Larry's Mac Blog

Back when I was at a startup called Packetlink, I bought a Gateway Liberty notebook computer off my friend and cow-orker Pete Carpenter. This was when Pentiums were becoming popular, so the 486-100 CPU was not the biggest hammer in the tooldrawer. However, it was fairly easy to install Linux on it, and unless I tried to run netscape, it did fairly well. It was actually a very usefull machine for text editing, and it was really small which made it an excellent roadtrip machine.

On June 20th of 2003 I came home to find that my house had been burglarized. I'll spare you my rants about being burglarized and write about them some other time. One nice thing about insurance is that I was able to replace the little Liberty 486 with a 12" G4 powerbook. It's larger in area, but doesn't seem as thick, so it may actually be a similar volume. I think that I'll name this powerbook g4est, to go along with my home naming scheme: red4est, big4est, g4est...

There were lots of reasons to get a Mac box. I already have a laptop that'll run windows and Linux. Unsigned is a Sony Vaio PCG FX190k. I've heard a lot of good things about OSX. Being a repackaged version of Next, it's the first real commercial desktop system that'll give me commercial applications and a bash prompt.

I am not, however, finding it to be immediately intuitively obvious. This blog will by my curmudgeonly narrative of the process.

Things I'm trying to do or having problems with:

alt-key doesn't work when ssh'd into red4est
install X
screen with focus has to be in the foreground
What browser do I want to use
connect it to my kyocera 7135 palm phone
  This was a case of the 7135 fax/modem program grabbing and not
  releasing the IRQ. I don't know why it wasn't a problem for Linux
  or Windows.

how to send a window to the back
why does it always need to reboot when you install software?

In order to change the hostname, I went into /etc/hostconfig and changed
HOSTNAME=-AUTOMATIC-
to
HOSTNAME=g4est

03-07-29
Picked up a couple of O'Reilly books, "Mac OS X for Unix Geeks" and "Switching to the Mac the missing manual".

To get a root prompt, go into the terminal and type:
sudo bash

My new Ibook showed up today. It seems a nifty piece of design. Once I
got it set up, the first thing I tried to do with it is play a DVD
movie. It turns out that the Mac dvd player doesn't have a fast
forward. You can skip whole scenes, you can slow it down and play the
movies frame by frame, but you can't skip ahead. And yes, I did
RTFM. The deadtree manual doesn't say diddly about it, the online says
about diddly about playing dvds. 

Sigh, I guess I just need to learn all the secret handshakes.

I wonder if jpilot works on macosX.

At least I found how to run the shell. Too bad I can't seem to get my
802.11 working. Unfortunately, it seems to have decided to stop
working on my linux laptop as well. sigh.

My new Ibook showed up today. It seems a nifty piece of design. Once I
got it set up, the first thing I tried to do with it is play a DVD
movie. It turns out that the Mac dvd player doesn't have a fast
forward. You can skip whole scenes, you can slow it down and play the
movies frame by frame, but you can't skip ahead. And yes, I did
RTFM. The deadtree manual doesn't say diddly about it, the online says
about diddly about playing dvds. 

Sigh, I guess I just need to learn all the secret handshakes.

I wonder if jpilot works on macosX.

At least I found how to run the shell. Too bad I can't seem to get my
802.11 working. Unfortunately, it seems to have decided to stop
working on my linux laptop as well. sigh.

From: "Michael C. Berch" 

On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 09:37  PM, Larry Colen wrote:
> I wonder if jpilot works on macosX.

If you would like to use an alternate DVD player (which also does 
MPEGs, DivX, etc.) try VLC Media Player (part of the VideoLAN suite) 
from www.videolan.org .   Runs on practically anything, including MacOS 
X.  It's slick.

--MCB
Sender: Charlie Stross 

On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 09:37:59PM -0700, Larry Colen wrote:

Cough, cough, Videolan, www.videolan.org. Does lotsa other
stuff too, when it isn't crashing (being an 0.56 release
written by French university students) like play any
region-encoded disk, stream DivX, and so on.

-- Charlie

From: Ted Lemon

On Wednesday 23 July 2003 00:24, you wrote:
> Learning the Mac way of doing things is going to prove
> interesting. You'd think that things would be intuitive. They seem to
> assume that their way is intuitive. It just seems to be different.

