Drinking the Apple Juice

6+ Month Update

DAJ — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 03:02:00 GMT

So far my overall opinion of the MAC OS X is very high - so much so that I am already planning to replace one of my home servers with a new MAC. The system is very stable, I really enjoy the UI and having a Unix kernel under the covers is simply excellent. I was able to find native equivalents for just about all of the applications I used on Windows to the point where I no longer use my Windows XP home system any more.

Windows Development

As far as using the MacBook for Windows development, I must admit that It has also been excellent. I actually think that XP (running under VMware Fusion) is faster, more reliable and stable.

Now I am sure there are many of you out there shaking your heads in disgust saying that it is just not possible - but hear me out. In my earlier posts I stated that my plan was to install only Microsoft Visual Studio (and any other required development tools) into the VM - everything else is native MAC (Mail, Calendar, Office Suite, VPN, Web Browsing, Video Production, etc.) which I have managed to do. I also uninstalled every optional component under my Windows XP VM that had a corresponding native MAC component.

I attribute this phenomenon simply to the fact that the more software you install on Windows the slower it becomes - even if the software is not running. In my mind the registry and active-x are two of Microsoft's biggest blunders. If you never ran a registry monitor and watched what is going on with not applications loaded you should as you would be amazed. So simply by the fact that I am installing almost nothing under Windows keeps it running lean and mean.

Summary

Is my MacBook and MAC OS X perfect - no. But then again neither is Windows or any software I have ever used for that matter. Read any forum for any OS or application software and you will find people that claim it to be perfect and others that can stand it. It is all a matter of personal taste and requirements.

I am not sure if my new found enjoyment is simply my natural desire to keep learning new technologies, or that I really am just tried of Windows. What ever the reason I am very happy and have no plans to return to a pure native Windows environment any time soon.

DAJ

Time for Microsoft Office :(

DAJ — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 03:00:00 GMT

This is a sad day for sure but it looks like I am going to have to purchase Microsoft Office for MAC. Although I really like Keynote vs Powerpoint and Pages meets my minimum needs just fine - Numbers is just not cutting the mustard. Excel, over the years, has become so much more that just a spreadsheet application. It can be argued that it is also its own development environment and this is where the problems arise. I simply have too many spreadsheets that require many of the enhanced capabilities of Excel such as custom controls and forms that are just not supported under Numbers. So I will be forced to switch. Yes, I am quite aware of Open Office but I do not like the fact that there is no native UI for MAC and I still believe that I will have the same problems with the spreadsheets.

DAJ

iPhone is Getting Better

DAJ — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 02:59:00 GMT

After several iPhone firmware updates, I must say that it has been more stable and the number of dropped calls has been greatly reduced - I will keep a closer eye on this and post some more later.

DAJ

IPhone 3G GPS: Are you kidding me?

DAJ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:08:00 GMT

Sorry but this is just another one I could not let sit. Here is a quote from Apple's web site regarding the iPhone's GPS capabilities:

"Find your location, get directions, and see traffic — all from your phone. Maps on iPhone 3G combines GPS, Wi-Fi, and cell tower location technology with the Multi-Touch interface to create the best mobile map application ever."

I find this quote worthy of another law suit as the mobile map application is laughable. Yes, you can get your current location, yes you can get directions. However, it does not support voice turn by turn directions. It does not even support auto advancing from one step to the next you have to manually keep advancing it your self - are you kidding me?

I was purposely postponing buying a standalone GPS navigation device based on the planned iPhone 3G capabilities and based on other GPS navigation application I have seen on other mobile phones - what a disappointment.

Steve, how could you ever let this piece of junk mapping application ever leave your engineering department? You must be getting soft.

DAJ

iPhone 3G - The worst mobile phone I have had in years

DAJ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 02:49:00 GMT

First let me clarify - when I refer to the iPhone being the worst mobile phone I have had in years I am talking directly about the using the device as a phone itself. My reason is quite simple, the coverage is terrible and I have had more dropped calls every day and failed connections than I can ever remember having with any previous mobile phone.

The first thing people say is that it must be AT&T and if I had not been an existing AT&T mobile phone customer for years I might believe them. However, my previous AT&T phone, a Blackberry Pearl, had excellent coverage and I almost never dropped a call and never had a problem initiating calls.

I now have to stand near the front windows of my house or wose stand outside to get reliable coverage.

Another co-worker was in town with his iPhone and had the same problem in the same areas I had - again areas where my AT&T Blackberry worked flawlessly.

Something is definitely wrong with the iPhone's phone capabilities and I have already recommended to people in my area to stay away from it.

Now, the iPhone's phone may work perfectly in other areas of the country but when I had a previous AT&T phone then upgraded to a new only to have less quality and covergae I find that completely unaccetable.

