tip-off that something is amiss. Indeed.

The short version is that I am in the process of moving to a new home, and in the process of transitioning to a new job (which job was offered me on the anniversary of this site, ironically — Universe, you're a riot). As you can imagine, changing up these two things alone changes so many things that fall beneath them in the hierarchy of life. A blog is certainly no exception.

Earthlink Blows
To be a bit more specific — or as specific as I can at this point — the missing banner and downloads are due to my change of home address and subsequent ISP service transfer. Seems when I transferred my cable service to my new home, Earthlink started a whole new account in my name and unceremoniously rendered the entirety of my old account — including every file I'd stored on their FTP server over the past eight years — null and void. Yep. They deleted all my shit without so much as a phone call and charged me for the pleasure. Rat bastards! If I weren't already signed up and so damn frantic already, I'd drop them like a hot potato. Rest assured, I will do so when next I have a chance (as I did with Sprint — how you like me now, Sprint? Bitches!). Earthlink has just lost my 8+ years of business. Maybe not today; maybe not tomorrow; but soon, and for the rest of my life.

The Future
All of this in conjunction with my upcoming change of employ leaves the future of this blog very much in question. For one, without Earthlink, how will I handle the file archive? How will I handle every dead link on my now-three-year-old site? Would I continue to use Blogger for the site? Or should I start running my own site to mitigate such future transitions? Doing so would allow me to update all the broken links en masse fairly easily, but would be extra hassle, responsibility and downtime. Going forward, will I have issues with the new employer? Or maybe I won't. Will I finally be able to reveal my secret identity? What will I blog about? The fame! The fortune! It's downright dizzying!

Or should I just take this as an omen and throw in the towel?

Honestly, I'd like to not do that. And my friends and colleagues tell me that I "have to" keep blogging. So understand that I will be looking hard for ways to continue writing about systems in a public forum such as this. Understand that The Adventures of Systems Boy! is not planning on going away. (And if it ever does I'll post an explanation. This will never be one of those sites where the author just stops writing. I frickin' hate that. Just kill it, man! Jesus!) But please also understand that this transition will require a great deal of thought, planning and effort on my part, particularly if I switch hosts. It will take time. I may not write much for a while. Comments that don't require a response (and maybe even those that do) may go unanswered for some time. And there are likely to be some significant changes to the content of the site. (Suffice to say, the Macintosh platform plays a significantly smaller role at my new job. Linux, anyone? Anyone?)

In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions regarding a transition such as the one I'm describing, I'm all ears. Otherwise, please feel free to catch up on the past three years worth of posts. I will write more as soon as I'm able, and will update the site periodically as details about its future solidify. Please stay tuned. (God, I finally get what feed readers are good for!)

Okay, I think that covers everything.

Hope to see you all soon!

UPDATE:
The banner is back! Finally! That was bugging the hell out of me.

Happy Birthday to Me!

2008-05-29T00:01:00.003-04:00

Today The Adventures of Systems Boy turns 3! I totally spaced last year's anniversary — so I was totally shocked to realize that it's been 3 years, not 2 that I've been doing this. But this year I'm catching it in time thanks in part to Blogger's new scheduling feature (currently in beta as of this writing, which writing is actually occurring a full two months in advance of the actual birthday and scheduled for publishing on said birthday). Blogger continues to add features I want, so I'm still here. And scheduling is one I've wanted for a while. Those Google folk, why they're downright prescient sometimes.

In any case, this year, for whatever reason, I've seen a general increase in comments, and most of those comments have been really great. It's quite gratifying to realize that there are more than a smattering of people who are actually interested in reading about and discussing this weird, wild Mac lab management niche, and who come here to do it. That makes me feel like a success in some small way.

Anyhoo, I don't want to toot my horn all day. Just wanted to say thanks to anyone who's reading, and especially to those who've contributed. It's appreciated!

And Happy Birthday to me!

Adobe Update Hell

2008-05-07T12:44:00.008-04:00

I've been hopeful in the past about Adobe installers, and there have been improvements. But Adobe's update process still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth every time I try to use it, which is with less and less frequency, largely because of said bitter taste.

Adobe Updater: Update Thyself? Not Confidence-Inspiring
(click image for larger view)

Even more frustrating is the fact that Adobe's updaters continue to annoy even after being expressly told not to. To wit, this dialog popped up out of nowhere recently, despite its preferences being set otherwise.

Adobe Updater Preferences: Completely Disregarded
(click image for larger view)

I contend that Adobe's automated update process is just plain broken. It's actually much easier to use their support site than their updater. That's what I do when I need to run Adobe updates. And I keep the updater turned off.

Or at least I try to.

A Brief Foray Into Windows

2008-04-29T16:53:00.015-04:00

I just had a rare occasion to use a Windows XP machine here in the lab. Oy, was it painful! All I wanted to do was take three simple screen shots — just three — for an instructional article I was writing for our community.

It took a half an hour.

I started, of course, by logging in to a Windows box. That went fairly smoothly. Type my name and password, and, sure enough, I get in. So I open a new window by going to the Start menu and clicking "My Computer," although it's not my computer. It's anything but. Still, "My Computer" gets the new window open. I take my first screen shot by hitting the "Print Screen" key. Yes, Windows has a dedicated screen capture key called "Print Screen." Hit it and it sends the entire screen to the clipboard. Not to a file, mind you. To the clipboard. Next you'll need to open up some kind of image editor. I chose the venerable Photoshop CS3. Opened the app, created a new document, and hit control-v to paste my screen grab in. Good (if a bit of a pain in the ass) so far. Next I made some settings in my open window, and made another screen grab. And once more for good measure.

In Photoshop I decided that it would be best to save my files to my centrally-located network home account, so I hit the save button and navigated there, named the file, and... The Save dialog crashed. After waiting about five minutes I decided that the only thing to do was to force quit Photoshop, which I did, losing all my screen grabs and necessitating beginning the entire process anew.

Windows XP: Definitely Not My Computer
(click image for larger view)

The next time around I saved each of my screen captures locally as I went, and that seemed to go okay. Next I just wanted to copy these documents to my network account so I could access them from my office Mac, but the copy failed, producing a meaningless error message. Looking through my files, however, it was clear what the problem was. Apparently, during the crash Photoshop had spewed about three thousand temp files all over my home account, and these needed to be deleted before Windows would copy anything over.

So, I began the process of deleting these three thousand or so files by selecting about six hundred of them and hitting the delete key. I kind of like that Windows' delete key actually deletes stuff. That's a nice touch. What I didn't like was that deleting 600 zero byte files was going to take four minutes. But what was I to do? I went ahead with the file deletion. Four minutes of sitting and watching that miserable, 8-bit trash deletion progress bar — you know, the one where the trash files fly through the air and dissipate in a big pink sparkle — is enough to turn just about anyone's brain to mush. Which is probably why, after it was all over I went ahead and switched to list view (though there seems to be no way to make this setting stick across windows) and selected the remaining 2400-or-so files, right-clicked and hit delete.

Eleven minutes?! Argh!

With some time to kill I decided to log in to an adjacent Mac. Once logged in the Windows brain-fog cleared and it dawned on me: I could just delete the files from the Mac! And it won't take eleven frickin' minutes!

And by golly, that's just what I did.

Eleven seconds later I was able to copy up my files from Windows to my network account and get on with my life.

When I think of how easy all that would have been on a Mac I'm appalled. Absolutely appalled. Windows is ugly, flimsy and crash-prone by comparison. And the user experience is dead-awful. It's no wonder I avoid it like the plague.

God help the Windows Admins! You have my pity.

Time Machine After Logout

2008-04-24T11:19:00.013-04:00

I've been using Time Machine for a while now. And I've noticed some interesting things about its behavior. Of particular note, I've noticed that Time Machine does not back up your data when you are logged out. I found this strange until I figured out why this is the case.

I first noticed Time Machine not backing up logged-out users after setting up the staff computers here at work. Oddly, my work computer did back up when I was logged out, which I realized when I noticed a backup failure due lack of drive space. According to the Console logs this backup attempt had occurred in the middle of the night. Clearly Time Machine was able to backup when users were logged out, but it would only do so on my machine. So what was the difference?

By default, Mac OS X wisely un-mounts external volumes when a user logs out. This makes sense for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it's what users expect, and it's the least likely to break something if a user logs out and pulls their firewire plug without ejecting their disk. It's a very sane default that errs on the side of data protection. But it's not always what you want. For instance, say you have network shares, like external RAID drives, that are connected via firewire (which, in fact, we do). Or say your network backups that run in the middle of night get stored on a firewire volume (which ours do). If you want these drives constantly available you need to be able to keep them mounted even when no user is logged in. Fortunately, Apple provides a method for doing this, though it's by no means obvious.

The trick to keeping external drives mounted after a logout lies in a little .plist file. The name of this file is autodiskmount.plist, and it does not exist by default; you have to make it. In the file should be the following text:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">

<dict>
<key>AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Put this file in:
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/

And reboot. (Yes, reboot.)

Now all external drives (firewire, USB, eSATA, etc.) will stay mounted after a logout. If they're shared, they'll always be available. And they'll always be available to Time Machine.

So the difference between the staff machines and mine? My computer is set to never unmount drives at logout. Apparently, Time Machine is perfectly capable of running even when no one is logged in. But it obviously needs the Time Machine drive available to do so. Keeping firewire drives mounted post-logout will allow Time Machine to work all night long. Sweet!

And since I'm so crazy with the Installer Packages these days, I'm including one here that will install the necessary preference file to make all this happen. You know, just to make your lives a little easier.

Download KeepExternalDisksMounted

You're welcome!

UPDATE 1: A reader asked in the comments how I came to have the preference file installed on my system. I'd put it there long ago because I needed firewire drives mounted for rsync backups of staff machines. But I certainly didn't figure out how to create that file myself. Credit for that goes to this Mac OS X Hints hint. It's got all the details if you're interested.

UPDATE 2: One other thing I forgot to mention: Why is this useful? I mean, if you're logged out you're not really capable of creating any new data, so there's nothing really new to backup anyway, right? This is mostly true, indeed. But imagine your boss uses Time Machine for his hourly backups. Now imagine he creates a whole buttload of data — I don't know, emails to the CEO, photos of his kids, whatever — and he creates this data right before he leaves for the day. Then, safe in the knowledge that Time Machine's got his back, he logs out and goes home for the weekend. That weekend there's a power surge or something, and his machine is fried. "No problem," he thinks, "I have my backup." But his most recent data is gone. His photos, his draft to the CEO, gone. And guess who's to blame? Yup. The Systems Admin. Your ass is grass, and Time Machine is the lawn mower. (Uh, this is why I don't write in the mornings.)

Personally, I think it would be smart if Time Machine asked you at logout if you'd like to make a backup, or at least warned you that backups would not be performed after logout. This seems like a bit of an oversight on Apple's part.

The other time this can be useful is when you're creating your first backup. This is typically a lot of data. Here in the office we told folks to let it run overnight. But they couldn't log out. So we dropped them to the Login Window with Fast User Switching. Still, it would have been that much more intuitive if we'd just told them to log out like they always do, and that their backups would be ready in the morning.

So yeah, not earth-shattering, but still potentially useful. And interesting on an academic level to know that Time Machine will run sans login.

I have to go install that preference file on my staff machines now. Bye!

NetBoot Part 5

2008-04-11T11:41:00.002-04:00

So far this NetBoot/NetInstall thing is working out a thousand times better than I ever thought it would. I wish I'd done this years ago. Not only does it save time, it also reduces errors. This is often one of the most overlooked features of automating a process: the less human interaction in the process, the fewer mistakes can be made. I have only to compare the set of instructions I gave to last year's crew for building a new system to the instructions for using the new NetInstall system to see evidence of this truism. The list of human actions to take — and, thus, potentially screw up — is significantly shorter using the new process. And that's a beautiful thing.

At this point I've converted about half the staff to Leopard with the NetInstall system, and for the most part it's been quick and painless for both me and them. Contrast with years past, where upgrading staff computers — which are both the most customized, and the most important to preserve the data of — has been fraught with tension and minor hiccups. This year I almost feel like I've forgotten something, it's been so easy. But staff would surely let me know if there were problems. (I'm so knocking wood right now.)

I've also had an opportunity to test building multiple machines simultaneously. Yesterday I built five Macs at the same time, and, amazingly, all five built in about the same time it takes to build one — about a half an hour. I'm astounded. We should be able to build our new lab workstations this summer in a day. And still have time for a long lunch. And for the most part I'll be able to offload that job to my assistants.

As I finish up the system, I've realized some things. First of all, it sort of reminds me of software development — or at least what I imagine software development to be like — because I'm building little tiny components that all add up to a big giant working whole. Also, as I write components, I find myself able to reuse them, or repurpose them for certain, specific scenarios. So, in a sense, the more I build, the easier the building becomes, as I imagine is true in software development. Organization is also key. I find myself with two repositories: one contains the "build versions" — all the resources needed to build the packages — and one contains the finished products — the packages themselves — organized into something resembling the physical organization (packages for staff computers in one area, packages for workstations in another, for instance). It's shockingly fascinating to work on something like this, something that's built from tiny building blocks and that relies very heavily on good organization. I'm really enjoying it so far, and I'm a little sad that the groundwork is built and it's nearly done. There's just something fundamentally satisfying about building a solid infrastructure. I guess that's just something I innately like about my job.

The next step in this process, as I've alluded, will be to do a major build, i.e. our new batch of workstations when they come in the summer, and an update of all our existing computers — all-in-all about 40 machines. Between now and then there are sure to be some updates, so I'll probably update my base config before we do the rest of the lab. And then will come the fun. I will report back with all the juicy details when that happens, in what will probably be the final installment of this series.

See you in summertime!

Firefox URL Bar for Mac Users

2008-04-08T12:11:00.005-04:00

The fact that John Gruber is trying and writing about the latest Firefox betas — which, by the way, I am frickin' loving — is a testament to how good this release will be. Though he's not switching for a variety of reasons, his review is still quite complimentary.

Most of Gruber's Firefox complaints either don't bother me or don't affect me, but there is one that has always bugged the crap out of me: a single-click in the URL field of the browser highlights the entire URL. This is almost never what I want to do. If I want to highlight the entire URL, I'll just hit Command-L and be done with it. If I'm clicking in the URL field it's because I mean to edit that thing, and I want my click to place the cursor right where I clicked, damnit. Despite Firefox 3's attempt — and, I should mention, general success — to integrate better with your platform of choice, it gets it wrong here.

Fortunately, Gruber's posted a link to a dude who has the skinny on the fix. Here it is in my own words, if you don't feel like following the links:

Type "about:config" in the URL field
Filter by "clickSelectsAll"
Change the "browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll" to "true" (just double-click it)

Firefox 3 Beta 5: Fix the URL Bar
(click image for larger view)

From now on clicking in the URL bar in Firefox will behave as it does in Safari: single-click places the cursor; double-click highlights the word; triple-click highlights the whole URL.

Oh, sweet merciful heaven, that's good stuff.

NetBoot Part 4

2008-03-31T17:11:00.013-04:00

So this is going great. I have a really solid Base OS Install, and a whole buttload of packages now. Packages that set everything from network settings to custom and specialized users. I can build a typical system in about 45 minutes, and I can do most of the building from my office (or any other computer in the lab that has ARD installed).

I'm also getting fairly adept at making packages. A good many of my packages are just scripts that make settings to the system, so I'm getting pretty handy with the bash and quite intimate with dscl. But, perhaps most importantly, I'm learning how to make all sorts of settings in Leopard via the command-line that I never knew how to do.

The toughest one so far has been file sharing. In our lab we share all our Work partitions to the entire internal network over AFP and SMB. In the past we used SharePoints to modify the NetInfo database to do so, but this functionality has all been moved over to Directory Services. To complicate matters, SAMBA no longer relies simply on standard SMB configuration files in standard locations, and the starting and stopping of the SMB daemon is handled completely by launchd. So figuring this all out has been a headache. But I think I've got it!

Setting Up AFP
Our first step in this process is setting up the share point for AFP (AppleFileshareProtocol) sharing. This wasn't terribly difficult to figure out, especially now that I've been using Directory Services to create new users. To create an AFP share in Leopard, you use dscl. Once you grok the syntax of dscl it's fairly easy to use. It basically goes like this:

command node -action Data/Source value

The "Data Source" is the thing you're actually operating on. I like to think of it as a plist entry in the database — like a hierarchically structured file — which it basically is, or sometimes I envision the old-style NetInfo structures. To get the needed values for my new share, I used dscl to look at a test share I'd created in the Sharing Preferences:

dscl . -read SharePoints/TEST

The output looked like this:

dsAttrTypeNative:afp_guestaccess: 1
dsAttrTypeNative:afp_name: TEST
dsAttrTypeNative:afp_shared: 1
dsAttrTypeNative:directory_path: /Volumes/TEST
dsAttrTypeNative:ftp_name: TEST
dsAttrTypeNative:sharepoint_group_id: XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXX
dsAttrTypeNative:smb_createmask: 644
dsAttrTypeNative:smb_directorymask: 755
dsAttrTypeNative:smb_guestaccess: 1
dsAttrTypeNative:smb_name: TEST
dsAttrTypeNative:smb_shared: 1
AppleMetaNodeLocation: /Local/Default
RecordName: TEST
RecordType: dsRecTypeStandard:SharePoints

Okay. So I needed to use dscl to create a record in the SharePoints data source with all these values. Fortunately, the "sharepoint_group_id" is not required for the share to work, because I'm not yet sure how to generate that number. But create the share with all the other values and you should be okay:

sudo dscl . -create SharePoints/my-share
sudo dscl . -create SharePoints/my-share afp_guestaccess 1
sudo dscl . -create SharePoints/my-share afp_name My-Share
sudo dscl . -create SharePoints/my-share afp_shared 1
sudo dscl . -create SharePoints/my-share directory_path /Volumes/HardDrive
sudo dscl . -create SharePoints/my-share ftp_name my-share
sudo dscl . -create SharePoints/my-share smb_createmask 644
sudo dscl . -create SharePoints/my-share smb_directorymask 755
sudo dscl . -create SharePoints/my-share smb_guestaccess 1
sudo dscl . -create SharePoints/my-share smb_name my-share
sudo dscl . -create SharePoints/my-share smb_shared 1

This series of commands will create a share called "My-Share" out of the drive called "HardDrive."

After modifying the Directory Services database, it's always smart to restart it:

sudo killall DirectoryService

And we need to make sure AFP is running by starting the daemon and reloading the associated Launch Daemons:

sudo AppleFileServer
sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.AppleFileServer.plist
sudo launchctl load -F /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.AppleFileServer.plist

Not the easiest process, but not too bad. SMB was much tougher to figure out.

Setting Up SMB
Setting up SMB works similarly, but everything is in a completely different and not-necessarily standard place. To wit, Leopard has two different smb.conf files: one that's auto-generated (and which you should not touch) in /var/db, and one in the standard /etc location. Fortunately, it turned out, I didn't have to modify either of these. But still, it led to some confusion. The way SMB is managed in Leopard is rather roundabout and interdependent. Information about SMB share is stored in flat files — one per share — in /var/samba/shares. So, to create our "my-share" share, we need a file named for the share (but all lower-case):

sudo touch /var/samba/shares/my-share

And in that file we need some basic SMB info to describe the share:

#VERSION 3
path=/Volumes/HardDrive
comment=HardDrive
usershare_acl=S-1-1-0:F
guest ok=yes
directory mask=755
create mask=644

Next — and this was the tough part to figure out — we need to modify one, single, very important preference file that basically informs Launch Services that SMB should now be running:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.smb.server "EnabledServices" '(disk)'

This command modifies the file com.apple.smb.server.plist in our /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration folder. That file is watched by launchd such that when it is modified thusly, launchd knows to start and run the smbd daemon in the appropriate fashion. Still, for good measure, I like to reload the LaunchDaemon for the SMB server by hand. Don't need to, but it's a nice idea:

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.smb.server.preferences.plist
sudo launchctl load -F /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.smb.server.preferences.plist

That's pretty much it! There are a few oddities: For one, the new share will not initially appear in the Sharing Preferences pane, nor will the Finder show it as a Shared Folder when you open the window.

Shared Folder: This Won't Show Without a Reboot
(click image for larger view)

But the share will be active, and all will be right with the world after a simple reboot. (Isn't it always!) Also, if you haven't done it already, you may have to set permissions on your share using chmod in order for anyone to see it.

I was kind of surprised at how hard it was to set up file sharing via the command-line. But I'm glad I stuck with it and figured it out. It's good knowledge to have.

Hopefully someone else will find it useful as well.

NetBoot Part 3

2008-03-31T17:00:00.006-04:00

I've become quite the package whiz, if I do say so myself. Actually, I'm probably doing something ass-backwards, but still, I wanted to share some of my working methods as they seem to be, well... Um... Working...

One of the things I'm doing is using packages to run shell scripts that make computer settings (like network settings and user-creation) rather than actually installing files.

PackageMaker: I Prefer the 10.4 Version of Packages
(click image for larger view)

This can be done in PackageMaker by taking some creative liberties with preflight and/or postflight scripts. The only hitch is that PackageMaker insists that you install at least some files onto the target system.

PackageMaker: Installing Scripts to /tmp
(click image for larger view)

So the majority of my packages contain only a single script. That script first gets installed to /tmp, thus fulfilling PackageMaker's "must install files" directive.

PackageMaker: A Postflight Script
(click image for larger view)

The script then runs as a posflight script, and the last line of the script deletes the instance of the script in /tmp, just for good measure.

Shell Script: Removing the Script from /tmp
(click image for larger view)

It could be argued that there's no reason to create packages from scripts, that you could just as easily run the scripts directly in ASR, but packages offer a couple of advantages. For one, packages leave receipts, so it's easy to check and see if something's been set on a computer. For two, packages are easy to deal with; assistants and other SysAdmins know how they work and can easily understand how to use them. Need to change a machine's settings? Don't run a script. Hell, don't even bother opening System Preferences. Just open and run a package. What could be easier (and less error-prone, I might add)? From an ease-of-use perspective, packages have a huge advantage. And ease-of-use adds efficiency. Which is why I not-so-suddenly find myself in the envious position of being able to build systems in about half the time (or less!) it used to take. That's a huge improvement!

Using this method (and sound DNS) I've been able to write packages that configure network settings, create computer-specific users, set custom disk and file permissions, set up autofs, bind to our authentication server and set up SSH for password-less login.

Next on the list: File Sharing!

Should be fun.

Firmware Goodness

2008-03-12T10:00:00.005-04:00

I don't usually get too excited about firmware updates, mainly because the things they fix rarely tend to affect me, for whatever reason. But the last Leopard Graphics Update from a few weeks ago has actually caused me some problems. Two, I believe, to be precise.