The Mac UI is reasonably intuitive to someone who's never used a computer, 
although the DVD player (which is not an Apple product, BTW - I suspect that 
Apple doesn't want to sign the license agreement) is an extremely bad 
example, because it follows none of the Apple UI guidelines.   However, for 
someone who's coming from a Unix background, the Mac UI takes some getting 
used to.   I found that after a couple of weeks it started to feel really 
comfortable, but it definitely took getting used to.   The harder you fight 
it, the longer it'll take.   :'}

I'm now back to using Linux for most of what I do, and I miss the Mac UI a 
_lot_.   YMMV.   But since you just bought an iBook, might as well try to 
maintain a positive mental attitude about it...

From jcr
 John Randolph

On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 9:37 PM, Larry Colen wrote:

> My new Ibook showed up today. It seems a nifty piece of design. Once I
> got it set up, the first thing I tried to do with it is play a DVD
> movie. It turns out that the Mac dvd player doesn't have a fast
> forward.

Yes it does.  Hold command, and hit the right or left arrow keys.

> You can skip whole scenes, you can slow it down and play the
> movies frame by frame, but you can't skip ahead. And yes, I did
> RTFM. The deadtree manual doesn't say diddly about it, the online says
> about diddly about playing dvds.

Try the 'Help' menu in the DVD Player app itself.

-jcr

From: "Valerie L. Hall"

Hi there,

First:
http://www.ancientspear.com/mac.wmv

From: John Randolph

BTW, all the menu items that have key equivalents show the key 
equivalents on the right edge..

-jcr

From: Larry Colen 

I've run into a baffling problem, as in something isn't working, not
as in "what a weird way of doing things".

I've got a kyocera qcp-7135 palm phone. The sync cradle has both
serial and usb connectors. I can sync fine using the serial connector
with Linux and the USB connector using windows. So that half of the
equation works. 

I installed the mac software off of the kyocera cdrom, and was not
able to sync. The powerbook does not seem to even recognize that the
phone is plugged in. At the reccomendation of a cow-orker who plays
with macs I updated to the newest palm desktop off of the palm
website. I'm still not having any luck.

The apple system profiler doesn't show anything under either usb 0 or
1.

The hot sync manager hot sync is enabled, and enable hot sync
software at startup is turned on.

Once I turned off palm connect in the hotsync manager and lef the usb
box checked, at least the mac would recognize that the phone was
trying to sync, but would just freeze up with a Status: Preparing to
synchronize up in a HotSync Progress box. eventually the phone would
time out and say that it couldn't connect.

With palm connect on and usb off, I wouldn't even get that. there was
no sign from the mac that anything interesting was happening.

It doesn't matter which of the two usb ports I plug it into, I get the
same behaviour.

Alex, I'd like to buy a clue.

---

The above problem ended up being a bug in the kyocera. I had to go
into fax/modem then exit the fax for it to release an interrupt it was
holding.

From: Larry Colen 

Speaking of learning a new system I'm still wrestling with OS X. I
swear they fucking hired Miss Dove's second grade class from Cupertino
Elementary school to write their documentation. I am constantly
running up against the Macintologist arrogance that any software on a
Mac is completely intuitive. Who was it that said that "the only
intuitive User interface is the teat,e verything else is learned"?

I am amazed at some of the design choices in iPhoto.  You can only
have one "photo Library".  I'm sorry, but I don't want my webpage to
be the same photo library as my book. And I don't want anyone who is
looking over my shoulder when I fire up iPhoto to see the various
pictures that I've, shall we say, downloaded from the internet. Do you
know how to change photo libraries? You have to fucking rename the
library and restart the program so that when it fires up, it has to go
looking for them. Then there's the fact that it'll just crash about a
third of the time when importing directories. 

When it crashes, it just leaves a bunch of data and files in the
directories it set aside for the photo albums. It doesn't go back on
restart and clean up it's mess, or figure out what was there and pick
up where it left off, it just leaves all the files cluttering up the
disk and using up disk space.

When it doesn't crash, half the time I think it did because there are
certain things it'll do where it goes off for a long time, and doesn't
tell you that it's working on somthing, it just stops responding.