DAJ

Mac OS X, Automator and Subversion (SVN) Fun

DAJ — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:35:00 GMT

I finally decided to play around the the Automator application that is part of Mac OS X. I am a big fan of workflow based technologies so I was excited to see what it has to offer.

My goal was to create a Finder Automator plug-in that would display any subversion project that I had modified and needed to be committed back to the repository. To make things even more interesting I decided to use a number of different tasks just to see how they all interact through Automator.

I fired up Automator and got to work.

1. I dragged the "Get Selected Items" action onto the workflow designer window. This is the action that would receive the list of folders I selected from any Finder window.

2. I dragged in the "Get Folder Contents" action. This action would return the list of items (folders) under the subversion repository folder that was selected in step 1.

3. Because Automator does not contain subversion actions (there are CVS ones) I had to go it on my own. I dragged in a "Run Shell Script" action and after much work and syntax frustrations and two other people helping me I ended up with a very small and simple script.

for fn in "$@"
    do
        svn status $fn | grep ^M >nul
        if [ "$?" = "0" ]; then
            p=`echo $fn | awk 'BEGIN{FS="/"} {print $NF}'`
            echo "$p has been modified"
        fi
    done

Automator will pass in the list of items found in step 2. So I created a simple for loop to cycle through them all. For each item I run the subversion status command, pipe it to grep looking for a modified flag. grep will return a code identifying whether or not it found any matches. If the project has any modified files I use awk to strip out just the file name from the full path and turned it into a more readable message.

4a. Now that we have a list of modified projects from step 3 we need to provide feedback on the modified projects. This is where I had some fun by dragging in the "Speak Text" action. Now when the automator workflow is run it will speak what subversion projects have been modified. Lot's of fun but eventually does get a little old.

4b. To make things a little more bearable and less annoying to my co-workers I decided to modify the workflow to display a pop-up window with the modified projects listed. This is where I was really surprised to find out that Automator does not have any default action for displaying a message. Therefore I decided to try some AppleScript and dragged in an "AppleScript" action and added the following code.

on run {input, parameters}
    
    if input is not {} then
        if the class of the input is list then
            set s to ""
            repeat with i from 1 to length of input
                set s to s & item i of input & "
"
            end repeat
            display dialog s
        else
            display dialog "No SVN Projects Have been modified"
        end if
    else
        display dialog "No SVN Projects Have Been Modified." buttons {"OK"}
    end if
    return input
end run

The above AppleScript is simply converting the list that is passed in to a large string because the 'display dialog' will not handle the list. There are some quirks with the display dialog; not being able to set the title bar text (there might be a way I but didn't quickly find it); and the window size not growing when there is a lot of text.

5. Finally I saved the Automator workflow as a Finder plug-in which made it accessible off of the finder pop-up menu.

Conclusion:

Automator is a fun tool and has some interesting possibilities. However, its lack of branching actions will limit its use to simple sequential data processing chores.

Mac OS X Leopard Lockup #4

DAJ — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:27:00 GMT

Here we go again. The typical symptom are the same as the last two lockups:

Can’t put Leopard into sleep mode from the Menu or Expose
When I reopen my MacBook and I don’t login in right away the login screen disappears and the only way to get it back is to close the lid again, wait and reopen and quickly login.
Leopard won’t shutdown. I have to hold down the power button.

There appears to be a new Mac OS X 10.5.4 Leopard update tonight, which some have suggested will correct the problem. I am hoping for the best.

Mac OS X Two Month Update

DAJ — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:23:00 GMT

Well it has been two months since my purchase and the start of my conversion from Windows XP. As noted in a previous entry I finally went cold turkey on a 6/9 business trip leaving my Thinkpad behind. Everything went well and I have not had to switch back since then. Although I do occasionally wake up my Thinkpad to utilize as a second development box my MacBook has officially taken over as my primary office and development box.

VMware is still running fast and smooth - a better Windows than Windows. One thing I did notice right away is that ActiveSync is much more stable under VMware. On my Thinkpad I would often have to reboot to restore ActiveSync connectivity - yes, I know about stopping it in task manager and restarting it but that would rarely fix the problem 5% of the time. During my own analysis of ActiveSync failures it appears that it really was not ActiveSync itself that was failing but rather the USB port. By constantly switching between different PDAs and cradles I think the USB port got a slight voltage spike and according to the USB spec when this occurs the driver can disable the port until the computer is rebooted. Because VMware is virtualizing the USB port this no longer appears to be an issue. I will continue tracking this one more closely.

Smart Folders and Spotlight simply rock. I am slowly getting to the point that I no longer care what folders are holding my documents because It is quicker to find them with Spotlight.

Using the keyboard between native Mac OS X and XP running under VMware fusion has definitely been keeping my brain working overtime - no need for Nintendo Brain Age here!

