OS X 10.4.11: Macintouch reports and an update procedure

My policy on these bug fix updates is to wait a few days and check both the Macintouch Reader Reports: OS X 10.4.11 and the Apple Discussion List.

I follow a simple subset of Gruber's update procedure:

1. Download the full cumulative update from Apple's site.
2. Shut down and disconnect all external drives.
3. Restart into my admin account (very plain account).
4. Install update, don't run anything until it's done.
5. Restart into my regular account.

I don't do an extra backup but I do check that my nightly backup completed correctly. If I'm feeling paranoid I do a test restore of a single randomly selected file.

There has been a longstanding bug with Apple's Updater (note, however, I have removed unsanity's application program enhancer from all my machines). There's a low but non-zero probability that it will botch an update; the probability rises sharply if you're doing anything during the update process or if another users is logged on at the same time. The restart reduces that risk substantially, as does the plain admin account.

I don't repair privileges. Everyone I read feels that's pointless.

Since I have no recognized problems with OS X 10.4.10 I'm in no great hurry to update*.

*iPhoto 7.1 is crashy. I hope the combination of 10.4.11 and iPhoto 7.11 will help.

Update 11/15/07: Some hints in Apple's release notes and user experiences suggest 10.4.11 may have the same trouble with input manager hacks (application program enhancer mostly) as 10.5 has. I recommend checking for APE as described in the APE uninstall guidelines. Then uninstall it.

After the update, if you absolutely can't live without APE, do your research prior to reinstalling the very latest version.

Bento and the iPhone

FileMaker has discontinued FileMaker Mobile

As of the end of the business day, December 19, 2007, FileMaker, Inc. will no longer sell FileMaker Mobile.

That's a serious drag, because a database client for the iPhone is one of my high priority requirements.

On the other hand, FM has introduced the mysterious 10.5 only Bento "personal database" app:

Meet Bento — Learn More

... Bento is designed exclusively for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It takes advantage of many of the new features of Leopard, including live linking to iCal data, core animation, advanced find, Time Machine backups, and multimedia features...

So will there by a companion iPhone application for Bento?

In the meantime, I'll be holding off on FileMaker updates. In fact, I'll be holding off on all Apple purchases until I see the iPhone SDK and the rumored major iPhone update in Feb 2008. Apple's strategy is simply murky ...

Safari: Ok, you win

I really thought Safari's web rendering engine was doomed, though I noted some caveats.

Ok, so even I can be wrong. Yes, I still use Firefox (kind of got away from Camino, though I use it on slower machines), but clearly WebKit is a winner.

The iPhone has established WebKit compatibility as a must-have for most web sites, but the use of WebKit in the Android platform has finished the deal.

This is from the Safari WebKit blog:

...Many of you have seen the announcement of the Android Mobile Platform (www.openhandsetalliance.com) followed by today’s release of the SDK (code.google.com/android). We (Android) were happy to highlight the use of the WebKit engine as the rendering core for Android’s browser. We have been working on our mobile implementation of WebKit for quite some time. A few changes that we made to WebKit, which make it more suitable for mobile devices, have been submitted to the Tip Of Tree prior to the release of the SDK...

Another interesting change we made, which is not mobile specific, was to make the canvas tag platform independent. Again we are working on migrating this to SVN.
Most changes made to WebKit are clearly identified with a #ifdef ANDROID_[feature name]...

Canvas is the drawing environment for applications in WebKit. Knowing little, I think of it as "QuickDraw for the web".

Making Canvas "platform independent" sounds interesting.

Anyway, sorry WebKit. I was wrong, you were right.

If Google changes their Docs and Blogger sites to work better with Safari, I might even switch back. (Safari editing in Blogger causes a tag mess in the output.)

Update: See the comments for a persuasive explanation of what Canvas does and it's relation to Quartz. I'd been using "QuickDraw" as a metaphor rather than a technology, but it's very nice to get more background.

Incidentally, I write this blog primarily as a way to create notes for my own learning and reference, and secondarily as a way to "give back" to the net. I get enormous help from people who share knowledge freely, this blog is a small way to share what I know, and sometimes what I think (I mostly put opinion elsewhere).

I assumed readership would only come incidentally, as the result of a Google Search to solve a specific problem I'd written about.

Somehow, for reasons that are unclear to me, I seem to have acquired some rather knowledgeable readers. It's an unexpected pleasure.

Lunarpages: a sign of the end-times for low end hosting solutions?

My blogs are posted through Google's Blogger, and they've been very reliable for months.