Have I mentioned how badly the Macintologist help files suck? They
can't give you a real tutorial, or a real manual with a usuable
index. They've got a lame ass search engine that if you enter your
search will give you 238 possible things to look at. Then, if you
click on the listing, with a one line summary, it'll give you a three
line summary, which if you click on it, will show you the whole twelve
lines that they've written on the subject, rather than just showing
you those twelve lines in the first place. You can't just say, "teach
me how to use this".

It's especially frustarting, because there are some really nice things
about OS X.  A lot more things in it "just work" than on most Linux
boxen. It's so far ahead of Windows it's not funny.

To make a copy of a bootable CDROM:
sudo bash
#insert CDROM
umount /dev/disk1s0
dd if=/dev/disk1s0 of=targetname.iso
#run iMusic
#eject CDROM
#insert CDROM
#run disk copy

Another problem with iTunes. If there are problems with a CD, iTunes, just gets into a tight loop where you can't stop importing the song, can't exit iTunes can't do anything.

17 august 2003

I plugged the powerbook into the Pan Galactic Ghetto Blaster at a party yesterday. In some ways it worked great, but there is no obvious way in iTunes to tell it that when it is done playing this song, play that song, then the another one in particular. You can set up play lists, but you can't seem to just change them on the fly.

Also, if all of the songs in whatever sort of set they cojoin them in to display have little check marks next to them (to activate them apparantly) there's no way to turn all of them off, and just select the songs that you want to play. You can select them to move them over to playlists, but you cant easily turn on or off whole sets or groups of songs within the playlist.

I took my nephew up to Boomer's Castle on Friday, and shot some video up there. I'm trying to burn it onto DVD and this damn Apple is driving me nuts.

The most egregious thing is that in iDVD, it plays this obnoxious loop of annoying elevator music and there is no way to shut it off. Now I know why Apple doesn't publish the source, because if people knew who wrote this, their programmers would be in physical danger of getting colonoscopies with powerbooks.

Then there's the fact that after importing the video onto the Mac, in iMovie, I want to add chapter marks and burn it onto a DVD. When I try to export it, iMovie says that it automatically converts it into the right format, but iDVD says that it can't import that format.

If I get to a folder in finder that has all the clips, it seems like I can import them into iDVD, but when I play it, it just plays that annoying background music loop as if to taunt me into hurling it onto the highway in front of a large truck.

03-08-20
I just tried deleting all the .aac files (.m4a) in my music directory. I moved them to the trash just fine, but when I tried to empty the trash, it got down to 4 files left and just hung. It's really annoying the way a program will lock up and the only way out of it seems to be to reboot the machine.

I need to find a decent editor for the mac, espcially for html.

03-08-21
Hurray! I found out how to turn off the annoying background music in iDVD! It's not in preferences. There's a button at the bottom of the screen called "customize" which has all sorts of stuff that you'd expect to find under preferences. I don't know WTF the difference is. Anyways, you can click on Background audio, on the picture of the speaker and turn off the music.

What do I need to do to run sshd on the box?

More gripes with the documentation. I wanted to change some configuration stuff on the printer. There is apparantly something called print center. The primary way of getting there seems to be via the print dialog when you print a document.

If you don't want to wait until you need to print to set things up, you can supposadly get there from the "format for" pop-up menu in the page setup dialog. Of course the help page doesn't say what the ehll the page setup dialog is, nor does it have a link to it.

I'm at a complete loss why apple doesn't have a button for the printer in the system preferences page. Perhaps putting it in the obvious place isn't thinking different enough.

Speaking of the printer, I just tried to print a couple of files, realized that I didn't want to print them. Thank goodness for the unix underneath, I was able to use lpq and lprm to find and remove the print jobs. I sure as hell couldn't figure out how through the mac gui.

I recently received the following email from Tom Hackett:

Hi Larry,

I just stumbled onto your MacBlog. Being a long time Mac User and fairly experienced with Mac OS X, I think I might be able to provide some help with some of your troubles.

> What do I need to do to run sshd on the box? In the System Preferences program click on Sharing. This is the quick way to turn all your internet services on and off. sshd is controlled using "Remote Login" and "Personal Web Sharing" turns on apache.