The first problem I've had may or may not be related to the Leopard Graphics Update: occasionally my machine — my brand new, fresh-out-of-the-box machine — just locks up, requiring a force reboot. I don't remember where, but I do remember reading that people were associating this with the Leopard Graphics Update, and it definitely started happening to me immediately after that update, so I'm fairly sure the update was the cause. The second problem has been cosmetic: when typing in the Spotlight menubar the drop-down sheet flickers in and out, causing a really annoying strobe effect until the window stops updating. Very irritating!

The good news is, Apple's latest ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT Firmware Update fixes the second problem. Here's hoping it fixes the first one as well. Only time will tell.

UPDATE 3-28-07:
Yep. All fixed. Since applying this update my machine has not locked up. Nice.

A Rift in the Space-Time Continuum

2008-03-11T12:28:00.007-04:00

I did it. Yes, I finally did it: I went and pissed off Time Machine.

I've been using the Staff Backup drive for my Time Machine backups, see. And that drive needs a certain amount of free space for any large chunks of data that staff might create during any given day. So when Time Machine finally ate up all the disk space on the drive, I decided to see what would happen if I cleared some space up by hand, the old fashioned way. And so I deleted the first month's worth of data from my Time Machine backupdb folder.

Now, I'm not totally stupid, and I have at least a good enough understanding of how Time Machine works to know that this would cause problems, but I was curious, and I wanted to see what those problems would be and how they would manifest themselves.

The first thing I got was a generic Time Machine failure:

Time Machine Failure
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Clicking the red info button revealed surprising details, considering my drive showed 200GB free:

Time Machine Error: Really? How do You Figure?
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So I decided to run a backup and see what happened. The backup appeared to start smoothly, but eventually I wound up getting this message:

Time Machine Error: Funny Math
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Hmmm... I think I broke it.

It makes sense, really. I mean, it stands to reason that, in Time Machine, the first and oldest backup actually contains the most actual data. It's the base for all the other data. Subsequent backups only copy changes, but the first backup is kind of the Mother of All Backups, if you will. Deleting that first backup will, unsurprisingly, wreak all sort of havoc on your backups.

Havoc that is, as far as I can tell, irreversible. The only way I've found to fix this is to start the backups fresh. That is, turn off Time Machine, delete the old backups (or at least move the old backupdb folder out of the way), and then set Time Machine up again.

Bummer.

Oh well.

UPDATE:
Ahhh! That's more like it.

Time Machine: Back Up and Running
(click image for larger view)

iPhone 1.1.4 Update

2008-02-27T12:28:00.005-05:00

Just wanted to quickly post that the complaint I had about Mobile Safari's browser cache being pointless appears to have been a bug.

iPhone 1.1.4: It Works!
(click image for larger view)

And, happily, that bug has been fixed in the 1.1.4 update.

Yay!

Translucency

2008-02-22T18:20:00.004-05:00

Every now and then, when I connect to a network share, the window opens with its top slightly behind the menubar. This has been happening at least since Tiger, and I half expected it to go away in Leopard. But it hasn't. What has changed in Leopard, however, is the menubar, which is allegedly translucent.

Leopard Menubar: My Window has Been Decapitated
(click image for larger view)

But, as you can see from this screen grab, when one of my windows opens behind this supposedly translucent menubar you cannot see it. It just disappears. So, one of two things is happening here: either the menubar is not actually "translucent" but simply draws a shaded strip from the top of your Desktop image and layers the menubar atop that strip; or my window is not actually going up behind the menubar but, rather, is being partially sucked up into some neither-universe where graphics as we know them cease to exist.

Either way, it sure is disconcerting.

ScreenFlow and Opacity Redux

2008-02-22T15:41:00.013-05:00

I recently wrote some criticism of a couple very promising new applications: ScreenFlow and Opacity. Both these apps came out at roughly the same time, and each was of particular interest to me. Each also had some pretty glaring bugs.

One of the great things about being a member of the Mac Community is that it actually is a community. Loosely, It's a group of people with similar interests and ideas about the computing experience. And Mac software developers — perhaps more than anyone — feel keenly this bond. At least the good ones do.

So, in true Mac Community fashion, shortly after my initial reviews (like, the next day) I got comments from the developers of ScreenFlow and Opacity. And those comments basically said, "Hey, I addressed the bugs you mentioned, and have released an update to my software. Check it out!"

I have checked it out. And it is good.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to do a complete review of these products. And I'm sure that someone more qualified will beat me to it in any case. But I did want to mention a few things about each.

ScreenFlow
ScreenFlow is a revolutionary approach to screen capturing and screen-based presentation. It is a complete environment for creating computer-screen-based presentations, in fact, letting you capture both your computer screen, its audio, and the video and audio from an external camera all at the same time. ScreenFlow then drops you into a very elegant editing mode that allows you to do all sorts of tricks specifically designed for screencasts (the Callout Actions are particularly nice).

I had a few problems with the 1.0 version, but I'm happy to report that the latest update, v. 1.0.1, fixes them all. I've been playing around with it a lot, and I can't say I've really had any problems at all, at least on my home machine. My work machine sports a 30" monitor, however, and ScreenFlow has problems with its native resolutions. The good news is, it says so:

ScreenFlow Alert: Better Late than Never
(click image for larger view)

The bad news is that this alert comes up after you've captured your too-big screen. Still, it's absolutely crucial information, and this alert is better than the nothing we had in version 1.0. I'll take it.

Otherwise, ScreenFlow has been a complete joy to use, and I do anticipate buying it for our lab at some point, probably in the summer. I've even showed it to my boss, who was duly impressed.

If you're looking for such a beast, ScreenFlow makes all the others I've tried pale in comparison.

Opacity
Opacity is a graphics app dedicated to creating, editing and outputting screen graphics — for the web, applications or desktop icons. As an occasional icon creator I can tell you, something like this has been a long time coming. In the past I've used a combination of Illustrator, Photoshop and the IconBuilder plug-in for Photoshop to create icons. Opacity costs only slightly more than IconBuilder, and it doesn't require Photoshop. In fact, it doesn't require anything. It, like ScreenFlow, is a dedicated environment for doing one thing. Unified, task-based apps like this are all the rage right now, and I for one think it's great.

Opacity Interface: Simple and Specific
(click image for larger view)

Opacity is more personally interesting to me than it is something we'd need for the lab. It's also something I need more time to explore. ScreenFlow is almost instantly intelligible. But Opacity will require a bit more investigation on my part before I decide whether or not I need it. Since many of my icons are hand drawn with a Wacom, I'll need to investigate the level to which this will be possible in Opacity.

But there are two things I want to point out about Opacity. One, I like the idea of it very much, and I think it's actually fairly novel on the Mac. I'm sure professional icon designers are loving that this exists and that it might actually turn out to be good. Two, it seems to be a very well-though out application. I think icon design is actually a much more complex task than screencast recording. But Opacity strikes a really good balance between the complexity of the task and a clean, elegant UI. It might not be right for me in the end, but if you design computer graphics of any kind, you should certainly take Opacity for a spin.

Oh, and one other thing about Opacity I'd like to mention: Its latest version (1.0.1) resolves every issue I mentioned in my initial article.

So, my thanks to the creators of these fine applications. Not only have they made what look like a couple of really neat apps, but they've handled initial criticism with the aplomb worthy of a Mac Developer.

Great work, guys!

UPDATE:
Testing of Opacity continues, and not without issue. The program is a good deal more solid than it was in version 1.0, but, for the record, attempting to import very large Illustrator documents causes the "Out of memory" alert to rear its ugly head once again. This alert will cause the application to quit. And, unfortunately, the default behavior of Opacity is to open the previous document on launch. If that document happens to be a large Illustrator file that causes the alert and subsequent quit of the program, you will be unable to successfully launch Opacity without moving the offending file. Bummer.

Also of note, Opacity is not currently pressure-sensitive when used with a Wacom tablet, which may be a bit of a problem for some — myself included — though perhaps not a deal-breaker. I'm certainly not averse to creating line-art in pressure-sensitive programs (like Illustrator) and importing them into an app like Opacity if it beats my previous workflow. But obviously this won't work if the Illustrator file essentially kills Opacity.

In any case, like I said, this is all for the record. I still feel Opacity has great potential. That's why I'm testing it so rigorously.

Secondary DNS Configuration

2008-02-21T12:05:00.013-05:00

I recently had occasion to do some Mac OS X DNS configuration. Primary DNS setup is pretty straightforward, but I always get stuck on the secondary DNS config, and this week I had the (not so) rare privilege of discovering I'd been doing it wrong all along. I thought I'd post some quickie instructions for next time this comes up.

So, to set up your Mac OS X Server as a secondary DNS server (that is, if the primary goes down, this one will act as a failover), you'll need to open Server Admin and navigate to the DNS section (we'll use the 10.4 version, but the basic gist is the same in 10.5). Next, add a secondary zone under "Secondary Zones." This first one will be for your forward lookups. In the first field add the full name of your zone. In the second field add the IP address of your primary DNS server. It should look like this:

Secondary DNS: Forward Lookups
(click image for larger view)

Now add another secondary zone for the reverse lookups. This is exactly the same except that instead of the zone name in the first field, you'll use the reverse zone information. It looks like this:

Secondary DNS: Reverse Lookups
(click image for larger view)

Note that the reverse IP in the field should cover the zone IP range. That is, if your primary DNS server covers "192.168.1" zone, you'll enter the reverse info for that range. If your primary DNS covers all of "192.168" (notice the truncated IP number) then you should enter that. All together it should look like this:

Secondary DNS: All Together Now
(click image for larger view)

Once this is all set up and saved, you can start the service. You can tell it worked by listing the contents of /var/named. You should see two new files, one called your.domain.com.bak and one called your.IP.in-addr.arpa.bak. And these should be populated with the same DNS info as your primary.

And that's it! Enter the new secondary DNS server info in your Network System Preferences, just after the primary, and if your main DNS fails you'll be covered.

Oh, almost forgot, thanks to this dude for helping me figure all this out.

Linked

2008-02-21T11:56:00.003-05:00

I don't monitor my traffic, but I don't think I have a really heavy readership. Every now and then I have a minor hit, but for the most part we're pretty hardcore systems administration around here. It takes a very special kind of geek to follow exploits such as Tiger Lab Migration, Three Platforms, One Server or External Network Unification.

Truly special.

But all of a sudden I started getting comments on an old article from just over a year ago. Seems the Mac OS X 10.5.2 update causes a similar problem to one in the 10.4.9 update — network slowdowns due to bad delayed ack values, or some such — and MacFixit has linked to the old post. Neato! I feel popular!

Anyway... Hi, MacFixit folks!

Opacity: Another Crash-Happy 1.0 App

2008-02-18T12:42:00.004-05:00

It's 1.0 release week, here at TASB, apparently. It also appears to be crash week.

Another useful-looking app has caught my attention: Opacity. It's a graphics editor designed especially for doing one of my favorite things: icon creation.

Opacity, like ScreenFlow, looks like a really nice application built for doing one specific thing. Which makes it really good at doing that specific thing. And Opacity appears as though it will, someday, be quite good at icon creation. In fact, it looks to be the best icon-specific graphics editor I've seen thus far. But — and this seems to be a theme here lately — it crashes constantly.

Opacity: Crash-Happy
(click image for larger view)

I mean, like, unusably. Like during the tutorial. Not good. The saving grace here is that it at least autosaves a copy of your document. But when an icon editor, working on a single-layer, 512x512 pixel vector image, tells you it's out of memory (I have 5 GBs of RAM for crap's sake) when you're trying to save your file, you know there are some serious problems with the app. Am I right people? Seriously, who's with me here?

Opacity: Out of Memory? Already?
(click image for larger view)

'Nuff said, I think.

Opacity looks like it might be a really good application for icon creation — maybe the way to go. It's got some great tools for preview and output, and the price is right — it's about ten bucks more than Icon Builder, but is completely self-contained and doesn't require Photoshop. But it's far too unreliable for serious use at this point.

It's too bad that developers are releasing such buggy stuff. It leaves a really bad first impression, and makes me not want to rush out and purchase the product, no matter how hot it might look. I hope I get over that first impression before something else better comes along, or simply steals my attention.

In the meantime, as with ScreenFlow, I'll try to remember to check back for Opacity's 1.0.1 release.

ScreenFlow

2008-02-17T14:10:00.012-05:00

Holy poo! ScreenFlow is one of the nicest, most polished, yet useful applications I've seen a really long time.

On the surface, Vara Software's ScreenFlow appears to be just another in a series of applications designed to capture your computer screen to a Quicktime movie as you work. Typically such captures are then used for demonstration purposes for new products, or workflows, or videocasts, or what-have-you. But ScreenFlow is much more than just another screen capturing app. ScreenFlow is really an entire environment for creating and finishing computer demonstration videos.

And it's gorgeous!

The most obvious thing that sets ScreenFlow apart from its competitors is the fact that, along with the computer screen, it can capture iSight (or DV camera) video and audio at the same time. By default it sticks this video in a reduced-size window in the lower right hand corner, though, as you'll discover, this can easily be changed. That's because ScreenFlow, in addition to being a screen capturing application is also a presentation editor.

ScreenFlow: Capture Screen and Camera
(click image for larger view)

Once you've captured your computer screen actions and your iSight video, ScreenFlow presents you with an editing interface. Here you can perform all sorts of actions, including zooms, pans and something called "Callout Actions," which allow you to highlight specific windows as well as the mouse cursor. Vara has a nice demo of this feature (in a video, of course, which by the way, is where I pulled these screen shots from) on their site. But the application is so smart and well thought out, that if you've ever used a screencast app, you'll find the learning curve incredibly gentle.

ScreenFlow: Edit Your Presentation
(click image for larger view)

I do want to point out that this is a 1.0 release, and I have experienced numerous bugs. On my work computer (a Quad Intel box with copious amounts of RAM), the application completely crashes my machine. Force quit will not rectify the crash; a hard reboot is required. On my home system (an 8-core Intel with 2 GBs of RAM) ScreenFlow functions well enough, but there are still problems. The iSight registers video and audio in the setup screen, but no audio gets captured for some reason. Also, when exporting my final product to DV-NTSC, I was presented with a set of options, one of which was "Letterbox Content." Though I checked it, ScreenFlow did not honor the "Letterbox Content" option, and my movie came out squished. In fact, I exported the same movie without the box checked and there was no difference between the two movies. Clearly this function is broken. Clearly, ScreenFlow has some kinks to work out.

Still, once the problems are solved — and I sincerely hope that happens soon — ScreenFlow is poised to be the application of choice for regular producers of screen-based videos. And beyond. I admit, I don't do a lot of screen-based capturing, but I'm starting to wonder if the reason is because there haven't been any great apps out there for doing it. ScreenFlow is one of those apps that gives you ideas. It instantly makes you want to use it and then you start thinking of ways to do so. Being in education, this has been pretty easy for me to do. Something tells me I'll be buying and using ScreenFlow in the very near future.

UPDATE:
Version 1.0.1 has just been released, and it seems to fix at least some of the problems mentioned above, in particular the iSight audio problem. Expect a re-review sometime in the near future.

Leopard Installer Certificates

2008-02-17T13:21:00.009-05:00

If you've been using Software Update (like I have, up 'til the other day), you've probably missed one of the new features of Leopard: Installer Certificates. Major updates from Apple now come with certificates of authenticity.

So, for instance, download the standalone Mac OS X 10.5.2 installer and launch the package in the Installer application, and you'll notice a small, new certificate badge in the upper right hand corner of the installer window.

Apple Installer: Certificate Badge
(click image for larger view)

Click the badge and you can take a look at the certificate that's attached to the installer, replete with details about said certificate under the "Details" disclosure triangle.

Apple Installer: Certificate Details
(click image for larger view)

It's another preemptive step in the right direction, security-wise. Always nice to see.

iPhone Browser Cache

2008-02-17T13:04:00.008-05:00

I love my iPhone. It is increasingly important to me for getting things done. I use it for everything: appointments, reminders, fact-checking, contacts, text, entertainment and, of course, as a telephone. It's boosted my productivity immensely, yet made my life easier and better in so many ways. I'm not sure how many products I can say that about.

Nevertheless, I have one persistent gripe when it comes to the iPhone, one thing that just pisses me off and confounds me every time I encounter it: Mobile Safari's cache is simply too small, to the point where it almost seems pointless to have cache at all. Case in point: I open a web page. It gets cached. I open a new window, and a new page in that new window. It too gets cached. Unfortunately, this new cache invariably wipes out the previously cached page, so that when I navigate back to the other window, the first page has to reload. And, just for the record, these are mostly text-based blogs, sometimes with a picture or two. It doesn't always go down this way, but more often than not it does. This defeats the usefulness of both cache and the multi-page interface available in the browser. I'm not sure what the point is.

I'm sure the browser cache equation rides a fine line between usefulness and unnecessary disc overuse. But for anyone who uses the Edge network on any kind of regular basis, I think they've got that balance wrong. And I can't help wondering why they don't give us a setting — just like in any other desktop browser — for cache size, within a sensible range, of course. Or, if not that, simply make the default a bit larger. The current one is pointlessly small.

UPDATE:
Fixed!

NetBoot Part 2

2008-02-13T13:31:00.006-05:00

So here's the plan, as it stands right now. (Yes, I have a plan already! Yes, that was quick.) First, build an image that's good for all workstations (laptops, staff machines, standard workstations, etc.) throughout the lab with:

Base OS (Mac OS X Leopard 10.5)
A DHCP network connection
Apple applications
Adobe applications
Drag-and-drop applications
Other third-party applications
One admin user
ARD active

IMAGE THIS SYSTEM
This becomes the base system build, the Master Image — the replacement system if a machine ever needs rebuilding. It is the only full system image. There is only one.

Everything else that is machine-type specific — that is, users, applications, application components, crontabs, anything — gets turned into and installed via either a downloaded or hand-rolled package. So far I've been using Apple's PackageMaker, which has matured a great deal since last I tried it. It's pretty nice. I'm also taking a look at Iceberg, which also looks to be pretty full-featured and nifty.

Iceberg: by White Box

(click image for larger view)

PackageMaker: by Apple
(click image for larger view)

These packages can be machine-type specific and stored in a simple folder hierarchy by machine type — laptop packages in the laptops folder, etc. — for organizational purposes. In addition to being machine-type specific, packages can also, I believe, be machine specific. That is, I think we can make settings like computer name and network settings using packages as well. So what we're talking about here is a system of computer building that happens completely over the network, and that can be directed almost entirely from one ARD-toting computer, that computer being mine, of course. (I've always said, the sign of a good SysAdmin is that he never leaves his chair.)

I've gotten pretty good at making application packages, at this point (not that it's terribly hard, mind you). My next step will be to learn how to make system settings with packages as well. My other next step is going to be, of course, creating the Master Build. None of this building happens 'til summer. But still, something tells me it's going to be smart to start this process now and see what crops up over the next couple of months.

As usual, I'll be reporting any new and/or interesting developments.

Oh, and thanks to everyone who commented on the last post. The comments were extremely useful!

Tiger Hates Leopard

2008-02-12T12:22:00.000-05:00

So I'm sitting in my office, waiting for the Mac OS X 10.5.2 Leopard update to show up in my Software Update, and it just isn't happening. And at some point I realize, "Hey, maybe it just hasn't been downloaded to our Software Update Server yet." Yes, we run our very own Software Update Server under Mac OS X Server 10.4. It's super cool. It downloads all Apple updates to itself, and then any Mac in our lab can get all the Software Updates from our own internal server, rather than Apple's, which just saves gobs of time and bandwidth. Oh, we love it. But there appears to be a catch: Tiger Server will not download Leopard updates.

So I'm sitting there waiting, like, forever. And the 10.5.2 update never shows. Nor does the Leopard Graphics Update, or the HP Printer Drivers Update, and I'm all like, "Dude, what the fuck?" When all of a sudden the iLife Support Update does show up.

And that's when it hits me: Tiger totally hates Leopard.

But that's okay, 'cause Tiger's a total bitch.

In any case, I'm not sure if the converse is true — if Leopard Server will fail to download and serve Tiger updates — but if it is, good luck running a Software Update Server in a mixed Tiger/Leopard environment. Geez! You'd think Apple's software would be more compatible with, um... itself!

Highly annoying.

Oh, and by the way, after removing my Leopard box from the SUServer client list, these commands got me back in business without a restart:
sudo killall DirectoryService
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

Just so you know.

UPDATE:
It would appear that Leopard's Software Update Server is a bit less finicky when it comes to older updates, for previous versions of the OS. Hmmm... Do you get the feeling Apple's trying to tell us something? (You know, like, "Upgrade your server." Or something.)

Leopard Software Update Server: Backwards Compatible
(click image for larger view)

The Beast

2008-02-09T13:13:00.000-05:00

Just wanted to mention, I have purchased The Beast. And it is good.

The Beast: Eight Frickin' Cores, Dude
(click image for larger view)

To wit: I was doing some video compressing. The top command showed about 300% processor usage. And I thought, "Wow. That's not even half."

NetBoot Part 1

2008-02-08T17:02:00.002-05:00

My big, fat, self-assigned new project — or, as I like to call it, the bug up my butt — is system roll-outs. That is, I realized at some point two things. One, I am managing way more computers than ever before, and way more than I realized; and two, the scope and variety of these various systems has become increasingly wide. These realizations inevitably brought me crashing, headlong (yes, headlong) into a third and final revelation: I need to come up with a better system for managing machine builds and systems roll-outs.

Enter: NetBoot.

Actually, let me first explain how we've handled this in the past. When I began this job we had maybe 15-20 Macs running OS 9 briefly, and then OS X since about its inception. Mac OS 9 was notoriously easy to build. Just copy that shit and be done with it. But Mac OS X was a different beast entirely. Mac OS X was complicated. Moody. A tougher nut to crack. Mac OS X required me to delve into the dark arts of system cloning.

Cue thunder clap, scary music.

The process that eventually evolved was cloning over firewire. We'd build our master machine — a basic Mac OS install with all the latest updates and our requisite software — and then clone that to the other machines over firewire, with clients booted into our Master via firewire target disk mode. This was a quick and dirty way to build a bunch of systems. Once the group was built we could customize machines or groups of machines as we saw fit. For a lab of 15-20 Macs this has worked swimmingly. But our lab has grown slowly and steadily, and completely without my realizing it.

My latest count shows our lab at more like 50 Macs now. We've added a bunch of stuff: laptops, servers, more A/Vmachines of various configurations, a render farm, and of course more workstations. Using our old system of firewire cloning is becoming increasingly clumsy, slow and error-prone. We need a better way of doing things.

