On Friday, I attended an event on the east bank of the University of Minnesota campus, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to stop at the bookstore and pick up a copy of Snow Leopard. Over the weekend, I discovered a few things that I thought I'd share.
Installation
Gizmodo called it 'a move that can only be described as showing off.' Snow Leopard can complete it's installation even if you accidentally (or intentionally) shut down the computer during the upgrade. In another impressive move, the installation runs for about 20 minutes before the first restart. During that time, the dashboard app still works fine, so if you want to see the calendar, check your stocks, or do basic math with the calculator, you still can. It restarts once part way into the installation and then again once the installation is complete. There are a few background tasks, most notably the Spotlight metadata importer, that will slow down the computer for a little while after the upgrade. After that, you're good to go.
Speed
With every release of OS X since os 10.0, the system has gotten faster. The one exception to this was 10.5. My guess is that they spent a lot of time porting the system over to Intel x64 hardware while keeping support for x86 and PowerPC chips. With OS 10.6, they took the time to optimize all that code and remove support for the older PowerPC CPUs. Unfortunately, that leaves me with four systems that I can't install 10.6 on, but it also means that the newer machines see a performance boost once again.
Secure Empty Trash
Emptying the trash Securely has been an option in OS X at least since Leopard and, since I work with some sensitive data that I try not to have on my hard drive, I turned that option on. After upgrading to Snow Leopard, I've found that emptying the trash takes significantly longer (despite the improvements I mention above). I wonder if the definition of 'secure' has changed from 10.5 to 10.6. I have heard that it now follows DoD procedures and overwrites the file seven times. I might just rely on disk encryption to speed things up a bit. We'll see.
File Vault
Speaking of disk encryption... I've had some trouble with File Vault in the past. Preferences like firewall settings and my default browser wouldn't get saved correctly due to some permission or file location issue with the encrypted disk image. That all seems to be fixed now because Firefox has reliably been my default browser after every reboot. I spent quite a while discussing this issue on the Apple support forums and it's good to see that they finally fixed it.
1080p
I use a Mac Mini as my DVR and video player at home. It's connected to my 1080p LCD television via a Mini-DVI to HDMI adapter and for some reason never supported 1080p output, only 1080i. I had suspected that this was a problem with the video adapter not being dual-link. With the upgrade, I can now select 1080p as the display resolution. Not a huge improvement, but really a bonus in the home entertainment category. I paid for all those pixels after all.
Cisco VPN Support
A welcome addition to the OS is native support of Cisco IPSec VPN connections. That means I can delete my 3rd-party Cisco VPN client. It also means that I get the convenience of a menu bar icon to connect to VPN and the seamlessness of support that keeps my applications from complaining that their IP address has changed. Groupwise used to crash horrifically if I changed IP addresses while it was open and the Oracle Calendar client used to complain loudly.
Parallels 3
Unfortunately, Parallels 3 is non-functional under Snow Leopard. On the other hand, the only reasons I was using Parallels was for a couple of web applications that didn't work under Firefox or Mac OS and now also don't work under Explorer 8 and isolating my VPN connection... see above on that. Parallels says they're working on enabling support, but they've had quite a while to release an update and Snow Leopard is actively blocking the application from starting up. Parallels 4 works fine, so this sounds more like a matter of forced obsolescence to me. Fortunately, the free Virtual Box from Sun has no problems.
SSH-Agent
I make dozens of ssh connections every day to support Linux, Solaris and AIX servers. (Oh Windows, why hast thou forsaken me?) In order to streamline the process, I use a passphrase-locked ssh key to authenticate with the servers to avoid using my two-factor keyfob. This is still two-factor authentication because the ssh key is something I have and the passphrase is something I know. SSH-agent is a tool that unlocks the key with your passphrase and then keeps it unlocked for the next time you need it. It's automatically enabled in the new version of terminal.app so I only have to enter my passphrase once. And as long as my screen locks properly, it's still secure.
