MacNoob

My Dell XPS has been in its bag for over three weeks now.  It is my “official” company-issued computer, but I have a new Vista machine on my desk that I’ve started using for all the Windows heavy lifting.  The surprising thing is just how much of my job I can do on my Mac, once I installed VNC, that is.  (VNC is the remote desktop app we use to connect to any computer on-site.)  I have installed Office 2008 on my Macbook Pro and much of my work involves creating and editing documents.  That is, of course, unless the document contains any VBA code.  You see, Microsoft neglected to add that feature to the newest Mac version of Office.  Most all of the remainder of my job description can be accomplished by remote connections or via a web browser.  All my servers and about 95% of the desktop PCs at my site run the VNC server software allowing me to pop in by simply typing my password.  All our network hardware (printers, switches and routers) sport their own web servers and Firefox works just fine for them.  Most companies have hard and fast rules about using a non-company computer on the company’s network, but since I’m the IT manager (thus, the enforcer of said rules) I get away with using my Mac.

The corporation I work for has mandated so much security software on portable computers, they’ve rendered them virtually unusable.  The two main culprits are SafeBoot and Sygate.  Safeboot encrypts the entire hard disk with 128 bit AES.  In a word, it’s S-L-O-W!!!!  Never mind the stupid screensaver that kicks in every 15 minutes and is too moronic (CIOs call it secure) to remember your user name.  Sygate is the mother of all big brother applications and forces compliance to whatever corporate “security” policy the intellectuals at headquarters think is appropriate.  You must comply with Sygate policy before it will let you log into your network.  It’s just ill-advised paranoia mandated by upper management so they can sleep better at night knowing their network is secure.  Guess what, it’s not!  I suspect installation of this nazi-ware just enabled them to check a couple of boxes on some audit forms that weren’t checked before.  Now, at least, their jobs are safe.

“The CIO”

I’ve worked for three Fortune 500 companys in my life and the IT executives of each seem to read from the same playbook.  I think they are well-intentioned for the most part, but I sometimes wonder if they ever have a creative thought.  It’s almost as if they get all their security ideas from a Symantec brochure.  Oftentimes the initiatives they direct are last year’s solutions to a previous decade’s problems.  When I see the overbearing and machine-crippling “solutions” they’ve provided for us helpless sheep, I can’t help but wonder if they ever read anything current or browse the internet at all.

Using my Mac sidesteps the whole corporate security issue altogether.  There is no Sygate or Safeboot for the Mac because there are no real security issues with OS X and I never keep any proprietary data on my machine.  Yes, the corporate network is still quite safe.  Besides, I think the Mac is just a lot more fun and I really like being the non-conformist.  Actually, there is no company policy regarding any computers other than Windows machines, a loophole you could drive a truck through.  Come to think of it, I know how I can save the company millions.  Next, Ubuntu!

To be honest, I’m not a cheapskate.  On the contrary, I’ve spent way too much money on software titles that didn’t fit my needs and sit unused in my Applications folder taking up valuable disk space.  I like to think I’m a careful buyer and always do my due diligence.  I read reviews, download trials and “test drive” things as best I can.  Often though, a 14 or even 30-day trial isn’t long enough to get comfortable with a software title especially if the thing is crippled in any way.  Sometimes I just don’t run into that “show stopper” inadequacy before I buy the application with the intent of using it regularly.  That’s why, when I find a piece of freeware that I really like, I try to support the author.  I’m not talking about the Googles and Yahoos of the world, but the small, independent developers who write useful utilities and other small apps and distribute them freely on download sites like VersionTracker.  Although freeware isn’t as pervasive for OS X as it is for Windows, there are a few real gems out there and I’d like to urge everyone to support these guys as I do.  These apps have all become an integral part of my Mac experience to the point I think Mr. Jobs should buy them and include them in the next OS X release.  Here’s my top 5:

5.  Caffeine : A little menu bar app to suspend screen dimming and screensaver (for watching movies and such)

4.  Twhirl:  If you Twitter, this is a great client app that does it all.

3.  OnyX:  A utility for real gearheads.  This GUI lets you tweak OS X to your heart’s content. (Careful, OnyX lets you do things you may not want to do!)

2.  Quicksilver :  The ultimate “search & launch” app for OS X.  Find apps, contacts, events, the works!

1.  iStat Menus :  This is a great menu bar utility for monitoring your system CPU, memory, temperatures, network, hard disk(s) and more.