Okay, now. Enter: NetBoot!

Leopard's NetBoot Interface
(click image for larger view)

NetBoot is Mac OS X Server technology that allows for centralized storage of and access to system images for installation over the network. The way it works is this: You build a system, trick it out, make it perfect — this is your Master System. Put it on a firewire drive or something transportable, because you can't be booted from your Master System for the next series of steps — imaging. Run the application called System Image Utility, that comes with Mac OS X Server's server tools, and create a NetInstall image from your Master System. Load that image onto your server and enable it in the NetBoot settings in Server Admin. And what happens next is something akin to magic (unless you use Linux, and then it's pretty par for the course, I guess.)

The Network Boot Volume: So That's What It's For!
(click image for larger view)

With your NetInstall image enabled on your server, go to any client system and open the Startup Disk Preferences. Where you'd normally see the "Network Startup" icon (I'll bet you always wondered what that was for), you'll now get something a bit more descriptive. You should now be given the opportunity to boot from your master image. Choosing to do so will incur further magical results. Your system will now boot... Over the network! What's even cooler is that you'll be booted into the same basic installer environment you'd see if you were booted off a Mac OS X install disc, and you'll be walked through the steps required to install your Master System onto your computer. Um... OVER THE NETWORK!

There are some immediate advantages to a system such as this. First off, you can have a bunch of different Master System images for various build configurations in your lab. For instance, we can have a separate build for laptops and desktop machines. Cool! Also, this can all be automated (thanks to Automator integration) to make the process run almost entirely unattended. Sweet! And since the whole thing sits on the server and is available at all times, if a machines needs a rebuild, you just set it and forget it. Awesome!

But NetBoot has its drawbacks as well. Images — particularly large images — take for-freaking-ever to build. To give you an idea of how long, my near-36GB boot drive took an hour or so to clone to firewire, then 3-4 hours to be imaged by System Image Utility. So each build will take several hours to create. And God help you if you make a mistake on one of your images: the NetInstall images are read-only and can't (to my knowledge) be modified once they're built. NetInstall technology can't be used for non-package installers or updates either (again, to my knowledge), so you'll have to run all your Adobe and Microsoft updates by hand as usual. Also, one minor caveat that threw me at the outset: Mac OS X 10.5 server can only serve Mac OS X 10.5 builds. So you'll either be needing to update everything to Leopard or wait until your server and client OSes match.

I think I'm right on the crux of really needing this. I could probably live without it. Keep doing what I'm doing. But I do think I'm at a point where the benefits of using NetBoot outweigh its limitations. And I have enough resources now (like the required massive drive space and robust stable servers) that it's not impractical on the physical level. So, this summer I plan to use NetBoot to build my lab.

I mean, imagine this: you get your new systems over the summer, you unbox them, plug them into your network, set them to NetBoot (everybody say "command-n"! Good!) and go home for the night. You come in the next day and everything's basically done. You've just built your lab. Overnight. In your sleep. I don't know. Sounds pretty cool to me.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Oh, and by the way, in case you can't tell, I'm just now learning all this. It's still very new to me and there is a lot about it I don't know. So if anyone has any experiences or insights into using NetBoot (or if I get any of the facts wrong), I would absolutely love to hear about it. Please feel free to share your experiences in the comments.

Duplicate Computer Names and IPs

2008-02-06T13:21:00.000-05:00

So there's an incredibly annoying and puzzling behavior in Mac OS X with regards to duplicate computer names on the LAN. Most Mac Admins probably know what I'm talking about. Here's the deal: Let's say you have a Mac Pro on your home network named Spanky and it has an IP address of 192.168.1.25. Let's also say, for the purposes of argument, that your best friend — who likes to emulate you in every way — has a Macbook named Spanky with an IP of 192.168.1.25 on his home network. (Hey, it could happen.) Now let's say your pal decides to come over, and he decides, "Hey, I think I'll bring my Macbook over so we can swap some illegally obtained music and pornography." He gets to your house to find you happily surfing the 'net. He whips out his Spanky and plugs it into your network, fires that puppy up, and Bam! All of a sudden your Mac Pro locks up. You can no longer surf. And you get an error message that looks a little something like this:

Duplicate Computer Name Alert: Why Me?
(click image for larger view)

You go to your Sharing Preferences (or your Terminal, or what-have-you) and, sure enough, your computer has been renamed. Renamed! WTF! Why is your computer, on your network, suddenly called "Spanky-2"? Because that's how Mac OS X handles duplicate computer names on the same network. It renames the existing computer to existing computer-2. Not the intruder. Not the new kid on the block. Your computer is now the computer formerly known as your computer. Why, it's pure genius, I tells ya! Brilliant!

Seriously, what in God's name were they thinking? Because, the way I see it, this goes beyond annoying into the realm of the dangerous.

Case in point: Let's say your Mac Pro Spanky is actually a server that provides services — authentication, Kerberos, LDAP, file sharing, the works — for a network full of computers. And let's say your friend is actually a guest on that network. When that guest plugs his computer into your network, and it just happens to be named the same thing as your server, God help you. You just lost — well, I'm not sure how much, but — a significant portion of your services. And all it takes is a computer name? I can rename any Mac on any network from any other Mac on that network by just changing my Mac's name? What's more, if you can get the IP of that server, you can bring it down entirely. That is total shit.

Strangely, it's been this way for at least three iterations of the OS now — since 10.3 — and it's still this way in 10.5. I am appalled. Can someone please explain the rationale for this to me? Please? 'Cause from where I sit, this is a major security flaw. To my mind it makes way more sense to have the newly installed machine make changes to it's configuration than to essentially be able to force changes on another machine. It's just backwards. And dangerous. And it desperately needs to be fixed.

UPDATE 1:
Mat X points out two very important facts: 1) the name change in this instance should only affect the Bonjour (.local) name of the duplicate machine, not it's actual name (the name it calls itself) or it's FQDN (the name as resolved by a DNS server), and 2) a client name change on the LAN should not be able to bring down a server with the same name because of the previous fact.

Dude, you're totally right, though I have seen, way back in the old days (10.2 maybe?) a duplicate name kill a server. So it did used to be possible. Nowadays though, Mac OS X Server has better, smarter naming conventions that prevent such things. I will say, though, that what prompted this was that I booted a clone of my own machine up on the LAN (same name, same IP) and it killed my computer, internet-wise, probably more because of the duplicate IP address. It's possible that all would have righted itself over time if I'd waited to see. I was just so annoyed by the behavior that I went on a bit of a rant. I still think it would be better behavior to leave the existing LAN client alone and make changes only to the new Mac on the LAN. But still, I got a little carried away.

Thanks for keeping me on my extremely bitchy and unscientific toes!

UPDATE 2:
So I've been doing some more testing on this issue. And while duplicate names on the network will not bring down your Mac OS X Server, a duplicate IP address will. Here's what I did:

I changed my client's IP address to match that of the Mac OS X Server (both Leopard 10.5.1). My machine got kicked off the internet and I got this warning:
I rebooted my client machine. Once the client had rebooted, the server got the above alert.
At which point the server could not ping out to the internet. Bad Mac OS X! Bad!

So, while my rant is partially in error, there does seem to be a bit of a flaw in the way Mac OS X handles new duplicate clients — particularly duplicate IP addresses. And I maintain that a better way would be to only modify the behavior on the most recent addition to the LAN.

What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and WYSIWYG HTML Editing?

2008-02-04T18:49:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure why, but the concept of the WYSIWYG HTML editor has really taken a beating. The most recent comment I've heard comes from Shawn Blanc's review of MarsEdit, an offline blog editing product. Shawn says that:

"In all my experience with WYSIWYG editors I have found them a clumsy enemy of fine web typography."

This, apparently, is the major rationale for what seems to be the prevailing notion in the web development community that WYSIWYG HTML editors are an inherently bad idea. The logic seems to go something like: every time I edit my web page in a WYSIWYG editor, the experience is a bad one, therefore the concept of WYSIWYG HTML editors is flawed from the get-go; real designers only ever edit raw HTML. (Though I might point out that I have yet to see or read of a single example of a WYSIWYG editor creating terrible HTML code in a very long time, at least when it comes to fairly simple HTML pages, which most blog pages are. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Comments like the following also make it sound like if I'm not editing raw text, I'm just a big pansy-ass wuss:

"I suspect most of you are at least a bit HTML savvy and prefer the use of monospace type and a HTML editor anyway. But for those who are getting weak in the knees at the thought of having to type your own HTML relax."

Now, I'm not a web developer by any stretch of the imagination, but my experience with WYSIWYG editors — even web-based ones — has been largely positive. And, though I'm fairly comfortable looking at HTML code (and actually enjoy looking at other types of code), I never, ever want to edit it if I can at all avoid it. It's a completely unnecessary distraction from what I'm here to do: write. I'd much rather work on something that more closely resembles the finished product and not have it cluttered up with code. It's not that I'm scared of the code, it's that I'm annoyed by it.

For my personal web pages I have always used Dreamweaver. And while the user experience offered by that app is not always the most intuitive or Mac-like, it's always far preferable to me than using a text editor. For my blog pages — which are all formatted exactly the same way as per the Blogger style sheets I've set up — I use the Blogger-supplied online WYSIWYG editor. As much as I like the idea of working on my blog offline, I do not use MarsEdit or any other such client. And the reason is because of their lack of WYSIWYG.

Blogger's HTML Editor: All I Really Need

(click image for larger view)

John Gruber also supports the use of MarsEdit and its ilk:

"My best argument for using MarsEdit (or any desktop weblog editor) instead of a web-based interface is that it’s like using a desktop email client instead of webmail."

That's a great argument, except that it's a bit flawed: A desktop email client adds features and ease-of-use to the email experience. MarsEdit, on the other hand, removes a major feature that, for me anyway, greatly hinders ease-of use. It's far less aggravating to me to use a web-based WYSIWYG editor than it is to use a desktop-based code editor. To follow Gruber's analogy, using MarsEdit is like using a desktop mail client that only shows you the code in which your email is written. MarsEdit hinders ease-of-use by making me look at code when I really don't need to. All I need are some very simple markup commands and basic text editing. I really can't see any reason not to use WYSIWYG, particularly when it comes to editing blogs.

But this is not to completely disparage MarsEdit. That's not my intention at all. It sounds like a great product, really, and MarsEdit's author, Daniel Jalkut even acknowledges the need for WYSIWYG in his product and is planning it for a future release. Awesome. I may even buy and use MarsEdit when that day comes.

My point is that the WYSIWYG HTML editor is a great idea that someone needs to get on and do right. I believe its time has come. Over the past few years I've watched a series of HTML editors hit the market. The latest are either completely template-based — like Apple's iWeb, which lacks any ability to examine the code when it's necessary to do so, which is a big problem — or completely code-based — like, well, all the others. In between is a gaping chasm. The giant WYSIWYG hole. CSS editors, too, seem to be plagued by this lack of WYSIWYG. So I always find myself using Dreamweaver in the end, for lack of a better replacement. I suspect I'm not alone.

Again, I can't help wondering if there's a faulty rationale at work here. Do software authors think that, because their WYSIWYG editor experiences have been bad ones, the basic idea is also bad? Or entirely too difficult to build? Or unprofitable? Because I think that, in the same way that beautiful, affordable image editors are springing up to challenge Adobe's dominance with Photoshop, WYSIWYG HTML editors could have great appeal. I've been marginally on the lookout for one for years, and I write web pages only occasionally. And the best I've found, frankly, is Dreamweaver, which is good but not great, and very expensive.

Or is it possible that it's just machismo? (God, I hope not. Is there anything worse than macho geeks?) It is possible that developers think that WYSIWYG just isn't cool? That real web developers would scoff at such a product? Seriously, why is it that Coda, an absolutely beautiful app that does, like, everything under the sun, lacks the basic WYSIWYG found in all web-based editors? (Yes, I would totally buy Coda if it had WYSIWYG. Without a doubt.)

Guys, all I can say is, you're missing a big opportunity here.

MacFUSE Follow-Up

2008-02-04T12:16:00.000-05:00

I recently wondered aloud about the benefits of MacFUSE-supplied ssh access in a web development environment. A reader asked for a follow-up in the comments to that post, so I thought I'd just do a quickie today.

After writing the article, I tried out MacFUSE and the sshfs extension to that bundle. This combo facilitates the mounting of ssh-enabled computers directly on the Mac OS Desktop via a bundled GUI app, foregoing the need for an FTP client application. It was our hope that this would provide a more intuitive and user-friendly experience for our web developers. Unfortunately, in my experience there were bugs: the ssh filesystems often hung or had trouble mounting, often requiring a logout or restart to get things back to normal. (Mind you, this was over a month ago, in Mac OS X 10.4.something-or-other and God-knows-what version of MacFUSE and sshfs.) Also, from a user-simplification standpoint I felt that adding yet another application to the mix (the sshfs GUI app for mounting shares) didn't really do all that much to simplify things. In fact, in some ways, it complicated matters as it is not standard practice anywhere as yet.

That said, I really like the idea of mounting any sort of network share in the Finder. It's what's done in every aspect of our filesharing lives except web development, for some reason (that reason mainly being that Apple, inexplicably, still has not implemented this capability into the Finder.) As I mentioned in the original article, there are styles of development that take place outside the lab that are inherently different from what can happen inside a lab. The use of MAMP, for instance, is not friendly to a shared, multi-user environment, but is perfectly suited to a lone user on a single computer. So, again, I wonder aloud, do we provide a different way of working inside the lab than outside? A completely different workflow?

Ultimately, my answer will mostly be yes, I think. We provide it. We provide it right alongside the sorts of workflows that are common in the industry today. We provide both. We show students. We show teachers. And hopefully, someday, down the line, this will become the standard way of developing for the web. Until then we leave the old ways in place; they are not mutually exclusive.

My concern with MacFUSE and sshfs right now is stability. Because the product requires kernel extensions, and because I saw bugs in my limited testing, I am reluctant to put this on our machines. I can, however, use NFS from within our lab to provide a testing ground for the same sort of behavior that MacFUSE provides (i.e. ssh servers on the Desktop). And this will actually fit in nicely with the way we mount other shares in the lab as well (more nicely than the sshfs GUI, in particular). I will most likely implement this over the summer, however, as there's not enough time in the semester for it to really have much impact. Also, things will probably change a bit with the arrival of Leopard to the lab, and I don't see much point in making folks learn it twice.

Again, external development can be handled differently. So I may recommend, for advanced users, the use of MacFUSE outside the lab if they really end up digging the Desktop web development experience.

That's my take at this point on MacFUSE and web development. Hope it's useful to someone.

iPhone to iCal Sync Problems

2008-01-23T19:05:00.001-05:00

I recently had a problem with iCal syncing to my iPhone: Calendars would sync fine from the Mac to the iPhone, but any event entered on the phone would not sync to the Mac. Moreover, calendars deleted from iCal on the Mac — calendars that no longer existed — would still be available for syncing in iTunes. Clearly there was a problem with cached data of some sort, somewhere. But where?

After a lot of trial and error, and hunting around — I tried resetting iTunes preferences, iCal preferences, and anything else that might present an easy fix — I finally figured out where all this data gets mashed up. There are two folders in your home account that are responsible for syncing the databases between your iPhone and your Mac. The first one, as far as I can tell, just contains a backup of your iPhone data. It is:
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync

The second is where all the syncing action happens:
~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices

To fix my problem, I renamed these two folders. They'll get recreated the next time you sync your iPhone and you can keep these in case anything goes wrong. Then start up iTunes and reset all the items under the Info tab for your iPhone. (Fortunately, items under the other tabs seem to have been left alone, at least in my case. YMMV.) I still couldn't see my calendars in iTunes at this point, but I went ahead and just hit the Sync button. And it worked.

Everything now appears properly in iTunes. New calendars show up; deleted ones disappear. And syncing calendars between my iPhone and my Mac works perfectly now.

UPDATE:
Reader Ferdinand points out that Apple strongly discourages the removal of the SyncServices folder. Instead they recommend resetting your SyncServices with the instructions in this article for Mac OS X 10.5 or this one for 10.4. I'm quite happy I didn't have any problems, but if you need to mess with your sync services, I strongly recommend following Apple's advice over my own.

Leopard Beefs

2008-01-23T15:55:00.000-05:00

So I really like Leopard. It's nifty, but not without it's problems. I thought I'd take a minute to post some of the issues I've had with the new OS.

So far I've only had a few complaints. Actually, my initial experiences were quite positive. I did an Archive and Install, preserving user and network settings, on my work machine, a Quad-Core Intel Xeon tower. I left all my old preferences in place and used my old home account data. All this went off almost completely without a hitch. The only snag, oddly, was my Final Cut Pro Studio suite, which needed to be re-serialized. Beyond that, smooth sailing.

Upgrade Woes
That upgrade went so well I decided to do the same to my aging PowerMac 2.7 GHz G5, and for the first time since I bought it that machine felt slow. Dog slow. Problematically slow. This was cause for concern. But what finally convinced me that there were major problems was what Leopard did to my iPhone. Oh, the horror!

Addresses
On the first iPhone sync with Leopard, all my addresses got completely borked. Each address was there, yet the name field was blank and there was a lot of information that didn't make the transfer. Fortunately I had a backup, and I was able to get back up and running. Oddly, the second sync worked perfectly, and only the latest contact info on my phone was lost.

Photos
Importing photos from the iPhone to iPhoto was also problematic on the upgraded Mac. The import took an extremely long time, and the imported photos suffered from strange color shifts and banding. They were unusable.

At this point I decided to do a fresh install. This worked much better, and my computer has been running much faster and handling iPhone syncs much more reliably. As part of the fresh install process, I also started with a fresh home account, which may have helped as well. But this was not the only source of problems, as I verified their existence on a clean account as well. Still, better safe than sorry, I figure.

In any case, for whatever reason, older hardware seems to like a fresh install. Things have been working reliably now for a few weeks. I'm happy.

AFP and MPD
My other beef with Leopard has to do with AFP mounts in the Finder. The way the Mac OS has always dealt with such mounts in the past is that when you mount a shared drive, you authenticate as a user with access to the resource and the drive mounts as though the authenticated user had mounted it, even if that user is different that the one who's logged in. So, for example, I could be logged in as SystemsBoy, but authenticate to a server as JimminyCricket. The server will show me the available shares for JimminyCricket, not SystemsBoy, even if they have different access privileges to that server. If I unmount the share, I can then reconnect to the server, this time authenticating as SystemsBoy, and then I see the shares available to SystemsBoy. This is actually more useful than it sounds. I have numerous identities that I use on my network. This allows me, for instance, to be logged into a machine as a non-admin user, but still connect to a server as an admin user and have admin access to those resources.

In my initial experiences with Leopard, however, the behavior had changed in a way that was potentially sucky. In Leopard, when I'd connect to a share I'd authenticate as a user, just as in the past. And the share treated me like the authenticated user, just as in the past. But once authentication had taken place, Leopard remembered the user credentials even after ejecting the mount. At this point, when attempting to re-log in as a different user, the Finder would refuse to forget the previous login identity and authentication would be bypassed. The server would simply remount as the originally logged in user.

This behavior could be a convenience for users who only use a single identity on client and server. But for those of us with MPD (that's Multiple Personality Disorder, smart guy) it's a real problem. We'd now find ourselves unable change our login identity on a server without a reboot, or until some period of time has expired. Crap!

Now, I have to say, this was happening to me without fail a few weeks ago, and it was really annoying. But now, for some odd reason, the behavior seems to have reverted back to it's old self, asking for authentication each time I request a server. It's really quite strange. I know this was a problem, because I noted it in my log of Leopard issues, but I'll be damned if I can reproduce it today. I suppose it's something to watch out for, but I'm glad to see that it seems to have cured itself. In any case, clearly there are bugs in Leopard, however inconsistent and occasional they might be.

~/Library
Leopard is a bit of a hard ass when it comes to your Library folder. The Library folder is where all the user's settings are stored, and Leopard takes steps to insure that it's always there. In fact, it disallows you from renaming or moving the folder. Try to rename it and it simply won't highlight; try to move it and you can only copy. This is both a blessing and a curse, I suppose. I mean, from an admin standpoint, I never really have to worry again about users removing their ~/Library folders. But then again, I never really did anyway. Conversely, it requires a trip to the Terminal to move a user's Library folder and test any problems therein, which is a fairly common troubleshooting step. I guess we break even here, but I think I preferred the old way of doing things. It just made my life easier.

Uh... So far that's it. Compared to my Tiger Beefs from a couple years back, that's nothin'. Hell, compared to any new software release that's frickin' amazing.

I'll say it again: Leopard is a pretty damn sweet release.

UPDATE:
I continue to have AFP problems on my Intel machine. They're different from those detailed above, but no less annoying. Earlier, I attempted to connect to a server and the process hung. I had to force quit the Finder to get out of it. And just a few minutes ago I connected to a server and copied a group of files over to my local system using a "command-c" copy, only to be denied for permissions reasons. Dragging and dropping the same batch of folders worked properly. And now, after ejecting and reconnecting to the same share, both styles of copying the same, exact folder work just fine. So clearly there are some AFP bugs that need to be worked out in Leopard. Nothing life-threatening, but surely annoying.

Leopard Quota Alerts

2008-01-22T15:21:00.000-05:00

Our home account server — the one all our network users' home accounts live on — mounts via NFS. I've already mentioned one of the improvements with regards to this behavior in Leopard, namely, autofs. But I just discovered another.

See, that NFS mount I'm always talking about, well, it's a Linux RAID — Fedora Core 6, I believe. And we've put quotas on every user's account to keep it from filling up. This has worked great, for the most part. The problem has always been how the Tiger Finder handled a user exceeding his quota. Basically, what would happen is that any Finder copy that exceeded a user's quota would fail, mid-copy, with an extremely vague and essentially — unless you happened to know you were looking for a quota problem — useless error message. Can't recall it exactly, but it's something along the lines of: "The Finder encountered an error and could not complete the request."

Ew.

The good news is that the Leopard Finder behaves exactly like we'd want and expect:

Leopard Quota Alert: That's More Like It!
(click image for larger view)

This alert actually came somewhat prematurely, as I hadn't actually exceeded my quota, and the alert seems to be triggered by hitting the soft quota rather than the hard. What's up with that?

Still, I have to say, I'm endlessly impressed with these little tiny details. They make all the difference in the world from an admin standpoint. I no longer have to worry about quota weirdness! It's great to see Apple do so much for admins with this release. I'm seriously pleased as punch.

Self-Management

2008-01-16T11:01:00.000-05:00

It seems I only have time for these brief posts. Tons in the pipe; time for none. Life must be... I dunno... Good or somethin'...