Developers
I am amazed at the number of developers who are still relying on 32-bit support in the OS. This upgrade has been coming for over a year and has been available to developers for months, so there's been time to release updates for 64-bit compatibility, but there are still a number of Preference Panes that require restarting System Preferences in 32-bit mode to run them. I haven't seen any updates coming through to take advantage of Grand Central for parallel processing either, but I'm confident that both will happen before OS 10.7 comes out and drops 32-bit support completely.
Quicktime X
I like the fact that Quicktime now has built-in support for screencasting and iSight recording, but I probably won't use either one of those any time soon. The new look is nice, especially the way the title bar of the window fades out for a bezel-less effect while playing a video. Unfortunately, Quicktime now looks like it was designed by a different company, since the rest of the OS still has the brushed-steel theme going on. Update: Under the same category of mismatched interface elements, the context menus for the dock are white on black and the context menus for everything else are black on white.
Finder/Dock
The Dock has some new functionality, like grouping minimized windows under the application icons and integrating with Exposé more closely. The long-click that Apple has always used on the dock will work well if they ever produce a touch-screen tablet running OS X rather than the iPhone OS. I use the Spaces multiple desktop manager to expand my screen real estate and I'd like to be able to use the flip and cube transitions that are built into quartz to switch spaces, which didn't happen in this upgrade, but that's just eye-candy.
So... a few things don't work any more. More things work better. I guess that means Snow Leopard is exactly what I'd expect from an OS upgrade.
I'm not much for speechifying and all that stuff. Others have wished FreeDOS a happy birthday better than I. The "benevolent dictator" who created the project has a post at the FreeDOS blog. Greg Laden, from whom I stole the term "benevolent dictator" has a little item at his blog. Stephanie has a character piece on James Hall, the "benevolent dictator" at her blog. I don't mean to leave out The Lousy Canuck and others, but these are the ones that really matter.
I've seen the future and the geeks were right
I remember seeing a show on the Discovery channel a while ago about people who had chosen to live their lives a cyborgs. Not with truly bio-embedded technology, but with helmets and cameras and four-fingered chording keyboards. The additional computer connectivity gave them access to metadata through specially coded signs that would display text in their heads-up display and allowed them to be constantly in contact with an Internet full of data.
MIT's Media Lab, as they do, has started to bring this to a practical end by making the technology interact with everyday items around you automatically.
This is an 8 minute video from TEDTalks. It gets really interesting when they show dialing the projected phone:
Last night, the Internet seemed to work like it always had. I'd enter something into the Google search field in Firefox and Google would show me a list of links that matched my search. This morning the results are pretty much the same except that Google marked the entire internet as "suspicious" with their new, Safe Browsing feature. And the best part about their Safe Browsing feature is that, in order to continue to a "suspicious" website, you have to copy the url from the body of the warning page and paste it into the browser. I'm all for moving changes to production in a timely fashion, but this is one of the many times that quick builds for fixes can go wrong.
My first thought: We should all learn from this that software, like an airplane, needs to be tested before being put to use.
My second thought: How much extra traffic are Yahoo and Hotmail getting today?
25 years ago today, Apple released the add that launched the Macintosh. Go watch it and read about it at Gizmodo.
And while you're there, learn how to hack a road sign.
The blog you're reading is running on a homebrew perl engine that I wrote for the purpose of allowing customers to edit content on their page without needing ssh access to the server. That's a little daunting for people if they just want to change a few lines of text. The code is a few hundred lines and has a configuration file that is independent from the executable code. There's also no database, just a series of flat files. It's pretty basic, but it has served me well.
After learning what I have of Java and AJAX, I'd like to make some improvements. At the moment, nobody can comment on my posts, so I rarely get feedback. I occasionally post links on facebook where people can comment, but that seems like a lot of separation of content to me. When looking at other blog and community sites, I've discovered some things about how comments are handled and, in my opinion, what works and what doesn't.
I don't like the forum layout except for getting questions answered. Even then, it seems a little clunky without a working knowledge of the forum's organization. It seems to me that forums aren't a streamlined mechanism for community building because of their rigid organizational structure. Tagging would be an improvement on this because the user is more likely to guess a single tag correctly than guess the category a post is placed in sometimes.
