10.25.06
Time keeps passing me by
Or How sloooow Time Machine is:
So I’m sitting here with the newest version of pre-release Leopard and not much else to since I have no life, I decide to upgrade my “old” Leopard installation on my Powerbook. So I crank it up and think to myself, “self, you have a external HD crying to be used and tested”. So I grabbed my new 120 gig drive, split it into two partitions ready to be used as the backup drive. I reboot, go to the installer and when asked if I wanted to backup my disk before I install the new version, I click yes and wait. And wait, and wait and wait.. right now after an hour, Leopard is telling there is more than TEN hours of backing up to do. WTF???? THis time machine is flipping slooooow. I am debating whether to skip it or let it run out because I really would like to test it. But my god, 13 hours to snap a 40 gig system? This is not going to be pretty Apple..
Back to staring at the slowness of time..
Update:
I tried again but running locally with the new version of Leopard installed. Still slow as hell. Now it is sucking up an average of 95% CPU and not moving very much data very fast. I hope this is not a sign of the times…
Update #2:
I let the TimeMachine run all morning and in spite of the 10 hours it was saying to me, it was done in less than 5 hours. I wonder if the initial scan is slow because it is the first time? I am trying to auto backup tonight. The restore interface is pretty cool. Simple enough that you dont need directions if you are willing to click around a few times. My quick and easy test restore worked fine. I also see that you can manually drill into the backup and I think you can just copy out the files. I have not tried it yet, I’m pretty tired after the one year old decided to get up at 3:30am today 
10.17.06
It’s the image stupid
I have been using iPhoto Library Manager quite a bit in the past month. When I first started to use it, I was luke warm to the application. So I can switch libraries, big deal. As it turns out, it can do alot more and be very useful to someone like myself with thousands of images and would like to keep using iPhoto as the primary image tool. That in itself is a switch for me who was a hardcore fan (zealot?) of Google’s Picassa which I loved on my Windoze machines. Over time I have grown use to iPhoto and accepted the fact that there are multiple ways to get to the end of the game. With a few tools like iPhoto Library Manager, it gets better. I still use Photoshop CS for my “good” stuff but to use CS to adjust the pictures of the kids in the tub for grandma is way overkill. I have tried Aperture and so far, I’m underwhelmed with it’s performance. And then I am officially not supposed to be able to use it on my Powerbook? What the hell is up with that Apple?
Anyways, I have learned that ILM can not only pick which library to start iPhoto with, it can create new ones, copy albums over to the new one and keep the edits intact, make backups of the complete library, split the library, merge the library (a godsend for me with three libraries on three different machines) and rebuild libraries (another godsend as you will see in a minute). In short, this tool will become you new best friend when using iPhoto.
Rebuilding the iPhoto library, you would Apple would have made it easier to rebuild it but no, you have use the secret handshake when you boot iPhoto which was pretty annoying. I had reason to put this to the test when I found that in a fit of cleaning, I had deleted way too many pictures from an airhow I had been at earlier this year. And, my backup was whacked since I needed the disk for a test install of Leopard. Oh what to do? Never fear little Monica, the un-man is here(name that show!). I had a backup but it was on a piece of shit Maxtor 1TB external drive. I really hate that thing, it works halfassed and will fail for no apparent reason. I had not known this when I used it to backup three of my systems and a special copy of my iPhoto library. So now I spent three hours getting most of the library off the @#*@## maxtor which required many reboots and restarts. But while I had the data, all I had were little bitty grey squares. I knew I could rebuild the database but how to do it? I did find the magic key strokes on an Apple page and ILM offers a way aslso. ILM offers a way to rebuild the AlbumData.xml file by choosing the menu item. Apple offers a menu with four choices of various levels of the hail Mary pass for iPhoto.
You need to hold down the command and option key on starting up iPhoto for version 5 and later. This gives you the fancy menu with all the options. In my case, I rebuilt everything and now the library is back. This can take a while, my little database of 22 gig (NOT) took over an hour. But it fixed it. So now I have my library AND my MIA airshow files.
10.10.06
Click, click,Adjust the Aperture
Here we are again, I have been working with Aperture 1.5 for the past week and I have to say I love the interface.Mostly I do, I am very used to Photoshop so I’m always looking for things in the wrong place but it’s not bad. As I said before, it is much like working with iPhoto on steroids which is a pleasant way to work with my pictures. I had been thinking that the response of Aperture was pretty good till I tried to use the touch up tool. OMG, what a pig..it was literally click and wait a minute or two for the screen to update. This was extremely frustrating when I was trying t move section of the picture to cover up something. And just for the record, I’m running this on a last G4 iMac Apple put out which is no slouch for performance. This is not acceptable and what is scary is that I’m told this is the “improved” version of Aperture. I cringe to think that this is improved, makes me wonder what 1.0 and 1.1 were like. So far, I have to say that Adobe Lightroom is going to kick Apple’s butt on this. Lightroom is relatively fast even on my Powerbook G4. I would not even try to run Aperture on a G4, it would drink you to drink assuming you could do any actual work. I’m still working with Aperture to compare how it works with layers and other day to day edits I use but I’m not hold my breath based on what I have seen so far.
