OS X 10.5 Leopard: Cries of the Damned

Apple's Installation and Setup support forum for 10.5 (Leopard) now rings with the cries of the damned. The inevitable "wait for 10.5.1?" posts are appearing, but Apple is killing them within an hour of posting. (I tested this by commenting on one of them. It was gone an hour later).

This is not at all surprising. We see it even with only minor updates, much less a major OS transition. Apple is very secretive, and secrecy is the enemy of quality. Sure, the Vista update is much worse, but Apple controls the hardware and Microsoft doesn't. Given control of hardware Apple should have much smoother OS transitions, but the secrecy is lethal.

Most people will do fine. A number will lose all their data. They ought to scream, but I don't think Apple will change its ways.

Overall 10.5 looks to be a very promising update. Unless you're buying a new machine, an update like this is strictly for the foolish, the prepared geek (two backups, different methods, one a bootable image for quick restore), and those blessed by the Gods of Apple (Andrew).

I expect to be pretty happy with 10.5.1 and very happy with 10.5.4.

I wouldn't install 10.5.0 if you paid me.

Leopard spots: what's bad

Doing the Leopard Moan. Great stuff by Neuberg.

Personally I think Apple ditched Classic because it was an enormous security hole and a bother to QA, but I love Matt's comments on FrameMaker. Progress in software is not linear.

How to install a major OS X update

Daring Fireball: I Believe in Murphy's Law has the lowdown. I'm willing to do a non-bootable image myself, but otherwise I completely agree. Conservative yes, safe also.

Of course I don't install 10.5.0 and he will. So if you're like me and waiting for 10.5.1 you can ease up a bit.

Shure QuietSpot Headset: just perfect

Here's what I wrote about my Shure QuietSpot Headset for Mobile Phones with Inline Microphone

I've used earsets (headsets) that cost twice as much. I've used earsets that cost 1/3 as much. I've used Bluetooth arsets (don't bother).

Nothing compares. These are simply as good as it gets. Simple. Great sound. Great fit. Compact. Rugged. Reliable.

I own two pairs. I wouldn't mind three pairs.

I'm a demanding consumer. There are a lot of products I don't like, but every so often I come across something that's perfect at what it does.

This product has a 5 star Amazon average rating.

Shades of the singularity: Canon SD 1000 for $170

Amazon is selling the Canon SD1000 today for $170.

We live in a weird world. There's all kinds of cheap worthless junk sold for low prices, and then then there's something like this. It's a genuine marvel of technology, and at least the early versions were actually manufactured in Japan. Yes, like the old days.

Today it's selling for the cost of a big date.

I just want to say that's weird. I think I'll buy my wife this for her birthday and give our perfectly decent Canon SD 600 to the kids.

Update 11/6/07: It's made in Japan! Still, just like the SD 600 before it. It feels like an Apple product. Compared to the SD 600 it uses the same battery, charger and SD memory card. It fits the SD 600 case - somewhat thinner and very slightly longer. I turned off the 'face focus' feature as it seems a bit slow to focus lock, I need to test it more with different focus parameters. I prefer the raised controls of the SD 600 to the perfectly flat buttons on the SD 1000, but the SD 1000's camera/video/review toggle seems less likely to move accidentally.

Update 8/25/08: Not quite the singularity. At 10 months of age the focus motor broke.

Leopard and file sharing: but can you share the Shared Folder?

Glenn Fleishman of Tidbits has a new eBook out on Leopard File Sharing and he gives us some highlights here: Leopard Simplifies Sharing.

I am almost ready to hope that OS X users can now SHARE THE #$@% shared folder [1]. Yes, it's true, for years OS X has had a "Shared Folder" on every drive used to share items between users, but that folder couldn't be share with network clients

Just fixing that ridiculous design flaw would justify half of the upgrade price to 10.5. I've asked Fleishman to address that question, I hope he'll update his post.

The more I read about Leopard, the more I realize I might have to admit to being ... errr .... wrong. When Leopard slipped its dates, I figured they were going to have to slip again from October 2007 to April 2008 -- or that the October 2007 release would be pretty crummy.

I still have no intention of messing with 10.5.0, but the early news is damned impressive. It now seems likely 10.5.1, when it comes out in a month or so, will be a truly large leap forward -- maybe the biggest release of OS X since 10.1 made it usable (ok, so 10.4 on Intel was impressive too).

It would be funny if the 10.5 release were to turn out have been under-hyped given all the flack Apple gets for its PR machine.

Update 10/28/07: Yes, you can.

Update 5/30/08: I finally upgraded to 10.5.3. There's no problem with sharing the Shared folder, in fact I think I can share any folder. We haven't been able to do that since MacOS 9.

[1] See:
OS X: Creating a "parents only" shared folder and Odd OS X bug: can't share the shared folder

Generating Sharepoint-friendly URLs (links) using Microsoft Access

This is damned obscure, but it's not documented and I figured it out, so I'll stick it up here.

Maybe it will help someone.

Microsoft Excel, Access, and Sharepoint  2007 (latter is really SQL Server dressed up) all have an implied datatype called the "hyperlink". It's not well documented, I don't think Excel 2007 and Access 2007 implement the hyperlink quite the same way.

Excel has a "hyperlink" function that will generate a hyperlink from a string and a URL, but when I pasted that into a hyperlink field in SP 2007 bad things happened and I had to power cycle by XP box. (typical XP behavior)

On the other hand I couldn't figure out how to generate hyperlinks in Access 2003 or 2007. Here's the trick, and they do work in SP 2007. I assume one column holds the URL and the other the text displayed in the UI.

1. Concatenate URL and text fields (+ operator in Access) to a string of this sort: "friendly name#http://myserver.org/friend.html#"

2. Write out the results to a table.

3. Change the datatype of the column containing "friendly name#http://myserver.org/friend.html#" to "HYPERTEXT".

Now you have the hypertext URLs.

Link to your target SP 2007 list (table really), and join on your identifier, then do an Update query to stuff your hypertext URLs into the appropriate Sharepoint field.

I'm sure there's a better way using VisualBasic for Access, but Microsoft's approach to VBA gives me hives. It's a total mess, I'd much rather spend time learning Objective C or Python.