I use every one of these regularly and I have gone to the developer’s site and donated to each.  Not much, five or ten bucks, but if everyone who used their product did the same we could assure their continued development and support.  Case in point, Quicksilver.  Although officially still in beta, Blacktree, Inc. has said development work on Quicksilver has stopped.  That’s really too bad.  This is such a great piece of work I can only imagine how it might evolve given more time.

iStat Menus by iSlayer is my top pick because I use it so much.  It may not be the pure magic that Quicksilver is, but its’ utility value is indispensable.  At a glance I can see how much memory I’m using, my CPU load, how my network is behaving and at least a dozen other pieces of information.  The hardest part is knowing when to stop.  iStat will let you put so much information on the menu bar there’s no room left for apps!  It also runs very lean in that it uses very few system resources even when you set update times to half a second.

So this is a request to all you skin flints out there (you know who you are).  Dust the cobwebs off your wallets and help these developers out.  I was a code monkey long enough to recognize what an huge effort goes into these applications and that effort shouldn’t go unrewarded.  If you folks using this software for free had the conscience of a mud-sifting bivalve you wouldn’t allow these hard-working developers to continue unappreciated.

My oldest daughter recently graduated from college.  We’re all very proud of her and decided to reward her for finishing in four years with a good GPA and two degrees.  When I asked her what she wanted, I was a bit surprised when she said “A Macbook Air”.  She’s always been a PC person and well-versed in Windows XP.  She told me she loved my Macbook Pro and was willing to learn the “Mac” way of doing things.  “Besides,” she said, “the Air is so cute! “  I stopped arguing with that type of logic long ago.  I gladly capitulated.  What the hell, it’s her graduation and the Air is certainly cheaper than even one summer semester.  Also, I knew I’d get to play with it a bit while helping her set it up.

We bought her the 1.8 GHz, 80Gig model with the external “Superdrive” (Apple’s naming conventions are a bit dramatic, don’t you think?).  Everything arrived in a few days in good order.  I called my daughter and asked her if she would prefer to open the packages herself or have me set everything up beforehand.  I was praying for the latter.  I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the “cute” little thing.  My girl, being the pragmatist she is, opted for the free setup service I offered.

I love new, shiny stuff and the Air is the ultimate gadget for a geek like myself.  The first thing I noticed was how solid the machine is.  You have to hand it to Apple, their manufacturing tolerances are second-to-none.  It’s hard to imagine how anything so thin and complex can feel like it’s carved from a block of granite.  The fit and finish of the Air makes my 17″ Macbook Pro (a well-made machine by anyone’s measure) seem almost shoddy by comparison.

I navigated through the normal OS X setup entering my daughter’s information, connected to my home network, installed iWork and created her .Mac account.  I ran the Apple Software Update utility and was pleasantly surprised by how up-to-date OS X was.  I was also very pleased with how snappy the Air felt.  I experienced very little lag time even when its tiny (1.8″) hard disk was accessed.  I really expected it to be a bit more sluggish.  The “Superdrive” worked flawlessly when connected directly to the Air’s one USB port, but when I decided to “sneaker net” her data from her PC I ran into my first problem.

Needing another USB port, I got a portable USB hub I keep in my laptop case.  When I plugged the Superdrive into it, OS X reported there wasn’t enough power to run the drive.  So, I powered the hub and plugged the Superdrive back into it, same message.  I went into my office and got my powered desktop USB hub and tried it.  Still no workie.  So far, the only way I can get the Superdrive to work is by plugging it directly into the Air’s one USB port.  Is this by design?  Am I alone?

So, I finished everything requiring the Superdrive and put it back into its box.  After that, everything else I plugged into the USB hub worked fine and I transferred her data using my flash drive and the wireless network.  The HP printer install went perfectly but I had to download the software from HP so I wouldn’t need to get out the DVD drive again.

Here’s where the fun began.  I got iChat working and my other daughter and I had some fun playing with it room-to-room.  See, I don’t know anyone else with a Mac well enough to play with all the exclusively Mac features.  I shared the Air’s desktop, had a video chat and used “Back to My Mac”.  That was the epiphany.  I need my Macbook Pro for the real “heavy lifting” of audio and video recording and encoding not to mention all the photo editing I do, but with “Back to My Mac” I can still have access to all that when I’m on the road with an Air.  Yeah, that’s it.  I can use it while I’m on my date with Morgan Fairchild!  Yeah, that’s the ticket!

External hard drives have been a challenge for me on my Mac.  I’m pretty well-versed in the Windows “plug and play” methodology, but OS X either hides configuration options from the user or I’m too ignorant to know how to find them.

As you might have read in one of my previous posts, I love the eSATA interface for its speed.  I’m such a backup freak that having an external device working at near bus speed is a real timesaver.  It makes copying large amounts of data almost painless.  It’s such a nice feeling to know that if my Macbook’s internal drive dies, I have a fresh, bootable duplicate ready to use at a moment’s notice.

