Dustin’s Blog

There is a bit of buzz on the internet right now about Apple’s announcement of OS X Snow Leopard which is to replace Leopard sometime next year. Word on the street is that it won’t be luring people in with hundreds of new features but Apple is instead concentrating on stability of the OS. This is amazing to me for a couple of reasons. One, Apple seems to be admitting that it is out of ideas! Two, when is the last time you’ve heard of a big software company just going back and streamlining their OS? This is fantastic because as I wrote before, I’m liking Leopard more now than I did when it was initially released but compared to Tiger it’s just not as polished. Boot times for instance could be improved as Leopard takes nearly 50% to twice as long to boot compared to Tiger.

Along with the Snow Leopard client comes Snow Leopard Server and here is my prediction. Apple hasn’t told us everything (as usual) and based on the direction Apple is taking the iPhone, I believe Snow Leopard is going to be Apples biggest attack on the business/enterprise market yet. They have already admitted that ZFS will be included in Snow Leopard and they are talking about better Exchange support. Virtualization is a huge topic lately and I won’t be the least bit surprised to hear Apple announce virtualization support in Snow Leopard Server and maybe even in the client version. My guess is for the support of any OS including OS X itself..

What are your thoughts? Leave them in the comments area!

Well by now it’s no secret to any of my friends that I’ve become a bit of an Apple fan but I’m not so much a fan that I can’t criticize what they do. I’m not that rabid yet.

So it was with trepidation that I gave Leopard a try, twice no less, before finally making the switch to it permanently. I wanted to be sure the kinks were worked out and that it would work as well as Tiger did. I had read about and had my own issues with Leopard on my mini including poor animations, apps failing to start and just a general clumsiness to it that just was not what OS X should be like. While I’m not convinced it is quite there yet, the latest update has brought it a long ways in my mind.

The latest update, 10.5.3, seems to fix a lot of the big issues I was running into with Leopard. The biggest issue was actually with some iLife apps like iMovie. Either through luck or an actual fix iMovie now runs on Leopard. In previous versions I couldn’t get iMovie to open fully and when it did working with video was problematic and importing video was terrible. While I have yet to import video since installing 10.5.3 I’m fairly confident it’ll work much better than it has in the past based on how well it runs otherwise.

In my previous entry I mention my Super Smash Bros. Brawl testing and one of the other tests I wanted to do involved determining how much data is required to play a four way game. My home network setup is a bit involved yet I couldn’t find a way to route the Wii through a device that I could measure network usage with.

To make a long story short, I found that you can configure your Mac’s wireless to “create network” and unlike a Windows PC that would setup an adhoc network, the Mac will act like a normal wireless access point or wireless router. This was fantastic because the Wii will not join an adhoc network. With my Mac set to create a new network I was able to join my Wii to it and determine that a four way game in Brawl requires at least 10KB/s of network traffic in both directions.

Early in March I decided to give Leopard another try on my mini. There have been a few updates, namely the graphics update and 10.5.2, that were rumored to fix the issues I was having. After a couple of weeks with Leopard, I again removed it in favor of Tiger (10.4). Either there are problems with Leopard or OS X is the most finicky operating system I’ve ever used (people tell me to reinstall).

I just can’t get used to the look of Leopard, the darker gray with the even whiter menus is just too harsh. I had apps that would crash repeatedly at random times. Thunderbird would sometimes crash while checking mail and Firefox or iTerm would crash when the system was resumed.

Ok, so iTerm, Firefox and Thunderbird aren’t Apple apps, people writing the software should make sure it works with Leopard right? Well it wasn’t just third party apps that went haywire on me. iMovie 08 would start, but nothing would show up. The menu bar would be iMovie, the app was running, but there was no actual window to work in. I reinstalled iMovie and it worked just once. Loading it again resulted in the same issue.

I also found that I ran out of memory far faster in Leopard than in Tiger. There *is* a lot more to Leopard but the difference was too much for me to handle. In the end, I’ve concluded that Leopard is either not right for me or it isn’t a good fit on the generation of Mac mini that I own.

I’ve been using my Mac Mini as what I’d call my “primary computer” almost from the moment I received it. While I have a laptop that I can use around the house or travel with, I use the Mac because it is so quiet, it’s hooked up to a 22″ screen and because I enjoy the OS X experience. Over the months I’ve managed to find a few software titles that help me get things done.

