freeform goodness

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Slashdot’s CmdrTaco, upon the introduction of the iPod, October 23, 2001

Apple’s iPod platform is a monster in the portable music space. Tens of millions have been sold, and the application that interfaces with the device,iTunes, runs on tens of millions of computers.

I have a love/hate relationship with the iTunes application. I use it to manage my digital collection, which it does handily, but I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that it has limitations and inconsistencies that I bump into every day.

Continued @ moodmat.

:: Dave Walker 01:52 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
:: tags: applications

:: Comments (0)

My little LazyWeb mewl from a few weeks ago didn’t really generate much in the way of attention, though one poster, Matan Ninio, was apparently able to get things working with a manually specified proxy:

The problem seem to be that iCal does not know how to work with a proxy.pac file, but does know how to work via a proxy. Just enter the proxy address and port directly, and suddenly all is well again. (at least thats the case with our 10.5.2 machines)

My employer now supports Juniper’s SSL proxy, though, which means “free” split routing, which means my iCal traffic doesn’t need to negotiate a proxy at all.

:: Dave Walker 15:26 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx]
:: tags: osx

:: Comments (1)

iCal sure isn’t perfect (far from it, actually), though its current incarnation is far more useful than it was at 1.0. I use it because it integrates well with the rest of the OS (e.g. Mail, Address Book, i$ShinyDevices, etc.) and since, unlike a certain other calendaring product from a large corporation that I Won’t Name, it acknowledges that the rest of the world exists and that integrating with things Not Invented Here is OK…

There is one thing about it, though, that drives me batty. Unlike just about every other tool Apple ships, it doesn’t work through an HTTP proxy. They managed to fix the icon so it displays the correct date when the application isn’t running (which has to be hacky as hell behind the scenes), but they couldn’t do something as basic as reusing the same URL retrieval logic as almost everything else on the platform.

In practice, this means that if I log into my employer’s VPN, my calendar subscriptions are broken (i.e. non-refreshing) until I disconnect, rendering them useless during the most important part of the work day.

If anyone has managed to hack around this problem, I’d appreciate hearing about it in the comments.

:: Dave Walker 11:37 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx]
:: tags: osx

:: Comments (5)

I’m working from home today, which means I’m connected into work via the corporate PPTP VPN. To drastically oversimplify things, when you’re connected via a VPN, your local network basically “goes away”, for all intents and purposes, unless you manually set up split routing, which is, to be frank, a complete and utter pain in the ass.

What I noticed today, though, is that Bonjour apparently takes care of split-routing .local addresses automagically. Connecting via ssh and afp worked fine to my local, non-VPN machines, and they even showed up in the Finder’s sidebar and iTunes.

I know this isn’t a huge thing, but it’s nice that “the right thing” happens by default.

:: Dave Walker 11:23 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/apple]
:: tags: apple

:: Comments (0)

No detailed upgrade journal, you really ought to read John Siracusa’s latest novel for that. The only thing that was immediately broken was the URL for this blog, because Leopard switched things over to Apache HTTP Server 2.x and doesn’t move your old configs over.

sudo cp /etc/httpd/users/* /etc/apache2/users

If I have anything to say that you haven’t already read 167 other places, I’ll post it.

:: Dave Walker 16:42 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/apple]
:: tags: apple

:: Comments (0)

Guess what — I’m a switcher! I mean, I’ve been using Macs since 1985, so I probably don’t meet the usual definition, but for the last 2½ years I’ve been using a Dell laptop (warning—embedded java) for work. And boy, did it suck. I managed to make it suck a little less by running a Linux distro as my primary OS on it, but that had its own way of sucking, too. It seems weird that, having used Macs since The Dawn of Time™, I’ve never had a portable one as my primary work machine — it always made sense when it was time for an upgrade for me to update my desktop machine. I’ve had many desktop Macs, of course — consistently at home and, when the fates smile upon me, at work as well.

