Today marks five years since I abandoned Windows on the Desktop in favor of an OS that doesn’t completely suck. At the time, my primary motivation, or excuse, was to familiarize myself with an OS that I was receiving an increasing number of tech support calls for at AirSurfer. Trying to support an OS I had never used was no easy task.

I had actually been eye-balling the Mac since the appearance of the Power Mac G4 Cube and later the iMac G4. The high cost of either of these systems kept me away, but I was definitely drawn to the compact and elegant design of the integrated hardware as well as the rich graphical UI Apple had been showing off since the early releases of OS X.

More important than a flashy GUI, then and still to this day, 90% of my time was easily spent at the shell of some UNIX like operating system or another. Ideally, OS X would give me the best of both worlds: a flashy GUI with availability of high-end commercial apps and a powerful shell on the local machine. This felt like it would be superior to spending all my time SSH’d into a remote system to get real work done.

I probably would have been perfectly happy with just about any low-end OS X capable machine to use as my workstation, but I had also just recently acquired two 17″ flat panel LCD monitors for my current setup. I wasn’t about to give one of them up. Back in 2005, the only system that Apple had that was equipped for driving dual displays was their PowerMac G5. A little bit of smooth talking with the higher ups and several interrogating phone calls to WestWorld to tie up any last minute paranoia driven questions and ensure I wasn’t going to end-up with an expensive system that would be completely useless for my purposes I was on my way.

I ended up with the most entry level late 2004 model of the PowerMac G5. It was not cheap, nor really very well spec’d given the price tag. Nearly $2,200 dollars for a 1.8 GHz G5 with a pitiful 256 MB of RAM and a modest 80 GB hard drive. Anything higher than this spec would have blown the already stretched budget I was allowed for this acquisition so I wasn’t about to complain. Fortunately it was not very long after that I was able to purchase a couple 512 MB modules from a reasonably priced 3rd party vendor to bump it up to an awesome-for-the-time 1.25 GB.

It didn’t take much longer than the initial boot-up for any of my doubts to fade. Everything I used on a daily was built into it’s Darwin base (perl, CVS and vi to name just a few). On the GUI side, there were native ports of both Firefox and Thunderbird so that easily took care of my web and e-mail requirements. Being a geek, I also enjoyed the complete lack of legacy crap that still encumbers modern PCs: no PS/2, no parallel and serial ports, no ancient BIOS. Nothing but modern computing goodness.

Fast forward half a decade later, AirSurfer agreed to let me take the machine home with me when I moved on to Tera-byte. The machine has been through two operating system system upgrades but is still running as flawlessly as the day I picked it up. Though it has since been demoted as “The wife’s workstation.”

I will always enjoy PC hardware. There’s something special about picking up a box of the latest components from the local OEM hardware retailer and assembling a PC to my exact specifications. In fact, the PowerMac was the first computer I had used since 1991 that I didn’t personally assemble. Far too often, PC hardware is also associated with an MS operating system, the two are not mutually inclusive. I use several PCs for various purposes, I just don’t have a need for Windows is all.

I admire the freedom and openness in systems like Linux and the BSDs. I still hope they will some day catch up to the user experience and quality of applications I currently enjoy on the Mac. It’s certainly improved dramatically in the same time period. Indeed, a world dominated by Apple with their cookie cutter one-size fits all stock configurations would be pretty dull. Although I find the design of Apple’s hardware is very appealing, it would lose its luster if one permutation of the five or so hardware offerings was on everyone’s desk.

In the mean time, I’m on my third Apple system at home, a three and a half year old Mac Mini. Though I could probably use a hardware upgrade soon, I don’t have any intent to move to another platform just yet. The momentum Apple has built around their OS and overlying software shows no sign of slowing down.

Admittedly I did write this long winded post on my Sony VAIO laptop (currently running Fedora). It may lack some polish relative to OS X, but being a laptop, it does fit in front of the couch better while I try to multi-task watching a little TV and spewing this out.

The factory installed 80 GB Seagate (ST98823AS) was increasingly feeling cramped under the weight of ever growing iTunes and iPhoto libraries.

Adding insult to injury the 5400 RPM speed of the rickety old clunker was a painful bottleneck I could no longer endure. Suddenly the unrestful gleam of the legendary Mac Mini opening putty knife caught my eye. It was time.

