Archive for the “Computers” Category

After fixing the OS X Terminal’s keyboard shortcuts, I wanted to conquer the annoying functionality that keeps Terminal open after the last terminal tab is closed. I normally exit a shell by typing the command “exit”. However, you can also exit a shell by closing the Terminal tab using Cocoa methods (red close button, CMD+w). Between these two methods, things happen in a different order. (Using “exit” causes the user to logout and exit the shell, but the actual tab or window stays open until the processes end. On the other hand, using one of the window closing methods closes the window before the user logout and the processes end).

The general approach is to first watch for the EXIT signal to be sent to a shell (this happens regardless which way the Terminal is closed), then do some handling to determine if the user is exiting the last Terminal tab. However, this got rather cumbersome because of the behavior outlined above. (Sometimes when the final EXIT signal is caught there is still a tab open, other times there is no tab open when the final EXIT signal is caught). So anyway, this is how I did it.

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The OSX Terminal.app has come a long way. I had been using iTerm exclusively ever since I started using the Mac, but recently switched over to using the default Terminal.

I have become reliant on using Home and End to move to the beginning or end of the line at the command line. The behavior is different on the OSX Terminal though, they scroll to the top and end of the buffer. (Actually, I would settle for being able to use CMD+← and  CMD+→ like you would for Cocoa apps if that worked, but it doesn’t). Actually, the shortcuts that move to teh beginning and end of a line in the Terminal are CTRL+A and CTRL+E

Additionally, the PageUp and PageDown keys navigate through the buffer by default which is rather annoying if you are trying to edit config files (such as with Nano) and want to move through the file quicker. (The default to do a normal PgUp and PgDn is Shift+PgUp and Shift+PgDn).
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Don't Buy LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Drive

I see a lot of Mac users with LaCie External Hard Drives. I know that they have been used and relied on by many, and I had the overall impression that the quality of LaCie Hard Drives was excellent… until this thing.

I was using a personally-owned Western Digital MyBook hard drive with Time Machine on my work computer. It has been working fine for a long time other than the fact that it is very slow. I have had it for about 3 years, and spent almost an entire year working directly of of it. Well, it is not exactly the highest performance drive and it was aging (plus it was not that big). So I convinced my boss to buy me and the other Mac users in my workgroup nice, external hard drives for to use with Time Machine so that we could all have our backups… Approved. Awesome.

I ran across the d2 Quadra (SKU# 301442U). It is a 1TB drive, and has several options for the interface (eSATA, Firewire 400/800 and USB2.0) and included cables. It was $179. I have been seeing several “bargin” external drives going for $100 or less so I figured if I wanted the better perfomance, higher-quality drive with the multiple interfaces, we should go for the LaCie d2 Quadra.

The guy that buys everything for us bought abot 20 of them from buy.com and they came in relatively fast. When I opened them up they looked very well designed, and I set it up immediately to start my Time Machine Backup. Seemed to be going fine. That night, a colleague of mine let me know that his drive was acting funny. Well, I wasn’t sure what the issue was, but decided I would take a look at it in the morning. Turns out that the thing was dead. mechanically, the drive was dead. It wouldn’t do anything except make terrible noises when it was powered on.

So, we got a bad one. No big deal, these things happen, right? Mine was still working OK… So I go to find the guy that bought them and tell him that we need to return one because it is broken. Meanwhile, on our way over to the see it, another person in our group sees us as says that her drive is dead too, and making weird noises. Good thing he had only given one to the three of us so far.

OK… so we check the serial numbers, and they are all very close together (all three of ours were only 5 numbers apart). So, we find that we have one that is about 1000 different and she sets up to try that one out. This time a couple of days go by before the inevitable.

So, let’s recap.

2 dead within 24 hours with a third another 48 hours later or so. Mine and my other buddies’ replacement were still working, but I noticed mine started making a loud and odd click when I ejected it. Great. Needless to say, we are boxing up the ones we have open and sending the whole lot back. Unfortunately, being that we all work in government, the 3 that failed, we cannot even return because there is the possibility that there is sensitive data on them and they will have to be destroyed.

LaCie, What Happened?!?!

If anyone has a suggestion for a GOOD, high performance external hard drive, please let me know. I am currently looking at the following as replacements:

• Fantom Drive’s G-Force Quad Interface
  • http://www.fantomdrives.com/products/gfquad.htm
  • $119 on MacMall.com right now for the 1TB version
• Seagate FreeAgent Desk for Mac
  • http://freeagent.seagate.com/en-us/hard-drive/hard-drive-mac/Free-Agent.html
  • $165 on MacMall.com

I recently switched to the Mac for my work computer (with Windows XP in parallels… I have some VBA macros that are necessary to do my job. Over time, I expect to replace most of it with AppleScript.)