To be fair, the Dell was designed to work with Windows, and for all I know it would have probably been OK in that environment, but frankly the majority of my work life consists of email and scripting, neither of which has a Win32 dependency, and I was not about to add one. I ran SuSE Linux in preference over Windows because, in the course of my work day, it was more useful to me to have a laptop for which the truly necessary tools of my trade (ssh, nfs, perl, python, a decent shell environment) are native rather than crude bolt-ons. Besides, I’d rather make sweet love to a cheese grater than spend my working life in Windows. :)

Getting away from Windows and back to Dell, the machine was heavy, noisy, ran (very) hot, and had all the design elegance of a “Soviet tractor built on a Monday” ( thank you Jens Alfke). SuSE had no support for the Broadcom wireless NIC, so WiFi was always a kludge, and the ACPI support was so bad that the thing would regularly shut itself off to keep from overheating for the first several weeks I had it, until I tracked down the magic incantations. Overall, I could get work done with it but it always felt that I was fighting with the thing.

I ended up with a MacBook — I considered the MacBook Pro but I actually prefer the 13-inch form-factor, and the only thing I really miss from the MBP is the nicer video hardware. Traveling with a MacBook is so dramatically a more pleasant experience that I kick myself for not making it happen sooner. The wireless support is truly peerless — the engineers behind OS X’s 802.11x support really deserve kudos for taking something that’s really pretty complicated technically (smoothly moving between disparate networks) and making it truly as simple as I think it could possibly be. Neither Windows nor and Linux distro I’ve used comes anywhere near the Mac wireless experience. Even interacting with my employer’s VPN has been, dare I say, a pleasant experience. The suspend and resume support is first rate, and it even weighs about 20% less than the machine it replaced (a big deal when you’re schlepping the thing around constantly), and I get about an hour more in battery life in typical use. The reduced weight, better battery life, and more versatile wireless support make it a much more mobile machine than the one it replaced. Parallels under OS X is far nicer from a usability perspective than VMWare under Linux for running the occasional Windows app.

So for now I’m still in the honeymoon phase — I haven’t run into any significant hardware or software annoyances (or, more accurately, all of the annoyances are the general Mac ones I’ve been aware of and worked around for years…) Watch this space.

:: Dave Walker 11:37 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx]
:: tags: osx macbook dell

:: Comments (3)

I was tooling around on HBO’s site, looking for Sopranos stuff, when I came across the HBO dashboard widget (requires OS X 10.4.) Wow. Schedule grid, slick Quicktime integration, and loads of graphical polish. The only negative is that it takes up a fair bit of screen real estate, but it’s maybe the most impressive widget I’ve seen yet.

:: Dave Walker 20:00 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx]
:: tags: osx

:: Comments (2)

I don’t know when exactly this was added to the OS X terminal (running Mac OS X 10.4.5 (8H14)), but it looks useful.

click the image on the right to expand

:: Dave Walker 12:28 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx]
:: tags: osx

:: Comments (1)

I threw together this script and I thought one or two others of you out there might find it useful. It takes a single del.icio.us tag as a parameter, and, assuming you’re backing up your del.icio.us bookmarks locally (as you should be doing, using Ian Henderson’s delimport), it will return all your delicious links that match that tag.

tagquery

It requires 10.4 (as does delimport), as it uses Spotlight to find stuff.

Disclaimers: I whipped this up in about 30 seconds (and it shows). There are doubtlessly more efficient ways of grabbing the relevant info from Spotlight than running mdls 3 times in succession… It does no real error checking, and may very well turn your shiny quad-core G5 into a shiny aluminum puddle. Patches / complete rewrites welcome.

Known bugs: if you’ve renamed bookmark files with spaces, you’ll get some ugly.

:: Dave Walker 19:23 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx]
:: tags: osx del.icio.us spotlight

:: Comments (0)

In a recent podcast, a guy complained (damn non-internally-permalinkable things — fix that!) that a big problem with the iTMS is that the files are locked to a given computer and that, if that computer takes a dump, you’re screwed. He complained that Apple makes it too hard to back your songs up.

For all the complaints one might have about Apple selling DRM’ed music (and I have some myself), the idea that the songs are “too hard” to backup isn’t a valid one, IMO, since all the tools necessary to do the backups are built into the application, and they’re not hidden, either.

Really, there are only 2 steps to backing up your music —

1. Creating a smart playlist

   

2. Burning it to a disc . You probably want to make sure iTunes is set to make a data CD/DVD, rather than an audio CD.

You now have an ISO-formatted CD or DVD that you can place in a media safe, a safe-deposit box, mailed to your nephew, or whatever. None of this is hard.

:: Dave Walker 15:30 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
:: tags: applications

:: Comments (2)