Overall I am really liking my MacBook, almost to the point that I am wondering if the keyboard itself is laced with some sort of chemical at the factory to produce this unexpected enjoyment. I actually now prefer typing on my modern chick-let style keyboard over my old Thinkpad.

I near future entries I plan to detail the Windows Software I left behind in favor of a Mac OS replacement.

VMWare Fusion to Mac OS X Leopard Come in Please...

DAJ — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:12:00 GMT

I have been struggling to setup proper filesystem sharing between my VMware XP instance and Mac. Now I could simply just checkout the SVN projects within VMWare just fine but I want to keep all my SVN projects checked out on the Mac side for the following reasons:

I don’t want to have to install anything I absolutely need in the VMware XP install. The more I install the slower XP gets - we all know that equation.
Having SVN locally allows Time Machine to backup my files pre check in.
I no longer need XYPlorer (a great utility) installed in XP which I used to quickly search for and in my source files because Mac has this awesome feature called Spotlight

By default VMware created a default read only share to my Mac file system which does allow me read only access from XP. However, it is a little slow, is only read only, and most Windows XP applications (including Visual Studio) fail accessing it because it starts with a . and that can’t be changed.

I tried turning on Mac SMB sharing, with limited success. Access was established but I could never get the read/write permissions to stick properly. I have to admit that Unix file permissions are very weak compared to Windows. This was a long battle which I finally lost do to time and frustration.

I finally resorted to creating another share within VMware with read/write access. Then, within XP, I mapped a drive letter to the share. This eliminated the problem with Windows applications choking on the URL that started with a period.

Several blogs and news group posts reported issues with the VMware share’s reliability, but so far I have not had any issues.

Mac OS X Leopard Lockup #3

DAJ — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:18:00 GMT

Hmmm, same as lockup #2.

Some blogs have suggested it was a Firefox issue, well I am happy to say it is not in my case. I stopped using Firefox and the problem still appeared. Now, I did not uninstall it, but if just having Firefox installed causes such a problem with Mac OS X I would seriously have to reconsider Windows.

Crash #2

DAJ — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:23:00 GMT

I was using my MacBook off and on all day today with no problem. Then I opened it up and staring back at me was the little rainbow spinner. I waited and waited, closed and reopened, waited some more all to no avail. I guess I shouldn't believe all of the marketing hype (of Mac being such a reliable system) after all.

Hard reboot #2 is in the books.

My first solo flight

DAJ — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:21:00 GMT

I am heading out on another business trip, this time (and for the first time) with just my MacBook and not my trusty little Thinkpad. This will be the true test and I hope all goes well...

VPN up and Running

DAJ — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 02:34:00 GMT

Today is both a happy and sad day. The final piece my my migration puzzle from Windows to Mac is for the most part complete - I have VPN access to my Sonicwall. Of course it came at a sad cost of $199 which was the price of VPN Tracker. Now I must admit that VPN Tracker seems to be every bit worth its price. The documentation and application are both outstanding - I was connected in about 15 mins.

It is a shame that I had to purchase a VPN client and with the information provided by VPN Tracker I am almost certain I can now get IPSecuritas configured and running. Although I now feel somewhat obligated to VPN Tracked and I really do like their application so I think I will stay with them and use their $79 VPN Player for my other Mac co-workers.

At some point in time I will revisit the IPSecuritas application to see what I did wrong. But for now I am up and running.

The most advanced operating system in the world - unless you need VPN access.

DAJ — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:24:00 GMT

For an operating system that touts itself as the most advanced in the world yet can't connect to most of the major VPN appliances seems like something straight out of the Microsoft play book.

Obviously I have been struggling (and according to the forums and blogs I am not alone) for quite some to establish a VPN connection to a Sonicwall device over L2TP using Mac's built VPN capabilities. After many failed attempts is appears that all of the research on the web confirms that it can't be done out of the box and I need to use IPSec VPN. Of course the most advanced OS in the world does not support IPSec VPN access so I am experimenting with IPSecuritas and so far have managed to get it very close but as of right now still no joy.

Cupertino we have a problem!

DAJ — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 22:32:00 GMT

Today I had my first system lockup.

I first started realizing something was wrong when my MacBook would no longer enter sleep mode when I moved my cursor to the upper left (as I setup in Expose ). I figured I messed something up so I initially was not too concerned. Later in the day I went to turn on the bluetooth radio - no joy here either. This is when I realized something was very wrong. Time to shutdown and restart - the only problem is that I could not shutdown either. I checked for hanging applications, applications running amuck, the usual suspects - nothing. I finally had to restore to the old Windows style of holding down the power button.

After restarting everything seemed to be just fine. But this early in the game for a total lockup is troubling - especially when I am still using my Windows based laptop for more hours during the day than my Mac.

My Thinkpad is on to me!

