November 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The only Leopard tip guide you'll ever need
If you want to be in the know about Leopard's new features and how they can improve your work and life, you could wait for a book, sift though OS X tips sites, or have insider secrets leap into your hands the moment you need them.
The first step is to abandon presumptions about what Apple couldn't possibly have built into Leopard and its bundled apps. These presumptions lead to premature workarounds for absent features that actually exist in Apple's code. It's folly, bordering on hubris, to imagine that you're the first person who ever needed to do a given thing. Instead of assuming that a feature is missing because it isn't where you expected to find it, ask your Mac where that feature is.
Whenever you need to do something you haven't tried yet, turn to Help first. Query each application's Help; the Help for Leopard as a whole is linked to the Help menu that's available when Finder is selected. If your query fails, your terminology might be to blame. Go to the Help table of contents and drill down the hierarchy until you narrow in on what you're trying to accomplish, or its nearest identifiable neighbor.
If you lose your way in System Preferences, which is much harder in Leopard since Apple did a major reworking of the most complicated Security, Sharing and Networking preferences, enter a keyword or two (e.g. "firewall") into the search field in the corner of the System Preferences window. Preferences panes matching your query will light up. Most buttons and fields pop up brief, useful descriptions when you hover over them for a few seconds, and you'll often see questionmark buttons on dialog boxes that open context-sensitive Help.
Enter "shortcuts" into any Help window's search field. This will point you to a list of keyboard shortcuts for the app or, using Help while Finder is active, for Leopard. Even if you're not a fan of shortcuts, Apple wires most important and most commonly-used interactive features to the keyboard. Reading the one-line shortcut descriptions is much easier than pulling down every app's menu bar item and trying to figure out what it does.
I spell this out in such detail because Help is grossly underutilized on the Mac, especially among Mac users who are just too cool to click Help. Leopard's Help is concise and easily navigable. Use it when no one's looking if you must, but no matter how good you are, you will always find happy surprises in Help. Covert use of Help has made many a superstar on OS X tips sites.
If you still can't figure out how to make your Mac do what you need it to, open Automator. It drives GUI apps in ways that you'd never have imagined, and if Automator can make an app do what you want, then so can you.
Lastly, you'll come across simple needs, like sorting a list of number/name pairs, or converting data from one format to another, or removing the top five lines from every file in a certain folder, that you won't find in GUI apps because it's already been done in UNIX. The command line (Applications/Utilities/Terminal from Finder) opens the astonishingly well-stocked UNIX cupboard that Apple doesn't expose through GUIs. If GUI Help doesn't reveal a way to do what you want, open up a Terminal window and type "apropos" followed by a keyword (for example, try "apropos firewall"). This will search the documentation for commands relevant to the keyword. Then type "man" followed by one of the command names displayed by apropos. If the resulting manual page is long and confusing, many have Examples sections that spell out the most common usages. Of the roughly 1,500 command line programs in OS X, you may only need a handful, and learning these will take some experimentation. But you will discover that most of the wheels you have in mind to invent to work around some perceived shortcoming in OS X were created by a guy at AT&T or Berkeley back in 1983.
Familiarity with grep, awk, tr, find and the built-ins of the bash shell will serve you well.
Rest easy. Help is always there when you need it, and it's right on your Mac.
Posted by Tom Yager on November 24, 2007 12:08 AM
November 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Cool facts about the Leopard kernel
Source code for the x86 and PowerPC OS X (Darwin) kernels have been merged in Leopard for the first time. Prior to Leopard, PPC and x86 source trees had to be downloaded and managed separately. Now instead of building the right tree for your system type, you identify your target architecture at build time.
The Darwin sources now self-build a bootable Darwin using only make. Previously, you had to download a separate set of build tools called Darwinbuild.
x86 and PowerPC aren't the only targets for the Darwin kernel. The build example in the xnu README attached to the Leopard kernel makes reference to a Freescale MX31ADS ARM9 eval board (link to PDF manual) build target. That bodes well for the reach of the iPhone/iPod Touch developer kit in February, eh?
Posted by Tom Yager on November 22, 2007 07:40 AM
November 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Leopard kernel source code published November 8
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Among countless other things, I'm thankful to have a weekday during which I can leave my BlackBerry powered down.
