MacNoob

After spending the better part of the last 25 years in the computer business, doing everything from low-level (assembly language) programming on mainframes to corporate I/T management, Apple has made a convert out of me.  About six months ago I spent around $650 on a Dell Studio Hybrid for my game-room entertainment center and I’ve regretted the decision ever since.  Unless the world changes dramatically, it is the last PC I’ll ever buy.  I’m done.  Kaput!

This is coming from a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and Windows professional of 17 years.  I was such a die-hard Microsoft fan I bought a Zune!  Not one of the new, sleek ones either, but the first generation model shaped like a deck of cards, only fatter.  (I’m offering to give it away to registered readers of this blog, but can’t get enough people to sign up.  I think I might have done better offering a sharp stick in the eye!)  Many years ago I bet my professional future on Microsoft and have since made decision after decision that kept me on a Redmond-centric career path.  I don’t regret those choices too much.  In my professional lifetime there have always been ample opportunities to work with Windows systems and prosper.  That probably won’t change substantially for the foreseeable future because Microsoft is so entrenched in corporate America. But a new day is dawning and Microsoft’s sphere of influence is shrinking measurably.

Two and a half years ago I bought my first Apple product (a 30 gig iPod video) and my computing life was changed forever.  I had owned my Zune for about three months at the time.  My daughters all asked for (and got) iPods for Christmas that year and I was amazed at how much more user-friendly the whole iPod experience was, even with Windows.  Before the new year, I too was an iPod owner and eight months later I bought a new 17” MacBook Pro.  Since then I’ve bought an iPod Touch, a MacBook Air, an iPhone and two iMacs.  Yep, I got it bad.   Business analysts like to talk about the iPod “halo effect”, but for me it was more like a good nuking.  In fact, my only transgression was the afore-mentioned Dell.  I wish I’d bought a Mac Mini, but really thought I needed a Blu-ray player. The machine doesn’t do anything well. Its blue-ray player is skippy, and it seems like every time I want to sit down and watch something I have to wait for another update to finish and reboot. The only really good experience I’ve had with it is playing shared content with iTunes! Like most PCs, the Dell was long on specs but short on performance.

Maybe spending so much of my life immersed in win32 made switching to Apple even more of a pleasurable contrast.  Whatever the reason, moving to OS X re-invigorated me and I am constantly, pleasantly surprised by how well thought out the operating system is and how well everything works together.  Add to that Apple’s superb industrial design and I’m completely hooked.  I could (and often do) sit in front of this iMac for hours and enjoy the last minute as much as the first.  When I have to do something on one of my Vista machines I get the chore done and log off.  The day is fast approaching when the MacNoob house will be devoid of anything Windows and I can’t wait.  A wealthier MacNoob would have made this a reality already.

The only negative resulting from my switch: I still work in a veritable sea of Microsoft OSs, replete with barely manageable firewalls, anti-virus servers and a never-ending list of patches and zero-day exploits.  It was the same before I switched, I just didn’t know how bad I had it.  Now, wrenching on my Windows network has become a real chore.  It used to be fun before I realized how avoidable much of the effort is.  I sometimes wonder what it would be like if I’d taken the blue pill and never known the pleasure of using my Macs. Uggggh! I just got a chill.

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Joseph Kelley Apple Minutiae Apple, Mac, switcher

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

admin Apple Minutia, OS X Apple, fanboy, Leopard, Mac, Menu Bar, OS X

I just installed a Silicon Image Sil3132 SATALink express card controller and attached a LaCie 400GB external eSATA drive. I can’t believe how rippin’ fast this thing is. I did a complete SuperDuper backup using the new configuration and the whole thing (90+ Gigs) only took ten minutes! The data rate SuperDuper reported was 358MB per second!! Thats right PER SECOND! Not megabits, megaBYTES! I’ve never witnessed anything so fast on a home setup. I have a 4 TB SAN at work that doesn’t transfer data at these rates. The sweet part about this is how inexpensive it is. The external eSATA drive I’m using was only $35 more than the standard USB model of the same size. I’ve done a little investigating and all the major PC manufacturers offer models with eSATA ports and PCIx cards are typically less than $50 for two port setups that are capable of RAID1 and RAID0. The only drawback is the eSATA cable. All the ones I’ve seen are relatively short (the longest I’ve found is 1 m) and not very pliable. A small concession. I’ll never buy a plain USB or firewire external hard disk again!