In the networking world, I dragged my old M0n0wall firewall out and updated it and replaced my Cisco PIX with it. If you have not tried M0n0wall, you should. The price is right 
Right as in free! I did buy a WRAP board to run it on so I have a real firewall with WAN, LAN and a real DMZ port. Right now, I am connected to my iMac via a PPTP VPN connection from my Powerbook using EVDO at my local Starbucks You have to love technology when it all works. Why did I not stay with the Cisco? Aside from the fact that the Cisco VPN client has been troublesome, I gave up on it when it would not “see” my EVDO card when everything else did just fine. So I went back to the M0n0wall and PPTP which has been working perfectly. And I want my DMZ port back. The PIX only has a DMZ on the 515 which used is about 1,300 bucks verse free for M0n0wall. You should try Monowall.
Also, about two years ago I wrote a book on Linux security. Lets be honest, it was alot of fun to fun and layout and publish, I did all myself but you do not get rich off techie books. So now it is time for an update and my life has changed enough where I can not put in the effort. So the book will be release to public domain in about a month. The info is dated some but still very usefulto a good many people. To all of those that paid the 10 bucks for the PDF or the 20 for a soft bound version, THANK YOU. Watch this space for the details.
10.07.06
Things only get better
Well, I have Leopard running on one of my Powerbooks and it rocks even though it is a beta release. So much looks the same but a few things work so much better but migrating user data and applications is not one them, not yet at least. I wrote in detail about this under “Cats Paws”. But I have to say that so far with clean installs and just using it, Leopard is working well.
I gave iPhoto Library manager a real workout as I promised and it works pretty well, even with a 30 gig library. Takes FOREVER to merge and copy the library though. But in the end I was able my Powerbook library with my iMac library and then make a real copy of it on my NAS. Pretty slick overall but I did see that not all of my edits migrated from one library to another. Most of the picture rotations did not make it where it appears that most of the image adjustments such as exposure, sharpness and the like did make it. I really like the ability to switch between different libraries at a click and then run iPhoto which doesn’t know any better.
My newest toy is a Blackberry and PacketMac Syncmanger is now at release 4 which is a huge jump over the last version. There is now a toy to sync book marks from Safari to the Blackberry and sync from dot Mac. There is a new application that is installed on the Blackberry and now you have access to all your bookmarks.
Other fun items is Temperature monitor which gives you all the temps you could possible want. I found it reading about a weak temp probe on the 1.5/1.6 Powerbooks under the track pad that sends the system to sleep suddenly when it fails. TM can pin it down for you by showing you the bogus temps of that probe. Me? I just like watching
I also found a brightness control which worked very well for about two week and then hung my system with a black screen and would not give it back till I hit power. Still needs a bit of work I am thinking.
I broke down and bought Aperture (from eBay) and applied the new 1.5 patch. It is nicely done with the interface that looks and feels much like iPhoto. But, it’s slower than Photoshop CS and some of the adjustments are not intuitive at all. However, I did promise myself to give it a honest effort. I am also working with Lightroom from Adobe and at this point, I really like it over Aperture. Aperture took over three hours to import my iPhoto database into Aperture and then I tried to shut down and it was “updating” something on the database which took another few hours. At least I could run Photoshop on my 1.6 G4 but I’m afraid to try Aperture given it’s sluggish on my G5 iMac.
I found an excellent and free tool to very quickly resize an image called ToyViewer. This cool toy cna do some basics like fixing color balance, reduce colors, clip, rotate, resize and more.
10.01.06
Cats Paws
Leopards and sharp claws:
As I mentioned the other day, I have put my dev copy of Leopard on one of my Powerbooks and it has been great. But, I did an upgrade to another Powerbook with Leopard and things are not so happy. The upgrade went fairly well and the system booted cleanly until it tried to load “Dockstar” which puked on itself complaining about it does not support this version of OSX. Then Mail puked since I’m using the hack to view my mail widescreen much like Outlook reading panes. Or at least that is why I think it puked. It never did run in the few hours of testing.
My trusty Postfix Enabler puked as did the Cisco VPN which is not surprising given how touchy that client is. But, X Code shell puked which did surprise me. And the previously stable Powerbook now Kernel panicked on every restart. Ouch!! Hence kids, dont use this as production!!! Other tools like TextMate, Microsoft RDP client, RDC menu, MacTheRipper and others worked fine.
I thought I would be clever and use the migration tool to move my account to Leopard, but no go. The damn tool would not my firewire drive or the 2nd Powerbook booted as a firewire device. I suspect some of these issues will be resolved as the release date but I had hoped for better. I guess there much more significant changes under the hood than I had thought given how little the UI changed.