My older web pages however, and several domains, are hosted by Lunarpages. Lunarpages is a low-end to mid-range hosting provider with an above average reputation. I've used them for years and I've been reasonably satisfied.

They're not doing so well lately. They've been down 3 times in the past 10 days, and they've been offline all day today. Only their forums are working. Even several Google Apps domains, where Lunarpages only does redirects, are unavailable because the redirects have failed.

My guess is it's some kind of denial-of-service attack on their DNS servers. The worst part of it is they're maintaining complete radio silence -- no postings at all on their network status. Since their entire domain is unreachable I think that merits a comment or two.

Google has the technical team and infrastructure to handle a pretty massive BOT attack. Lunarpages clearly doesn't. I wonder if that vulnerability is going to wipe out the low end internet services market -- leaving only the big players.

I'll have to start moving off of Lunarpages. It'll take quite a while, but I'll start by moving my domains to the service Google uses for the Google Apps domains I have. The last step will be finding a new home for my legacy web pages.

Update 11/14/07: It looks like this was two problems. Lunarpages had been failing due to DNS attacks, but the failure of the past week was a routing problem with the service my Hotel was using. I didn't have time to debug the routing problem, so I can't say who was ultimately responsible.

Terrific review of Google Search 2007 - power user techniques

I hadn't realized how much personalization of search results Google does now. No wonder I can find my own blog material so easily!

Biases and Restrictions in Google Search:

...5. If you don't like Google's personalized results you can log out from your Google account, disable the Web History service or turn off the personalization bias by adding &pws=0 to Google's URL. Note that the parameter is not persistent and it only works for the current search.

6. To restrict your search to the high-quality (?) web sites included in the Open Directory Project, you can append &cat=gwd/Top to Google's URL or perform your search at Google Directory...

There's lots more. It's definitely worth studying this and keeping a link to the reference.

I tried the &pws=0 parameter when searching for my own stuff, and it was neat to see the search results change. It wasn't a large change, but in general my stuff moved down the main page one step.

XP Demotion: from Administrator to Debugger User

My corporate Dell laptop has been behaving badly. As far as I can tell, it's possessed.

Today our noble and long suffering sysadmin took a look at my privilege settings.

The one local and two network admin accounts on the Dell had been switched to Debugger User. Apparently, it's going around the office.

As of 11/09/07 a search on Microsoft's site doesn't turn up any useful explanation. The current theory is that it's a .NET bug.

The way the security privileges had been reconfigured should, in theory, work. It's not, however, standard.

Anything that's not standard in XP is in the danger zone - and it's getting worse. My best guess is that Microsoft has stopped seriously debugging XP, and every security update and/or installation of new Microsoft software drives XP closer to entropic collapse.

Vista SP 1, not coincidentally, is starting to look better.

I am tempted to buy a MacBook Pro for the office and run Outlook and Access in an XP VM. I could use OS X for all my other tools, and if the system started misbehaving I'd delete the VM and restore from backup...

Phil Bradley's Top 10 Useful Web Tools

A terrific list. I use many of Phil's choices, but Netvibes and PageFlakes are new to me:

Phil Bradley's weblog: Top 10 Useful Web Tools from Pandia:

...Netvibes is their preference for a start page. I use Netvibes as my backup system on Internet Explorer, but I'm very firmly in the PageFlakes camp here. More flexible, better options, easier to use, larger user base ...

I use Picasa Web Albums instead of Flickr -- though lately Picasa WA has really been annoying me. Otherwise I'm aligned with Phil in all tool choices.

Fixing a broken Windows XP Remote Desktop Connection install

This was so much harder than it should have been.

My home copy of XP Pro no longer had a Program shortcut to Remote Desktop Connection. It wasn't in Programs\Accessories\Communications or anywhere else I could find.

On the other hand RDC was installed. I tried reinstalling from the XP CD (see help for XP) but it said a newer version was already in place.

I tried looking for a way to uninstall RDC thinking I could then reinstall and retrieve my shortcut - I couldn't find any way to do that.

I tried searching my hard drive for the file and navigating windows folders, but I couldn't find it.

Eventually I found Remote Desktop Connection (Terminal Services Client 6.0) for Windows XP (KB925876) and installed that. It went well, but it didn't create a favorite/shorcut!

Well, it turns out that c:\windows\system32\mstsc.exe is the remote desktop client (tsc probably stands for terminal server client).

Isn't that pretty bloody obscure.

So I created a shortcut to that and now everything is fine. Presumably I accidentally deleted the original when cleaning up my start folders (specifically, I moved a lot of stuff out of the "all users" folder to protect it from the children).