DAJ — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:54:00 GMT

Up to this point things have been going very well. However, this afternoon my Thinkpad, uncharacteristically, started to just power off! No exception, no blue screen of death, just simply powering off. Now mind you my Thinkpad and Windows XP has been running exceptionally well for quite some time so this really worried me as I am still in my conversion process.

I quickly decide to do another HD snapshot using EZGig II from Apricorn. I have been using this utility for a quite some time now and it has saved me more than once. Note, the software only comes in kit form such as their $49 universal hard drive upgrade kit - which I purchased.

So far booting into safe mode appears to be working fine, the registry looks ok and the HD seems intact.

I reviewed my software install log and noticed that I had recently installed Livescribe software on the 28th. Prior to that I had not installed anything since the 5th so I will have to keep an eye on that one.

I plan to run some more system cleanup and diagnostic utilities to see what is really going on...

Migrating Outlook to iMail, iCalendar, and AddressBook

DAJ — Fri, 30 May 2008 02:32:00 GMT

Well it is finally time to start getting serious about this conversion - migrating from Microsoft Outlook. As I mentioned in a previous entry I plan to try and use the built in Apple application and stay away from the Microsoft Office product line.

The first step was trying to find a utility to help migrate my Outlook data files. Because I am using IMAP for email that conversion was not a problem and went well via a secondary Google mail account.

After searching for something to convert my email and calendar, I came across many different options and I was swaying towards the cheap (as in $10) method and going with O2M from which was recommended by many people including a colleague of mine. I started to surf on over to O2M when I had a Duh moment!

Sitting right next to me was my Thinkpad syncing up to my Blackberry device. So with the light bulb now glowing over my head I quickly diverted my browser to the Blackberry web site and download their PocketMac desktop client. After a excruciating install (so far the worst MAC installer I have used so far) and a required system restart as indicated by the installer. I managed to pull off my contacts and calendar (there is a known issue with todos not syncing with the current version) entries.

Outlook to Mac conversion complete!

The Migration Plan - Jumping in head first

DAJ — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:48:17 GMT

In migrating to the Mac OS I plan on jumping in head first and hopefully the water is deep enough.

My goal is to run all native Mac OS applications where ever possible.

I have quite a large list of application currently running on my XP system that I must now find replacements for and I will be documenting each one. Below are a couple of major applications I am targeting first.

Microsoft Office Replacement

I have decided to not purchase the recently release Microsoft office for Mac and either go with iWork or openoffice.org. The reason is simple, I am tried of the Microsoft code bloat and slow applications. Microsoft Outlook has to be the all time worst offenders of Microsoft's own best practices when it comes to UI - don't do any time consuming processing in the UI thread. When I sync my email Outlook is all but totally locked up.

Java Development

This is the one area where I am really not worried and somewhat excited. I plan to use Eclipse, which I already use on Windows, and I expect all of the other Java tooling to fall right in line.

Microsoft Windows Mobile Development

Unfortunately here is where I really don't have much of an option. I will still be using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 but running inside a VM.

VM Decision

Because I am familiar and already use their products I have selected VMware Fusion for my VM. Although I am going to be running a VM I will to try and enforce a strict policy on myself where I will only run Visual Studio in the VM and no other major software package - everything else will be a native OS X application.

I have decided against the dual-boot option simply because all of my other applications will be running in native OS X such as email and I will need access to them while developing.

First Impressions

DAJ — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:07:00 GMT

MacBook

So far I have to admit that I like my new device. It is a little on the heavy side but with how it is equipped I really can't complain too much. I was also a little worried about the chicklet keyboard (memories of an old Tandy computer) but so far I really don't mind it. Although not having the dedicated backspace, home, end, page-up, and page-down is going to take some getting used to.

One small complaint- the MacBook itself almost a little too smooth and streamlined to the point it is often difficult to pull it out of the neoprene sleeve located in my backpack. It needs just a little traction grip on the underside to prevent it from slipping out of my hands.

Install

Well that could not have been any easier! With all of Microsoft's money and talent it makes you wonder why can't they do that.

The default login which automatically secures the users from screwing things up is very smart and just makes sense.

The wireless network setup was just too easy - make you wonder some more.

Did I say I am having fun?

My Frist Apple

DAJ — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:15:00 GMT

Here we go...I purchased my first Apple computer today. My decision was based on my own simple set of requirements:

Travel/Airplane friendly

Medium weight for easy lugging around airports.
Does not impose on my neighbor's tray table
Good battery life - coast to coast would be great.

Powerful

Plenty of RAM and HD space so I can run Windows XP in a VM (I just can't shake Bill that easily or quickly)

Decent Screen size so I can work on code while traveling and away from my large home base monitor

and the winner is...

A MacBook with 4 GB RAM and 250 HD which just so happens to comes in a nice shade of black!