admin Hardware Apple, eSATA, Macbook Pro, OS X

I hate the “switcher” label. It implies that someone using a Mac for the first time has abandoned all other platforms entirely. I do love my Macbook Pro, but I still have four other Windows machines in my home, two of them running Vista Ultimate, and I really like them also. I think it has become fashionable to dump on Vista. Quite frankly, I’m getting a bit bored by all of it. The “main” PC in the MacNoob household is a Dell Core2 Duo and Vista works just as well on it as OS X does on my Macbook Pro. In fact, there are many aspects of Windows I find superior to OS X. Not to say OS X isn’t a fine platform, it is, its just that Windows has its’ strengths and OS X does too. What are they, you ask? First, Windows is upgradeable. If I want a bigger hard drive, I just install it. If I want a new video card, same story. If I want to add more firewire or eSATA ports, I just slip the new card in and bingo! With these pluses come the minuses. Drivers can sometimes be an issue. This is where I think Vista got its bad rap. The hardware manufacturers were woefully tardy delivering Vista drivers. Subsequently, lots of people wound up with printers that wouldn’t print, video cards that wouldn’t display properly and a host of other gizmos that worked fine with XP but gave Vista headaches. The same people who trash Vista now must have forgotten what a pain XP was when it first released. Now that Vista has been out for a while, PC makers have caught up nicely and things just work right out of the box. My Dell typically runs for weeks without error or need to otherwise restart. The key to the Mac’s stability is the absolute authoritarian nature of Apple. OS X only runs on Apple hardware, period. Most people don’t know or care to know what an infinitely smaller problem set that is for an operating system manufacturer to code for. For all you Mac fanboys out there, flexibility and stability are trade-offs! Given the virtual cornucopia of hardware combinations Vista runs on, its a miracle the OS will boot at all! Apple has done a marvelous job creating a sleek and sexy lineup of machines that run very well. To be an Apple user, however, YOU MUST COMPLY!
I bought my Macbook Pro the day Leopard was released but it came with Tiger pre-installed. I ran Tiger only briefly (about two weeks) until my Leopard disk arrived. Guess what, when I upgraded to Leopard my DAW software and firewire mixer quit working altogether. It took Alesis, the firewire mixer manufacturer, almost three months to get the first beta driver published. Steinbergh, the DAW publisher, didn’t have a working version of Cubase for leopard until late February. I heard a few complaints about OS X in the first months, but they paled in comparison to the outright lynch-mob mentality prevalent in Vista editorials.
My Mac is a ton of fun to work with. It does what it does very well. Core animation and core audio are, in my opinion, better technologies than their Win32 counterparts. So, when I need to create and/or edit audio or video my Mac is my choice. For most other tasks I default to my Windows machines. It may be because I haven’t figured out how to do some of those tasks on my Mac yet. Time will tell.

admin Apple Minutia, OS X Apple, Leopard, Vista, Windows

I wanted to upgrade my home wireless network to “N” for all the obvious reasons.  My Macbook Pro came equipped with N and I just could not stand being throttled to G speed while knowing something six times faster was available.  Like always, looking for instant gratification I went to BestBuy and picked out their best N router, the Linksys WRT600N.  It is Linksys’s best offering and offered dual-band radios (2.4 & 5 GHz) plus a USB connection for attaching storage allowing it to function as a NAS (Network Attached Storage) and FTP server.  I studied the specs carefully and made sure it would work with all my existing wireless PCs and my Mac.  Linksys’s box propaganda clearly states the WRT600N is Windows and Macintosh compatible.

Connecting and configuring the router was a snap.  I’d used many Linksys products in the past so I felt right at home with the setup.  As always, I avoided the “monkeyware” (that’s the setup utility that comes with most consumer-grade network products making their setup so easy a monkey can do it) and went straight to the web server interface built into the router.  In less than ten minutes the WRT600N was up and running, controlling all the wireless connections in my home and routing internet traffic to my cable modem.  So far so good, right?  Enter Mr. Murphy.  The feature that sold me on the Linksys product over the other offerings was its storage capability.  Having a NAS is a very handy way to keep shared data available to everyone and a really slick way to keep things backed up and always available, even when every other computer in the house is turned off.  Living up to its reputation, the “Storage Link” (Linksys’s name for this capability) setup was as easy as the router’s.  I attached a WD 500 GB “My Book” USB drive to the router’s USB port, clicked on the appropriate tab on the router’s setup utility and presto!  Every computer in the house could see and connect to the drive.  First I tested my main PC by mapping a network drive to the NAS and configuring a small backup to run immediately.  No problem.  The story was the same for the two other PCs and at this point I was feeling quite satisfied with Linksys and myself.  The sky began turning dark when I booted up my Mac.  When I opened Finder, I saw the router in the sidebar, navigated to the folder I wanted and provided the login I had configured.  A snap.  I’m still feeling good.  I started writing this blog in Word like always when I was interrupted by the doorbell.  I clicked “Save”, selected the NAS, named the file and saved it.  It worked like a charm.