How did I figure this one out? I had to find another XP machine and identify where the shortcut went on that machine. There was no other way.

Incidentally, mstc.exe has some very obscure command line options:

Parameters

ConnectionFile : Specifies the name of an .rdp file for the connection.

/v:server : Specifies the remote computer to which you want to connect.

/console : Connects to the console session of the specified Windows 2000 Server.

/f : Starts Remote Desktop connection in full-screen mode.

/w:width /h:height : Specifies the dimensions of the Remote Desktop screen.

/edit : Opens the specified .rdp file for editing.

Remarks ...

.rdp files are stored for each user as hidden files in My Documents.

When I use RDC on a dual monitor setup, full screen mode is limited to the size of my primary monitor. I wonder if I could use the /w and /h options to set it to the size of my larger secondary monitor ...

Searching: Google and Yahoo are very different from Microsoft

Today a quite heavily used and very senior Mac site noticed that almost all their search referrals come via Google:

TidBITS Inside TidBITS: Google Used 70 Times More than Yahoo:

... What could possibly account for Google's utter dominance in our statistics? I know the crawlers come through all the time, and indeed, searching Yahoo and the others for the same keywords used in the popular Google searches brings up our articles. Do users of Yahoo and the others just not like us?

Very strange. My first guess is that Google Analytics has a bug in it, but that would be one heck of a bug.

In any case I'm posting on this because I noticed something curious the other day that could be related.

I used the search string "Gordon's Tech" on Microsoft Live Web search. My blog didn't appear anywhere in the first few pages. Oh well, I thought, I can just type the URL. I have no delusions of fame after all.

On impulse though, I tried "Gordon's Tech" (phrase search, so with the quotes) on Google. The blog is the number one result. It's also, for that matter, the number one result on Yahoo (albeit with an older URL that still works).

I don't think this accounts for the TidBITS oddity, but it is a worthwhile reminder that Microsoft's search results can be very different from those of Google or Yahoo. So if you don't find what you expect on Google, try Microsoft.

Of course you can guess which search engines I approve of.

Word processing on OS X: my personal choices

A colleague asked me about what I use for word processing on the Mac. I started to respond, then realized it could be a quick post.

Briefly, I use Nisus Writer Express (NWE). It uses .RTF or .DOC as its native file format; that one absolute requirement of mine wiped out all the alternatives except Microsoft Word -- and I don't like Word. NWE is Cocoa native and works well with OS X services, it does the basics well. It has a great UI and has been fast and reliable in my experience. My wife uses it without any problems.

I haven't written any very long documents with it however.

Nisus has recently released Pro version of NWE. I'll eventually upgrade to, but it's a low priority for me. If the Pro version had a true outliner I'd probably have done it by now.

Nisus does a fair job importing simple Word documents, but even the Pro version can't import a Word Table of Contents. That's disappointing, since I use Word TOCs quite a bit. Nisus is, however, a much more agreeable word processing tool than Word. For one thing, the Styles actually make sense.

OS X 10.4 ships with TextEdit which uses a "package" version of RTF, but it's too feature sparse. The version in 10.5 is said to be closer to a true word processor and it has support for Microsoft's XML and the ODF file formats (inherited from 10.5). I've no experience with 10.5 though -- and I won't for months to come.

Pages, part of Apple's iWork suite, uses a proprietary Apple XML file format. That rules it out for me.

The only remaining alternatives are Word for Mac or Word 2003/2007 running in a Win2K or XP VM (VMWare or Parallels).

If all my machines were MacTel and I didn't use Nisus, I'd probably run Word 2003 in my Win2K VM. The tyranny of the .DOC file format should not be underestimated.

Update 2/28/2008: I've unfortunately become aware of Nisus Achilles heel. It can't compress embedded images. So a 3 MB JPEG embedded in a Nisus document produces a 20MB file -- Nisus stores the image as an uncompressed bitmap. Word compresses embedded images, and allows them to be clipped. I'm curious to see what Pages does.

Update 10/13/2008: When I moved my machines to 10.5 I also upgraded to Nisus Writer Pro. I haven't tested to see if it still has the bitmap problem, but it does have other issues. In a document where I used huge fonts (visually impaired user) Nisus was slow to redraw some pages. An image positioned using Nisus Writer Pro vanished when the document was opened in an older version of Nisus Writer Express. I have also become aware of how much I miss a drawing tool layer. AppleWorks drawing tools were particularly good, they really played to the strengths of AppleWork's compound document model. I might take another look at iWork, though that is a return to proprietary document formats. I do wish the rest of the world cared more about document longevity!

