Category Archives: Platforms

Apple Tiger UK launch

Mac OS Tiger box
Here’s my brief review of the launch of Apple’s latest Mac operating system – Tiger (10.4 for those of you who prefer numbers to wild animals):

I left work at 5pm last Friday and headed for the Apple Store in Regent Street, which is thankfully only a ten-minute walk from my office. When I arrived it looked as if there was no queue – just a few people milling about… then I looked beyond the entrance to the metal railings and a long qieue.

I ended up around the corner, down a side street. I answered a few questions from puzzled passers-by. Probably not too exciting for the average tourist. There was a camera crew scanning the queue – probably for Apple promotional rather than broadcast.

At 6pm we started moving into the store; it was packed out. Lots of tables piled high with the Tiger boxes. We were all given a scratchcard, with the chance to win a PowerBook or some other equipment. I won a free iTunes download – oh well, I can dream…

In the gallery a presentation of the main features of the new OS began. We saw the dashboard, spotlight, the automator; all great new functions of 10.4 that mean “once you’ve used it, you’ll never go back to 10.3”. Several people were already installing Tiger on their laptops.

I am not sure what I was expecting from the launch – possibly a bit more ‘pazazz’ – but then maybe that’s not Apple’s style. I only stayed until about 8pm anyway, so they may have done more interesting stuff later on. In any case, I was keen to get home and install the OS.

More experiences with Tiger to come…

More on iTunes AU, CH, SE, NO, DK

Country flagsAppleInsider has found the icons for the new iTunes countries, thereby confirming iTunes is about to start in Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Not before time for those AU-ers among us. I’m seeing more and more of those white earplugs on the train to work.

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes. So far all the Australian online music stores have concentrated on selling protected WMA files. These haven’t been setting the world alight, partly of course because the files are useless for legions of iPod owners, and from observations, there are hardly any non-iPod portable music players out there in userland. And for myself, I’d refuse to buy files that won’t live beyond the (hopefully long but inevitably limited) life of my player.

Record companies must surely be waking up to it by now. They can’t copy-protect conventional CDs properly — it either breaks the Red Book standard (and thus compatibility) or it doesn’t work. Anything they try is either useless or has been hacked. So you might as well just sell MP3s. They’re no more vulnerable than CDs. And it’s better to be selling copyable songs than no songs at all.

And the reported Apple price of A$1.80 per track is competitive. A quick scout of some WMA-selling stores showed a typical price of A$1.89 per track, with top ten hits at A$0.99.

The other thing this week for Apple fans is the OS X “Tiger” release, though I’m sure they all already know that.

Win2K support go bye-bye

If like me you’re still clinging to Windows 2000 as the best balance between performance on older machines and the functionality of a newish operating system, you may like to take note that Win2K finishes mainstream support from June 30th.

Yep, only six months after NT4 mainstream finished — hardly seems fair, does it? Yeah okay so it’s almost six years since Win2K was released, but NT4 dates back to… what… 1996?

Personally I reckon it would have been nice to have had an all-encompassing final service pack to wrap things up. Makes things easier when rebuilding machines, you know. Instead Win2K will get a “security rollup” which seems to be code for “we can’t be arsed doing an SP” or possibly “sorry, we’re too busy building Longhorn.”

Little Dreams Coming True

At last, one of my longest standing tech dreams has been realised. I can finally sync my phone with Outlook. I know you’ve been able to do this for years but up until today I’ve never had the means to. Two weeks ago I got a great new Nokia 6230 so I purchased a connector cable off Ebay which arrived today. I could have used Bluetooth for my connection but this chews through battery life (more of which shortly) and a cable was cheaper than an IR usb adaptor. Now I have all my contacts and calendar information for the next 12 months wherever I go.

“But surely you had all this in your Ipaq?” I hear you ask. I did, but in an effor to simplify my life and reduce the bulge in my left pocket I am increasingly leaving it home in favour of my Hipster PDA. Another reason for relying less on the iPaq is the Pocket PC version of Microsoft Money never really synched with my desktop version and tracking finances on the go was one of the major reasons I wanted a PDA. Now I simply keep my receipts in my wallet until I get home.

While I love my new phone, I’ve even set it up so I can email photos from it direct to Flickr (see my test shot), I am not impressed with the battery. It advertises 300 hours of standby – I get 48. I’ve tried to get it replaced but am having nightmare time as Optus and Nokia shuffle responsibility. All I want is a new battery and they will never hear from me again.

Unix flowers

I was digging about in the Unix system directories on MacOS X today (actually, searching for ‘joe’ which I thought I had installed, but is nowhere to be found) and stumbled upon the directory /usr/share/misc. Within this folder is the file flowers which is a listing of flowers and their meanings. I don’t know if it is actually referenced by any command; my guess is that a Berkeley programmer got bored and decided to put in an interesting, if not entirely useful in an OS environment, text file.


# Flower : Meaning
# @(#)flowers 8.1 (Berkeley) 6/8/93
#
# Upside down reverses the meaning.
African violet:Such worth is rare.
Apple blossom:Preference.
Bachelor's button:Celibacy.
Bay leaf:I change but in death.
Camelia:Reflected loveliness.
Chrysanthemum, other color:Slighted love.
Chrysanthemum, red:I love.
Chrysanthemum, white:Truth.
Clover:Be mine.
and so on

Where art thou Google X?

Google’s new beta Google X Mac OS-X-themed page was taken off air only about a day after appearing. Given how aggressive Apple (and Google) have been at pursuing imitators, maybe they thought better of copying the OS-X Dock.