Blogger/blogspot has an extremely clunky comment system. Posting a comment requires going to a new screen where, by default, the context of the comment you are about to make is removed from that screen. It's a small annoyance to make an extra click to see the orriginal post, but an annoyance nonetheless. Even then, the interface feels cramped since it is limited in width and has two columns of information showing.
Science Blogs is getting there. When you click on the permalink for a post the orriginal post, all the comments and a form to enter your comment are all displayed in-line on the page. It almost forces you to pre-read or at least scan the comments before yours prior to making a new comment, which is good for a community that has a tendency to not read things before spouting off duplicate comments. Not that I'm saying that's what the commenters there do, just that I've seen it before. Particularly on the Gawker Media websites.
Gizmodo and Gawker Media, are also getting there. They changed their commenting system a couple years ago to force users to log in, which I know annoyed some veterans of the site. This has given them the ability to store your preferences for following other commenters or bookmarking your favorite posts. Many of the Gawker sites will honor your login from another Gawker site, which is very good, but some of them don't for some reason. That forces you to either log in again or create a new account. While that's not bad when you consider that the sites are not all the same and will have different readership and a different commenter base, it's a little annoying for users who are fans of the Gawker network as a whole. This sticks out especially so when one site crosslinks to another Gawker site and I can't comment there.
Facebook has made leaps and bounds in the community department, but their AJAX implementations seem to be a little random at times. I can refresh my news feed and get a completely different set of items, there are some people I rarely see in my feed even though I can see that their status has been updated, and there seems to be some sort of persistence algorithm that removes items from my feed after facebook is bored with them even if I haven't seen them yet. They do have a good, if militant system of notifications that not only sends you an email when someone has commented on you or something you have commented on but also tells you on the webiste, just in case you aren't following your email. It can get a little confusing at times since the email contains all the same content you would see on the website (usually) and I have a tendency to think "haven't I seen this?"
As a result of my frustrations and happinesses of commenting in online communities, I've come up with a wish-list for the new blog engine that I'm working on.
- Users should be allowed to log in to make a post, but not forced to if they wish to remain anonymous. (Blogger)
- Users who wish to get a commenting account can comment with a username and password, if I like what they have to say or at least think it's interesting, I grant them an account. (Gawker)
- Users can see the last several comments on posts that they have commented on by logging in and going to their homepage. (flickr)
- Other users can see what commenters have posted by clicking on a commenter's name. (Gawker)
Last week, I had a hard drive die. In the past, this has been an earth-shattering event.
When I bought my new computer last spring, I made three major hardware decisions. The first was to get the most future-proof, powerful machine I could afford. The second was to equip it with RAID. The third was to invest in multiple, external drives for incremental backups made by Apple's Time Machine.
The first decision doesn't really come into effect here except that everything that follows the failure happened much quicker than it would have otherwise.
When a drive fails, you loose all the data stored on it, that's just the way it goes. The beauty of RAID 5 is that you can lose any one hard drive and keep all your data because it is stored redundantly. There is a very convenient function of binary math called XOR that is used by RAID 5 arrays. Basically, if you XOR all the bits in the same spot on each drive together, you get 1 (or is it zero? I can never remember.) So if one drive dies, you know that the bit stored in that spot on the drive is whatever results in 1 with an XOR opperation. As a result, when my drive failed I got a notice from the RAID controller that I was down one drive, but everything was otherwise pretty okay.
At some point, I rebooted my machine, I don't remember why. When it came back up, the RAID controller no longer seemed to think that drive was back. "Great," I thought "I'll just throw it back in the group and rebuild it." In the mean time, I was copying data between two remote web servers, and installing Parallels Desktop to make it easier to take a class from home next week. As it turns out, the current version of Parallels for Mac is not compatible with something on my machine and caused a kernel panic. That's like the Blue Screen of Death, but for Macs. You almost never see them... really.