Apple's temperature problems: iMac again

This is very disappointing. The 1st generation flat panel iMacs had very serious heat problems, but Apple did come up with a passable redesign. The Intel switch was supposed to make this a thing of the past.

It appears that Apple forgot that lesson rather quickly:

AppleInsider | Freezing iMacs may be victims of hardware, not software

...This and other reports provide increasing support for beliefs that the lockups and related symptoms are caused by excessive heat inside the all-in-one chassis. Users often report graphical corruption in the operating system as a precursor to the freezes -- a sign some PC users recognize of a video card pushed beyond its safe operating temperature. In some instances, the visual artifacts become increasingly likely as time goes on....

Once again, proof that you never want to buy the first generation of any Apple hardware or software product - no matter how glowing the reviews. Apple does not have a "culture of quality" -- so customers need to wait for early adopters to do basic quality control.

SpiderOak: online backup for Mac and Windows

SpiderOak provides online backup, unlimited public file share and differential backup (only changed parts of files). Cost $10/month but limited to 20 GB. Requires a proprietary client.

Interesting, but I don't trust their software enough to expose my machine to it. I'll keep an eye on them though, maybe when they've been around a while ...

It's a bit odd that they don't tell you how to sign up for their free 2GB service. I suspect it's done through the client but they might mention that. I suspect they'll clarify that omission pretty soon.

Microsoft LifeCam software progress: now the blue screen can't be read

I bought a Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000 over a year ago. That was before I realized the quality consumer desktop videoconferencing market was dead on Windows. (Ok, there may be an rare exception.)

At the time it installed without a problem on my home XP machine, but on my Dell Latitude D620 it was another story:

Gordon's Tech: Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000 - personal impressions

... On my pure, clean, office laptop however, it produced the XP Blue Screen of Death (STOP error) on launch. I don't remember ever seeing the XP BSOD. I think it's produced by an 'inner ring' memory error, something that only device drivers can do...This is what one sees in white on blue text:

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer ...
STOP: VX6000xp.sys
kmixer.sys

Happens every time on launch of LifeCam (is it doing some kind of dynamic device driver hack?). When you get these errors, btw, you get to file a special bug report with Microsoft on system restart.

I restored the system to health per Microsoft troubleshooting recommendations:

System restore: restored to the point set by the LifeCam install.
sfc /scanonce: ran sfc.exe to verify core XP files were intact. See xp resource kit, system file tools

I'll try again in September when Microsoft says they'll put the installer files online.

Well, I didn't get back to it in September 2007, but I tried again today, 13 months later. I downloaded the latest XP SP 2 LC 1.4 installer.

I'm pleased to report that Microsoft has made a lot of progress in the past year. Now the blue screen vanishes so quickly it can't be read, and the system doesn't let me generate a bug report on restart.

I think there's something buggy with the video in my Dell laptop. Once again I miss my Macs.

I wonder if Microsoft is going to decide they need to buy Dell and emulate Apple ...

Windows Live Writer is out of beta

The best blogging tool on any platform is now out of beta:

Finally Final! « whateverblog

We’re thrilled to bring you the final version of Windows Live Writer 2008–our first non-beta release!

It's an excellent product. Ecto 3 beta is probably the closest OS X alternative, and it's much less robust than WLW (editor is buggy, it doesn't download a full tag set, etc).

Free, too. I use it extensively with Blogger and Sharepoint 2007.

Don't miss the Firefox integration. (Unsurprisingly that doesn't appear on the Live.com page, but surprisingly it does exist.)

OS X 10.5 Leopard firewall really is broken

I thought the early reports might be exaggerated, but it really is broken:

TidBITS Safe Computing: Leopard Firewall Takes One Step Forward, Three Steps Back

...These are all problems Apple is perfectly capable of fixing and I'll be surprised if they don't address them sooner rather than later. Until then, I still recommend you activate the firewall in Block All Incoming Connections mode so you don't break applications. If you need to enable file sharing or other remote access, you'll need to either select the Set Access method, or turn your firewall off. One last option is to use ipfw and manually configure firewall rules, or use a GUI tool like the free WaterRoof, and skip the Leopard firewall completely. In WaterRoof, just click Rules Sets to pick your rules, and then go to Tools > Startup Script and install a startup script to run those rules when you reboot.

I originally thought I'd go to Leopard with 10.5.1, but now I'm settling in for a significantly longer wait. Maybe 10.5.3. It looks like I was right last February when I guessed they were a year away from ready.