Mac OS X 10.4.3 Update: Beware!

The OS X 10.4.3 Update (Delta) has been released. I believe the 3 people who read this blog know this is a BIG pile of bugfixes. It would be astounding if it didn't cause some people serious trouble.

I have been keenly awaiting this release, but I will chain myself to the mast to avoid installing it until at least a week has passed. This is not a minor update. I'll let my good friend Andrew do some testing first ... (Andy prides himself on installing every Apple OS and product update without hesitation ...)

Note one fix is to completely disable Quartz Extreme:

Disables Quartz 2D Extreme—Quartz 2D Extreme is not a supported feature in Tiger, and re-enabling it may lead to video redraw issues or kernel panics.

Quartz extreme was a major Tiger pre-release feature. I hope this doesn't mean it's been bumped completely out of Tiger! A bitter pill indeed.

LaunchBar 4.1b1 has Search in Spotlight option

I wrote Objective Development a month or two ago requesting Spotlight integration in their Launchbar application (Launchbar alone is sufficient reason to use OS X over XP). They told me the work was underway. I guess I wasn't the only customer to ask!

Now it's out in beta. I'll report on how this goes as soon as I install it. This might make Spotlight really useful for me.

LaunchBar 4

LaunchBar 4.1b1 is a Mac OS X launcher with drop-down menus, shortcut keyboard access to menu items, and launching of bookmarks, email addresses, files, and applications. This beta release adds new options for opening items, support for color labels, improved iTunes support, improved Address Book support, a Search in Spotlight option, a Look Up in Dictionary option, faster startups, and other changes. LaunchBar is $19.95 for non-commercial use ($39 for business use) for Mac OS X 10.2 through 10.4.

Update 11/1: Fabulous. Heavenly. Suddenly Tiger is worth something. The Spotlight syntax now makes sense. I can do phrase searches. I can do Boolean searches. I've removed Spotlight's keyboard shortcut and assigned the Spotlight Windows shortcut to F2. Launchbar again owns the cmd-spacebar key.

Roku SoundBridge vs SlimDevices Squeezebox

It's great to have choices.

1. The Roku SoundBridge decodes AAC on the receiving device, the SlimDevices Squeezebox decodes AAC on the server -- and streams FLAC.. Roku has an iTunes license, Squeezebox doesn't.

2. Squeezebox is tightly integrated with the OpenSource SlimServer with a web client interface. SlimServer can stream to iTunes or to the Roku SoundBridge (not documented).

3. SlimServer in my limited experience seems to demand a lot of machine resources, and is a bit flaky.

Decisions pending ...

Fixing a broken WDS wired to wireless bridge on an Apple Airport Express

Subtitle: Who is Henry B, and why has he posted about 35,000 times to Apple's support site?

I recently bought an Apple Airport Express (discount) to stream AirTunes music to my compact AudioSource amplifier (inputs are Airport Express and iPod, output to local Mission and remote AudioSource speakers). I was unhappy with the usability of AirTunes (though TuneConnect is helping!), so I decided to investigate a SlimDevices Squeezebox. I figured I'd hook the Squeezebox up to the wired ethernet port on the Airport Express, and use the AExpBS simply as a WDS network extender and a wired to wireless bridge.

Problem was, when I tested with my iBook, the bridge didn't work. The iBook reported the ethernet cable was not connected. Research led nowhere (several sites mentioned that the AExpBS didn't support bridging using WPA encryption, but that's dated, it does now). In desperation, I tried Apple Discussions.

It worked. "Henry B." (level "four", @35K posts), who I hope is a pseudonym for many persons, came up with a response that worked:

Apple - Discussions - WDS bridge not working

...I should be able to use an AEX in WDS mode to connect an ethernet device to my WLAN, using the the AEX as a bridge.

It's not working here. All theWDS settings seem fine. I can stream to the AEX and use it extend my WLAN. If I plug an ethernet cable into it, however, no joy. My iBook says there's nothing plugged in.

...

1. Do a factory reset of your Airport Express to get it back into a known state per:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=108044

2. Make sure your Powerbook, Airport Extreme Base Station, and Airport Express are all - for now - in the same room.

3. With your Powerbook connected to the wireless network of the Airport Extreme Base Station (prove it by making sure you have internet access) run the Airport Admin Utility. We are going to have you clean up some settings on it first:

• make sure the Base Station is running firmware version 5.5.1. If not ...
  install firmware 5.5.1 on the Base Station:
  http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airportextremefirmware551formacosx.html
  and 6.1.1 on the Airport Express:
  http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airportexpressfirmware611formacosx.html
  WPA on a WDS network works perfectly with these firmware versions.
  