Who knows, maybe Google were scared of Apple, who certainly don’t hesitate to call in the lawyers when they think they’ve been wronged.

Scoble’s found some mirrors so you can see Google X for yourself.

Using AppleTalk networks

Though I’ve been a Mac user for over ten years now, AppleTalk is one of those protocols that has remained a bit of dark mystery to me. It’s only recently that I’ve been networking computers together at all, and because I have a network comprising Mac and PCs—together with owning a router that wouldn’t know what to do with an AppleTalk event if it was wearing polka-dot pyjamas—I am strictly a TCP/IP man.

However, this article on AppleTalk and AppleTalk zones provides a useful introduction to setting up AppleTalk on a Mac server. As and when I invest in a Mac laptop, or maybe a Mac Mini, I’ll probably dip my toe in the water. Currently, every other bit of communicating hardware I own or manage would greet such Mac language with a stony silence, so for now I’ll stick to more universal languages.

Over-exuberant Mac font cleaning

A couple of weeks ago I decided to give my Mac a spring clean. Though Mac OS X is pretty good at housekeeping itself, it can’t take account for all the unused software and redundant system bits-‘n’-pieces that I’ve added over the years. I decided to load up Font Book and clean out some of my dusty fonts.

At some point in the past I remember installing the same font in multiple places, which is just plain wasteful of disk space, when all that’s required is to put fonts in a publicly accessible place and ensure that all users can access them from their accounts (particularly as I am the only ‘power user’ with a couple of other accounts for my wife and for guests that rarely get used, font management shouldn’t be a big issue).

Well, I got fed up with plodding through each font family deleting the ones I didn’t want. There were a heck of a lot of duplicates, as I suspected, and I knew it would be quicker to dive into the terminal window as superuser and delete them from the command line.

Having searched for them, I found a number of /Library/Fonts folders and located the duplicates. rm‘ed them, then mv‘ed the remaining ones into one sensible place.

Reboot…

OK the Mac OS X loading screen appeared with the progress bar, but no descriptive text. Errm… what have I removed?

Next, the desktop pattern and white menubar appeared, with the spinning rainbow disk, and then the screen blanked out for a second, and the desktop reappeared… looped again, and again, and again…

The system had stopped responding to any input. I had stupidly removed all the fonts from the main /System/Library/Fonts folder, and now not only was all the text invisible, but the system couldn’t even boot to a point where I could blindly get to the Terminal and correct it.

Help, what now?

Booting from the Mac OS X install disk didn’t help, as all it wanted to do was to reinstall the system (logical, I guess), and I wasn’t prepared to go back point-eight versions then spend the next day downloading all the updates again.

Fortunately, my Mac is old enough that Apple hadn’t disabled the “Boot into Mac OS 9” mode, so I fired it up—having remembered both the firmware and the OS 9 passwords I’d set and promptly forgotten about—I then checked out the OS X install disk again (after realising that I couldn’t even cry for help on the Apple website as my new Net settings weren’t configured in OS 9). I was very pleased that it wasn’t simply an image file, but had the real system directories and files—I found the /System/Library/Fonts folder. Now the dilemma – can I just copy those fonts over the top of my Mac OS X volume or will it corrupt the other files?

Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. I tentatively dragged and dropped the 17 fonts from the CD to Kayleigh (my OS X volume), reset the startup disk, and prayed as I restarted.

Splash screen … woo-hoo – text is appearing. Desktop … I can see the menu! Problem solved, after not a little agonising over the best thing to do.

I don’t know how many of the fonts in the root System folder are required, but a sensible guess is all of them.

Moral? Don’t mess about with anything in the System folder, even things that seem as innocuous as fonts, without a very good reason. Not being able to read text properly is one thing; causing your computer to refuse to boot up is quite another. I don’t know what the solution would have been if Mac OS 9 mode hadn’t saved the day, but it would probably have been expensive.

Default passwords, iPod mini and mobile games

Common default passwords, most-used passwords, lists of trojans, all good stuff for the network admin or hacker. (via Office Weblog)

Hot rumour department: iPod mini to get a colour screen and a bigger drive, probably 5 or 6Gb, with a probable announcement next week.

This mob is selling well-known games adapted for mobile phone use. They vary from clone games like Packman to the apparently fully licensed stuff like Shrek 2. My kids are addicted to Midtown Madness 3 on the XBox… would they go for it in 2-D on my phone? Dunno, but at AUD$8, it’s not too exhorbitant. Might give it a try, when they get bored of Bounce Back.

Briefs

The weird bounces I was getting a while back are apparently due to a bug in QMail. They’re also causing some mails to be sent multiple times from webmail. Triffic. But I’ve switched webmails from SquirrelMail to IMP, and that seems to help. I don’t like IMP’s “This mail was sent by IMP” footer, but I do like its features, especially the timezone setting, which was never satisfactory in SquirrelMail.

A big batch of Microsoft patches are out. Through as someone at work pointed out, they shouldn’t be due to buffer overflows, ‘cos MS claimed years ago that they’d eliminated them in Windows XP. (Thanks Ian)

Mr 99Zeroes has apparently been sacked from Google. As Scoble remarks, the rule for blogging about work really needs to be: Don’t piss off your boss. The alternative is simply not to blog about work.

C/Net’s new online news/RSS reader/aggregator: NewsBurst. (via Steve Rubel who features on the latest G’day World podcast)

An Englishman was arrested after he used the text-only browser Lynx to donate money to a tsunami fundraiser. Apparently British Telecom technicians looking through the web site logs thought it was a hacking attempt.