Rebooting again, I found that my RAID controller no longer felt that it had a valid array, and that the one bad drive was preventing my machine from booting at all. Once I removed the bad drive, told the RAID controller to create a new array, and created a new filesystem on the remaining three drives. I used the Mac OS install disk to restore my system from my last known good backup on the external drive.
The moral of the story was best summed up by my friend Rick: If you're paranoid, you only have to be right once to make it worthwhile. If you always assume the best, then you have to be right every time. Two bad failures in a row + zero data loss = a happy Ben.
Patric Rhone had a link to this article over at Tom's Hardware that was quite informative. The linked page is kind of in the middle of the article, so click around to read all of it. The basic conclusion is one that I've been aware of for quite a while: Apple hardware is not overpriced, but their upgrades are. As long as you're willing to go to NewEgg or FirstTech to get your RAM and hard drives, there's no price-related reason not to buy Apple hardware. It seems a little ironic to me that the people who could legitimately complain about Apple's prices (for upgrades) are the people who can't install their own RAM. That's not, to my recollection, the people who complain about the cost of Apple hardware.
As a Mac user in a windows shop, I feel I need to use Mac applications when I can rather than the sometimes better open source alternatives to Microsoft products. I use Firefox because I find it to have two or three critical improvements over Safari, but Safari is getting there. I use iChat for instant messaging and I use Mail for all my email. iChat has its issues, but that's another post. This one's all about Mail.
During the average business day, I receive a multitude of email messages of varying priority. I found that it would be useful to be able to mark priority by color. Many email clients have this ability including Thunderbird, so I felt a little left out by Apple on this one. Searching the Internet, I found details on how to set up filters that will automatically change the color of an incoming email, but that's childsplay. I also found AppleScripts to manually change the color, which seemed like too much of a hack to me.
As it turns out, this functionality is built into Mail.app and, while it's not as user-friendly as a right-click option, it works quite well. Here's how to do it.
- Select the message you wish to change to a different color
- From the Format menu, select Show Colors. ( Shift-Cmd-C )
- Choose your favorite color-picker. I like the crayons
- Choose a color for the message.
It may not look like this did anything right away so choose another message and experience the beauty of your new colors. If you do this a lot during the day, just leave the color picker open so you have quick access to it. You'll need to re-open the color picker the next time you start Mail.app.
Happy coloring!
I don't know if it's useful to anyone but me, but I was trying to figure out the best way to display a random image on a webpage. What I ran into for using Server Side Includes is that the image to show is defined in my css which isn't parsed by the server for includes and apparently include directives within class= statements are ignored with my server configuration.
Well, it seemed that there should be a simple way to do this. The result was to create a configuration-less perl script that displays a random image from the folder it's in. It currently only does files that end in .jpg, so I'll leave that change as an exercise for the reader.
If you just want to use the script, here are some instructions. In the directory where your source images are stick the code in a file whatever name you like as long as it ends with .cgi or .pl, I'd suggest something like randomimage.pl. Make the file executable (chmod a+x randomimage.pl (windows users are on their own)). In your html or css use the name of your file as the name of the image, something like "http://www.yourdomain.com/randomimages/randomimage.pl" would work nicely. This will work best if all the images are the same size so the web page doesn't look different every time and you can define the image dimensions in the html or css.
#!/usr/bin/perl
opendir (THISDIR, "./") or die "no such directory: $!";
@imagelist = grep { /.*\.jpg/ } readdir THISDIR;
closedir (THISDIR);
$max = $#imagelist + 1;
$imagenumber= int(rand($max)) ;
print "Content-type: image/jpeg\n\n";
open (IMAGEFILE, "<", "./$imagelist[$imagenumber]") or die "can't open file $imagelist[$imagenumber]";
foreach (readline (IMAGEFILE)) {
print;
}
close (IMAGEFILE);
Anyway. No guarantees. No promises. Code provided as is and free for any legal, non-malicious use.
--Ben
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Finland: Designed Environments
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at State Theatre
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