The other day, I noticed some weird emails in my Sent Items Folder in Entourage. They did not have a sender or a subject. If I opened them up, I could see all the headers and any html tags(if any). under the displayed headers, I could see that it was indeed emails that I was sending, but they were somehow becoming corrupted. Today, I figured out that they were emails being sent with my iPhone using my exchange account. I did a little searching and found out that there is a bug that adds some junk to the email header. Outlook on the PC doesn’t get the bad headers because of the way it connects to the server or it just ignores the bad header (it wouldn’t suprise me if the latter was the case).

Fortunately, it is just a simple added three lines at the top of the email and this should be correctable with a script. Since I am trying to learn AppleScript anyway, I thought I would take my chances. After reading a view discussions and blog posts on the issue with some suggested fixes and scripts, I came across an AppleScript made to correct the problem that I decided to examine. Unfortunately, this script didn’t work at all for me, but from looking at the script, it appeared this was mainly due to how it was attempting to detect the “bad email”. Pretty much every “solution” I found required the user to select one or more messages in Entourage and running a script from the Entourage Script menu. Not a very elegant solution, in my opinion. On top of that, it appears that Entourage does not allow AppleScripts to directly modify the email and save it back anyway. Well, I need better detection, and the ability to link the script to an Entourage Rule (and maybe still maintain the ability to run it from the script menu if I wanted.) So, I did and here you go:

Download:

FixSentFromiPhone_1.2.scpt.zip

Here is how I setup my Rule in Entourage to make it run automatically when new message arrive in my sent items folder:
Execute If all criteria are met
If
Folder Is Sent Items
Specific Header Subject Does not exist
Then
Run AppleScript FixSentFromiPhone.scpt

UPDATE: I found that there is a much easier way to do a portion of the script I wrote and updated it.

UPDATE2: It appears my script needs to be made more flexible in order to handle messages with multiple recipients (at least it didn’t work correctly when I did a “reply to all”). I am thinking about it and may update soon.

UPDATE3: Since I had not gotten around to it yet, a reader modified my script and sent me the changes he made to handle messages that had been sent to multiple destinations. I then took his changes and integrated them into the script. Everything seems to work well for me. The download above has been updated. Thanks!

Slightly adventurous Intel-based Mac owners seem to often be afraid or confused about installing Ubuntu along side OSX, but it is actually quite simple. There are some oddities that make it different from installing on a PC (but if it was the same, it wouldn’t be a Mac now would it?). Because of this, I am going to outline my easy install method that will leave you with a dual-boot system with OSX and Ubuntu (Those out there that want a Triple-Boot setup will require a bit more complication and I suggest just checking at ubuntuforums.org).

Intro / Setup

For the purposes of this article, I will be assuming that you have OSX Leopard (10.5) installed on your Mac (with some additional details for those with OSX < 10.5), and you would like to install Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex along side it. This should cover most users at the time of this writing.

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On my aluminum Apple Keyboard I prefer to have the F1 – F12 keys operate as the F1 – F12 keys by default, and access the brightness, expose, and other extras in combination with the Fn key. The is the opposite of the way they function in OSX. In OS X, you very rarely ever need to use the F1-F12 key unless you are using some professional software that uses them for shortcuts, so it is not that big of a deal. In Linux, however, I use these keys a lot to switch to virtual consoles and access gnome shortcuts. Previous to Intrepid, it was recommended to install pommed to enable the functions of many of these special keys. pommed’s config file had the option to swap the way the Fn key works, requiring you to use Fn in order to change the brightness, etc. Now, in Intrepid (8.10) most of the functionality of pommed has been implemented into hal and pommed simply creates conflicts. So how do we swap the function of the Fn key?

First edit /etc/modprobe.d/options
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/options

and make sure it has the line
options hid pb_fnmode=2

Then save and exit. Lastly, we need to update ramfs:
sudo update-initramfs -u -v -k `uname -r`

Then just reboot!

I decided to do a complete reinstall with Intrepid on my iMac. Everything went quite well, so I decided to share the steps that I took to do the install. Note that in the end, I want to dual-boot OS X and Ubuntu on my iMac with no other partitions. You will need to adjust your install for any custom setup you might want to have.