I sweet-talked Jessie into grabbing me a shiny new 500 GB drive on her round-trip to the local Pita Pit and began a full Time Machine backup in preparation for the ol’ upgrade routine.

Several hours and $129.99 later the Mini began to crawl. It soon became apparent that it had no intention of carrying out the backup I had requested. Figuring this would be a decent opportunity to see if Time Machine would resume a half finished backup gracefully, I powered down the machine and attempted to boot it back up. Unfortunately from this point on, powering the system up left me permanent Apple logo limbo. Uh oh!

After much tedious disassembly, cursing, troubleshooting and more profanity I determined that the original drive – clearly disgusted by my intentions to replace it – had kicked the bucket. How convenient for it to crap out halfway through my backup. Rest assured I was pleased.

Having exceeded the point of no return (and my bed time for that matter) I decided to proceed with a reinstall of Snow Leopard on the new drive. The reinstall went smoothly thus confirming my suspicions on the old drives discontent with its sudden unemployment.

I reassembled the Mini and began rummaging through my backups to see what I could salvage. Time Machine finished backing up my home directory but crapped out before backing up the most critical – my iPhoto Library. Not good!

Seeing as how it was 3:30 AM at this point, the remainder of this fight would have to be postponed. After work today I popped the old drive into a spare FreeBSD box I’ve got kicking around. Unsure how FreeBSD felt about reading data from OS X HFS+ partitions, I instinctively threw in a Knoppix LiveCD to see if that would do the trick. Much to my frustration and in spite of inconclusive Google search results, it appeared Knoppix was not equipped to deal with the EFI GUID partition table which OS X has standardized on. Endless Google queries later I was still unable to find any conclusive evidence as to which Linux live CD (if any) had a kernel with GPT support.

In frustration I replaced the Knoppix CD with a Gentoo Live CD and decided to try again. Whadda ya know! The Gentoo live CD does in fact have GPT support AND HFS+ support. Eureka!

Much to my delight I was now able to use scp to transfer my iPhoto library across the network to my new drive. Everything is now up and running with all my data intact.

Woohoo!

The moment I stumbled upon Prowl (a new iPhone App that routes Growl notifications to your iPhone via Apple’s push service) I knew I would find some powerful uses for it.

At Tera-Byte, several of my colleagues telecommute. In order to stay in constant communication with each other, we all use good ol’ IRC. In order to be readily available and allow quick roaming from one location to an other, I use Irssi‘s proxy module which runs continuously within a screen session on my co-located server.

On my Desktops and iPhone I run Colloquy which connects to my Irssi proxy. Although push capabilities are planned for Colloquy, it’s not ready yet. Prowl appeared to be the perfect band-aid for the situation.

My original plan was to use Prowl as intended and have Colloquy’s Growl notifications directed to my iPhone. This had some limitations, most importantly it required leaving Colloquy running on my work desktop.

Fortunately the developer of Prowl provided an example perl script to push notifications to Prowl independently of Growl. I’ve never attempted to work with Irssi script’s, but it appeared I had all the required pieces to build something clever.

I downloaded BCOW’s awayproxy.pl script as a starting point and began to hack away at it. The result: prowlnotify.pl.

Change the prowluser and prowlpass lines then load this script into Irssi. While you’re connected to your proxy the script will do nothing. When your last IRC client disconnects it will push all subsequent public messages containing your nick as well as private messages to your iPhone via Prowl. How sweet it is!

Of course, this post would not be complete without an obligatory screenshot. Nobody appeared to have anything to say today, so I was down and out. In my desperation I called upon cshaiku to grace me with his words of wisdom:

Update: I have now updated this script to use the new Prowl apikeys. Editing the script is no longer required. Simply copy your Prowl key into ~/.prowlkey.

Another update: Every time I try to search Google for an Irssi plugin to work with Colloquy’s push notification feature instead of using Prowl I find my own page. Amusing, but not helpful!

Just found a Colloquy push script for Irssi written by Nicolas Pouillon that does exactly that.

Almost a week short of two years ago I ported Motorola’s CNUT tool to OS X. I originally did so to satisfy my personal use but also decided to share the package for others who fall into the tiny niche of being responsible for the administration of Canopy networks and wanting to use OS X to do so.