• under the Airport tab, make sure you have NOT checked the box to "create a closed network"
• under the Access Control tab, remove ALL table entries
• under the WDS tab, remove all entries and uncheck all boxes

Then update settings to the Airport Base Station.

4. Make sure you have the Airport 4.1 update installed on your Mac:
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airport41formacosx.html

5. Now run the Airport Setup Assistant. Use its guidance to configure the Airport Express as a new base station that "extends" the existing wireless network created by the Airport Extreme Base Station.

Incredibly, this worked. The bridge was restored. I noticed two things with this process:

1. After I'd installed the firmware 'downgrades' on both base stations I couldn't connect wirelessly to the Airport Extreme, I had to reset it first.
2. When I ran Airport Setup Assistant it complained that I didn't have IPv6 enabled (it's disabled on my older 10.3.9 machine). I skipped that step and it then hung after locating my base station. I went back and enabled IPv6 and it completed successfully.

Was it the firmware downgrade that did the trick, or was it enably IPV6 on the iBook?
I wonder if bridging from wired to WAN using a WPA encrypted WDS configured Airport Express Base station requires IPv6 ...

In any case, it's a relief not to have to call Apple tech support!

The latest programming fad: Ruby on Rails

I guess I have to figure out what this one is. O'Reilly is always the best source: ONLamp.com: Rolling with Ruby on Rails.

What is Ruby?

Ruby is a pure object-oriented programming language with a super clean syntax that makes programming elegant and fun. Ruby successfully combines Smalltalk's conceptual elegance, Python's ease of use and learning, and Perl's pragmatism. Ruby originated in Japan in the early 1990s, and has started to become popular worldwide in the past few years as more English language books and documentation have become available.

What is Rails?

Rails is an open source Ruby framework for developing database-backed web applications. What's special about that? There are dozens of frameworks out there and most of them have been around much longer than Rails. Why should you care about yet another framework?

What would you think if I told you that you could develop a web application at least ten times faster with Rails than you could with a typical Java framework? You can--without making any sacrifices in the quality of your application! How is this possible?

Part of the answer is in the Ruby programming language. Many things that are very simple to do in Ruby are not even possible in most other languages. Rails takes full advantage of this. The rest of the answer is in two of Rail's guiding principles: less software and convention over configuration...

OS X Tiger includes the Ruby interpreter.

MacWorld: Secrets of Safari

MacWorld did secrets of Firefox a while back. Now they do Safari. News to me! I never even noticed the 'add to iPhoto Library' feature.

Controlling Apple AirTunes with SlimServer, or how I was turned to the Darkseid

I've been around long enough to know how pernicious and nasty these DRM (digital rights management) schemes are. I knew sooner or later they'd turn me to the Darkseid where one skirts the edges of the foul abyss of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. (DMCA badness befouls both Republicans and Dems alike.)

So my 3,500 iTunes tunes are 99.99% from our large CD library. Only a few are AppleStore FairPlay DRMd. Still, they are largely AAC, which is theoretically an open (mp4) standard. All the same, I've been cautious.

Good. Because Apple has broken their implied contract. The contract worked like this:

1. We will grudgingly accept Apple's four DRM scheme as the best of a bad bunch.
2. Apple will provide us solutions that work.

With their failure to provide a half-decent remote control solution for iTunes/AirTunes Apple has left us with no good way to stream music from a server based iTunes library to an AirTunes speaker. Even the Keyspan remote is a weak solution. We needed an Apple solution at least as good as the SoundBridge and SlimDevice solutions; Apple has persistently failed to provide.

So it's with a clear conscience that I now skirt the twilight zone of SlimServer, the iTunes LAME plug-in, and even (dare I mention the word?) JHymm (though the last is least important). Solutions that are legal today, but certainly unpleasing to Apple.

Thus far the results are remarkably better than my attempts with AirTunes (I walk upstairs to adjust the volume?!), TuneConnect (no playlists, still this is very promising) and NetConnect (disappointing). At the moment SlimServer and iTunes are running on my iMac upstairs in a background user session. SlimServer is reading in AAC files, transcoding them using the iTunes LAME plug-in, and streaming them as high quality .mp3 files to iTunes. iTunes is then transcoding them to FLAC (I think) files and streaming them to my remote AirPort Express, the music then plays on my speakers. I can control play from a web browser on my iBook, or I could use the Java softsqueeze app for remote control. This cost nothing, though it all works better if one buys the Squeezebox hardware remote.

Weird. Kludgy. Hard setup with a few odd bugs I had to work around. Limited documentation. Had to download and install several pieces. It will all work better, of course, the further I move from Apple's DRM vision.

I hope they're listening. Apple has the capability to provide a great solution, but they're choosing to really irritate their customers.