You mentioned that you bought a couple of the Oreilly books, that is probably a great resource for you. I don't have any of the OS X books from Oreilly yet but I've found their Java books to be very well written. I get my hints and tips on OS X from the macosxhints.com website. It's searchable and though it's aimed at Mac users it has some reasonably sophisticated content sometimes, and it's searchable.

>There is apparantly something called print center. The primary way of getting there seems to be via the print dialog when you print a document.

/Applications/Utilities/Print Center.app

That's the program I think the documentation was referring to. But you're right it should be in System Prefs. Apple's thinking different sometimes, just not all the time. I think they created Print Center as a separate program because in the old Mac OS there were Control Panels which configured most of the settings that have been grouped together with System Preferences, and there was a separate program Chooser that selected your printer, either network printer or local, and also let you browse for file servers. This in one way since it kept all the network browsing that average users would do in one place. It doesn't make sense now because as you've pointed out your printer is just a setting and it should be configured just like all your other system settings. They might fix this in 10.3 which is due out later this month. It seems that 10.3 is going to be a big upgrade that users will have to buy, but it also seems that there a lot of bonuses for UNIX users. I can tell you right now that I'll be buying it.

Feel free to email me if you have any questions, I can help you with some stuff, but I'm not that great with using a Mac with a Cell Phone, PDA, or DVD Burner, since I have none of those. Still, I bet I can help with many different kinds of issues and problems that people face.

Good luck,

- Tom

Charles Merriam, asked Charles asked me about my thoughts/feelings towards the Mac after I've had some time to get used to it. Since I've been intermittently bitching to this list when I run across yet another completely bizarre thing with the mac, I decided to just post to the list.

I've got a lot of my notes up at www.red4est.com/lrc/macblog

Mind you, I use my x86 laptop almost entirely as a Linux machine, rarely booting into Win2k. So that probably colors my perception of what to expect from a notebook.

Overall, I rather like the Mac. And it seems as if a lot of my objections with the UI, will be dealt with in 10.3. It's probably worth waiting for 10.3 to come out. I don't know what it'll cost me to upgrade to 10.3.

It is really nice to be able to just close the cover and have the machine go to sleep. It's nice that the hardware pretty much "just works" with the software. This is a luxury that I don't have with Linux on the vaio, hence my http://www.red4est.com/vaiodiva page.

My biggest complaint is the documentation. Words cannot describe how bad it is, and the ones that come closest are prohibited by the FCC. If you want to get _anything_ done, plan on spending an extra $100-200 on books. David Pogues "missing manual" series, published by O'Reilly, is pretty good. Note that there are separate manuals for 10.2 and switching to 10.2 from Windows. I accidentally got the latter.

I'd say that at least once a week, I run into a case where I wonder what the person who designed the UI for whichever program was smoking. I'd say that the mac UI is as intuitive and consistent as emacs, but without nearly as good of online help. It wouldn't be so annoying if everything else weren't so nice. My last gotcha was trying to figure out how to stop a print job, I just gave up trying to figure out how to do it the "mac way" because it turned out that lpq and lprm worked..

I have some concerns over the reliability of the macintosh hardware. I had that brief difficulty with the cdrom not ejecting. I have two coworkers who have had problems with their hard drives. All of these on relatively new (still in warranty) powerbooks.

I really like the fact that the laptops will work "multi headed" if you just plug in an external monitor. It made getting the 12" powerbook an easy choice. I get the portability of the little machine, and the realestate on the screen when I plug in an external monitor.

I'm glad that I got the superdrive, though the iMovie and iDVD software is weird and annoying.

For the most part iTunes is pretty nice. I still haven't figured out how to get it to play several songs in a particular order after the current one, without setting up an entirely new "permanent" playlist. I've been plugging the powerbook into my Pan Galactic Ghetto Blaster: http://www.red4est.com/pggb as my car stereo, and it works pretty good. I did get a fancy (read expensive) power adapter from igo so I can run the powerbook off the car power. The igo also runs off of 110, 230 and airplane power jacks. It has output connectors that seem to work with most laptops, and I just ordered a cable so that I can simultaneously run/charge a laptop and my cellphone.

Since I'm using it a lot in the van, it would be really nice to have GPS and mapping with the mac, but the little research I've done has indicated that if you want gps on a mac, you're going to suffer.