As my need lessened for such a package due to a change in positions and responsibilities, the package was neglected shortly after. Although the original package still works, Canopy firmware 9.0 and later require the use of CNUT 3.x.

Due, however, to overwhelming pressure from the users of the original ports (or comments from three different users, rather), I have decided its high time to fill the niche once again.

Good news, everyone!

CNUT 3.12.3 (the latest release as of this writing) now runs natively on OS X! The new package has been tested (meaning it appears to run) on OS X Leopard. I haven’t tested it on previous releases or attempted any actual AP or SM upgrades using the utility, but I have little reason to believe it doesn’t work. As I no longer regularly roll out Canopy updates, I’ll depend on the feedback of whomever downloads the package to determine if it works as well as the previous package.

The usual disclaimer as per the previous release: if my attempt at being helpful caused your Canopy Network to be annihilated in a fierce and fiery disaster of biblical proportions and voids your Canopy warranty, I hereby disclaim all liability.

In addition, this release is by no means endorsed, authorized or supported by Motorola. It contains their intellectual property including copyrighted and unaltered but substantially repackaged Java byte code and Trademarks.

The package is being distributed with good intentions based on the concept of a community of users improving the solutions used for the greater good of the community.

If Motorola’s legal department becomes offended at the existence and distribution of this package, I will of course have to remove it. Though I am sincerely hoping they recognize this as a useful contribution.

You’re welcome.

I’m now back to my regular ol’ routine, just finished a week long “staycation.” So other than spend quality time with the family, what does a system administrator who doesn’t have to go to work for a week do with his time? Pull some CAT5 and clean up my home network, of course!

Inferno, my FreeBSD home gateway, file, web and everything else server has been irritating me with its typical PC fan whirring for too long. It was high time to uproot the beast from its cozy spot on my office floor, where it sat for nearly eight years and drag it to the basement and finally bring tranquility to my office.

This involved running six new cables from my electrical/laundry room to its new home in the basement’s spare bedroom. One Ethernet run to its LAN interface, one for its WiFi interface (I keep WiFi access to my network on a separate segment), one for my recently acquired Xerox Phaser 8400 printer and one spare for future use. I also needed two RG-6 runs, one for the cable modem which now sits downstairs and one for an old spare CRT TV as per the wife’s request.

After a long day of running and terminating cable and dragging equipment around, I ran into one snag: the NIC for the WiFi segment of my network was not seeing my piece of junk Tranzeo AP. I mistakingly saved this AP from AirSurfer’s dumpster several years ago and have been looking for an excuse to get rid of it ever since. After testing the cable run to the opposite side of the basement where the AP resides, I determined all was well and the Tranzeo pile of garbage was the worthy owner of the blame.

Upon hearing my tales of woe and coming to terms with what this meant for her iPod touch web-surfing habit, Jessie was quick to suggest we give the Tranzeo AP the fate it deserves and replace it with a far more capable AirPort Extreme. Who was I to argue? The Airport has been configured in bridge mode as I still intend to leave the routing duties to Inferno.

In my twisted reality, the aging beige Antec case in combination with the old 19″ CRT I dug up, alongside the Phaser, plain old Fujitsu keyboard and ancient desk (also saved from AirSurfer’s dumpster years ago) give the corner an almost retro-computing look. Somehow I find the whole setup appealing in contrast to my shinier, sleeker, far more modern and most importantly far quieter collection of Apple desktops upstairs.

As if their outrageous system access fees and astronomical $8 caller ID charges wasn’t enough. Rogers was clever enough to come up with yet another reason to hate them.

I originally bought an iPhone on July 12, 2008 with a three year term. At the time the plan was $60 (plus the multitude of miscellaneous rip-off charges) for a lousy 150 daytime (where daytime in Rogers’ world ends at 9 PM, not 6 PM) minutes and a humble 400 MB of data transfer. I accepted these lousy terms, cause well, I’m Canadian. Our cellphone industry is a joke and I wanted an iPhone. What else can I say?