I have also chosen today to give overdue thanks to the Leopard project team. The Darwin kernel used in Leopard has been posted to Macosforge.org. This figured into my ten out of ten review score, but yelling about sources in a review targeted to users, admins and IT buyers is a little too gearheady. If Apple is popping any champagne corks over Leopard being InfoWorld's first ten out of ten review, then I bid them set aside a well-chilled bottle of the finest (or their preferred adult or hypercaffeinated beverage) for Kevin Van Vechten and his team.
If you watch for Darwin kernel releases, you might have bookmarked Apple's Darwin kernel (xnu) project page, which still shows Tiger 10.4.8 as the newest announced version of the Darwin kernel. Keeping the news page current for media snoops isn't as important as getting the real work done. I confess being glad for that, because not many can grasp the relevance of Apple's lock-step kernel source publishing policy.
The sure-fire URL to bookmark for up to the minute Darwin sources is http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/tarballs/apsl/, which is an HTML gateway into Apple's open source version control system. The pretty page URL, which also provides convenient pointers to tools, docs and related sources, is at http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/. I haven't watched that page closely enough to vouch that it is kept up to date, but the xnu (kernel) releases listed there do reflect the full list of downloadable tarballs.
By keeping the release of kernel sources in step with commercial OS X updates a priority, Apple's engineers, program and project managers have now put a universe's worth of distance between OS X and other commercial OSes. Readers should know that xnu, the Darwin kernel, is an "extra mile" project. Publication of the kernel sources is not mandated by a license lien on any of Darwin's open source components. The BSD license attached to much of the Darwin kernel requires attribution, not distribution. I've always admired that.
The Leopard project team's brilliance and vision doesn't end there. I've unearthed some exciting details that deserve a post headline of their own, to follow immediately.
Posted by Tom Yager on November 22, 2007 06:31 AM
November 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Apple issues 23 updates in two days; highlights of Tiger and Leopard updates
Make sure your broadband bill is paid up, because Apple's got a crate full of fixes with your name on them.
In a couple of cases, these are the updates we've all been waiting for. I'm hoping that the iMac Graphics Firmware Update will get iMac users out of their work/save/reboot cycle. Such beautiful machines behaving so badly. I still wonder whether Apple or ATI did the brunt of the work on this fix.
The entire Pro Apps suite has gotten significant attention. One of the many qualities to appreciate about Final Cut Studio, Aperture and Logic is the frequency with which Apple tunes and enhances them. TV networks and movie studios deserve a bit of extra attention, no?
All Tiger and Leopard users have gotten major attention. 10.4.11 is the latest scheduled release of Tiger, and high points among its improvements include Safari 3.0, RAW image decoding for a range of new Olympus and Panasonic cameras, VMware Fusion stability fixes, the addressing of a bug affecting port mapping with shared Internet connections, 3rd-party WAN device compatibility, USB hard drive reliability, and security updates.
I'm all in for that USB hard drive update. I wonder if it would have kept my dead MacBook Pro eval unit alive. I just missed it.
OS X Server 10.4.11 has all this, along with some server essentials, like allowing users to belong to more than 16 groups, repairs to the FTP server to handle the LIST command properly, failover between Intel and PowerPC servers, LAN registration of OS X servers via Bonjour, proper handling of aliases on UFS and Xsan volumes, having the chmod command cause corresponding changes in ACL permissions, and fixes for memory panics in servers with 2 GB and 4 GB of RAM.
The OS X 10.5.1 update has some changes that really matter. It puts password-protected AirPort disks in the Finder's Shared sidebar and claims to fix Leopard's annoying tendency to forget wireless network passwords.
Have you used Back to My Mac? It's a simple tunnel to your home Mac from a remote system that works even when one machine or the other is behind a NAT router. The Back to My Mac fix shows remotely-accessible Macs in Finder's sidebar more reliably, and fixes glitches with D-Link NAT gateways. D-Link gear is priced right, but it tends to present challenges, doesn't it?
iCal and Mail have substantial fixes in the areas of the delivery of alarms via e-Mail, the invitation of meeting attendees through CalDAV, attachments inside HTML e-mail, SMTP connection failures in accounts created with Simple Setup, and a couple of significant fixes affecting .Mac users.
In security and firewall (which have been combined in Leopard), Apple has arranged to allow unsigned third-party applications through the firewall if they're whitelisted in either Application Firewall or Parental Controls. Apple has changed some confusing wording in the Firewall tab; instead of Block All, which sounds like your machine is cut off from the outside world, Apple has inserted the wording "Allow only essential services." Apple's idea of "essential" may differ from yours; dealing with that is your problem.