The new Mail is fun with the stationary and integration with iPhoto. I would not use it alot but the few times I would use it, definitely nice to have around. Speaking of integration, I plan to get a new copy of Aperture soon and see what all the fuss is about. I like my Photoshop but I like the idea of tight integration with my iLife tools and iPhoto. That is one of the strongest features of the Mac is how integrated everything is.
10.28.06
Must have OSX applications
Posted in Commentary, OSX Software at 10:27 am by hackamac
I found this list at Macspecialist.org but I copied it here since things sometimes “go away” after a while. They have some fine information there and I really recommend to anyone with a Mac to drop by their site and see what all is there.
Essential Mac OS X Applications…
• Acquisition – Gnutella file sharing client
• Adium – Multi-protocol instant messenger client (my personal favorite)
• Address-o-sync – Sync multiple Macs without .Mac
• Amadeus – Great tool for audio enthusiast
• Audio Hijack Pro – Custom audio output filtering
• Backlight – Menu extra toggles screensaver as your desktop
• BurnX Free – Burn multiple sessions on CD
• Butler – Get more out of Finder
• CandyBar – Change your application and system icons
• Carbon Copy Cloner – Easy-to-use backup/cloning utility (I went to Superduper and have not looked back)
• Chmox – An OS X native CHM file (Compiled HTML/eBook) reader
• Cocktail – Simplifies use of UNIX functions in OS X, and more
• Colloquy – IRC client
• CSSEdit – Visual CSS style editor
• DeepVacuum – Download entire websites
• Default Folder – Expanded functionality in “Save As..” dialogue boxes
• Deja Vu – Schedule regular file backups
• Delicious Library – Catalogue your books, cd’s, games, dvd’s
• Dimensionizer – Contextual Menu to display an image’s dimensions
• DeskShade – Hide desktop icons, terminal lock, and more
• Desktastic – Doodle on your desktop
• Dock-It – Add multiple multi-fucntion docks
• DragThing – An alternative to the dock
• DV Backup – Use your DV camera as a backup medium (very cool, I use it for my picture archives)
• Evocam – Webcam application with built in web server, FTP, etc.
• FileJuicer – Extract images from Powerpoint, PDF, HTML, and CAB files
• Fink – Unix Ports for X
• Firefox – Open source web browser
• Fugu – An SFTP, SCP and SSH frontend
• Huevos – Customisable search engine helper
• HyperEdit – live previews of HTML and PHP pages
• iBank – Intuitive personal finance manager
• iBiz – Self-employed time billing manager
• iConquer – 1-to-6 player world conquest game
• iPodDisk – Utilize your iPod as an iDisk
• iRooster – Great free alarm clock
• iWipe – Secure disk and file deletion
• iZoom – Crop and resize your photos
• LiteSwitch X – Keyboard application switcher
• Little Snitch – Alerts you of outgoing network connections
• MacJanitor – Great tool for running & rescheduling OS X maintenance tasks
• MacMame – Multi arcade machine emulator
• MacSniffer – View all traffic on a network connection
• MacTheRipper – Go Ahead, Back that DVD up
• MacTracker – Database of all Mac models
• Mac Vim – The aqua version of Vim
• Mail.appetizer – Enhance Mail with this small but handy notification plugin
• Mplayer for OS X – Another great video player
• Net Monitor – Network throughput monitor
• Net Tool Box – Handy tool for the toolkit – for network issues
• NetNewsWire – RSS aggregator (If you’re gonna use one, use NetNewsWire)
• Onyx – System tweaks and configuration
• OSXvnc – VNC remote control protocol
• PDF Browser Plugin – Allows web browsers to display PDF files
• Pixen – Pixel graphics editor
• Quicksilver – Application launcher and much more
• RCDefaultApp – Preference pane to set default applications
• Renamer4Mac – Rename files en masse. Useful for digital cameras
• SideTrack trackpad driver – Enhanced trackpad driver for Apple Laptops
• Simon Extreme – Classic Milton Bradley Simon game
• Skype – Uses P2P for phone-over-internet talking
• SubEthaEdit – Use Rendezvous for collaborative editing
• Synergy – Adds iTunes controls to your menu bar
• Transmit – FTP client
• Unison – Usenet newsreader handles messages, files, & media
• Virtue – Virtual desktop manager
• VLC – Play DivX encoded movies (and more).
• VoodooPad – Notepad with many advanced features
• Word Browser Plugin – Allows web browsers to display Word files
• xPad – Notebook/scrapbook supports drag & drop
• XRay – Expanded version of the Finder’s “Get Info” window
• xScope – Suite of screen tools for UI designers
I can not believe that they missed youcontrol:desktops for virtual desktops by yousoftware.com. Well, nobody is perfect
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