MacNoob

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.

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

Maybe I’m dense, but I can’t seem to get network shares, wired or wireless to work consistently in Leopard.  When I was using Tiger everything just worked.  I could connect to network-attached storage, shared folders on other PCs (Windows, Mac or Linux) shared printers, everything.  Leopard is a different animal though.  Pardon the pun.  Sometimes, I double-click on a network share in Finder and I’m connected like normal.  Sometimes though, the shared device doesn’t even show up.  Other times, I can connect, use the share but then it inexplicably disappears.  Every now and then I have to use the Go: Connect to server… menu to manually connect to a share.  Every Windows PC on my network seems fat, dumb and happy.  Vista and XP can see and use everything.  My neighbor still runs Tiger on his Macbook, and it works perfectly on his network and mine.  I’m not completely clueless when it comes to networking, I’m a MCSE, but there is obviously something going on behind the scenes in Leopard that I haven’t figured out yet.  Am I alone?  What about all this “Out of the box useability” Apple braggs about?

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!

Well, it’s conclusive, the problem with my network attached storage issue is a problem with Leopard.  Linksys (i.e. Cisco) has done what I consider their due diligence.  They were able to fully reproduce my problem in their lab when using a Leopard machine, but when they used Tiger, everything worked fine.  The engineer I spoke with said they have been working on the problem since I reported it and couldn’t fix it.  What was really intriguing is the level of effort they put into the issue.  This Cisco engineer told me they had poured over the source code for the WRT600N firmware and found it to be 100% compliant with Apple’s Leopard API.  Even if they wanted to fix the problem, they wouldn’t know where to start.  I’ve been in their shoes before.  When coding to someone’s API you have to go on faith that the API does what it says.  If it doesn’t, you can’t fix a problem even if you know where it is.  Kudos to Cisco for giving it their best shot.  Even though my problem still exists, I will buy Linksys (Cisco) products in the future simply because of this experience.  I have never been involved with a support incident that garnered so much attention from the provider.  As for Apple?…Give me a hand. I called Apple’s tech support, and they weren’t much help but did agree to document my problem. I figure the more folks complain about this, the more likely it is to be addressed. Give Apple support a call at 1-800-APL-CARE (1-800-275-2273) if you’ve experienced network problems with Leopard.

Thanks,

MacNoob

More to come.