One potentially serious squashed nasty regards the risk of dropping data when moving files across partitions using Finder. Time Machine no longer shrieks at huge, single-partition MBR (master boot record) drives and NTFS volumes.
Posted by Tom Yager on November 15, 2007 05:03 PM
November 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)
A little more detail on MacBook Pro recovery
As I related, I have recovered the data from a MacBook Pro that quit working on me a couple of weeks ago, and that I used the ditto command to do it. For the benefit of those more savvy Macheads among my honored readers, I'll offer a few more details on the process and its outcome.
When I discovered that Disk Utility would not create a restorable image of the dead MacBook Pro's internal drive, I fell back to ditto, figuring that to populate the new MacBook Pro with my existing data, I'd have to resort to a cautious, manual transfer to a clean Tiger install of those documents, applications and preferences that I could safely overwrite. I knew that some information that was encoded in binary form would have to be recreated in the application or preference pane that produced it, and that I'd lose the benefit of Migration Assistant's automated upgrade to Leopard.
As it turns out, Migration Assistant transfers files without much concern about the validity of their contents except when data translation is part of the process. When I finished with ditto, I had an OS X Tiger partition that I knew wasn't worth finessing into a bootable state. It might be worthwhile as the source for a Leopard Migration Assistant run. It was, and the result was better than I could have hoped. Most 3rd-party kernel extensions didn't survive the trip, but this gave Migration Assistant no trouble.The sole losses were kernel extensions and license managers and keys.
The lesson here is that a restorable block-by-block partition image need not be your objective in backing up or recovering data. It is okay to write changes to files as they are modified, just as Time Machine does. Time machine can even be outdone by ZFS and overlay mounts.
Whatever you do to back up your data to an external hard drive, don't use USB. Buy enclosures that have USB and FireWire.
Posted by Tom Yager on November 12, 2007 07:44 PM
November 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)
MacBook Pro gremlin vanquished, lessons learned
[accidentally posted with messed-up title to my other blog]
Noting gets my Irish up as quickly as when a hunk of technology takes on the characteristics of a stubborn animal, to wit, one more so than I. It's been the better part of a week struggling, with little success, against some cowardly goblin that infested the innards of the MacBook Pro in my possession, and in the course of his exploits managed to shred months of hard work.
My grief did not immobilize me. I dug through a stack of raw hard drives and found an archive that brought me back to late August. I then resolved to crack, rather, gently open the MacBook Pro's chassis to extract the hard drive to see if it was readable elsewhere. I had assembled the notebook's service manual, the requisite tools and the will for the operation, but Apple's replacement MacBook Pro had just arrived. I went to my office to restore the August backup image onto it, and the most wonderful thing happened: It locked up after the chime, precisely as the dead MacBook Pro had done, and in which state MacBook Pro the elder remained.
I call this a wonderful event, but I didn't think so at the time. I yanked the cables out of both sides of the notebook, reached underneath and ejected the battery like a spent magazine. After a minute's rest, I powered up again and found the new MacBook Pro in good health.
The wonderful part is that in a flash of understanding, I realized three things: The MacBook Pros' USB ports were the proximate cause of death, I might be able to get the dead MacBook Pro to boot from a flyweight FireWire drive, and that if it booted, it would be the last time I'd see that machine alive. While there is no defending this as a product of reason, it played out precisely as I had envisioned it. I was able see the internal drive and image most of its contents to an external FireWire drive, then transfer that to the new MacBook Pro.
Apart from reinforcing my long-standing disrespect for the USB implementation in Intel chipsets, the lesson, the yarn of which is too long to spin, left me with two simple bits of advice, one which you may take or leave, and one you're obliged to keep in mind. I recommend that you use FireWire drives. Apple developed it, they're understandably fussy about its implementation, and FireWire is not part of Intel's chipset. If you need to pull data from a damaged hard drive, don't use Disk Utility; it stops at the first error. Use the command-line utility ditto instead, which will plow through any read errors it encounters and copy everything it can, and with HFS+ metadata intact.
The dead MacBook Pro never boot again, and I don't believe it ever will. It is winging its way back to Cupertino, where it will be thoroughly refurbished and given a new life. I wish it well.
Posted by Tom Yager on November 12, 2007 04:26 PM
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