After dusting-off the salesman at the front door I decided to point my Mac backup (the regular one, not Time Machine) to the NAS like I’d done for the PCs.  That’s when things went south.  My backup failed with an error message stating I didn’t have sufficient privileges to write files to the NAS.  Hummmmm…  I right-clicked the NAS folder in Finder and selected “Get Info..”.  It said I had read and write permission.  Next I surfed to the NAS setup and double-checked the user account I was using.  It was OK too!  Just to be sure, I disconnected from the NAS and reconnected using the admin account.  No luck.  I could see everything, copy files from the NAS to my desktop or elsewhere, but couldn’t drag, copy or paste a file to the NAS from Finder.  Every time I tried I got the same error, “…insufficient privileges…”.  I decided to try copying files using Cyberduck, my FTP utility of choice.  It worked just fine no matter what credentials I used to log in.  This was getting weird, and beginning to look more and more like a Linksys problem.  After trying everything I could think of including reformatting the NAS drive, deleting and re-creating all the user accounts on the router and even resetting the router to factory defaults and completely starting from scratch, the problem persisted.  I was completely out of ideas so I started searching forums for clues.  It seems this problem happened to other Mac users on a similar Linksys product, the WRT350N.  The same box as mine without the 5GHz band radio.  The sad part, no solution.  The thread just ended with users bitching and crying.

With nowhere left to turn I went to linksys.com and got on-line with a tech using their support chat.  After the usual thirty or forty minutes of problem description and answering all the obvious troubleshooting questions like “Are you logged in as an administrator?“, the poor support girl in Bangla-desh or wherever the hell she was agreed I needed to elevate the support incident on their web site and wait for a level-two phone call from their support team.  I obliged and figured I’d never hear from Linksys again.

My cell phone rang the next morning at the precise time I ‘d requested on Linksys’s support site and I was very pleased to hear a Cisco engineer on the other end.  We spent the next twenty minutes reviewing everything I’d done so far, which OS X version I was using and him asking me to try a couple of different methods of connecting to the router, both of which did no good.  We ended the call with him agreeing to seek additional engineering help and promising to call me back when he had more information. I felt certain this was the end and I’d never hear from Cisco again.  I’m such a pessimist.

An hour later the same engineer called me back!  This time there was a second engineer on the line.  After introductions, the second engineer asked a couple of pointed questions about my Mac user account and the router firmware.  I answered, and to my surprise he said he was able to reproduce the exact problem in their lab.  You could have knocked me over with a feather!  These guys were actually working on my problem!  Additionally, they both spoke to me like the engineer that I am, not some ignorant teenager who can’t get to his WoW server.  We had a succinct, thoughtful discussion about the possible causes, concluding with their admission to something being amiss with the WRT600N’s firmware.  I felt vindicated and very pleased with the absolute professionalism displayed by both engineers, even though we hadn’t solved my problem.  After this experience, I have every reason to believe Cisco will get this fixed and everyone owning a Linksys router with Storage Link will have a firmware revision soon.

I attribute this entire incident to the “early adopter” syndrome, even though I’m not early to adopt a Linksys router or a Macbook.  I do, however, feel fairly confident I’m early to adopt the combination.  If this problem had surfaced on Windows machines, the routers wouldn’t have gotten past QC and likely wouldn’t have shipped until the firmware was fixed.  I can’t wait to hear what Cisco will do next, but I have a feeling I’ll be one of the first to know.

admin Apple Minutia, OS X Apple, Cisco, Linksys, MacNoob, router, wireless N

I ordered an iPod Touch the day it was available on Apple’s site. I’m a Verizon customer with a long time left on my contract, hence no iPhone yet. The Touch is a great device, but I quickly became jealous of the iPhone’s e-mail, maps and other features unavailable to us Touch users. When the 1.1.1 jailbreak got stable, I did the deed and had a cool Touch with lots of games, utilities and the like. When 1.1.2 was released, I did the whole 1.1.1 downgrade, jailbroke, ran OKtoPrep and did the 1.1.2 upgrade. Of course, I had to re-install all the apps and then find the 1.1.2 versions of e-mail, maps and so-on and get them back on. I completely skipped 1.1.3 because I was perfectly happy with my 1.1.2 version and saw it as only giving me the “jiggly-icon” desktop rearrangement feature which was of marginal value. With 1.1.4, it looks like the SDK is right around the corner, so I thought it would be prudent to get to the new release as quickly as possible. I did some research, touring the multiple iPhone jailbreak sites and blogs and settled on the Ziphone app to prep my iPod for the 1.1.4 update. I did my due diligence reading all the instructions carefully and followed them to the letter. Guess what? My iPod hung, unrecognized by my PC and endlessly scrolling text across its screen. The really scary part; I was unable after several attempts holding down both <Home> + <Display> buttons to get it into recovery mode! The damned thing just kept rebooting and scrolling white text across the screen. For about 30 minutes I pondered the idea of buying another iPod and wondered if I should upgrade to the 32GB model. “Do I really want to drop another $500? If I ordered it now would it get here tomorrow? Just how far is Fry’s anyway?“, it’s funny what you think about while holding a $400 brick. Finally, after several attempts, the beautiful picture of a USB connector with an arrow pointing to an iTunes icon appeared on the screen…PHEW! Long story short, I restored and upgraded to the legal 1.1.4 firmware. That’s it. I’m done. No more hacks for me. I’ll just have to wait like a good sheep ’til Uncle Steve says it’s OK for me to install apps on my Touch.

admin Apple Minutia 1.1.2, 1.1.3, 1.1.4, Apple, ipod, ipod hack