1. Download the Ubuntu 8.10 x64 Desktop iso and burn to a CD with Toast at the slowest possible speed.
2. Use DiskUtility to resize the OSX partition and make space on the hard drive for Ubuntu. Select your hard drive on the left side, and on the partition tab, click the “+” to add a partition to the disc. You can make this partition any format as it will just be removed later. Right now, we are just allocating space for the install.
3. I already had rEFIt installed, but if you do not have it yet, now is a good time to do it.
4. Make sure that the Ubuntu CD is in the drive and shutdown the iMac. Start it up again, and this time you should see the rEFIt menu on startup instead of the grey and white Apple logo screen. If you still boot directly into OS X, then you might need to perform the manual installation of rEFIt.
5. Once you have rEFIt working, you will be able to select the Ubuntu CD to boot. Eventually, you will get to the Ubuntu desktop.
6. Once there, go to System > Adminstration > Partition Editor. This will start gParted. In this application, you will see a graphical representation of the partitions on your hard drive similar to how DiskUtility does in OSX, except this will show ALL the partitions (even ones that Apple tries to hide) and free space on the disc too.
7. Near the Right end of the bar at the top, the partition that was created with DiskUtility will show. There will likely be a tiny bit of free space before and after this partition as well. At the beginning of the disk, there will be a EFI partition (don’t touch!) and the OS X partition (shows as an HFS+ filesystem). Select the FAT32 partition created in DiskUtility and delete. This will leave a bunch of free space on your hard drive for Ubuntu. When you are ready, click “Apply” and the partition will be deleted.You can now quit gparted.
8. Now,  start the installer with the icon on the desktop. Choose your language and then Timezone. (I chose English and the Central Time Zone [Chicago]). Why in Linux do we always have to choose a city for the time zone? I just want to specify the name of the time zone I am in!!
9. On the next screen select the Macintosh variant of your language’s keyboard. (I chose USA-Macintosh. This variant has always worked for me on my older White Apple Keyboard as well as my newer Aluminum Keyboard).
10. On the next screen, choose to install to the largest continuous free space on the hard drive. This will allow the installer to create a root and swap partition in the free space you left on the drive.
11. Next you will setup your user account and password. (I also chose to enable auto-login as I am the only person that uses this machine.)
12. On the final screen, click the Advanced button and choose to install GRUB to /dev/sda3. This is the Ubuntu root partition. Click OK for that and back at the summary screen, click Install to start the installation.
13. During the install play a little Tali or Tetravex . After the install is complete reboot the machine.

That is it for the basic installation. After the reboot I went to System > Admin > Hardware Drivers and enabled the “Broadcom STA driver” (not the B43 driver) to get the WiFi working. 3D Acceleration and “Extra” desktop effects worked with the default open source driver, but there seems to be an issue when using 3D graphics while desktop effects are enabled (to test this, you can enable the “Extra” desktop effects and then run ‘glxgears’ from the commandline). Turning off the desktop effects will fix the issue. Enabling the Proprietary ATI driver in the same place where you enabled the Broadcom driver will probably help that situation.

After all that, you can install any updated packages with the update manager and reboot. WiFi should now work. Stay tuned for other tweaks that I make to my machine to get things working the way I want.

There has been a bit of confusion on how to get the iSight working on many of the Intel Macs recently. Fortunately, the newer MacBooks coming out have a working iSight out-of-the-box without needing to do anything, but for older iSights, firmware loading is still required. They changed the firmware loading back to the kernel out of userspace, so all you have to do is get the firmware and place it in the correct location in the filesystem. Let’s do it step by step.

1. First you need to get the firmware out of a particular file located on your OSX install. You can copy it to a USB drive or other location so that you can acess it from Ubuntu. It is located in /System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/
AppleUSBVideoSupport.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleUSBVideoSupport
2. Boot into Ubuntu and install isight-firmware-tools

   sudo apt-get install isight-firmware-tools

3. Go ahead and place the AppleUSBSupportVideo file in /lib/firmware

   sudo cp AppleUSBSupportVideo /lib/firmware/

4. Now, extract the iSight firmware from the file

   sudo ift-extract -a /lib/firmware/AppleUSBVideoSupport

This should place a file called isight.fw in the /lib/firmware directory. It would be a good idea to save a copy of this file somewhere so that you can find it again later and not need to extract it from the AppleUSBVideoSupport file. In the future, you just need to place the isight.fw file in /lib/firmware/.

When all this is done, you need to shutdown your Mac and Start it up again (not reboot!!). Completely shutting down will reinitilize the hardware and allow the firmware to load while starting Ubuntu.

Finally got an iPhone. I love it. Jailbroken too. It is really cool that the package management for all those non-AppStore apps is based on apt. I installed a terminal and can even do stuff like ‘apt-get update’ from the commandline. Right at home for me.

It was also a saving grace for me since my work email quit working correctly on my old Palm T|X (with VersaMail 3.5+). I had to downgrade VersaMail back to 3.1 in order to receive mail again, and that version is really bad since contacts and such doesn’t sync that way. I have to say that the contacts management is huge with the iPhone. I now have my Google Contacts, iPhone, AddessBook (in OSX), and Outlook (work) contacts all in sync. That was painful before. It apparently can sync with yahoo too, but I don’t use yahoo anymore, so I haven’t tried that.

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About 3 years ago, someone my wife (well at that time, just my fiancee) worked with at Sam’s Club got a steal of a deal on a computer that was a display model (or someone returned because Sam’s would take back anything… but that is another story). I was attempting to work on her old computer (Dell Optiplex w/ Pentium II) which ended up having a bad hard drive, when she found this mini HP desktop system. I actually thought it was pretty cool myself. I made some backup install discs (from the wonderful restore partition that HP has) since it had come with no discs or documentation, did a factory restore, and cleaned off the usual crap that comes on new PCs. I even went so far as to install Avast! antivirus (free), Ad-aware (free), and Spybot S&D (free), and Firefox (of course, free), and left a note on the desktop explaining that these utilities were FREE, and how to use them.

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