Anyway, I just updated my iPhone to the latest 1.1.3 firmware. You know, the one with all the goodies. It's pretty damn hot, I must say. The most useful thing will be the ability to send text to multiple folks. But the faux GPS is pretty damn cool too.

The other thing I updated was my iTunes, wherein I discovered this little nugget:

iTunes 7.6: Manually manage music and videos
(click image for larger view)

Looks like you can finally drag and drop music right into your iPhone and create iPhone-specific playlists — ones that live right on the phone and nowhere else. At this point I'm so used to the old way of doing things that I'm not sure what to do with this feature. But something tells me this new found freedom will be a boon at some point in the very near future.

Just as soon as I have some time to use it.

MacBook Air

2008-01-15T16:37:00.000-05:00

The MacBook Air came out today. It's tiny. It's light. It's as beautiful as anything Apple has ever made. But it's just too damn expensive. Knock off about $600 clams and I think they'd have a hit. But at $1800 bucks, I think I'll take something with a firewire port, thanks. Or I'll just use my iPhone.

MacBook Air: Too Expensive
(click image for larger view)

I am, however, getting one of these. This week if possible.

Mac Pro: Awesome
(click image for larger view)

Goody!

Web Programming and MacFUSE

2007-12-12T14:51:00.000-05:00

I'm not a web programmer by any means. But a component of the department I work in deals with the web from an artistic standpoint, and a subset of that group does, in fact, do programming. We have web programming classes.

Recently, one of the teachers of one of those classes made the charge that our approach to web programming is old and outmoded. Whether this is true or not is not really the issue. I've been looking for new ways to think about the systems end of that workflow because, well, that's my job, and because it's an inherently interesting challenge to me. How can we make our web development environment more user-friendly?

One general suggestion has been to make the experience more "OS-like." And one step in this direction is to have the web server mount on the Desktop, allowing the developer to work on her site as if it were local. That is, rather than firing up one of the popular SFTP clients and transferring files back and forth from the local machine to the server, the developer could mount her site — or actually, the share her site lives on — directly on the local filesystem. I have two options here: MacFUSE and NFS. I'm testing both currently. So far I've had a couple minor hiccups with MacFUSE's sshfs.app, but it looks to be a fairly smart and user-friendly implementation that web developers here might benefit from. And the NFS approach would work well also, though only from inside the network.

I'm curious what other Lab Admins are doing with regards to web development in their environments. How have you facilitated ease-of-use for a process that's inherently complicated? Or have you? Also, I'm curious if anyone is using MacFUSE — specifically the sshfs component — and what experiences you might have had with it, either positive or negative.

If any of you fine readers have any thoughts on this I would really love to hear them. I've been querying students, staff and faculty for ideas, but haven't come up with much. Maybe things here are perfect, but somehow I doubt it. And, as always, I really just want to make things better.

Please sound off in the comments if you're so inclined.

Safari Remembers

2007-11-20T12:45:00.000-05:00

The new Safari 3 is out for both Leopard and Tiger (it's included in Mac OS X v.10.4.11). It's pretty nice, I have to say. It now works with Blogger's HTML editor dealio, which is excellent (though slightly buggy at present). The find function now kicks some serious — and, more importantly, some Firefox — ass. Safari now handles tabs intelligently, letting you not only rearrange them in a window, but also letting you tear them off or drop them into existing windows. All extremely slick. Oh, and it's really pretty and fast as Hell. Seriously, it's smokin'.

But perhaps my favorite improvement to Safari 3 is that window placement is now remembered properly. You see, Safari of yore (of Tiger, actually) would remember the placement of the last window opened, rather than the placement of what I'd call the "base" window, or the first window opened. So, after using Safari, if you'd opened any windows other than your first window — even if you then closed them — the next time you opened Safari you'd get a blank window where the last open one had been. Or sometimes in seemingly random spots. I complained about this a long time ago, and it never got fixed to my liking. It was part of the reason I ended up switching to Firefox — I'm rather anal about my window placement and I like my browser pinned to the upper right hand corner, but in Safari it was always moving. Argh!

Well, Safari 3 fixes this. Sort of. Actually, I'm running Safari 3 in both Tiger and Leopard. The behavior remains unchanged in Tiger, but in Leopard, all is as I like it. So perhaps this is a fix in Leopard and not so much a Safari fix.

Either way, it's just one more reason I like Leopard and can't wait to be done with Tiger.

Can't. Frickin'. Wait.

That said, will I switch back to Safari once I've successfully transitioned to Leopard? Only time will tell. But somehow, I doubt it.

Remote Management Commands in Leopard

2007-11-20T11:33:00.000-05:00

A while ago I wrote about the networksetup command, which provides a command-line interface to network preferences, as well as the systemsetup command, which provides command-line control over additional system-level preferences. In the past those commands were stored in the labyrinthian:

/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support

Yes, inside the ARDAgent. Perfect.

Finally Apple has put those commands in a location the shell recognizes as a command path. In Leopard they reside in the far more sensible:

/usr/sbin

Now all you have to do to call them is... Well... Call them.

Really now. Was that so hard?

I Don't Care Anymore

2007-11-16T18:09:00.001-05:00

I've heard that the WACOM company's name is supposed to be pronounced "wack-em." But I don't care. I'm saying "way-com." 'Cause let's face it, you just sound stupid saying, "Hey, can I try your wack-em?" Or, "Your wack-em is huge. Much bigger than my wack-em." Or, "Wow, I just love my new, giant wack-em."

Oh yeah, and I say, "OS Ecks" as well.

Deal with it.

What Everyone's Bitching About

2007-11-16T11:11:00.000-05:00

There's been no shortage of commentary on Leopard's 3D Dock, mostly because it's just ugly as Hell. But that's fixable.

There's been almost as much bitching about two other new visual changes in Leopard. The first is the menubar, which is now translucent. I'm ambivalent about this one. On the one hand, I understand that, from a usability standpoint, it's a bad idea. It's now slightly harder to read a primary interface element under certain conditions, those conditions being, in particular, the use of busy Desktop pictures and/or patterns. The default Desktop picture for Leopard, in fact, is an image of outer space whose star field can directly compete for visual attention with text in the menubar. My argument to this, however, is that busy, distracting, high-contrast Desktop pictures are a far greater hindrance to usability than slightly-harder-to-read menubar text, and if you're really bothered by the menubar changes, you should probably switch to a nice, solid or muted Desktop background and remove all distractions from your life once and for all. That's what I do and, so, while the I understand that translucent menubar is not the best idea for usability's sake, it really just doesn't bother me in the least. Actually, I kind of like the muted, lower-contrast lack of in-your-face-ness of the new menubar.

The other big gripe has been about pulldown menu transparency. No. Seriously. David Pogue of the New York frickin' Times for Pete's sake:

The most serious misstep in Leopard is its new see-through menus. When the menu commands — Save As, Page Preview, whatever — are superimposed on the text of whatever document is behind them, they’re much harder to read. Often, Apple’s snazzy graphics are justifiable because they make the Mac more fun to use. In this case, though, nothing is gained, and much is lost.

This one I don't get. Pulldown menus have been transparent in Mac OS X for a long time. (Oh, wait. I mean forever!) The difference between how Tiger deals with them and how Leopard does is extremely subtle.

Tiger Pulldown Transparency: Pinstripes! Ew!
(click image for larger view)

And Leopard does away with the pinstripes, which to my mind is a huge usability gain. At worst we break even here.

Leopard Pulldown Transparency: A "Serious Misstep." Really?
(click image for larger view)

I wonder sometimes if people are forgetting that pulldowns in Tiger were transparent. You'd think, by the level of general annoyance with this change, that they had. Honestly, people. It's really not that bad. I'm totally on board with the Dock thing (though a lot of people don't mind that even). But when it comes to the new transparencies, they just don't bother me much at all. I hardly even notice.

UPDATE:
Oddly, Firefox's group bookmark pulldowns exhibit the old-style, non-blurred menu transparency, minus the pinstripes of course. I can't find another application that does this. Weird.

Firefox's Group Bookmark Pulldown: Old Skool
(click image for larger view)

Spaces Switchery

2007-11-15T13:11:00.000-05:00

Leopard's Spaces application is pretty cool. I have to admit, I'm using it more than I expected to. Sure, it has some issues compared to older *NIX-based implementations that have been around forever. But I've never used a virtual desktop implementation until now, and all in all I like it.

I have had one little annoyance, however, and it deals with the fact that, as John Gruber puts it:

...Spaces seems designed for app partitioning, not task partitioning.

Indeed. Let's take an example: I have my browser bound to and open in Space One. I also have a Finder window open in Space Four, and the Finder is not bound to any particular Space. Currently, I am viewing my browser, and then I command-tab to the Finder. The behavior is to switch me to the Space with the open Finder window, Space Four. Cool so far. But what if I have a second Finder window open in Space One in addition to the one in Space Four. Ideally I'd like a way to switch, via the command-tab Application Switcher, either to the Finder window in Space One (the one with my browser window) or the one in Space Four (the one with the lone Finder window). Fortunately, such a thing is possible through the magic of click-and-hold.

So, if I'm in Space One and the browser is in front, and I want to switch to the Finder window in Space Four, I click command-tab, then hold the command button for a second. This takes me to the Finder in Space Four. But, if I'm in the browser in Space One and I want to switch to the Finder window in the current Space, I command-tab very rapidly and I switch to the Space One Finder window. Not bad.

Now what happens if we add a Finder window to Space Two? Well, things start to get a bit weird. A rapid command-click will still take you to the Finder window in your current Space. A click-and-hold command-tab will alternately take you to one of the other Finder windows in the other Spaces. That is, the first slow command-tab will take you to the Finder window in Space Two. Switch back to Space One and slow-command-tab again and you go to Space Four again.

Confusing? You bet it is. But at least there appears to be some thought going on as to how to manage applications with windows in multiple Spaces. Hopefully this gets refined a bit as time goes on. For now, I'll take it.

Leopard Menu Text

2007-11-14T14:30:00.000-05:00

It's not a difference you'd probably ever really notice, but Leopard's standard menus now use color to create the dark gray text you see throughout the interface (though not in the menubar).

Tiger's Menu Text: Black, White and Gray
(click image for larger view)

I'm not sure the reason for the change — perhaps to add a warmth and a softness to the text.

Leopard's Menu Text: Now in Full Color
(click image for larger view)

It's a subtle difference, almost imperceptible. And I'm curious what the thinking was behind this change. If anyone has any clues, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

UPDATE:
John Gruber has the answer over at Daring Fireball, actually. Turns out this is nothing new and not a difference between Leopard and Tiger. What you're seeing here, generally, is the difference between standard and sub-pixel anti-aliasing, two techniques for anti-aliasing text. What you're seeing, specific to my two computers, is the difference between the "Standard" and "Light" Font smoothing style settings in the Appearance Preferences. "Standard," as you might guess, uses standard anti-aliasing — i.e. shades of gray — to anti-alias text, whereas any of the other settings use sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which uses color to achieve the same effect. Turns out I've always preferred standard, even on LCDs. Weird.

More details here.

The Death of NetInfo

2007-11-08T13:52:00.000-05:00

Not sure how I missed this, but NetInfo is dead as of Leopard. And I don't just mean the NetInfo Manager application. I mean NetInfo technology. It's gone. Completely replaced by a generic set of plist files in plain ol', flat XML. The GUI functionality is found mostly where you'd expect it. Gone, too, are the command-line tools for modifying the NetInfo database. These have been replaced dscl and friends. To quote AFP548:

Since dscl can't do everything there are some new, and greatly enhanced tools to help you:
dsenableroot - just like it sounds. This has been on OS X for a while now, but it may be more useful now that NetInfo Manager is gone.
dseditgroup - also present in 10.4, but will get more usage now. Good for manipulating group memberships.
dscacheutil - brand new in Leopard. This tools allows you to peek into the Directory Service cache and flush it if necessary. Semi-analogous to lookupd -d.
dserr - a curious tool. Lives only to lookup DS error codes for you and return the text equivalent of the error. I half expected to find a quick shell script here just grepping the man page for DirectoryService.
dsmemberutil - now this is a command you can sink your teeth into! Allows you to check group membership and do some debugging on what groups the system thinks a user is in.

That's about as good a description as I've seen on the topic in a nutshell. Suffice to say, this is a day we've all been waiting for, or at least expecting. That it's come with such little fanfare is probably, in retrospect, not all that surprising. It just took me off guard a little.

In the end I think this will basically be a good thing. So far, things once done with NetInfo look at least a bit easier to do with the dscl and GUI equivalents. So, cool. NetInfo has finally been replaced. Of course it's been replaced with something else proprietary and weird, but it looks like it's at least a bit easier to manage. But, whatever.

So long NetInfo, we hardly knew ye!

Leopard Groups

2007-11-02T11:20:00.000-04:00

Leopard now allows for the creation of groups in the Accounts preference pane. When creating a new account, you can now select the type, and one of those types is "Group."

Accounts Preferences: User Types
(click image for larger view)

Of note is the fact that Leopard, unlike Tiger, does not create a group specific to the user. That is, in Tiger, when the user "systemsboy" was created, a group called "systemsboy" that systemsboy was a member of was automatically created. Apple has done away with this in Leopard for some reason.

Accounts Preferences: Adding Users to a Group
(click image for larger view)

If you want to add a user to one of your newly created groups, simply select the group and then add the user by checking his name. Multiple users can, of course, be added to a group.

Also of note, control-clicking the user's or group's account and selecting "Advanced Options..." from the pop-up will reveal additional account options formerly configurable only from within the now-defunct NetInfo Manager.

Accounts Preferences: Advanced Options
(click image for larger view)

I'd say this is mostly nice, or at least certainly a general improvement over NetInfo. I could talk a client through this over the phone. NetInfo, not so much. I do think this is a clumsy interface for dealing with large batches of users, but maybe such things are best left to the Workgroup Managers of the world.

In any case, now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

Yo Joe!

Leopard

2007-10-31T09:18:00.000-04:00

The founding article for this blog — indeed, the very reason for TASB's existence — was a little post called "Tiger Beefs" in which I ranted for a few thousand words about everything I disliked about Tiger. It's been over two years since that faithful first post, and Apple has just released the follow-up to Tiger, Mac OS X 10.5, codenamed Leopard. Please note the absence of the word "beef" from today's title. So far, I have to say, I'm quite pleased — and certainly not deeply irritated — by this latest OS iteration.

Right off the bat I want to point you to the best and most thorough review of Leopard. Every time a new cat is born, John Siracusa not only reviews many of the new features, but goes deep into the depths of the OS to tell us geeks what's really changed and what it means for the future of the platform. It should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in Mac OS X changes.

Also, I want to point you to Apple's infamous list of new features. It's pretty comprehensive for the surface features, and even touches on some of the things I'll deal with here. And speaking of, my particular perspective on Leopard will be less about productivity features (though there will be some of that, to be sure) and more about Leopard from an administration and maintenance standpoint. So, let's get started!

Time Machine
The most highly touted new feature in Leopard — and rightly so — is Time Machine, which automatically makes backups of your data to any external hard drive (or even, I'm told, partition). The whole idea behind Time Machine is that it's so simple, and requires so little thought, that anyone can — and, more importantly, will — use it. It's backups for the masses. And while Time Machine is really made for the end-user, the fact that such a beast now exists as part of the OS is a huge boon to SysAdmins.

Time Machine: Drop-Dead Simple
(click image for larger view)

I maintain a backup system for all staff members in my department. Anyone who's ever had to deal with such a system knows what a pain it is to implement and maintain. In the old days, we used to back up to tape using Retrospect. But as data storage became increasingly large, and tape increasingly expensive, the system grew unwieldy. An unwieldy system, as you surely know, is not reliable. A few years ago (in fact, with the introduction of Mac OS X, come to think of it) we moved to the free, scriptable, and very reliable rsync (we use the RsyncX version). This allows us to back up over the network to a large RAID drive. But still, the scripts require occasional maintenance, staff must be sure to leave their computers on. There are numerous points of failure. And most inconvenient of all, if a staff member does lose data, they have to come to me to retrieve it, which is inconvenient for both them and me.

Time Machine removes that last step from the equation. Time Machine puts the end-user in control, not just of their current data, but of their backups as well. Now, if a staff member accidentally throws away a file, or makes changes they don't like to a document, or whatever, they simply activate Time Machine and roll back. No freak-outs. No calls to the SysAdmin. No worries. Time Machine is frickin' beautiful.

I will continue to make backups to the RAID with rsync for the foreseeable future. It doesn't hurt to have an extra backup, and, Hell, the system's already in place. But I've also bought all staff a firewire drive specifically for Time Machine as well.

Time Machine: Limited Options
(click image for larger view)

One thing to note about Time Machine: It is geared towards the idea of backing up everything. Like in Spotlight, you can add exclusions to Time Machine, but the default is to back up all your data. A fellow SysAdmin complained that he needed the ability to select what would be backed up, not what wouldn't, if this were to be useful in a production environment. Yes, my friend, but this is not made for production. It's made for people. So the default is, back up everything. What could be simpler?

The Finder
I won't spend too much time on the Finder. In a nutshell, I'm mostly happy, though I'm a bit peeved that the first thing I felt the need to do was hack that ugly-ass Dock.

The Dock: Ugly-Ass
(click image for larger view)

Seriously. Ouch. I can see liking it on first glance. I mean it is shiny. I know people like shiny. But damn is it intrusive, and not the least bit of an increase in functionality. Yikes! What were they thinking?

The Dock: Now That's Purdy
(click image for larger view)

There are a few awesome new touches in the Finder, though. Quick Look is probably my favorite. Hitting the spacebar to view a preview of a document is a great productivity boon. Students in the art department where I work will love it for presentations as well. It's beautiful, useful and extremely well-implemented. I only wish it were more key-command-able. (Or maybe we'll discover that it is.)

The Finder: Quick Look
(click image for larger view)

Speaking of key-commands, the Desktop now has a presence and key-command in the "Go" menu (it's command-shift-d). Sweet!

Go Menu: Go Desktop!
(click image for larger view)

Also, a long-standing (read: never solved) problem with Tiger's inspector, wherein the inspector would not properly update file ownerships, has been fixed.

I also rather like the look of the new Finder. I'm pleased as punch that there's finally a window standard, and that it's not brushed metal. While I'd probably prefer a lighter shade of gray, and apps in the background to be darker rather than switching to a lighter shade (dark recedes; light comes forward, at least that's what they always told us in art school), the current iteration is really quite nice. The Sidebar is also, in my opinion, more efficient than it once was. And Cover Flow in the Finder might even prove useful at some point.

Other nice touches:

Clicking on a file name only highlights the file's name, not its extension, thus making file renaming a lot quicker and easier.
Drop shadows are larger and darker and generally more dramatic, making windows easier to discern.
Drop shadows are also now included in screen captures of individual windows.
File sharing, which is now possible on a per-folder basis (hooray!), can be activated and configured right from the Inspector.

One oddity: the Finder seems to be a bit more fascistic about what you can and can't do with your data. In fact, it disallows trashing key folders in your home account. I was unable to trash, or even rename my Library folder from the Finder. This might be great for the home user. But it could slightly complicate troubleshooting from an admin standpoint. Not a big deal, but I'm not crazy about the trend towards over-management of user data. It's fine for Time Machine. Not so sure about the Finder.

Finder: Data Nazis?
(click image for larger view)

Still, that's a lot of good and very little bad. Overall, the Finder's a big win for me.

Disk Utility
Probably the best thing about Leopard is that there is so much good stuff for SysAdmins. Each OS upgrade has brought us a couple goodies, but Leopard is chock full of them, and the goodies are so... Uh... Good...

First off, Leopard now handles broken disks more gracefully. Attach a damaged external firewire drive, for instance, and if it's mountable, Leopard will mount it and allow you to copy any data that might be salvageable. This actually happened to me in the beta days, and Leopard provided successful, albeit partial, disk recovery where Tiger simply refused to even mount the damaged drive. That's a pretty sweet improvement that no one but SysAdmins are likely to see. Kudos to Apple's Disk Utility team for that one!

Disk Utility: Plays Well with Broken Disks
(click image for larger view)

Another huge advancement in Disk Utility is the ability to re-partition a drive without wiping it, within limits, of course. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Disk Utility allows partitioning — or splitting — of partitions. Let's say you have two partitions. But you want to turn that into three. In Tiger and before you had to erase the entire drive and repartition. In Leopard, you can cut one of your two partitions in half (or quarters, or whatever). Leopard will even indicate the free portion of the disk and cut it at the right point. It's pretty damn cool, and something I've been wanting for a long time. For forever, really. I've already used it in the beta, and it seems to work great. Cool!

Disk Utility: Splitting Partitions
(click image for larger view)

The one caveat to this dynamic partitioning is that the disk must be formatted using the GUID partition map, which Apple has adopted for the move to Intel. It's GUID that makes all this possible. The old style Apple partition map won't allow non-destructive partitioning.

Disk Utility: GUID is the Wave of the Future
(click image for larger view)

The final touch in Disk Utility — and actually, this appears to be true through much of the new OS — is that the wording of dialog boxes and information panels has been made much clearer. This should do a lot to make scary disk operations a bit less scary.

Disk Utility: Clearer Language
(click image for larger view)

Directory Utility
The application formerly known as Directory Access gets some love in Leopard too. Now called Directory Utility, the application does more with less. It's simple, four-tab interface still allows the configuration of services, but there's just a lot less to configure. The only services left now are Active Directory, BSD Flat File and NIS, LDAPv3, and Local. Gone are the services that were never really configurable in the first place, save for turning them on and off.

Directory Utility: Do More with Less
(click image for larger view)

But Directory Utility allows for the configuration of Directory Servers now in a separate panel, and this is where you'll most likely set up your Open Directory server (though the option still exists in the list of services as it always did). Setup is super simple: check the type, and enter the name. That's it!

Directory Utility now also has a panel for configuring NFS mounts. This is also really easy to use. Simply type the path to your NFS server, and type in the mount point. Directory Utility will verify that the server is functioning and then, when you hit apply, it will mount it. Neat-O!

NetInfo (RIP)
NFS mounts were once handled in an obscure admin utility called NetInfo Manager. NetInfo Manager is now dead. Leopard has moved all of its arcane functionality into other more GUI-friendly apps. Directory Utility handles NFS mounts. The Finder and Sharing Prefs handle per-folder file sharing (which was once the domain of a little app called SharePoints, which configured properties in NetInfo). And home account location can now be configured by using the Accounts Preference Pane and control-clicking the account in question, then choosing "Advanced" and selecting the appropriate options. It's true, I can't think of too many more reasons to go to NetInfo Manager.