Moving on, a few months later I discovered they are now advertising 1 GB of data and 250 minutes and the addition of “my five” for the same price I signed up for initially. Of course Rogers would never move a client to an improved plan. They’d prefer to happily charge you extra for all your minutes, again at astronomical rates. I was quick to notice their upgraded package (I watch them like a hawk, I don’t trust the bastards). I immediately called up and requested an upgrade from the $60 iPhone plan to the $60 iPhone plan. This was November 23, 2008. All was well.

Now for today… As part of my “can’t trust the bastards so I must keep constant surveillance on them” routine, I logged into their on-line billing system and browsed my account for oddities. There I found something that wasn’t there before. Right next to the usual “iPhone Data Access 1 GB” was a new line of blue text that read “term expires on 23/11/2011″. Um, excuse me? What does that mean?!

I called them up and after a 20 minute hold time confirmed the worst of my suspicions, they extended my contract by several months when I changed my package. Perhaps they’re hoping nobody will notice this shenanigans?

Contrary to what I’ve been told, the friendly Rogers rep proceeded to tell me that all data plans have a three year commit… Um? Really. That’s odd. The story I’ve always heard from Rogers (aka Robbers) is I can upgrade my plan at any time with no penalties and could downgrade my plan at any time, incurring a downgrade fee. Never have I heard such non-sense of extending a contract upon changing plans.

After putting me on hold for another several minutes, the rep informed me she could backdate the term to August 25, 2011, allegedly the computer simply “wouldn’t let her” backdate it any further. This is only a month and some longer than what my term was supposed to be, but I backed down at this point. It’s close enough… After-all, if I didn’t want to be ripped off, I wouldn’t be a Rogers client to begin with! Clearly I must accept the occasional unexpected rape in exchange for their services, no?

I’ve been keeping one eye on the Apple store in West Edmonton Mall ever since I was made aware of the quiet construction that was taking place.

When Apple announced the grand opening for this weekend and added the incentive of free t-shirts for the first thousand people, I had little choice but to check it out.

First thing this morning, not wanting to miss out on the free t-shirt (for the novelty, if nothing else) I gathered up my wife and daughter, dragged them out of bed and off we went. Unlike Jessie, I didn’t expect to see quite so many people show up for something as trivial as the opening of a retail store. In spite of arriving 15 minutes early, a large line-up of eager Apple addicts were already present with hundreds more quickly swarming in behind us.

Once the store opened up for business, the line of people flowing into and out of the store with their shiny new purchases was impressively quick and streamlined. The staff had no issues whatsoever in dealing with such a large crowd of people.

Not wanting to leave without giving the place a test run, Jessie was quick to snag an Apple TV and HDMI cable to add to our collection of Apple gear. When she needed assistance to locate the lower-end 40 GB model, help was immediately available. Apon getting everything we felt like blowing some cash on today together, checkout was extremely quick and convenient. A hand-held device was used to collect payment for our purchase and a receipt in PDF format was e-mailed off to the address of our choice. The whole process took less then a couple of minutes.

Being an electronics addict, I purchase all sorts of toys from a variety of retailers and I’ve yet to witness a checkout experience as quick and hassle free. Every other retailer on the planet has a lot they can learn from Apple in this regard.

Being indescribably impressed, Jessie, Natalie and I happily left with our new toys and three new t-shirts. When a retail outlet is this well organized, you just can’t help wanting to give them all your money on a routine basis. I look forward to our next visit.

There is no shortage of potential iPhone users infesting the Internet with their whining and moaning about the outrageous service plans Rogers is tossing towards Canada. Not wanting to feel left out, I’m compelled to contribute two cents of my own.

Every individual has a tipping point, once that point is reached said individual will flip their potential service provider the bird and tell them to keep their f*cking iPhone. With the announcement at WWDC 2008 that Canadians would no longer be shunned, I was excited. Extremely excited.

I expected it to be costly. In fact I was certain it would cost me a fortune. Price usually isn’t an issue for me, not because I’m ridiculously wealthy, far from it. Simply, I’m accustomed to paying a premium for devices that don’t suck. The iPhone is the only smart phone that doesn’t suck for my intended uses.

Now that I’ve had some time to stew over the iPhone plans, I’ve made a decision. I am not going to purchase the iPhone until either a) The plans are made more realistic or b) Another option from another provider becomes available.