One thing that has spoiled me with fvwm under X is the to have "focus follow cursor", so that the active window does not have to be "on top". I also like being able to pop a window to the back, or bottom. On the mac you can only bring windows to the top, or off the screen entirely.

I did buy the O'Reilly book, Macos X for unix geeks, but have been too busy working on racecars to sit down and read it, or much of the other aftermarket documentation I've spent money on. I will need to read it to get X working. Emacs only works in raw text mode, and I miss all the X-emacs features I've got programmed on my linux boxes. I'm also having trouble getting it to read my .emacs file. These are probably rtfm issues, now that I've bought tfm.

It'll come with a trial version of MS Office, but if you want to keep using it, you'll need to pay money for it. Text edit does not impress me at all. It basically sucks. Especially for editing html files.

I haven't found anything that I like for editing html files on macos. Perhaps Mozilla.

The mail program is annoying in that if I point it to red4est, it'll mark everything in my red4est mailbox as read. This may be an rtfm issue, but I haven't spent money on tfm for the mac mail program.

iPhoto is annoying in that it insists on putting every picture in the same library. If you want to change libraries, you have to rename the file. I'm sorry, I'd rather have separate photo libraries for different purposes: cars, website, book, pr0n, whatever. I don't want all of my mumblehundred pictures all in the same mamoth library, I want smaller photo libraries. Actually, there are a lot of annoying things about iPhoto.

In summary, I do really like the powerbook. The things that it does well, it does really well, and it's nice to now be able to run all three major desktop systems (I'm sorry but BSD is not a "major" desktop system, neither really is Solaris). The things that it sucks at, it REALLY sucks at, and are al themore annoying because of the stuff they got right. The biggest problem is the astoundingly bad documentation for the counterintuitive, and often inconsistent user interface. This can, mostly be taken care of by sending David Pogue lots of money. If anyone at Apple had two braincells to rub together they'd just fire the fourth graders that have been writing their "manuals" and buy everything that Pogue has written.

I receieved several replies to that message. Lusty had an interesting comment:

I had a disturbing conversation one day at Alice's with someone who is a developer onthe iPhoto team. I think of her as someone who definitely has a clue, but she did not at all understand why having everything in one photo library was a problem. Nor did she understand, if you wanted to have more than one, that having to rename the file was a major pain in the ass.

Jon Handler points out:

There's a Mac Port of Emacs at:

http://www.webweavertech.com/ovidiu/emacs.html

There's also a setting to map the mac "option" key to "meta". I can't remember offhand, but I can look when I get home.

Echo'd by Ted Lemon

I've been running emacs in non-raw-text mode almost ever since I got my Mac. I think there are builds available out there as installable packages, or you can just build it from source, which is what I did. The catch is that you have to build from the CVS repository - the latest official Emacs 21 distribution unfortunately doesn't have MacOS X support yet. :'(

The CVS repository is at: :pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/emacs

When you do the build, do a "make bootstrap" to build the .elc files - otherwise emacs can't undump. They distribute built .elc files in regular emacs distributions, but they don't check them in to the CVS repository.

Andrew Bresson reccomends fink

do you have fink on your mac? I seem to remember x installation being pretty easy with it, plus all the other cool things it has.

I haven't needed to buy any books for mine, mostly relying on web stuff, but I don't use most of the apple apps; to me it's an x/unix box running xemacs, gnus, xterm, and mozilla firebird.

From: Tom Hackett

Hi Larry,

I just stumbled onto your MacBlog. Being a long time Mac User and fairly experienced with Mac OS X, I think I might be able to provide some help with some of your troubles.

>There is apparantly something called print center. The primary way of getting there seems to be via the print dialog when you print a document.

/Applications/Utilities/Print Center.app

Good luck,

- Tom

Case sensitivity:

I downloaded a file to my linux box which mplayer puked on: http://home.comcast.net/~93_le/carexplode.wmv so I scp'd my whole ~/movies directory to g4est, my powerbook.

I went into finder and couldn't find the movies directory in my home directory. OSX decided that I must have meant that I wanted everything put in ~/Movies.

Fucking A, either you are case sensitive, in which case case fucking matters (unix), or you are case insensitive, in which case you convert everything into the same case (DOS). What you don't do is show two things being different and treat them the same.