My problem with external hard drives on my Mac is one of control.  More specifically, how long is the inactive period before the disk spins down to save power?  When it does spin down, how do you wake it up?  I’ve had continual problems with disks falling “asleep” and not being able to wake them.  This leads to all sorts of Finder beachballs and other application errors trying to read or write to a disk OS X thinks is awake but is really in some near-comatose state.  Windows has a nice set of tools for managing these devices in the properties applet within Device Manager.  Even more settings are available in the Power Settings applet in Control Panel.  Between the two you can define in minutes how long a particular external drive is inactive before it spins down and optimize that drive for speed or quick removal.  OS X doesn’t offer this level of control.  There is a single checkbox in the Energy Saver portion of System Preferences.

There’s also an application buried in /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/CHUD/Hardware Tools called SpindownHD.

It only seems to offer a global setting for all the drives on your Mac.  To try and resolve the MyBook sleepiness, I unchecked the Energy Saver checkbox and the “Disk sleeps after..” checkbox in SpindownHD.  This had no effect on my eSATA attached MyBook Studio.  I tried lengthening the “sleep after” time.  Still no good.  I downloaded and installed the latest firmware from Western Digital, no workie either.

The Workaround
The problem seemed to lie within the eSATA interface.  The MyBook Studio I’m using has a triple interface (USB, Firewire and eSATA) so as an experiment, I ejected the disk and reconnected it using the firewire interface.  After unchecking both the above-mentioned checkboxes, the MyBook doesn’t go to sleep any more, even now after I’ve switched back to the eSATA connection.  I’m still looking for a better solution.  WD and Apple don’t seem to offer one that I can find.  Is there anyone out there willing to help this noob?

I listen to a ton of Mac podcasts, read many Mac blogs and visit lots of Mac forums in my quest to become a better Mac user.  One of the issues I’ve always had with the Mac, the Menu Bar, is one of the most touchy subjects one can mention when criticizing OS X. Real fanboys look down their noses at those of us who dare question Apple’s wisdom in locking down this most valuable piece of screen real estate.  If you’re one of those zealots, read no further, I’m about to commit blasphemy of the highest order.
First, I get it.  The whole Mac philosophy revolves around a stable, consistent user experience.  To that end, Apple needs to limit the amount of “tweaking” users can do to their systems.  I also understand that for reasons of efficiency, it makes sense to have a single, dynamic menu system that changes to display the menu of the focused application.  OS X’s menu design saves a ton of screen space when you tend to have many applications open simultaneously.  But what about when I don’t need to save space?  What about when I’m using a 30″ second monitor and it feels like a half-mile hike to mouse back to my laptop display to use a menu function I can’t remember the keyboard shortcut for?  Is it too much to ask for me to be able to move the menu bar to a more handy location?  Would it unbalance the space/time continuum were I to resize or auto-hide the thing?

Send your hate-mail to: bikerfunjoe@mac.com

I received my copy of Aperture 2 from Apple today and could not wait to get it installed.  In doing so I crossed over my self-imposed free disk space threshold of 20 gigs.  I bought the largest 7200 RPM hard disk available when I purchased my Macbook Pro, 160 GB.  At first I was amazed by how lean the whole OS X environment was with regards to disk usage.  Being accustomed to Windows [where bloatware is the norm], I couldn’t believe how much free space I had after installing everything I could think of.  Vista Ultimate on a 30 GB Bootcamp partition, MS Office 2008, my entire music collection, Firefox, Google Earth, Gimp…the list went on and on and I still had over 65 GB free.  Not until I installed Logic Studio 8 did I even concern myself with disk space.  Logic took almost 25 gigs and I installed most of the loop library on an external drive!  So at that point (three months ago) I still had over 35 gigs available.  You know how it is though, freeware, additional music, a few iDVD projects and “disk creep” was becoming a factor.

I really prefer to do “complete” installs of most software because I hate to go digging for a DVD or CD when a feature I want to try is an optional one I didn’t think was necessary at the time.  This Aperture 2 full install left me with less disk space than I’m comfortable with.  Maybe it’s my Windows upbringing, but I like a little more “elbow room” than 20 gigs.  (Can you imagine how stupid that statement would have sounded five years ago?)  It was decision time.  Something had to go!  I decided to do a little investigating, so I rebooted into Vista to see how long it had been since I last used it.  The fact that I didn’t remember how long should have been answer enough.  The first thing Vista told me was that my anti-virus files were out of date.  The last update was in December of 2007!  End of investigation.  I thought, “If I haven’t booted to Windows in over four months, I don’t need it that badly“.  Still, there was an anxious moment of indecisiveness when Disk Utility asked me if I was sure I wanted to delete the Windows partition.  In the end, I took the leap of faith.  No more Windows on my Mac.  I could almost hear Darth Vader saying, “Your transition to the dark side is now complete“.