The final decision was less based on total price and more on overall principal. Let’s have a look at the basic plan and start breaking it down. $60 a month is the starting package for a pitiful 150 minutes and an acceptable 400 MB of data. Great, I’m still in… Wait, this is the the cell phone industry. We’re not near done yet, no no no. You see, in addition to paying $60 a month for a service, Rogers has deemed it necessary to screw over customers by another $5.95 via a “System Access Fee.” Apparently there is a distinction between paying for a service and “accessing” the services you’re already paying a fortune for. On top of that, let’s not even bother mentioning the extra $0.50 they want to squeeze out of me for “911 Access.”

Ok. This is getting ridiculous, but you know what? I’m still in, I’m annoyed, but I’ll pay it. I want an iPhone, the utility of this device will be extremely useful for me. I’ll allow you to rip me off to this extent, where do I sign?

Whoa, wait… Hang on a sec, what did that last bit of fine print say? All the above factored, I’m now paying $67.45 for phone service and you’re not giving me Caller ID?! An extra $7 per month to allow me to decide if the person whom is calling me is worthy of my precious few minutes?!

The only thing to date that I’ve missed from the dark ages of using Windows XP Pro is the built in Remote Desktop capability. RDP is one of the very few things I’ve seen come out of Redmond that actually worked beyond a satisfactory level.

Nearly three years ago my work machine was replaced with a PowerMac G5 running OS X Panther, ever since I’ve been looking for an equivalent solution for those occasions when I need GUI access to my desktop via the company VPN.

Unfortunately the only solution with acceptable performance in the Mac world, to my knowledge, is Apple Remote Desktop. While Apple Remote Desktop has some excellent functionality, it is overkill for my uses. At a starting price of $349.00 (CAD) for a 10 user license it is also out of the price range most would be willing to spend to gain simple remote desktop functionality equivalent to that bundled with XP Pro at no additional charge.

In my recent playing with Leopard, one of the things immediately noticeable was the ability to connect to another Bonjour discovered Mac within the local network from the Shared section of the Finder sidebar. Unfortunately, beyond using the Back To My Mac feature available only to .Mac subscribers, it was not immediately obvious if this new Leopard functionality could be used to connect to any arbitrary machine via an IP address.

As my curiosity began to get the better of me, I began to casually glance around to see if I could call the Screen Sharing application directly and manually supply it the host information. I first checked out the obvious locations, namely the Applications and Utilities folders. No dice. After a little more digging, I discovered the application bundle in the /System/Library/CoreServices folder. Running the application from this location immediately prompts the user for the host address to connect to. Eureka!

Having successfully connected to my PowerMac G5 at work via it’s private (RFC 1918) IP address via the VPN, my next experiment was to determine if I could access the machine through an SSH tunnel.

Although I have had issues with either compatibility or performance when attempting to connect to OS X desktops using generic VNC clients, the protocol of Apple Remote Desktop is essentially just VNC. Based on that knowledge, I figured tunneling TCP port 5900 to the inside IP address of the target machine would allow me to connect without a VPN in place.

The SSH tunnel can be established from the Terminal application like so:

ssh -L 1024:x.x.x.x:5900 y.y.y.y

Where the x.x.x.x is the private (internal) IP of the target machine and y.y.y.y is the IP address of a host accessible via SSH that has direct access to the private network. The 1024 above can also be changed to any arbitrary local port number. Once the SSH tunnel is established, launch the Screen Sharing application and enter localhost:1024 (or whatever local port number you used instead of 1024). You will now be connected to your remote machine.

Note: The target machine you are connecting to does not need to be running Leopard, but the Apple Remote Desktop service must be enabled from the Sharing applet in System Preferences.

Being a technology enthusiast I had a very hard time waiting until October to give Leopard a test run on my Mac Mini.

I decided to give the beta build (9A527) a test run to see what I have to look forward to when the family pack I’ve been eye-balling finally hits store shelves.

Unfortunately, unlike my initial impressions of Tiger, Leopard has already given me enough gripes and annoyances to dampen my excitement towards its release.

Although most of the negative points I have towards Leopard in its current state are subtle, attention to the small subtleties is what traditionally keeps Apple a cut above their competitors in the area of clean UI design.