• iTerm - Nice terminal app that more closely resembles my favorite Windows SSH client, putty. Has tabs, etc
• Firefox - Who doesn’t know what Firefox is?
• Thunderbird - Mail just can’t compete with the speed of Thunderbird for IMAP accounts
• Gamepedia - I play games and I like to track them. There are other software options available, even some more generic but I just like this one
• Adium - Adium is a multi-protocol chat client using the same libraries as Pidgin
• Vienna - Great RSS reader
• Things - Simple way to track…things
• Mythfrontend - MythTV is my DVR of choice and I need a way to access it on the Mac, this it!
• Integrity - This is a simple link checker for OS X, similar to Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is superior however.
• MacTheRipper - Best DVD ripping tool I’ve found for the Mac
• NeoOffice - This is currently the only way to run OpenOffice “natively” on the Mac. It’s slow but gets the job done
• Remote Desktop Connection - Sometimes you need to access a Windows machine. I use this primarily to connect to my XP VMWare guest running on my Linux server for web site testing
• Macfuse/SSHFS - Nearly identical to fuse and sshfs for Linux
• Transmission and Azureus - One bittorrent client just isn’t enough
• VLC - Great multi-platform video player. Perian is able to install many of the same codecs VLC will play but I have soft spot for VLC

One thing that a number of people overlook is that RAID is NOT a backup solution. That’s right, say it with me, “RAID is not a backup solution.” RAID is at most a data availability solution and nothing more. With that in mind it is always good to have a backup. This post will concentrate on creating a backup script and routine for my Linux server as well as my Mac. Since the Mac is UNIX based I can back it up in much the same way as I do my Linux server.

Please keep in mind that this method assumes a lot of things and should not be considered for a business environment where security is more important. My method involves creating a public/private ssh key without a passphrase and worse, the root password for my MySQL server is also coded into this script. Since this is all DIY, you can expand whatever you do to be a bit more secure.

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I’m a little slow on adopting the latest Internet trends. I have no idea why but I seem to get stuck on last years hot item and then I never seem to hear about the latest and greatest until it has created a lot of buzz. I also have a tough time seeing the value in some of the new items until some very smart and crafty people put it to use in such a way that it really reveals the power of, well, whatever is the hot button item.

RSS is one of those things for me that just didn’t really catch my eye outside of using del.icio.us RSS feeds to keep my bookmarks in sync between my computers at work and at home. In reality, I’m not even using del.icio.us correctly. At any rate, the value of RSS has hit me like a ton of bricks.

I browse a number of newsish sites related to Nintendo, Apple/Mac, digg.com and a number of blogs. I visit these sites just to see what is new. For a long while I’ve used Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature to keep up on sites that had RSS feeds but now it has just gotten out of hand. I have too many sites and blogs I like to check.

Enter Vienna for the Mac. This thing is spectacular. It looks great, it’s very fast and it allows me to group RSS feeds into any arbitrary group I wish. Apple/Mac feeds in one group and Nintendo feeds in another. Reading feeds is simplistic though I opted for the ‘condensed’ layout rather than the default ‘report’ layout. In the condensed layout it’s very much like using a Microsoft Outlook with mailboxes on the left, messages in the middle and the full message on the right. Now if I could just find a comparable program for Windows I’d have my new RSS fetish fully satisfied.

I ran into two strange issues with Leopard on my mini. For whatever reason, importing video via firewire would drop frames. I’ve never seen dropped frames while importing video with firewire, I didn’t know it was possible. It’s possible there really is something wrong with the tape or the camcorder but it seems to play back perfectly on the camcorder. The other issue is a drop in frame rate while minimizing windows. This sounds pretty trivial but it was actually pretty annoying. It was nearly as bad as running OS X 10.3 on a 400Mhz G3 iMac.

Anyway, I removed Leopard and reinstalled (erase and install no less) Tiger. It still wants to drop some frames, but not as many.

I managed to acquire Leopard for my Mac mini and have been putting it to use for almost a week now. Initially I was a bit underwhelmed, probably because of all the hype, but after spending some more time with it I’m really liking some of the changes put into it though I haven’t had a chance to really get to know all of the new features Leopard has to offer.

Right away I was put off by the color scheme. I was really liking the colors used in Tiger for selected menu items and the title bar on windows. The menu bar also being translucent doesn’t excite me and I’ll probably install this utility to disable the transparency, but I’ll give it some more time. The glass shelf dock looks fine to my eyes except for the odd shadow behind the icons. They are shadowed as if light is shining up through the glass shelf, it ends up creating an effect that just looks like a poorly drop shadowed image. It just looks wrong and would be much more pleasing if there was no shadow at all, or a very subtle shadow similar to how all windows in OS X are shadowed.
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I’ve had the Mac mini for a few weeks now so I thought I’d write a bit my thoughts on the mini and OS X in general. There is a lot to like about the mini and OS X but there are also a few items I’ve come to dislike which I’ll discuss below.

The Mac mini is a tiny computer that looks great. I am personally not aware of any sort of PC that is this small, includes the same features AND looks good doing it. That said, aesthetics are in the eye of the beholder and are a matter of opinion. With that in mind I’ll try to steer clear of personal opinion and concentrate more on practicality and usability.

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