But wait... How do I activate root?

AutoFS
autofs is the new automounter daemon in Leopard, and boy is it cool. I've watched with envy for years as my Linux counterparts dynamically mounted NFS shares — or folders within NFS shares — as they get called by the OS. I realize that autofs does a great deal of good for hangs caused by network dependencies, but what I'm most excited about is the dynamic nature of autofs. Prior to Leopard we used automount, which I simply could never coax into doing what autofs does out of the box. With automount, we basically just hard-mounted our NFS server at /home at every boot. With autofs, however, we can specify a wildcard in our map file. What that allows us to do is to never keep the entire NFS server mounted, ever, ever. Instead, when the needed share is requested, autofs mounts the portion of it that was requested.

Perhaps an example is in order. Currently, our NFS server gets mounted in its entirety at /home on every client in the lab. This happens using an arcane Startup Item that contains a truly Byzantine script that I made. It's horrible. Not only does it require this crazy-ass script, it only happens at boot or when automount is specifically restarted. It also requires (for reasons I can't recall) a series of symlinks to land in the /home folder properly. And, worst of all, it keeps the entire home account server mounted over the network on every client all the time. Yuck!

By contrast, autofs requires no such Startup Item. You simply edit one tiny text file (/etc/auto_home, if you're interested) and you're done. Not only are you done, though, but the entire process is now dynamic. No reboot required. In fact nothing happens. The home account server doesn't mount... Until it's called! That's right. No home account server is mounted until joe_user comes and logs in. When that happens, autofs springs to life and mounts the user's home account. And here's the other thing: it only mounts the user's home account, not every folder on the share. This is a huge savings in terms of network overhead. It's also much easier for me to maintain and manage. For me, a working autofs is a huge, huge deal, and it's the thing I'm most pleased about. SysAdmins doing any kind of NFS home account mounting will totally understand where I'm coming from here, I'm sure. This is fantastic. My job just got easier, and my network and Mac systems just got a helluva lot more efficient. Awesome!

Other Notables
There's a whole other list of new features that should make SysAdmins and even regular folk pretty happy. Here are my faves, in no particular order:

Preferences and applications (i.e. Sharing, etc.) that can be applied to specific users now list network users and groups.
Login, remote login (SSH), and file sharing are all now configurable on a per-user/group basis.
The firewall is now configurable on a per-application basis.
There is now a built-in guest account that gets deleted at logout.
Software Update now logs you out for certain updates where your presence might cause problems.
Software Update now remembers what it's downloaded and will use that if you postpone an update, rather than having to re-download it.
iCal event entry doesn't suck as bad now, and is reminiscent of Google's method of contextual calendar entry.
Dictionary now includes Wikipedia and can easily toggle the three views (dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia) or view them all at the same time.
Spotlight works well now, like it always should have.
Spaces might actually be useful as well!
Screen Sharing! For free! Cool!

So, that pretty much covers my initial impressions of Leopard. We'll be holding off on installing it in the lab until I can run the majority of major applications (currently, AfterEffects is listed as not working, and that's a deal breaker). Until then, I will run it on my test machine.

And happily. Leopard has been extremely stable and reliable so far, and I must admit I really rather like it. I was never a big fan of Tiger, actually. I found everything "cool" about it to be buggy or annoying. Spotlight sucked, Dashboard was stupid, and there were all manner of problems, and few features to recommend it over Panther, at least not from a SysAdmin standpoint. Leopard, on the other hand, is completely the opposite. There are tons of new, useful features for both users and admins alike. So far, I'm very happy with this release.

Nice job, Apple people!

Word of the Day

2007-10-26T13:23:00.000-04:00

The term "sea change" has been extremely popular of late. I'm not sure why. I have a sneaking suspicion that the universe of online Mac journalism is highly incestuous. (I feel dirty.) But stranger still, the word "rejigger" has popped up, in one form or another, in no fewer than three articles or blogs, today alone, each related to Leopard.

And that is why rejigger is today's Word of the Day.

Okay kids. Give it a rest now.

Hallelujah Items

2007-10-24T18:12:00.000-04:00

Two hallelujah items today: First, Google Mail now supports IMAP. This is great news for us POP haters, particularity to the extent that we love ourselves some serious GMail. As of this writing, GMail's IMAP capabilities aren't available to everyone, but should be in the next few days. According to Google:

Don't fret if you don't see "IMAP Access" yet under the Settings menu. We're rolling it out to everyone over the next few days.

Second, the hideous Leopard Dock will now, apparently, be optional. And what's awesome is that the attractive replacement actually looks to be an improvement over the current, Tiger Dock, at least from my aesthetic perspective.

Neat-O!

The Tiger Dock of Yore: All Good and Well, and Square
(click image for larger view)

The Godawful Leopard Dock: My Eyes!
(click image for larger view)

The Attractive and Useful Leopard Dock Option: Rounded and Tinted
(click image for larger view)

By default, the no-glass option is apparently only available when the Dock is placed on the side. It can be had at the bottom, however, using the following command:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

At least that's what being reported as of today, two days before Leopard's actual release. We'll see how it actually goes. Either way, I'm happy.

More Leopard SysAdmin Goodness

2007-10-12T12:52:00.001-04:00

The other day a staff member's firewire drive tanked. I could see it in Disk Utility, but I could not repair it, nor could I mount it. It was in a bad way.

After exhausting my standard barrage of tests and utilities, I remembered that Leopard seemed to have some rather advanced disk management capabilities not found in previous versions of the OS. So I figured I might as well try examining the bad drive on my Leopard install, if for no other reason than to see what happened.

What happened was awesome. Upon attaching the drive to my Leopard install I received this alert (note the drop-shadow, which is now included in Leopard window caps):

Leopard Disk Repair Alert
(click image for larger view)

From there the drive mounted read-only, and I was able to copy most of the data from the damaged drive. Initially I was copying from the Finder. The problem with this method is that, at least in this iteration (build 9A527), every time the Finder hits a corrupt piece of data, the copy stops — hangs, actually — and you have to force quit the Finder and pick up the copy where you left off. Painful if you have lots of broken bits. In the end I used the ditto command to copy over the data. The ditto command will continue copying even after hitting bad data, and it will report which data is bad as well. I sent the output of ditto to a text file and so was able to run the process unattended while still having a record of which files were broken. Pretty sweet! I feel smart!

If you're wondering, my command looked like this:

sudo ditto -V -rsrc /source/directory /target/directory 2> DittoOutput.txt

But the real news here is how cleverly and usefully Leopard seems to be dealing with disks. And how Leopard has some genuine new goodness for SysAdmins. That's pretty amazing. I'm getting excited.

I'm not sure this post violates my NDC. It probably does. But honestly, I've seen other sites posting much more revealing stuff, so I'm going to assume I can probably get away with this. If not, well, we'll know soon enough. But this is just too cool to keep secret.

Apple Remote Desktop Copy Problems

2007-10-12T12:39:00.000-04:00

Prosaic title, I know. But it's true. Every now and then, copying to remote systems via Apple Remote Desktop fails inexplicably. Fortunately, the solution is a simple one: restart the ARD Agent, conveniently named ARDAgent. Said command will look something like this:

sudo killall -HUP ARDAgent

Ironically, you can also send the command to the offending system via ARD itself. Just be sure you remove the sudo and send it as root.

Restarting ARD Via ARD
(click image for larger view)

That's it! Just another helpful tip from your friendly neighborhood Systems Boy.

Please resume your normal activities.

El Keyboardo

2007-09-20T13:24:00.000-04:00

I'm still swamped, buried under the avalanche of work that is the direct result of endless delays to the renovation of our department. Nevertheless, I find myself with little to do today. Or, I should say, little I'm actually able to do. Today's delay, from the "I can't catch a break to save my life" department: Keyboards. In Spanish!

Today I finally got a chance to start unboxing and building my new Macs. Opened up the first one and noticed that the keyboard said "Ayuda" where it should have said "Help." Uh... Shit...

So now what? Will I have to send the entire box back for exchange, or just the keyboards? Until I know the answer to this, I can't build my systems. And I won't know 'til Monday, because purchasing is closed this week.

So I blog.

Hola.

What I Was Talking About

2007-09-20T13:13:00.000-04:00

When Adobe went all periodic table on our asses with their icons, I wrote a little article about it, just like a lot of people did. At the end of that article I suggested that Adobe start thinking about actual icons — visual symbols — for their applications that could be recognized at a glance, rather than using letters or letter combinations in the place of icons.

I think the best approach Adobe could take — both from a conceptual and a practical standpoint — would be to actually create memorable, iconic symbols for each of their applications. Thus far they have not done so, and choosing instead to represent their apps with plain two-letter text identifiers just seems a little cheap, lazy and ineffectual. Why doesn't Photoshop have such a memorable symbol associated with its product line after all these years? Or Illustrator? By now they really should. Maybe it's time to start working on these.

It looks like that's what they've started doing, at least in the case of Photoshop (Warning! Annoying Flash content ahead), which now has its own icon. Unfortunately, the icon itself ain't all that great. It's kind of confusing, not all that attractive and seems totally disconnected to the idea of Photoshop. It looks like a combination of a metallic speech bubble and the 1970s PBS logo. And I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Still, it's a step in the right direction, and I'm glad to see it. And I have to say, I kind of like the typography. Not that I'm any sort of expert in any of this.

Installer Renaissance

2007-09-13T20:58:00.000-04:00

First it was Adobe. Then Apple. Now even Microsoft is making the software installation process more sensible and trouble-free.

I tell ya, it's enough to make a Systems Boy cry, I tell ya.

I tell ya.

Final Cut Studio 2 Installer

2007-09-08T18:10:00.000-04:00

This is not a particularly glamorous topic, I realize. But some SysAdmins might be happy to see that the Final Cut Studio 2 installer contains some additional screens, as well as some additional smarts and freedoms not seen in previous versions. So far, I'm pretty pleased, and I haven't even launched any of the apps yet.

First off, if you're installing on slower-than-recommended hardware, you get this alert:

Final Cut Studio 2 Installer: Alert
(click image for larger view)

This is excellent for two reasons: for one, it's extremely detailed and tells you exactly what you have versus what Apple recommends; and for two, you are not prevented from going ahead and installing the software against Apple's recommendation if you so desire (which I do). Contrast this with previous versions, which simply would disallow you installation of the software, citing a reason like, "Hardware does not meet the necessary requirements for installation of this software." I'm glad Apple is letting me, the SysAdmin, make that call, and glad for the extra info as well. Nice job.

Next, the Installer lets you decide whether or not to install and activate distributed processing on your system. Another nice touch:

Final Cut Studio 2 Installer: Distributed Processing
(click image for larger view)

Then Apple has included another screen which is just text, but it's text that's actually useful. It's text that tells you what's about to happen, and gives you some information about your upcoming options:

Final Cut Studio 2 Installer: Information
(click image for larger view)

This actually answers a lot of questions about the install process that I had when using the previous version's Installer. It's nice to see Apple being very clear about what's going on with the install process rather than making us intuit it every step of the way.

Finally, we get this:

Final Cut Studio 2 Installer: Choices
(click image for larger view)

This screen was available in pretty much the exact same way in the previous version. But what I'm most happy to see this time around is the option to install or not install NTSC or PAL versions of the DVD Studio Pro templates. Those templates, as you can see, take up a lot of space, and I always ended up having to go in and clean out the PAL versions by hand, which was a drag. Nice to see that I can opt out during the install process, which has the extra added benefit of making the install process that much speedier now that I'm not installing 4 gigs of stuff I don't need.

I'm always happy to see attention paid to little things like installers. It shows someone's thinking about the SysAdmins, which doesn't happen too often in the world of software installers. Whoever's responsible for these little changes, thanks! I appreciate it.

Addendum:
One thing I forgot to mention. Previously, Final Cut Studio applications were all on separate discs, but now all the application files reside on a single DVD, while all the content is on the other DVDs. This greatly simplifies installation if all I ever want to do is install the suite of apps on my 30 machines (which is usually what I want). I now only have to cart around one DVD, not five. And in theory this could all be done over the network via Apple Remote Desktop (though I haven't tested this, and it would probably be tremendously, painfully slow). Nice!

Early Adoption

2007-09-06T13:50:00.000-04:00

Here's the thing: two months ago, people like myself — early adopters — put our faith in an amazing company and plunked down $600 clams for a completely new, completely revolutionary and completely untested product. That company is Apple Inc. and that product is the iPhone.

Yesterday — a mere two months later — Apple dropped the price by $200. Some of us were outraged. Some of just said, "Hey, them's the breaks." And some of us — and this is where I find myself — some of us felt not outrage, nothing so dramatic, but we did feel slightly cheated. We felt like we'd paid a premium for a product because we just couldn't wait to get our hands on the damn thing, and now it turned out that that product wasn't really particularly rare and precious after all. Rather, we got burned to the tune of $200 for our love of technology, and if we'd had it all to do over, we'd have waited. Two months of early access did not feel long enough to justify the extra $200. We felt vaguely exploited. Like lab rats. We felt we'd lost out on the deal, and that people were laughing at us.

Steven Riggins says we're just pissed because we're no longer special. And I think that's true, though I don't see that as a bad thing. When folks like me bought the iPhone we did feel special. Hell, let's face it, in some circles we were special. And we worked it. We showed that phone off like it was nobody's business. All of which was great for Apple. Now they go and drop the price, and yup, we look like schmucks. And I'm suddenly far less proud of my iPhone. (Okay, I'm not — I can't stay mad at you baby! But you get the idea. I no longer feel like bragging.)

Apple needs it's early adopters. We are its best marketers, and without us there is no product launch. And for a company whose reputation rests so heavily on its end-user experience — that is, on how its customers feel about their products — it behooves Apple to treat us like we're special, at least a little bit. I don't see that as childish. It's the game Apple is playing themselves. They appeal to our emotions and we respond. Emotionally. I don't want to feel like Apple made a fool of me. I want to be able to brag.

Steven Riggins might not get that, but fortunately Apple does. They're giving us $100 store credit (which, I can tell you, is going straight towards a set of iPhone A/V cables). Perfect. That's exactly what makes Apple an amazing company. They understand the emotional side of technology. They don't poo-poo it. They don't belittle it. They embrace it.

Someone just came to my office, and the first thing they said was, "So, are you mad about the iPhone price-drop?" I just turned my laptop around, showed them Steve Jobs' open letter, and said, "Nope. I'm fine with it."

Addendum:
Saturday, September 08, 2007
There seem to be two camps forming on this issue. There are those who completely understand the backlash and feelings of misgivings held by iPhone early adopters (among them, Steve Jobs), and there are those who think we're assholes, bitches or crybabies for ever having had the gall to show off our $600 iPhones. You know what? From where I sit that's total bullshit.

We showed them off — or at least I did — in large because people asked us to. But also because we were excited about being a part of this cell phone revolution. This was not done cynically. We never said, "Nyah, nyah! I have an iPhone and you don't!" If anything, we said, "I have an iPhone, I love it, here's how it works. You should go buy one as soon as humanly possible." We evangelized. For Apple. And now we feel a little screwed by them. Emphasis on feel. This is completely unscientific, and completely subjective. But we feel taken advantage of. I think it would have been different if it had been even three months. Three months is a quarter of a year. It's some kind of milestone. But two months? What's that? It's nothing. It's a joke. This is not about money. It's about how early adopters were made to feel. And the fact is that many of them were made to feel shitty for being early adopters. And I say again, for a company whose reputation lies so squarely on making it's customers feel good, the timing and size of the iPhone price cut was a tacky, insensitive move. The $100 rebate, however, will go a long way, I think, towards helping folks like me — folks who weren't outraged, but who did feel a bit burned — feel good again about adopting early. I think that's important for both Apple and its customers.

I Was Right

2007-08-10T14:59:00.000-04:00

Well, I can't say too much because I'm under non-disclosure and I'm not sure what's fair game to discuss, but the Leopard client I've been playing with has some geekably great features — stuff I've been waiting for Apple to make easy for a long time. One of those features is something I alluded to a long time ago, when Boot Camp first hit the scene. I'd said:

...I remain hopeful that this utility is indicative of possible future utilities that would allow for more flexible, less destructive partitioning.

While I can't really say anything definitive, I will say this: looks like I was right.

Neat-O!

Buy the Fucking CD!

2007-08-10T10:04:00.000-04:00

Universal recently announced that they — like a handful of other major record companies — would begin offering DRM-free music for download at a number of online stores. But not on iTunes. It's a strange and controversial decision, and probably represents Universal's best efforts to gain some control over the online music market, which, from everything I've ever read, is currently dominated by iTunes. The tech world is, of course, up in arms over Universal's decision. But I find all this hullabaloo strange.

Ken Fisher, at Ars Technica, writes:

I know I've run across a few Universal albums I would have bought but then reconsidered, thinking, "This will be DRM-free soon." Foolish? Maybe, but DRM-free products are clearly superior, and it looks like music fans in general believe that to be the case.

Yes, Ken. Without a doubt that was indeed unbelievably foolish. You see, Ken, and anyone else out there who cares about this sort of thing and happens to be listening, which, come to think of it, is probably about six people at this point, there's a perfectly reasonable alternative to DRMed downloads that's been available for over 25 years: Buy the fucking CD! Yes, you can still buy CDs. You can even buy them online. And guess what? They're completely, 100% DRM-free. Not only that, they're better quality, they often include song lyrics and nifty graphics, and you don't ever have to worry about making a backup.

I find it strange that people are fighting so hard for DRM-free music online when the option to buy a CD has existed for years. Do DRM-free online music purchases offer certain conveniences? Sure. Immediate gratification, for one. But that's about it. In fact, the major advantage of DRM-free music will probably go to the music companies, they're just too stupid to realize it: increases in online sales over physical sales, which, since online music requires zero manufacturing costs, will be a huge gain for them.

So what are you fighting for? Essentially, you're fighting for the record companies to make more money so that your digital musical lifestyle can be slightly more convenient and instantly gratifying. Stop it. Please. It's stupid and I'm tired of reading about it. The solution is really quite simple. If you've forgotten, I'll say it one more time: Buy the fucking CD!

Ah, yes. I do feel better.

Another iPhone Post

2007-08-02T10:56:00.000-04:00

Apologies to any readers who aren't interested in the iPhone. It's my little obsession for the time being, so please just bear with me. Exploring it has been a seemingly endless journey, but I believe I will have soon plumbed the thing's depths. Also, with the semester starting soon, and all our cool new goodies in the wings, I should have some other, more network- or desktop-systems-related articles to post in the near future (I am still a SysAdmin, after all). But until then, here's yet another iPhone post (as if the thing needed any more press).

Briefly, I wanted to mention that I did attempt to return my iPhone, using as a pretext the camera's white balance issue, from which mine certainly suffers, and for which I'd heard replacements could be had.

iPhone White Balance Problem: This is a White Wall
(click image for larger view)

I was persistent (read: pesky but polite) enough to have a Genius take a quick look at the problem. He told me that his did the same thing, and that the issue would be corrected in a software update. That was Tuesday evening, July 31, 2007. Lo and behold, the next day Apple released their first iPhone software update.

iPhone Software Update 1.0.1 Lives in:
~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates
(click image for larger view)

Yesterday I installed the update, and I'm pleased to say, though the white balance issue has not yet been addressed, a number of other issues have. Firstly, the phone (mine anyway) is much, much more stable. My iPhone was getting to the point where I almost could not surf the web with multiple pages open without a crash. I mean it was bad to the point of me really not wanting to look at the internet at all anymore on the iPhone. Now, however, I find myself able to open several pages at once (including TUAW, which would consistently crash the browser before completely loading) without a crash. In fact, after a day of heavy use I have not had a single crash, where two days ago I was crashing on a very regular basis. This newfound stability is delightful.

iPhone Updating: Took About Five Minutes Total Time
(click image for larger view)

Secondly, MobileMail, which had previously only showed the top-level folders of my IMAP account, now properly shows all subfolders. This is excellent. I get a lot of server messages automatically sent to me, and without subfolders I had no way to file them. Now, though it can be tedious, it's possible.

iPhone Updated: Much More Stable
(click image for larger view)

There are apparently a whole host of other undocumented improvements. iPhone Atlas has a partial list. They claim that the earpiece and speaker volume has been improved. I cannot verify this as I haven't made or received a phone call since the update (because I am an asocial loser). But if it's true, it would take care of one of my top 5 issues with the iPhone.

With this update — particularly with the improved stability — I find myself less concerned about my dropped, cracked iPhone. It seems to be undamaged and working quite well. At this point I've pretty much made the decision not to make another attempt to get it replaced. Aside from a few scratches and a small crack, which I hardly ever notice anymore, and a fairly troubling white balance problem with the camera, the phone is perfectly fine. So I'll stick with it for now. If Apple does not fix the white balance issue with next software update, however, I may have another crack at it.

Sprint for the Holidays

2007-08-02T10:46:00.000-04:00

Internet communications involve a vast multitude of tiny but complex transactions all working together in a concerted effort to transmit and receive various kinds of data. We all know this. But at no time has this fact been more evident to me than during my visit to my mother's backwoods home in Maryland, where the AT&T cellular service on my iPhone has ranged from intermittent to nonexistent. From time to time, however, I can get a connection just long enough to fire off an SMS, but using any other service that requires the Edge network is like watching the internet in slow motion. Surfing is a non-option. And sending email takes significantly longer in this slowed-down world of spotty service. But I found it surprising initially that SMS is able to get through where mail cannot. My first impression would be to assume that both would go about at about the same speed — both consist primarily of text data and are fairly lightweight. But email is clearly the more complex transaction, requiring the contacting of and authentication to mail servers and often the exchange of said data over secure channels. I'm not sure how SMS works, but it's something much, much simpler and more direct. And when everything is going in super slow motion these differences become painfully apparent.

This trip was to be the ultimate test of my iPhone's capabilities: could I survive a weekend at my mothers without a laptop, using only the iPhone instead? Would it hold up on the train as an entertainment device for the two-and-a-half hour trip? Would it function adequately as an internet appliance for light surfing and emailing? Would it work as a telephone?

Surprisingly, it worked well enough in every capacity but this last one: I could not use my iPhone as a cell phone at my mother's. I eventually discovered that, when laid flat on its back, the iPhone was able to generally maintain a connection to the AT&T network, so SMS, email and surfing were possible though the latter two were often painfully slow. Still, they were good enough to get me through the weekend. Where the iPhone fell down was as a cell phone. As soon as I'd lift it to my ear (sometimes sooner) it would drop any call I might be attempting.