Dislikes

Poor Aesthetics

My first login immediately brought about feelings of disgust over the abomination that is the translucent menu bar. As one of many people with a color deficiency, I find the menu bar has lost significant contrast. This would create much irritation and potentially eyestrain throughout the day as I struggle to read the menu of a given application. This mis-feature becomes even worse in form of a distraction when one makes use of applications (such as those in the Adobe Creative Suite) that have toolbars just below the menu bar which will now clash in color to varying degrees depending on your wallpaper image. Given a check box in system preferences to turn this off or increase the opacity of the menu bar, I could potentially forgive this.

The new color scheme of the OS is dark, grey and gloomy. It is so far from modern and so putrid as to make me reminiscent of the Windows 98 UI. Overall, the visual appeal has left me so disappointed that I am in the back of my mind thinking the current UI design just has to be in place only to facilitate an upcoming Steve Jobs One more thing… moment in which he can announce to the world that this GUI was just a temporary placeholder for the real Leopard GUI that was intended to remain secret throughout the Leopard beta testing. One can only hope…

Time Machine Limitations

Aesthetics aside, I already have a few issues that are either annoying or disappointingly limiting with the new features. First up is Time Machine. Time Machine was a feature I was greatly looking forward to as the promise of a set and forget backup solution with an intuitive UI is far too compelling to ignore. All this promise is however lost with the inability to use a network share of any variety as a backup volume. Perhaps I am not the norm, but I have several computers (five at current count) Apple and otherwise. One of my habits is to keep as much data as possible away from my individual desktops in favor of a central file server. This allows me the conveniences of seldom worrying about data on my machines. The external hard drive required for Time Machine to work means I would either need an external storage device for each of my Apple machines or be forced to use a propriety setup involving sharing a drive via an AirPort Extreme. Either workaround makes my FreeBSD server with massive storage capabilities useless.

UI Annoyances

There are many new features in the UI that are welcome improvements but lack that last little bit of polish to make them perfect. An example is the new stacks feature in the dock, which although useful suffers by the fact that initially the drop off point on the dock to create a stack is right next to the trash. I don’t imagine there will be a shortage of users that inadvertently trash their target folder on their first couple stack creation attempts.

Another annoyance I have is with the new sidebar in the Finder which does not auto-size itself to fit the width of the item labels beneath the Shared heading. Although it conveniently snaps precisely into place when you manually resize the area, it also does not retain the width when the Finder window is closed and later re-opened.

Being a person who uses the Terminal application more frequently than nearly any other app on my system, I was excited to learn that I was soon to be spared the clutter of multiple terminal windows scattered across my screen due to the new tabbed functionality. Two issues immediately cropped up unfortunately, first up the key stroke to set the title of the Terminal window has been changed from Command+Shift+T to Command+I forcing me to lose some muscle memory that I’ve acquired over the years. Worse yet, there is no way to set the title on the individual tabs, only on the Terminal window itself. This has made the multi-tab terminal less then useful for my purposes.

Leaving with a Few Positive Notes

In spite of my above negativity and cynicism above, there are a few features that managed to impress me:

Dramatic Preview Improvements

The Preview application used to view PDF documents, images, etc. has been significantly upgraded with a new UI. This new version in Leopard has improved to the point that I can finally read a lengthly PDF document on screen comfortably. In previous OS X releases of the Preview app scrolling through a document was awkward and cumbersome if a single page did not fully fit into a non-scrolling window. This forced the user to zoom out to fit the screen size, usually making the content difficult to read due to smaller text sizes.

Document Content Icons in Finder

I am throughly impressed by the Finder’s new ability to generate icons based on the contents of documents represented. The accuracy, blazing speed and rich compatibility with a wide variety of file types this feature provides is a sight to be seen. The value of this new ability to quickly recognize previously forgotten files with obscure file names is immediately obvious.

Intuitive use of Network Volumes

One of the biggest annoyances I had with Tiger was the cumbersome UI required to connect to file servers. The new Finder in Leopard authenticates, mounts and un-mounts network volumes with far fewer clicks and substantially greater ease.

Spaces

A feature missing from OS X yet enjoyed for well over a decade on most X11 based window managers and desktop environments is virtual desktops. The Leopard implementation (Spaces) is not only visually rich but very well designed and a thrill to use. Anyone who is constantly multitasking across countless applications spread amongst nearly infinite open windows will wonder how they ever lived without this functionality.