Entries tagged with “apple” from Garbage In, Garbage Out

Most of you know we're a mac family. And, like many of those brainwashed by His Steveness, we upgraded to 10.5 starting the day after it came out. Here's a status report.

• The system seems faster, at least once the spotlight indexer is done. Even on old gear, the system just seems more responsive. I'm not the only one making that observation.
• Spotlight indexing after you fresh install and restore all your data SUCKS. For a couple hours of suck in my case. Once caught up, it becomes invisible.
• .mac and idisk worked great on all the machines we installed 10.5.0 retail box on. However, the wife's brand spankin new macbook, which came with "restore media", failed. And, the 10.5.0 retail box would not work on the macbook. Sigh. With last night's 10.5.1 release, the wife's iDisk syncing problems have entirely gone away.
• One machine out of the 6 (no, not a typo..) had issues with MS office, and the auto updater that can't seem to update itself. On that host I downloaded all the patches from MS and installed'em one at a time. Office is working on all the hosts. Boy, sure would be nice to get an intel build though!
• Everyone in the family is using Time Machine, backing up to a central mac mini with external storage. It Just Works.
• Remote management is built in and *easy* to use. Enable screen sharing on all the hosts, done. Everyone advertises via Bonour, so screen sharring is available by just browsing the network.
• Via shell, you can type open vnc://hostanme and it Just Works.
• One thing that sucks about the built in VNC: No full screen mode.
• One thing that rules: Built in tightvnc. And the screen background is automatically dummied out.
• Terminal: shift-apple-double click urls, opens automatically.
• Terminal is *stable* for me. This alone is a feature compared to past versions. I've managed to avoid X11 and XDarwin entirely since installing Leopard.
• GPG mail broke. There's a beta. Get on the mailing list, check the archives. The beta works on the latest version of Mail.
• Other than breaking plugins the new mail seems nice and more robust for my imap-over-socks use.
• Neither the wife nor the kids are yelling at me to restore Tiger.

Lots of little things suck into 10.5. Apple lists 300 new features, but .. that's far from all of them. None breathtaking on their own, but overall, this is a heck of a release.

Thanks to the info posted by Erik Romijn at http://www.uname.nl/closer-look-airport-extreme/, I now have the Airport Extreme being tracked by mrtg for graphs. For those wishing to do the same, the important interfaces are:

• 1 - gec0 - ethernet traffic on the home side
  
• 2 - ath0 - wireless traffic
  
• 5 - vlan1 - ethernet traffic on the provider side
  

There are other interfaces as well; wlan0 is the madwifi driver (and best I can tell, irrelevent), and bridge0, which sees all traffic (again, irrelevent).

http://www.macgeekery.com/hacks/hardware/make_any_mac_a_netboot_server

This script will read a file (or raw character device, such as /dev/rdisk0 on a mac), looking for read errors. It tries to work in large chunks to reduce the system call overhead, but will bring itself down to 512 byte blocks to accurately report how far into the (file or disk) the read errors are happening. It also reports on slow reads (>3 seconds).

http://gigo.com/ftp/pub/src/scandisk.pl

Good stuff - http://www.hornware.com/sharepoints/ . Lets you share more than just people's drop boxes.. and all it does is manage the built in server daemon (it doesn't actually run any new daemons).

For people having "wierd" things with mail.gigo.com and imap, you might try instead mail2.gigo.com. mail.gigo.com has some settings to try and make things just like it was on the old server. mail2.gigo.com does not have that. (If you do switch servers, you should remove the account on your mail software entirely - then add a "new" account and use mail2.gigo.com for the imap server).

The bad news: Apple's X11.app has serious z-order (window ordering) problems going from any app back to X11.app. The only way to get X11.app's windows back to the foreground is to click the dock icon twice (and I mean, not double click!).

The good news: XDarwin builds from fink "unstable"; and my problem with meta-V not being passed, can be worked around with Apple's new ability to remap hotkeys for existing application functions.

Damn you Apple. Mr Jobs: Please "innovate" some QA, please? Before someone accuses me of Apple bashing?

Okay, so, some of us, actually use terminals. Those ascii thing that don't come with a web browser or a gui or a personal assistent to hold your [deleted] while you try and wee.

Nasty suprise today: Apple's default computer name, is ass-sanely big, containing my full name and the model name of the computer. My dlink router (DI-624), apparently, has no bounds checking - even on the latest firmware. Plug in computer (or turn on wireless) and the router would suddenly reboot...

Anyone else having problems, try shortening your computer name (mac: System Preferences -> Sharing).

Okay, after some amount of beating and flogging, I have got Tiger and X11.app and xterm all playing nicely.

(Updated for fvwm note)

Thanks to the hints at http://www.perturb.org/content/dvd2mp3-2.html, I now have a sane way to handle copying the audio soundtracks from a DVD, and saving them as mp3 for use on our ipods.

Needed tools:

LAME encoder
MPlayer OSX to decode a DVD

From the mencoder package, I found (using the unix underpinnings of OSX) the actual mplayer executable, and put that in my path. LAME, I compiled and installed.

jfesler-g5:~/$ mkfifo soundpipe
jfesler-g5:~/$ ~/bin/mplayer -ao pcm -vo null -aofile ~/soundpipe -vc dummy dvd://2 -dvd-device /dev/rdisk3

In another window..

jfesler-g5:~/$ lame -b 128 soundpipe audio.mp3

My next experiments will hopefully be to extract one chapter at a time, so that I don't end up with a single 2 hour mp3.

I really wish Safari wasn't an awesome brower. I friggen HATE firefox. And the other mac browsers? Well, competition's good.. but.. uh.. I'll leave it there. They all left me disastisfied.

Which, leads to me being pissed at Safari. It crashes many times a day on my dual G5. Sure enough, got a dual G5 at work to replace an older G3 - and boom. Another friend with a dual g5, constant boom. Sometimes it is so bad that loading a single page after startup can reliably crash it again. I suspect it is something to do with threading or something; I've not heard of any single cpu machine users having this problem.