This is a major disappointment. I was expecting the other functions of the phone to be limited, but I was pretty sure I'd be able to use it as a phone most places in the U.S. It worked plenty well in the Adirondacks. But at my mother's house (the phone seems to get healthy reception a few blocks away) I simply can't use my cell phone anymore. This was never a problem with Sprint. Indeed my folks have used Sprint without issue for years here.

Moving to AT&T was a calculated risk. One that, at least in this case, did not pay off. At this point I can only hope that either the iPhone's reception somehow gets significantly more stable in the vertical position in remote areas, or that AT&T's service eventually broadens to encompass the greater Annapolis area. Until then I'll be stuck on Sprint for the holidays.

So, in conclusion: the iPhone does actually replace my laptop as a portable internet and media device for short trips; unfortunately, it doesn't replace my cell phone. And that just blows.

This post written on my iPhone

Gmail vs. Blogger

2007-07-19T12:02:00.000-04:00

Apologies if you've recently posted a comment on this blog, and had not heard back from me (I try to respond to all comments whenever I can). Seems that my Gmail account for receiving comment alerts began flagging them as spam. Seems the address for comment alerts was also not among my contacts. Seems odd to me, though, that two Google-made products would suddenly butt heads like that. Seems like they should know better.

Anyway, I'm back on track with comments again, and I've just posted a bunch of responses. So if you were looking for one, check for it. It should be there.

iPhone Follow-Up

2007-07-18T13:44:00.000-04:00

So I've had my iPhone for a few weeks now, and I've had a chance to travel with, accidentally lock and drop it. Thought I'd report on the state of the iPhone after long-term, heavy use.

AT&T and My SIM Card
One of the most common questions I got after my initial iPhone review was how AT&T was compared to Sprint. Mind you, I have grown to absolutely loathe Sprint and their treatment of long-term customers, of which I had been a member. Pretty much as long as I could ignore AT&T I figured I'd be happy. And if I did have to call them for some reason, as long as they weren't complete assholes to me and didn't try to charge me for stuff I didn't buy, again, happy camper. Well, I did have to call them.

At some point, while fiddling around with my iPhone's settings, I decided to try locking the SIM card. Locking the SIM is a security precaution: Should your iPhone wind up in nefarious hands, the SIM card is password protected. What I didn't know was that, out of the box, the SIM card is already password protected with a password known only to AT&T, initially. So when I tried to change the password, it asked me for the existing one. When I provided the wrong one, it locked me out as it's meant to do. Shit.

From then on the phone refused to let me make any calls or use the Edge network. I had to go onto a regular old computer to go to AT&T's website. Here I tried to log into my account, which I apparently had not set up yet. I had sort of assumed this had been set up for me when I activated my phone, but no. Setting up my AT&T web account required going to the site and doing so. Unfortunately, this didn't get me very far, though it did get me to a forum article that described the problem I was having and its solution. In the article was a link to an AT&T utility that would reset or send me the SIM card password. This tool worked perfectly except for one fatal flaw: It sent my SIM card password to my phone via SMS text. Uh, guys... That's not gonna cut it...

Loathe as I was to contact AT&T over all this — or customer service in general, for that matter — looks like that's what I was going to have to do. So I gave them a call (on a friend's cell phone, of course). After navigating the inevitable voice-based menus, I was told that my wait-time to speak to customer service would be two minutes. Not bad considering Sprint was usually upwards of twenty. In about a minute, though, I was speaking to a human. Not only that, but said human knew exactly what I was talking about, and how to fix it. He stayed on the phone with me while I entered the old password and set a new one, and after that everything was right back to normal. The whole call took under five minutes. Amazing!

I've heard AT&T has been making a great effort to improve customer service. And, while I still hope to avoid them in the future, I'll be a lot less resistant to giving them a call based on this recent experience. I can't say the same for their website, though. Finding info there seemed to be quite a painful affair. But, so far anyway, we're light years ahead of Sprint.

Travel
Over the last few weeks I've also had the opportunity to do some light traveling and testing of AT&T's cellular coverage in remote areas. I drove to the farmlands of upstate New York this past weekend, and I used Google maps for just about everything. I had taken along a paper map as well, in case I couldn't get cell phone reception, but I rarely needed it. Google Maps just freakin' rocks, and even in farm country, the AT&T network seemed to hold up pretty well. Not perfectly, mind you — there were certainly a few spots where I had spotty coverage, or none at all. But considering where I was, I was pleasantly surprised at my level of coverage.

Drops
One major bummer happened along my travels: I dropped my iPhone for the first time. I had gone swimming and brought the thing along with me. After my dip I went to pick the iPhone up off the pool chair where I'd left it — with a shirt to keep it from getting wet — and it slipped out of my hands and landed on the concrete, face down. The indestructibility of that glass is near-legendary at this point, and I'd only dropped it from a height of maybe three or four feet, so I honestly wasn't even worried. Imagine my horror when I got back to my hotel room and discovered not only scratches, but a small crack in the lower right hand corner of the glass. Yup. A crack. Fortunately, this is nowhere near the touch-sensitive areas of the screen, and the phone continues to work perfectly.

iPhone Glass: Crack-Resistance Over-Stated?
(click image for larger view)

I've since managed to drop it from full standing height face down onto a hardwood floor, and it has emerged unscathed, so I don't think my first drop was typical. Still, dropping the iPhone can indeed crack the glass, so if you're worried, or prone to dropping phones a lot, and you want to keep your iPhone in pristine condition, you may want to consider getting a case for it. Me, I'm trying to just accept the fact that the phone will not stay perfect forever, and that shit happens. After all, what's a few scrapes and scuffs, right? Builds character!

Yeah... Okay... Whatever...

iPhone Glass Crack Detail: Not So Bad, I Guess
(click image for larger view)

Anyway, I still love the damn thing. In fact, I have to say, maybe the most frustrating thing about it is how much I like it. It's the reason I bring it to the pool. It's the reason I drop it so much. Hell, it's even the reason I locked up the SIM card. I just can't seem to leave it alone.

So, yeah, still happy, cracks and all.

UPDATE:
iPhone Atlas has posted an article on options for cracked iPhone screens. It's pretty much what I'd expected, but what I didn't know is that Apple has a repair program for the iPhone, and they'll reportedly repair any iPhone for a flat rate of $199 for the 4GB model or $249 for the 8GB model. Why the price is different for the 8GB model is beyond me, but there you have it. Thought I'd let you all know.

"Disable Clear Text Passwords" Breaks Randomly

2007-07-18T12:10:00.000-04:00

Typically, when you set up a Mac client to bind to a Mac server using Directory Access, there is one lone entry in the Security settings that is checked by default, and that is the "Disable clear text passwords" setting. This seems like a prudent default, and I always leave it checked. I assume that this means that passwords are then sent to the authentication server in some sort of hashed or encrypted form, and that both server and client are set up to negotiate this transaction properly out of the box. Indeed, most of the time this does not present any sort of problem whatsoever.

But for some reason, every now and then, completely randomly, Mac clients will suddenly and mysteriously be unable to authenticate to my Master Authentication Server. Seriously, nothing's changed. Just all of a sudden, Macs can't authenticate. The solution? Un-tick that "Disable clear text passwords" box under the LDAPv3 server configuration's Security tab. Next thing you know, everything's right as rain.

Directory Access: LDAPv3->Select Configuration->Edit
How in Hell Does this Break?
(click image for larger view)

Seriously, can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? 'Cause frankly, it's annoying.

Ars iPhone Review

2007-07-13T15:11:00.000-04:00

It's funny. I just read Ars Technica's exhaustive-as-usual iPhone review, and in the conclusion they write:

It's clear to us that the iPhone wasn't meant, at the outset anyway, as a smartphone for smartphone people (who typically end up being business people). Instead, the iPhone was meant as a smartphone for everyone else: average people who, until now, had no reason or motivation to get a BlackBerry or something similar that may have been more difficult to use and had way too many features for the average phone user.

Why is this funny? Because the Ars crew and I completely disagree when it comes to the things we love and hate most about the iPhone. Particularly Safari — it's their "home run," but my least favorite part. This discrepancy is primarily a matter of perspective. I am a typical, non-smartphone using cell phone user. Or at least that's where I'm coming from. I'm used to surfing the web on a computer and using a phone as a phone and contact device. So everything that improves upon the telephone experience is a boon for me, but I never surfed on my phone anyway, and compared to my computer the iPhone just can't stack up. Smartphone users, on the other hand, have been frustrated by this crippled, mobile version of the web on their phones for years, so the iPhone's version of the web is a huge boon for them.

What's amazing, though, is that in the end we both come out fairly pleased with the device on the whole. Ars gives it an 8 out of 10. I'd give it a 9. But overall there is enough good about the iPhone to please both the cell phone crowd and the smartphone crowd. Now that's what I call balance!

If you really want a thorough review, I highly recommend the one at Ars.

My iPhone

2007-07-12T17:30:00.000-04:00

I bought one on opening day. I hadn't intended to, but sometimes the hype gets the better of even me. Well, hype and a burning hatred for my then-service provider, Sprint. So I bought one on opening day, over a full week ago. And I can honestly say I haven't been happier with a purchase since I bought my first Powerbook. In fact, this puppy basically is my new laptop. But it fits right in my pocket.

(A side note: A few days ago I got a bill from Sprint. Not for the early cancellation fee like I expected, but a bill for service that I'd paid several days earlier on a phone number no longer under their purview. This will not be the first time they've tried to charge me for a phone that's no longer in service. When I first moved to New York, it took me three months to cancel my previous phone. Their service has gone steadily downhill ever since. Sprint, this is why people hate you and will spend hundreds of dollars to switch to another service. Assholes!)

A lot has been said about the iPhone thus far. And I pretty much agree with most of it: the iPhone, with the exception of a few forgivable oversights, is a revolutionary, market-changing, life-altering device, and easily the best cell phone ever.

This sort of praise has been near-universal among iPhone owners. And for good reason. The iPhone is all those things. But it's the little things that people love and hate about the iPhone that vary from person to person. So I wanted to add my two cents, my voice to the chorus as it were. And I wanted to see if I could do it all (or most of it) on the iPhone itself. So, for a week I've been taking notes on the iPhone on the iPhone. And I'm typing this entire article on my trusty iPhone, between meetings and lunches, totally on-the-go style and shit, using the Mail application.

So far so good.

Google Maps
What probably surprised me most was how endlessly useful and well-integrated the Google Maps feature is. My first day with the phone I had dinner plans. I knew the name of the restaurant, but no one could tell me the address. Did I fret? Did I worry? Did I complain? Heck no! I just Googled it. On my cell phone! But not only was I able to easily retrieve the address, I also got the phone number and URL for the restaurant's site, and this information was easily added to my contacts for later easy retrieval — calling, browsing, want have you. Now I find myself looking up every place I ever call for take-out and adding it to my contacts because it's so damn easy and downright fun. Nearly everything about the iPhone works as easily and seamlessly. It's one of the true joys of owning this phone.

Camera
The next surprise for me was how good the photos look. The camera on the iPhone may not have many (ANY!) features, and the images may not hold up to a dedicated digital camera, but it comes a lot closer than any phone I've ever had.

Camera Sample 1: The Park
(click image for larger view)

Color and contrast look quite nice under normal lighting conditions. I've actually managed to get some really nice shots — shots that on my other phones would've looked like total crap.

Camera Sample 2: Some Dog
(click image for larger view)

And of course those shots can easily be assigned to contacts or wallpaper with the press of a few virtual buttons.

Camera Sample 3: Flower
(click image for larger view)

Optimizing Photos for iPhone:
Apparently, photos from my old phone are not good enough for the iPhone
(click image for larger view)

Contacts and Syncing
And speaking of contacts, all my contact information transfers seamlessly between my Mac's Address Book and my phone now. Windows users may be used to this, but it's another first for me. Synching my phone and my Mac now is not only doable but fairly easy and trouble-free. My only complaint is that, while Address Book syncs are two-way and multi-computer aware, most of the other sync functions hinge on the typical iPod paradigm, in which one computer is the master to which the iPod syncs. This is unfortunate — I have a bunch of computers I'd love to sync up — but not terribly surprising. And as long as the contacts can sync with multiple machines I can live with it.

Some Sync Conflict Dialogs
(click image for larger view)

Oh, one other complaint: locating a contact is a fairly straightforward affair — go to your contacts and scroll the list. Not bad. But I have hundreds of contacts, and this glut of contacts cries out for a search function. Apple's Address Book application has search capabilities. The iPhone's version of Safari has it too — start typing a URL and Safari makes appropriate suggestions based on history and bookmarks. Indeed, my previous phone — a Samsung A900 — even had this capability. It was just dog slow and a total pain. I was really hoping Apple would improve upon this functionality. Instead they chose to leave it out. Not a deal-breaker, but a bit disappointing. I do find myself wanting this feature on a regular basis.

While we're at it, do the same for the Calendar application.

Mail, Folders, Drafts
Mail syncing is not what it sounds like either. That is, account settings get synched but not the mail itself. In fact, the mail client is a stripped down version that (with my IMAP server, anyway) only shows top-level folders — Inbox, Sent, Drafts and Trash. No subfolders are visible. No rules are applied. No spam is filtered. Nevertheless, it's handy as hell to have constant access to my latest mail, and to anything I might be working on — like this article, for instance. In fact, the more I think about it, I'd rather save the organizing for my computer, so this is totally fine, and probably a good thing in the end. Typing in Mail, as throughout the iPhone interface does take some getting used to, but I'm already pretty proficient with two fingers after only a week. The only weird thing in Mail is that saving drafts requires a press of the "Cancel" button, after which you are prompted to save the draft. There is no "Save" button. (Though there does appear to be an auto-save, which I just learned after my first Mail crash — yikes!) I find this behavior very unintuitive and more than a little scary.

Notes
Another pleasant surprise has been the Notes application. I'm a big note-taker, and I find myself using it constantly. It couldn't be much more bare-bones — or much uglier — but I use it all the time. And again, typing is generally quick and trouble-free.

Safari
Having real web access has proven pretty damn handy as well, though without WiFi it's kind of painful. In fact, surfing the web is probably the least satisfying thing about using the iPhone. For one, Safari crashes on me with a fair degree of regularity. (And by the way, the other apps almost never do.)

Crash Log Dialog: The Logs are in:
/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/iPhoneName/Baseband
(click image for larger view)

And, though it's a fairly full-featured browser (I for one am glad there's no Flash most of the time), pages not designed for the phone can still be difficult to read. The New York Times, for instance, which sometimes uses a fairly wide column for articles, almost must be read in horizontal mode. Fortunately — brilliantly — the iPhone provides just such a feature. But surfing the web is just generally not the rich media experience I was hoping for. It has been useful for cheking our network and the status of certain servers. And it will be great for when I want to read sites that consist mainly of text. But really, who has time to read these days anyway?

Battery
I've also been quite happy with the battery life of this phone. I haven't actually talked on it for any length of time (that will require a call to Mom), but I use it for notes, mail, Google and checking the weather all freaking day (I can't keep my hands off the damn thing) and my battery seems to consistently last a full two days, though barely. My old phone would die in the middle of any call over a couple hours and needed to be recharged nightly. 'Course my old phone couldn't check mail, weather, Google or take notes either — at least not without jumping through some major hoops and incurring some major charges. I guess when I think about it, one of my favorite things about this phone is that it's not my old phone. Doing anything on that phone was a chore. Most everything on the iPhone is either dead easy or downright fun. Who'd've ever thought you'd hear a cell phone described as "fun?"

But I digress.

The Phone
The phone part of iPhone is fine. Nothing to really write home about, but fine. The nice thing about using iPhone as a phone is, of course, the interface. There is no talk button. When receiving a call, as everywhere else on the iPhone, you're presented with a list of contextual options — "Answer" or "Decline" if you're using other features of the device. I actually wasn't sure how to answer my first call. The phone was locked, so I unlocked it and then panicked a little. "Now what?" Turned out, I had already answered by the simple act of unlocking the phone. Nice!

Sound quality, as reported elsewhere, is clear but a bit quiet, especially given that I live in a big, noisy city. It's much better with the earbuds, but I'm not usually in a position to use them, especially when I'm out and about. I do hope they fix this with a firmware or software update. I have a feeling they will. Still, sound is clearer with less background interference than my previous phone. So overall I'm pretty pleased with the phone portion of my iPhone.

Improvements
The iPhone is by no means perfect, of course. Though I'm about as happy with a version 1 device as I think humanly possible, there are just a few things I would love to see improved. Everyone has their priorities. My list goes something like this:

Contact and event searching
Like I said earlier, this would be really nice if implemented well.
Better backspace placement
I am always hitting the backspace button inadvertantly (though I am getting better).
Cut/copy/paste
This a given, and probably the number one complaint about the iPhone. If Apple could provide this with a software update, everyone would be pleased as punch, I'm sure.
Disk access
I was pretty bummed that I can't use this iPod/iPhone as a hard drive. It's the one thing even my old phone can do. Give me access to that 8 gigs, please. (There is now iPhone Drive, though I'd rather not have to pay to access my own hard drive, thank you very little.)
Volume increase
It would really be nice if we could turn the iPhone up a bit for calls. Plenty of volume for the iPod, though.

That's about it. I'm really a pretty happy camper.

Final Thoughts
All kinds of new, mind-altering experiences have come my way since getting this phone. For one, people actually talk to me at parties now. The iPhone is actually so cool it spills over onto me. It has a surplus of cool. Cool to spare. And for the first time ever, though I've never been an iPod person, I've actually put on headphones and used the iPod functions of this phone (I may now be hooked like the rest of the world). I'm not sure why I tried it, really. I guess I just like the thing that much. It's just so damn touchable!

But the most telling event happened the other day while I was using my computer, actually. I was looking at a web page and wanted to scroll down. And for just the briefest of moments it was all I could do to keep from using my finger.

This is big, folks. Really big.

This article written on my iPhone
(but edited on my computer)

External Network Unification Part 5: Almost There

2007-06-28T11:29:00.000-04:00

It's been quite some time since I've been able to post anything of any substance. This has a lot to do with the fact that I've been super busy relocating our department and participating in the gut renovation of our lab. This has been an immensely stressful process, but in the end I find that I've learned so much from it, I simply can't complain. I'm coming out a far better SysAdmin than I was going in. And that's a remarkably valuable thing to both me and my employers.

But moving and planning the physical aspects of the new lab has only been a portion of what I've been working on. This renovation has been the perfect opportunity to rebuild our network infrastructure, and part of said rebuilding has resulted in the near completion of our authentication unification project. At this point we've gone from eight different authentication servers — that is, anytime we created a new user, we had to do so on eight different systems — all the way on down to two. Which means that now, anytime we create a new user, we do so on two machines.

Our goal is to get it down to one, hopefully before the Fall semester begins. Our mail server is proving to be the most difficult machine to get working with LDAP authentication, mainly because it authenticates mail users through the wonders of some weird combination of authd, Courier and PAM, and we've yet to crack the magical code that gets these all working in tandem via LDAP. Aside from Mail, though, everything is done. So I thought I'd take a bit of my hard-earned vacation and loosely describe to you how it's all working.

Before I start I'd like to just acknowledge all the help I've had from my fellow SysAdmins in the department. I had a huge amount of assistance on the *NIX server side of things, as well as with network infrastructure and even some last-minute PHP finagling without which this project would have taken significantly longer. In fact, all I really had to do was build the authentication servers and clearly articulate what I wanted. I'm extremely grateful to everyone who helped out.

The little bit of network infrastructure I mentioned is our DMZ. We now have a proper — and more importantly, properly secured — DMZ on which to place an authentication server. I won't go into too much detail here, but suffice to say, having a secure DMZ gives us all kinds of options for authentication between internal and external networks, and makes me feel a whole lot better about using Mac OS X Server as our authentication system for both networks.

Yes, we are using Mac OS X Server to authenticate our entire network. The reason is because Mac OS X Server is the most mature and usable implementation of LDAP for user authentication available on the market today. Is it perfect? No. Is it completely secure? Probably not. Is there anything that even comes remotely close to being able to handle the complexities of user management and database redundancy across platforms with such remarkable ease-of-use? Nope. Nothing. We tried building our own custom LDAP server, which would have been excruciating, and would have taken forever. We tried Red Hat's Directory Server, which looks like it will eventually turn into something to match Mac OS X Server, but which just wasn't yet up to snuff. Nothing matched Mac OS X Server, which did everything we wanted it to, right out of the box and with a minimum of fuss. In fact, once the user database is built, building a Mac OS X master or replica authentication server is a complete and total breeze. At the time of our building and testing it was really the only practical option.

So, here in a nutshell, is what we have:

Internal Network
All authentication originates from the internal network. Passwords can only be changed from the internal network at this time, which is by design. Systems on the internal network include:

Master Authentication Server
Hosts authentication for... Well... Everything, really. This is essentially the same server we used all last year for all our internal authentication needs for Mac, Linux and Windows workstations. It's now being used to push authentication to the external network as well.
Internal Replica Authentication Server
This provides replication of the Master. Should the master fail, the Replica is intended to pick up services (though this doesn't always work perfectly).
File Servers
We have two file servers on the internal network — a Mac and a Linux box — both of which authenticate directly against the Master.
Workstations
We have about 30 Mac, Windows and Linux machines all authenticating to the Master.

DMZ
The DMZ sits between the Big Bad Internet (BBI) and the internal network. It has its own firewall that is fairly strict about what can get in from the BBI. All DMZ authentication originates from the internal network, but is provided by a single server which sits on the DMZ. Systems on the DMZ include:

External Authentication Server
This server is also a replica of our Master, but it's not intended as a failsafe. Rather, it provides authentication services to the entire DMZ. It gets its user database, of course, from the Master. But for other systems to bind to an LDAP server, its role must either be "Master" or "Replica." Setting the role to "Connected to a Directory Server" won't work. In addition to sitting on our DMZ, which is properly firewalled against the harsh realities of the Big Bad Internet (BBI), this system also makes use of its own strict local firewall for an extra added layer of security. Also, all replication communication between Replica (DMZ) and Master (Internal) is encrypted.
Data Server
In addition to unifying authentication, we've also consolidated data storage and access wherever possible. In the past, for instance, movies streamed from the Quicktime Server were stored on that machine's local drive. Web sites were stored on our web server. So, building a web site that used Quicktime Streaming required users to log into two separate machines — the Web Server and the Quicktime Streaming Server. Now we're storing all user-generated content on a separate, dedicated machine — our Data Server — and sharing that machine out to the various servers via NFS. Centralizing this data store means users have only to log on to one server for anything they ever want to do. And also that only that server needs to authenticate users. And yes, that server authenticates them via LDAP on our External Authentication Server. All neat and tidy. Internal and external home account data is still segregated, however — users still have separate internal and external data storage. Though, if we could figure out how to do it securely, this could change.
Quicktime Streaming Server
This machine also uses its own local firewall. It gets its user database from our External Authentication Server over secure channels using the "Connected to a Directory System" as its role currently. Ultimately, however, because of the Data Server, this machine will not need to authenticate users. We are leaving the ability open temporarily to accommodate legacy users.
Drupal CMS
Our new Community site is built on the Drupal engine. We're using the LDAP module to authenticate to the External Authentication Server. Drupal's LDAP module is simple and easy to set up, as is the Drupal system as a whole. So far we're very happy with it.
Computer Reservations System
This is a custom web app built long ago by a former student. We've (and by "we" I mean my colleague) basically hacked the PHP code to authenticate via LDAP rather than MySQL.
Mail Server
Currently not authenticating to the External Authentication Server. We're working on this and hope to have it working by the beginning of the school year.

The Future
Yes, there's more we want to do. It's always amazing how, once you've completed something, you immediately start seeing ways to make it better.

More Redundancy
Ultimately, in addition to the Replica, I would also like to automate a clone of the Master's boot drive to an external firewire drive as sort of an ultimate safety. Should anything ever go wrong with the Master, I simply plug the firewire clone into virtually any Mac system on the internal network and I'm back on my feet. It might also be wise to have some sort of failsafe for external authentication as well.
More Security
while our setup is fairly secure right now, there are a few areas I'd like to beef up even more when I get a chance. In particular, our CMS connection is not as secure as I'd like it to be. And ultimately I'd like to harden every machine on the DMZ to the best of my ability.
More Unification
Anything else we can unify — and at this point that's mostly internal and external data — I'm open to considering. It's going to be really interesting for me to look critically at what we've done so far and find the flaws and refine the system. But I'll constantly be looking at ways to simplify our current setup even further without compromising security. The easier our network is to use, the more useful it becomes. We've come a long way, but I'm sure we can find even better ways to do things.
More Services
Now that we have an infrastructure in place for user creation, we can add services freely to our network without the worry of creating users for said services. New services need only the ability to authenticate via LDAP. We're already planning an equipment checkout system, and possibly some calendaring systems.

So, I've just finalized the master authentication server. It's done. Built. Finished. Kaput. The rest of our servers are still in various states of finality, and we have until September to lock them down. But right now, unified authentication is, for all intents and purposes (and with the exception of mail), working. And we couldn't be happier. The ultimate test will be, of course, letting users loose on this new infrastructure. I'm betting they'll like it almost as much as we do. At least the ones who know the old system. New users will be none the wiser. Ain't that always the way?

*Sigh*

Magic iPhone

2007-06-26T10:30:00.000-04:00

Just got done watching the iPhone Activation Video — 'cause with the announcement of the very reasonable service plans I've pretty much decided I'm getting one of these puppies — and I noticed a bit of an error in the video. The demonstration iPhone in the video is apparently an 8 GB model and starts off with 7.27 GB of storage.

iPhone: 8 GB Model
(click image for larger view)

But by the end of the video its capacity has increased tenfold!

iPhone: 75 GB Model
(click image for larger view)

Well, that cinches it. If the iPhone's capacity magically grows as you add data, it's surely the most wondrous device ever, and certainly worth having.

I'll take three!

Finally!

2007-06-14T00:09:00.000-04:00

I still have no time to post, but I did want to squeeze in a quickie regarding yesterday's WWDC news (or lack thereof).

Needless to say, count me among the underwhelmed. A usual, we were all expecting big things, but this seemed like WWDC 2006 reheated. Leopard looks nice, but hardly revolutionary. We've been waiting two years. We want revolutionary. We want the iPhone on the Desktop.

I guess there's always next year.

Oh yeah, and Safari on Windows? Great. If you're a Windows user. Or a Safari user. Unfortunately, Safari lost me a while back, and it's going to take a lot of catch-up for it to get back to the top spot in my browser list. Still, I will say, I'm typing this in the Safari 3 Beta, which I didn't used to be able to do on Blogger. At least not properly. There are still some things that don't quite work right, but it's much better than it was. And overall I'd say I'm favorably impressed with this version.

But for me the happiest moment was seeing Apple's new home page. They've finally ditched the 10+ year old pinstripe and Chiclet tab bar for something a bit more modern and refined.

Finally!

Apple's New Tab Bar: Much Better

(click image for larger view)

UPDATE:
As a couple readers have pointed out, looks like the Apple redesign is for the U.S. site only at this point. I never realized I had such an international readership.

Abusive When Harried

2007-04-24T17:20:00.000-04:00

I've determined that approximately 75-80% of all technical questions can be accurately answered with the response, "Because you are a dumbass."

Examples:

Q: Why isn't my computer working?
A: Because you are a dumbass.
Q: Why did my computer freeze?
A: Because you are a dumbass.
Q: Why can't I log in to the server (x)?
A: Because you are a dumbass.
Q: Why can't my browser read the website (x)?
A: Because you are a dumbass.
Q: Why can't I get online?
A: Because you are a dumbass.
Q: Why can't I find my file (x)?
A: Because you are a dumbass.
Q: Why is this piece of technology (x) so slow?
A: Because you are an unbelievable dumbass.

Seriously folks, computers have become exceptionally reliable and predictable. If something's not working, well, frankly, it's probably your fault.

Now leave me alone. I have work to do.

Idiot.

Notes on Google Desktop

2007-04-18T17:25:00.000-04:00

Google Desktop, the Google-made search utility for your computer, is finally out for the Mac. I've been playing around with it, putting it through its paces, and comparing it to Spotlight. Here's what I've found so far:

Google Desktop is much, much faster at searching than Spotlight. Spotlight took nearly a full minute to search the term "test" on my computer (that's measured from the time I hit return in the search bar to the time the pinwheel stopped spinning). Google Desktop was nearly instantaneous at returning results. I found both sets of results about equally useful — or useless, depending on your perspective.

Spotlight Search Results: Slow and Useless
(click image for larger view)
Google Desktop also returned fewer results than Spotlight. I'm not quite sure why this is so. My guess is that Google Desktop searches metadata and/or file contents differently than Spotlight. But who knows? I've often wondered how Spotlight determines what results get returned, and how relevancy is determined. It's mysteries like that that make these things perhaps less useful than they could be. I know how to optimize my web site for Google's internet search engine, at least to some extent, because how Google searches the web is not completely opaque to me. I do not know, however, how best to save my local data to optimize it for searching via Spotlight or Google Desktop. So my results tend to vary. The nice thing about Google Desktop, though, is that I at least don't have to wait 50 seconds to see my useless results returned. I get them instantly. Yee-haw.

Google Desktop Search Results: Fast and Useless
(click image for larger view)
Spotlight stores its index files on a per drive basis, which is smart: index your drive on one machine, it's indexed everywhere. Spotlight's index files are also really small. Google Desktop, on the other hand, creates much bigger index files than Spotlight, and those index files are all stored on the root drive (in /Library/Google/Google\ Desktop/Index/). This is bad for two reasons. On the location side of things, if you move, say, a firewire drive to another computer with Google Desktop, that computer will have to re-index the drive, and that index will always be out of sync with the ones on other systems, causing Google Desktop to constantly index external drives. On the size end of the equation, since the Google Desktop index is entirely on the root drive and can get quite large, it is quite possible, given a large quantity of data and a relatively small root partition — like, say, on my system — for Google Desktop's index files to completely fill your hard drive and lock up your system. Yes. This did happen to me. Thank you for asking.
Google Desktop also shows you other useful information right in the list of search results, which is nice. Info like the file path and a preview of the document's contents appear right there in the search window.

In terms of functionality, though, I like Google Desktop about as much as I like Spotlight, which is to say, not all that much. Mainly because I just don't get very useful results. There are some interesting features that Google Desktop offers in terms of Gmail integration that I've yet to try. These might add some appeal to the program. But as far as searching my local system goes, thus far even Google has yet to make a desktop application that rivals its internet search engine. Seems strange that searching local files is a harder nut to crack than searching the internet. But I guess it is after all.

UPDATE:
First off, I meant to mention that the initial indexing for Google Desktop took a very long time. I'm not sure how much because I ran it on my work machine and let it go all weekend long. Judging by the size of the index when I left the machine versus the final size, I'd guestimate it took roughly 24 hours. Very rough estimate. And bear in mind that I have probably around 1.5 to 2 terabytes of data.

Today I find that Google Desktop is hogging my CPU. I get a big performance hit whenever I'm doing large file writes to disk, which is understandable though hardly forgivable. Times like these the processor can hit near 120%. So, for instance, a file copy involving many files will cause my Quad G5 to bog down noticeably.

Google Desktop: Processor Hog
(click image for larger view)

In addition, since Google Desktop is apparently pretty damn slow about indexing, said file copy will cause Google Desktop to start indexing again, which makes its processor usage hover between about 50% and 90%. Google Desktop's indexing process is both slow — far slower than file copies — and processor intensive — to the point of making other apps run noticeably slower. I'm uninstalling it now. I have work to do.

That was fun while it lasted.

Google Gone Deaf?

2007-04-09T12:22:00.000-04:00

So the other day I was searching the term "Risso's dolphins" on Google. Something I'd read had referenced them, and I was curious what they looked like. So I type "Risso's dolphins" into that ever-familiar Google search field, and this is what I get back:

Google Search: Do I Stutter?
(click image for larger view)

Uh, yeah. I did mean "Risso's dolphins." That's why I typed, "Risso's dolphins."

Seriously, Google, you're losin' it, man. Maybe you should see a doctor.

How Do You Dress for That?

2007-04-04T14:40:00.000-04:00

The weather's been insanely variable 'round here for the past couple months. Recently I took this screen shot from WeatherDock.

Seriously, Mother Nature, what are you smokin'?

Insanely Variable Temperatures: Good Day for Layers
(click image for larger view)

Scripts Part 7: Contextual Menus with Automator

2007-03-31T15:00:00.000-04:00

Recently, for some odd reason, there has been a spate of solutions to the problem of creating new files in the Finder via a contextual menu. One involves a contextual menu plugin called NuFile. Another involves installing Big Cats Scripts and linking it to an Applescript. But honestly — and I'm surprised someone else didn't think of this first — when faced with simple contextual menu tasks, these days my first thought is to look to Automator.

And by golly, that's just what I did. Here are a few Automator workflows that do, more or less what the afore-linked methods do. To me, the advantage of the Automator approach is that you don't need to install anything. It's all baked in. Which means you don't ever need to update anything either. Nice. Simple. And, yeah, kind of the whole point of Automator.

So here you go. Maybe someone will find this useful, if for nothing other than as an exercise in creating contextual menu functionality with Automator. Or skinning a cat multiple ways. Or something. To use this, download the .zip file, unzip it and place it in:
~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder

NewTextFile Workflow

It should become active immediately.

Also, here are a couple variants. One will create a text file, and then open it in TextWrangler (if you have TextWrangler, and if you don't, go get it now); the other creates a Word document, and opens it in Word. I'm far to lazy to completely duplicate the functionality of NuFile. But if you examine these workflows, you can at least see now how that would be possible (in fact, fairly easy) to accomplish.

NewTextFile Workflow Variants

I actually think it would be great if Apple made it drop dead simple to create true contextual menus for the Finder. Fortunately, Automator gets us pretty close.

Oh, yeah, and since this is technically script writing, and since I haven't posted to that series in some time, we're gonna go ahead and call this a Script Sharing post. Deal with it.

Right. Good night.

UPDATE: Revised March 31, 2007, 3:00 PM
Stephan Cleaves has added yet another implementation of this idea. He's using a combination of Automator and AppleScript. I certainly think his implementation is better than mine in a few ways. Certainly more full-featured. It will prompt for a file name, for instance, and takes pains not to overwrite a preexisting file with the same name. Nice. But we're taking very different approaches to the same idea (his version places a file in the front-most Finder window, my version places it in the right-clicked folder), and he was confused by my approach. After speaking to him via comments on his blog, I realized that some clarification as to how my workflow is actually constructed might be in order.

Basically, my workflow takes the folder selected in the Finder as input and assigns that input to the variable "$@". That variable and the for loop in my workflow are automatically generated by Automator when you select “as arguments” from the “Pass input:” field in the “Do Shell Script” action. It’s how you get the context (the selected folder) passed to the script. Apparently Automator takes “$@” as the variable for “the folder you just selected” whenever there’s no input from a previous action. This was something I learned while fiddling around with all of this, and it's really my favorite part. The coolest thing for me here, really, was figuring out how to pass the context — i.e. the right-clicked folder — to an Automator "Do Shell Script" action. This opens up worlds of potential.

Finally, as I said, the for loop in the action is auto-generated by Automator. The workflow will work almost as well with the simple script:
touch “$@/NewText.txt”

Using the for loop, however, allows you to create a new text file in multiple folders by selecting said folders and running the workflow.

It's really kind of amazing how many ways there are to do this. Wow. Fun stuff.

An Elephant in the Way

2007-03-29T18:09:00.000-04:00

I still don't have time to write anything coherent. So, in lieu of — and as a tip of the hat to — my inability to do so, I give you this:
They didn't study

Via Scribd.

Oh my god that's hilarious.

Not Dead

2007-03-27T13:43:00.000-04:00

Hello out there, oh loyal, faithful readers. All three of you.

Just wanted to pop in and say hi. It's been a solid month since I've posted anything, and that's pretty unusual. I've even stopped responding to comments, which is almost unheard of. Unfortunately it's been somewhat out of my control. Both work and life have been insanely busy. I'm not so much making excuses here as posting this so that anyone who might be reading this site knows that:
A) I am not dead (or even injured)
B) I am not planning on discontinuing the blog.

That said, I wanted to just take a moment and explain what's been going on. Our department is getting a face lift. Which is to say that we are completely remodeling our floor. Gut rehab: Power. A/C. Network cabling. Seriously. Everything is being completely redone. It's freaking fantastic. It's also a hell of a lot of work as I'm the one overseeing the entire transition, from a technological standpoint anyway, which, since this is a digital art program, represents a fairly large piece of the pie. So I'm exceptionally busy helping plan the new floor — from actual per-room computer placement, to the power needs and layout of the server room. Much of this is new to me, so I'm being educated quite rapidly and on the fly. And since this is a gut rehab, we'll have to clear off the floor at the end of the semester, so I'm planning that transition as well — from moving staff computers to another floor and setting them up with an ad-hoc LAN, to moving our entire DMZ to said floor along with the requisite internet pipes. It's not easy, and it's very much a concerted effort. Fortunately, everyone here has really pulled together, and we're actually making it happen somehow. And while I'm elated to finally be getting all this done (it's been a long time coming, believe me, and we desperately need it, if for the cabling and power problems alone — don't even get me started on the A/C!) I'm way too overwhelmed to write about any of it intelligently right now. Or much of anything else for that matter.

We have been forging ahead with our various long term projects, however. Most notably, I've started building and testing an authentication server for the external network. So far it's going exceedingly well, and it shouldn't be long before our external network has a single authentication source (hopefully this summer sometime). I've been taking notes, so expect a post sometime when things get back to normal. We've also recently bought and set up a firewall appliance which we're loving. It's now being used to properly host our internal and DMZ networks, and is really making our network management a thousand times easier and more sensible. We'll be using it for limited VPN as well, which will be sweet. Today a friend will be running a demo of Leopard in his class as well. These — along with all the goodies associated with the renovation — are all posts in the pipe. Just as soon as I get some time.

You know — if I may wax reflective for just a second — it's not even so much that I have no time to write. Clearly, I'm able to write this post. The real problem is that writing about technology takes a certain amount of brain power. No, not even brain power. Brain space is maybe more like it. With everything I'm dealing with, I've got plenty to write about, and even some time to write about it. What I'm missing is the time to actually process what I'm experiencing. And before I can write about it, I have to process it. It's not so much that I need time to write as that I need to time to think. And that I just don't have right now.

So that's what's been going on here. This can't all last forever, of course. And I'm sure I'll be posting regularly again soon. Until then, do check back from time to time. I'll try to post small bits of stuff as I can.

Okay then. Back to the trenches. This has been fun.

Broken Downloadable Installers

2007-02-26T18:05:00.001-05:00

In the past it's always been possible to save a copy of updates downloaded via Mac OS X's Software Update application.

Software Update: Keep it Handy
(click image for larger view)

Recently, however, certain Final Cut Studio updates will only install via the Software Update mechanism. You can download the updater, but it won't install. For instance, the version 5.1.4 update will download several packages to my hard drive.

Downloaded Packages: Completely Useless in this Case
(click image for larger view)

And I can launch the Final Cut package installer, and it will open in the Installer application. But the splash screen gives me my first hint that something is not right.

Installer: Uh-Oh
(click image for larger view)

I can even navigate to the "Select Destination" screen of the installer, but here I am told that this update can only be installed via Software Update.

Installer: New and the Opposite of Improved
(click image for larger view)

To add insult to injury, even though I've already downloaded the installers, Software Update, once quit, needs to download them all over again. Lame. Painful. Awful. Installing this 39 MB update on my 25+ Macs will kill my network. Guaranteed.

Software Update: But... I Just Downloaded It...
(click image for larger view)

The ability to download software updates for later install — or reinstall — is a really wonderful function of Mac's Software Update mechanism, particularly from a systems standpoint. It's sad and more than a little scary to see it not working on certain, specific pieces of software. Here's hoping this trend does not continue.

Replica Reset Voodoo (That Works!)

2007-02-10T15:23:00.000-05:00

So today, after downgrading my master server to 10.4.7, I kept getting an error on my replica. So I decided to reset the replica by demoting it to a "Standalone" role, and then re-promoting it to the "Replica" role. But even after doing this, the error message persisted. The message was telling me to check the logs at:

/var/run/openldap-slurp/replica

and doing so did reveal errors like:

ERROR: Type or value exists: modify/add: memberUid: value #0 already exists

The solution was to again demote the replica to standalone status and then archive all the files in:

/var/run/openldap-slurp/replica

to anywhere else. I put them in a folder called "old." Just get 'em out of the way. Once this was done I was able to promote my replica without receiving error messages.

Yay! That wasn't too bad.

Oh, and you may be asking yourself how I knew to do this. Well, to be honest, I don't really remember. I just know that at some point in the past there was a problem I'd had with a replica and it was caused by stale files. So, since my ultimate goal was to start from scratch, I just got everything out of the way. And lo and behold. It worked. Sorry for the voodoo explanation, though. I wish I could be more explicit. Hell, I wish I fully understood what I was dealing with. But I don't. And, though it pains me to say this, I don't have time to figure it out.

But y'know? I'll take the cure even if I don't know what caused the disease.

Mac OS X Server 10.4.8 Breaks Windows Quotas

2007-02-09T19:51:00.000-05:00

It's great to finally have something systems-related to post about amidst the endless bureaucracy that fills my days lately. Of course that means that — yup, you guessed it — something broke. But hey, that's what it's all about. Well, that and the fixing of said brokeness, of course.

So we recently discovered that our Windows clients were suddenly, and without explanation, able to greatly exceed their roaming profile quotas. In fact, looking at the roaming profile drive showed users with upwards of 25 GBs in their roaming profiles, which have quota limits of 50 MB. Not only that, but further testing revealed that Windows client machines wouldn't even complain if they went over quota. Any SMB connection to the roaming profile drive could exceed the quota limit without so much as a complaint from server or client. AFP worked. UNIX worked. But quotas were ignored over SMB. What the fuck?

For three days I've been trying to track this problem down, testing all sorts of quota scenarios and SMB configurations in between meetings and meetings and more meetings. Eventually, when I can't make headway on a problem, I start thinking it might just be a bug. So I started poking around in the Apple Discussions, and I found one and only one complaint of a similar nature: 10.4.8 Server with broken quotas on Windows. Had I recently done a system update that perhaps broke quotas?

So I started thinking about what in a system update could break such a thing. How do quotas work? There is no daemon. A colleague suggested that they were part of the kernel. Had I done anything that would have replaced the kernel in the last month or two?

The answer was yes. Over the winter break I had decided to update the server to version 10.4.8. Upon realizing this I began to strongly suspect that Mac OS X Server 10.4.8 contained a bug that broke quotas over SMB. Fortunately, as is often my practice, I'd made a clone of my 10.4.7 server to a portable firewire drive before upgrading. Testing my theory would be a simple matter of booting off the clone.

Sure enough, after booting from the clone, quotas began behaving properly on Windows clients again. Because I had the clone, reverting the 10.4.8 server back to 10.4.7 was a simple matter of cloning the contents of the firewire to the server's internal drive and rebooting. Voilà! Problem solved!

From now on I think I'll hold off on server updates unless I really, really need them. When it comes to servers, I think the old adage is best: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Ass-Fucked by Flash and Java

2007-01-25T16:15:00.000-05:00

I'm in a rotten mood lately. It's my time of year. Sorry for all the ranting and swearing. Keep your kids away for the next couple of weeks.

Right, then.

I've always been baffled by the use of the "Start" page or "Enter" page at the front of some websites. I mean, really, what's the point of these things? If I didn't want to start or enter the site, I wouldn't have gone there in the first place. And, technically, I've already "entered" the site simply by navigating to it. So, I've always asked myself, why the extra step?

The Enter Page: Get Ready to Take One in the Heiny
(click image for larger view)

Today I think I figured out the answer. The Enter page signals something subtle but immensely important: You are about to be fucked up the ass. When you click the Enter button, a series of things is about to happen. First, a new window will pop up. This new window will be of a size, position and aspect ratio of the site author's choosing, i.e. not of your choosing and probably as gigantic as possible. The URL bar, bookmark bar, tab bar and anything else you might rely on for browsing the web will be disabled. And this new, probably gigantic window will most likely be populated with... nothing, at least for the first few seconds, save for a "progress" bar (really, is this progress?), which is a sure sign that, yes, you've just been anally reamed. Congratulations.

Flash Progress Bar: How's Your Tookas Feeling Now?
(click image for larger view)

Eventually, the Flash will load and you'll be browsing the site in no time, and, like some sort of alien abduction, you'll have absolutely no memory of this violation. Next time you see that Enter button, you'll go right ahead and click it like nothing ever happened. And then later you'll scratch your head and wonder where all the rectal bleeding is coming from.

So this post is a warning to all you forgetful folks out there. If you see a Start or Enter page for a site, just remember: It's a trap! Don't click it! No good can come of it.

Someday you'll thank me.

Smart Folders Suck Ass

2007-01-25T13:18:00.000-05:00

Rarely have I seen an interface or feature as useless or just downright broken as Smart Folders in the Mac OS X 10.4 Finder. Thought they might be handy, so I tried to make one. Here's what happened.

My goal was to create a Smart Folder that contained all my Final Cut Pro project files from the past year. In the Finder I clicked "command-f" to perform a search. A new window opened with some default search criteria pre-filled. I set the search location to "Home" and then set the "Kind" to "Others..." Next, I attempted to set up my "Kind" criteria to search for Final Cut Pro project files. Clicking the little arrow next to the text entry field brings up a list of document types. The list would seem to be rather exhaustive. It's huge. But the bad thing is that it seems to continually update, so as you begin to scroll through the list, it keeps jumping back to the top as the list is updated. Type-ahead find is also enabled, but again, even using type-ahead the list still jumps to the top. Too much typing and you'll get the beachball. All this makes the list of document types nearly unusable, or at least unreadable. Unless you know the exact name of the document type you're looking for, you'll be lucky to find it in this horribly broken drop-down. Fortunately I was able to correctly guess that the document type I was looking for was called "Final Cut Pro Project File." After typing this in, I got a list of all the FCP files in my home account. Okay. Great. Halfway to my goal, I saved the Smart Folder to the "Saved Searches" location and added it to my Sidebar (there are only three possible save locations for Smart Folders, by the way: Saved Searches, Desktop and Home).

My New Smart Folder: Let the Ass-Sucking Begin
(click image for larger view)

So, I had a Smart Folder that listed all my FCP files, but I wanted to narrow this a bit to include only those FCP files from the last year. No problem, right? I opened my Smart Folder and clicked the Edit button. Again I was presented with search criteria at the top of my window. For my second set of criteria I selected "Created Within Last 1 Years." At this point the Finder beachballed for about twenty seconds, then restarted. Fortunately — and I use the term loosely — when it came back to life it had actually preserved my Smart Folder and I was able to save it.

So, finally, after much effort, I had my Smart Folder of all FCP documents in my home account, created in the last year. Neat-O! I decided to see what I could do with this list. So I opened up my Smart Folder, and started poking around. The first thing I noticed was that the list was ordered alphabetically. There appeared no obvious way to reorder the list. It was just a flat list of files, and a long one at that. It didn't even show labels.

The Default Smart Folder View: Utterly Useless
(click image for larger view)

Fortunately, as it happens, switching to List view in the Finder window yielded a more useful view of my data, but it took me a bit of time to even realize I could do this.

The View Switch: Good Thing I Remembered This
(click image for larger view)

It's a little confusing that the default view in a Smart Folder is really quite limited in its usefulness. Why do they use the Spotlight view for this? The standard list view is just as user-friendly and a thousand times more useful. It's hard to believe this is an Apple-designed interface.

List View: Finally Something Vaguely Useful
(click image for larger view)

In the end, I'm not sure how useful my Smart Folder will be. Honestly, I've rarely found myself wishing I had this sort of functionality, and the confounding and oftentimes irritating user experience that is Smart Folder configuration doesn't really leave me with much desire to come up with a use for it. Nor does it instill much confidence that this view of my data is accurate. If Smart Folders can cause the Finder to crash, can I really trust them to accurately perform their searches?

Smart Folders are a neat idea. But I really think they're just one more area where Spotlight needs a ton of work before they can really be of much use. I recently read a description of Smart Folders as "underused." Yeah, well, maybe that's less because no one knows about them and more because they just plain ol' suck ass.

The Coolest Mistake

2007-01-13T14:48:00.000-05:00

The new ModBook, from Axiotron and OWC, finally realizes a dream long held by Mac lovers: the tablet Mac. But seeing this Franken-computer in action only makes me realize that it's a product that's doomed to failure.

As cool as the idea of a tablet computer seems — and make no mistake, these ModBooks do look pretty cool — all I can think about when I see them demoed is how incredibly inconvenient they'd be to use for most regular work — for most anything I use my laptop for. What do I use my laptop for? Email, billing, troubleshooting, surfing, writing. Almost everything I generally do on my laptop requires text input, for which a WACOM is poorly suited. What do I not do on my laptop? Draw! Let's face it, the WACOM is a drawing tool, and I just don't think most people use a laptop for drawing. And I don't think they want to either.

The ModBook: Best Bad Idea Ever
(click image for larger view)

Graphics people tend to use desktop systems as their main rigs. There are a lot of reasons for this: they need a faster computer; they need a larger viewing surface; and, perhaps most importantly, they just don't want to draw or design on-the-go. Ever try to draw something in your sketchbook in the car? Or on the train? On a plane? It sucks. Drawing is not a portable activity.

So, the scenario goes, you buy this ModBook, and not only do you have to draw on this small screen, on this underpowered machine, but you also have to handwrite your emails, your terminal scripts, and your blog entries. The ModBook cripples both the functionality of a portable computer and that of a drawing tablet. It flies in the face of both these products' very reason for being. And it costs a bundle to boot.

I'm not sure what the intended market is for these machines. But I can say with almost 100% certainty that they will fail, because I don't think that market is very large, if it exists at all. The ModBook adds either a layer of complexity or a lack of functionality to everything you might want to use a tablet or a laptop for in the first place. I predict that graphics users will find it underwhelming, and regular users will find it frustrating. Who does that leave? Um... People with a lot of expendable income for electronic toys they'll never seriously use. A novelty market at best.

It's almost too bad the ModBook was released alongside the iPhone. The iPhone shows us real and good reasons to use a touch-screen interface on a portable device, and some really brilliant and innovative ways to implement this. It totally shows the ModBook up. Compare the two, and the ModBook comes up looking like a product without a purpose.

Apple was right when they said that no one would want a tablet computer. Seeing the ModBook only drives the point home. With a vengeance.

Why did we want that again? I forget.

Yes, I Want One

2007-01-11T02:31:00.000-05:00

That's all I really have to say about it. I totally, unreservedly want an Apple iPhone. It will most likely replace my aging 867MhZ PowerBook. And my cellphone. And my wireless provider. And my iPod. And my portable hard drive. And... And...

Yeah, I want one.

The Apple iPhone: Completely Exceeded My Expectations
(click image for larger view)

Build It Ugly

2007-01-05T11:35:00.000-05:00

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the perception that Macintosh computers are more expensive than comparably equipped computers from other manufacturers persists to this day, despite the fact that this has not been true for several years now. Steven Frank recently wrote:

"Despite recent dramatic price drops across Apple's line, I still hear from beloved but uninformed relatives that Macs are "too expensive". It's a stigma that they seem unable to shake, even with raw numbers in your face demonstrating that the Mac is equal to or cheaper than a similarly equipped Dell."

Most Mac users — and non-Mac users in the know — can tell you that Macs, for what they offer, are very reasonably priced. Yet the stigma remains.

I believe the reason for this is that Macs just look damn nice. People take one look at a Mac and just instantly assume that it must be expensive, because no computer — hell, no product — could look that good and cost the same as something less beautiful.

If Apple is ever going to shake the perception that their computers cost more, they're going to have to build them uglier. Actually, I think they should come out with a whole new budget product line. Encase everything in cheap, shiny, silver plastic — you know, that chromed shit that just looks and feels awful and flimsy. This should cover 90% of the machine. Some flashy lights and extra, useless buttons would be a good touch too. Latches and ports should also feel cheap and sport gaudy colors. Display hinges on portables should be stiff and unyielding. Maybe the Mac OS X interface should uglied-up a bit too. The display itself should, of course, be ultra-glossy.

Call it the UglyMac.

The UglyMac (Mock-Up): Same Price as a Pretty Mac, but Uglier
(click image for larger view)

Of course, the price points for this budget line would be pretty much the same, because Macs are already sold at an average market cost. But the perception that they cost more would almost certainly dissolve. Finally.

There you go. Problem solved.

Beating a Dead Horse

2006-12-28T02:21:00.000-05:00

As everyone is well aware, Adobe recently released a beta of Photoshop CS3, complete with new icons. The new application icon is so stripped down and plain I had initially assumed it was a placeholder for something permanent in the final version — that this was merely a stopgap icon for the beta release. This is, it turns out, not the case. This is it. Put a fork in it. It's done.

Not only is this the final icon for Photoshop CS3, but Adobe has redesigned the entire CS3 application suite around the same concept. People all over the Mac web are weighing in on the matter, and they're generally sitting in one of two camps: They either love it or they hate it. Here are some links to the ongoing commentary:
John Nack
Veerle
Jason Santa Maria
Dave Shea

Personally, I'm on the fence. No, that's not actually completely accurate. Personally, I can see both sides, and in the end I think that the icon redesign sort of breaks even. I think we basically lose as much as we gain between form and functionality with these new icons. And I think that there is another approach that would have worked better than the one taken by Adobe on CS3.

The new CS3 suite icons are all based on the same idea. A colored square with a two-letter identifier that mimics the periodic table of elements. It's a nice concept in a way, especially considering its entire purpose seems to be to unite a vast and sprawling suite of applications. And I think on this level it works. Applications from the Adobe suite will be immediately recognizable as such in the Dock, and telling each application apart shouldn't be too terribly difficult. I even kind of like the sparse, minimal appearance of these new icons.

The Adobe CS3 Icon Set: Confused Yet?
(click image for larger view)

My first problem, though, is that they're not particularly iconic. They're basically text. Or, the thing that's used to identify each application is text. Conceptually, this bothers me a little. The Adobe suite of applications is, for all intents and purposes, visual in nature. It's made for processing imagery moreso than text. These are not text applications, but image editing applications. They're made for visual people working on visual projects. So using text as an identifier seems a strange — maybe even an inappropriate — approach. I can see it for something like the Microsoft Office suite, which does indeed use text-based icons. But for image editing apps it just seems wrong to not use something image-based.

My other complaint, from a practical standpoint, is that text is a much clumsier, more difficult way to identify an application than symbolism. It requires hard looking, reading, something more than a mere glance. Icons are, at their hearts, symbols, and symbols are intuitively easier to grasp than text. Which is the whole reason icons tend to be made from images rather than text in the first place. It's the reason almost everything on a GUI-based interface is a picture rather than (or in addition to) text. Can you imagine a folder on your Desktop that was a big square with the letters "Fo" on it? Imagine an entire OS described this way. I'd guess it'd get a bit trickier to navigate. (Actually, you don't have to imagine it. Just open up the Terminal. It's called the UNIX command-line. And we all know how popular that is with the design crowd.)

Adobe CS3 Apps in the Dock: Imagine an Entire OS Like This
(image stolen from Dave Shea)
(click image for larger view)

It seems to me that there is a better approach for Adobe — one that could unify the suite, while at the same time keeping in step with a more purely visual approach. We can see traces of it in the one exception to the rule with the new suite icons: Acrobat. Acrobat's icon uses the same sparse approach as the other applications — an application identifier on a colored square — but instead of using text as an identifier, it uses the well-known Acrobat icon image — that weird little loopy-loop we all know so well, and that we immediately associate with Acrobat — in the center of the colored square. Veerle (who likes the new icons) had this to say about it:

You might wonder why Acrobat Reader hasn't "Ar" as icon or "Pd" or something, just to take the same line with the rest of the products. The curvy triangle is so well known that it's obvious they kept using it for the icon. I think if the other applications had a similar icon over the years, they would have done the same. Since there are none they decided to use a two-letter mnemonic 'nickname' system as their primary identifier.

And therein lies both the problem and the solution. I think the best approach Adobe could take — both from a conceptual and a practical standpoint — would be to actually create memorable, iconic symbols for each of their applications. Thus far they have not done so, and choosing instead to represent their apps with plain two-letter text identifiers just seems a little cheap, lazy and ineffectual. Why doesn't Photoshop have such a memorable symbol associated with its product line after all these years? Or Illustrator? By now they really should. Maybe it's time to start working on these.

Acrobat Icon: Why Doesn't Photoshop Have a Symbol?
(click image for larger view)

Past Adobe icons were visual in nature, but suffered from a lack of readability in the Dock. They were pretty, but they looked too similar and their imagery made no sense whatsoever — form over function. But this new set will suffer from the same sort of unreadability. They're less visual, less image-based, but still very similar. And they'll now require you to read them and decipher their two-letter code. Still, they'll be somewhat easier to discern from one another (since the letters at least correspond to something in the real world, i.e. the application name, whereas the previous icons used images that were completely arbitrary and nonsensical) and a bit more unified as a group, though arguably less attractive — function over form. It's a tradeoff. But one that, again, we break even on with the new icon set. This new icon set offers no functional or aesthetic advantages over its older counterpart. Or what advantages it may offer are offset by disadvantages it spawns. Creating real symbols that speak somehow to the nature of the application — like they've done in some respects with Acrobat — for the rest of the suite would solve the problems of both form and function: Icons created from these symbols would be both more beautiful and more functional. You would think a big, giant, design-based software company would get this. But so far, they seem to have missed the boat.

I don't hate the new icons. I actually think they look kind of cool in a minimal sort of way. But they're just not particularly visually interesting, nor will they add much functionality over their predecessors. So I can't say I'm overly enamored with them either. For a major change to a major application suite — one that has a lot of folks up in arms — I have to say, I'm feeling quite... neutral on the matter. And that's a little disappointing in and of itself. I wish I were feeling excited.

Photoshop CS3 Does Video

2006-12-27T18:17:00.000-05:00

Everyone's talking about Adobe's Photoshop CS3 Beta release. In a day and age when paid betas are all the rage among smaller developers, a big developer releasing a free (though time-limited) beta of a flagship program is exciting in and of itself. But this beta has legs. It's good stuff. I'll go over some of the more significant features that everyone's buzzing about. But I also want to spend a little time talking about some things that no one in the mainstream press seems particularly interested in, 'cause, you know, I'm funny like that. And 'cause there are some real gems, from my particular perspective.

The Installer
I wanted to briefly mention the installer for Photoshop CS3, because it's pretty nice, particularly in contrast to the Acrobat Reader installer. No, it's not an Apple Installer, but it does offer a great deal of control (and some features not available from Apple Installers), and from a systems perspective, this is wonderful. Most notably, the Photoshop CS3 installer (called Setup.app) contains an uninstaller. Awesome! Yes, it may be hard to believe, but there have been times I actually wanted to completely uninstall Photoshop, and I couldn't. Now I can.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta: Uninstall or Reinstall
(click image for larger view)

The uninstaller even gives you the option to delete application preferences. Wow. That's pretty thorough.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta: Uninstalling Components
(click image for larger view)

Secondly, the installer allows you to choose which Photoshop components get installed, or to reinstall or uninstall specific components of the suite. Don't use Camera RAW? Don't use Bridge? Fine. Don't install 'em. Change your mind? Fine. Go reinstall 'em.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta: Reinstalling Components
(click image for larger view)

I can't believe I'm saying this, but Adobe has really gotten this installer right. If I can't have drag-'n'-drop or package installers, then this is what I want. The only problem is, I'm pretty sure it won't work with Apple Remote Desktop (but then it never did anyway). Otherwise, I'm pleased as punch.

One other thing to note about the beta installation: Adobe requires you to produce a valid Photoshop CS2, Creative Suite 2, Production Studio, Adobe Web Bundle, or Adobe Video Bundle serial number to use the beta for longer than the 2-day trial period. Supply this serial number and you'll be given a new serial number for the beta. The new serial number can be used to activate the software until the beta expires, ostensibly some time around the official release date. The software gets activated online via a connection to Adobe, and it keeps tabs on how many machines you've installed the beta on. The limit is two computers. I installed it on two machines, but then, after installing it on the third I received this alert when trying to activate the software:

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta: Too Many Activations
(click image for larger view)

This seems relatively fair to me. The only thing I find somewhat irksome is that we have a 20-seat volume license. So, to my way of thinking, our serial number should be good for 20 installs of the beta. Apparently Adobe feels differently. I also wish I could deactivate machines remotely, via this interface (like you can with iTunes music, for instance). But no, unfortunately I'll have to go over to the machines in question, log in and deactivate them locally. Oh well.

The Icon
The first thing I noticed after installing the Photoshop Beta was the strange, minimal application icon. I kind of like it, but it seems somewhat inappropriate to me that Photoshop — an image editing application that's always had pretty fancy icons — has such a plain one. I'm assuming that this is just the icon they'll use for the beta, and that a more sophisticated icon will come with the shipping version.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta: Minimal Beta Icon
(click image for larger view)

The Hot New Features
One item of significance — in fact, according to the scuttlebutt, it's a big reason the beta was released — is that this is the first version of Photoshop to run natively on Apple's latest Intel hardware. Amazingly, this comes off as a footnote in most of the reviews, overshadowed by the fact that this also happens to be the first major revision of the photo-editing powerhouse to actually be packed with exciting, new and useful features. In fact, after trying it out, it's the first time I've been impressed with an Adobe release other than Lightroom in years. And it's Photoshop, man. Frickin' Photoshop!

One of the most discussed aspects of Photoshop CS3 is the interface, and it's certainly worth a mention here. It's been quite extensively overhauled, and yet still feels completely familiar. Everything is right where you'd expect it, but there are numerous productivity enhancements throughout the app. Little touches, really, like a toolbar that is one tool wide, giving you more room for viewing your image. Palettes are more logically (and attractively) presented and unified, instead of floating around all over the place. This seems to be the trend with a number of apps, and if AfterEffects 7 and Lightroom are any indication, Adobe is following it. This is a good thing. I truly hate moving windows and palettes around. And with today's big screens, there should be little need to.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta: Nice Interface Refinements
(click image for larger view)

My one big beef is that there still seems to be no key command to switch between open documents. Almost every other application on the Mac nowadays uses "command- `" to switch between open docs. Yet Photoshop CS3 still not only fails to adhere to this standard, but apparently lacks the ability to switch between open docs with the keyboard at all. This seems like a strange oversight for such a significant interface overhaul. I also wish Adobe would use standard Apple key-commands for things like hiding the app ("command-h" on the Mac, generally) but at least the ability exists to do this from the keyboard, and it's configurable.

Finally, the Refine Edge tool is quite the talk of the town. And for good reason. Anyone who's ever tried to select a color range and then tried to tweak the selection has longed for this tool, which basically allows you to interactively refine the edges of your selections. And it's finally here!

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta: Refine Edge
(click image for larger view)

Video (Yes, Video!)
But there's another fantastic new addition to Photoshop CS3, and it's one no one's mentioned, maybe because no one's quite as weird as me: Animation. For years I've wished Photoshop — with it's powerful layering capabilities, selection tools and brushes — could be used as a 2D animation tool. I always wanted to be able to import and draw on video in Photoshop. You could always fake this with ImageReady, which came with basic Quicktime import/export functions and a pretty useful Animation palette, and which I've demoed in my class numerous times. But it was clunky and confusing. ImageReady was not well equipped to deal with large numbers of relatively large images — it became painfully slow — and it lacked WACOM touch-sensitivity and the full range of brushes found in Photoshop. Plus, it was just plain inconvenient to use ImageReady when Photoshop was sitting right there. Well, my wait is finally over. Photoshop CS3 now includes the very same Animation palette formerly found only in ImageReady. It's there, and it works exactly as it did in ImageReady. Only now we get all that Photoshop goodness and the familiar interface we all know and love (or at least are accustomed to). Hooray!

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta: Holy Shit! Animation!
(click image for larger view)

There are a few new video-specific features too, though you might not know it from the coverage. There's a "Video and Film" Workspace, for one, which highlights all video-related menubar items and brings forth video-related palettes, including the Animation palette.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta: Video and Film Workspace Highlights
(click image for larger view)

And now, since Photoshop CS3 does video, it only seems appropriate that it should have the ability to preview that video to a monitor, which in fact it now does.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta: Video Preview
(click image for larger view)

All these new video capabilities were a huge surprise to me. And a hugely pleasant one. There was a time when I got pretty excited about new Adobe releases, but it was a long time ago. It's great to see Adobe, once again, release a really compelling version of Photoshop. I'm amazed at how much thought and care they've given "the little things," from the interface to the installer to, of all things, video. And yet they've still managed to keep all the good bits. This version has something for everyone. I, for one, am truly impressed.

UPDATE:
Looks like I was wrong. The new Photoshop CS3 icon featured in the beta is here to stay. Not only that, lots of people are buzzing about it. Personally, my favorite comment on the "issue" so far (I haven't had time to read them all — Help! I'm on dialup!) is one from John Nack:

[Not dismissing your opinion at all, but isn't it nice that in this world, at the end of 2006, it's computer iconography that constitutes our nightmares? We are very lucky to have literacy, intelligence, and leisure enough to give a damn about this stuff. --J.]

Totally agree. Still, I've decided to add my voice to the already huge compendium of opinion on the matter.

The Adventures of Systems Boy!

Systems Boy has moved! Redirecting NOW...

Meet the New Systems Boy!

What's Going On

Happy Birthday to Me!

Adobe Update Hell

A Brief Foray Into Windows

Time Machine After Logout

NetBoot Part 5

Firefox URL Bar for Mac Users

NetBoot Part 4

NetBoot Part 3

Firmware Goodness

A Rift in the Space-Time Continuum

iPhone 1.1.4 Update

Translucency

ScreenFlow and Opacity Redux

Secondary DNS Configuration

Linked

Opacity: Another Crash-Happy 1.0 App

ScreenFlow

Leopard Installer Certificates

iPhone Browser Cache

NetBoot Part 2

Tiger Hates Leopard

The Beast

NetBoot Part 1

Duplicate Computer Names and IPs

What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and WYSIWYG HTML Editing?

MacFUSE Follow-Up

iPhone to iCal Sync Problems

Leopard Beefs

Leopard Quota Alerts

Self-Management

MacBook Air

Web Programming and MacFUSE

Safari Remembers

Remote Management Commands in Leopard

I Don't Care Anymore

What Everyone's Bitching About

Spaces Switchery

Leopard Menu Text

The Death of NetInfo

Leopard Groups

Leopard

Word of the Day

Hallelujah Items

More Leopard SysAdmin Goodness

Apple Remote Desktop Copy Problems

More Good Reading

El Keyboardo

What I Was Talking About

Installer Renaissance

Final Cut Studio 2 Installer

Early Adoption

I Was Right

Recommended Reading

Buy the Fucking CD!

Another iPhone Post

Sprint for the Holidays

Gmail vs. Blogger

iPhone Follow-Up

"Disable Clear Text Passwords" Breaks Randomly

Ars iPhone Review

My iPhone

External Network Unification Part 5: Almost There

Magic iPhone

Finally!

Abusive When Harried

Notes on Google Desktop

Google Gone Deaf?

How Do You Dress for That?

Scripts Part 7: Contextual Menus with Automator

An Elephant in the Way

Not Dead

Broken Downloadable Installers

Replica Reset Voodoo (That Works!)

Mac OS X Server 10.4.8 Breaks Windows Quotas

Ass-Fucked by Flash and Java

Smart Folders Suck Ass