Mac

A while back I wrote about advertising Linux services via Avahi/Bonjour. Since then I’ve made a few changes to my setup.

First, I nixed netatalk for direct AFP support. My primary reason for using it was to gain a more Mac-like network filesystem which would make Time Machine happier. Well, Time Machine uses a sparse bundle disk image on it’s target; after learning about that, using AFP seemed a bit unnecessary. Also, Samba CIFS/SMB seemed to perform better. I don’t have solid benchmarks for this, but simple file copies seemed to be consistenly faster with Samba. One of the biggest annoyances about netatalk was all the extra hidden files and folders it created. I run a hybrid network, I have more Mac machines, but also Windows, plus I browse file systems on the command line quite often; and those excess files pushed me over the edge.

Second, I nixed Time Machine. Just when I thought everything was working perfectly, it completely blew up and could no longer access its data store. Not good for a backup solution. I plan to write about my new home backup solution sometime, but it’s basically rsync with a few key points.

I’ve been spending some time getting my son’s blog setup. In doing so, I discovered that as of WordPress 2.5, there is built-in [ gallery ] functionality.  Though it isn’t full featured, it’s pretty nice, and perfectly integrated with WordPress, since, well, it IS WordPress.

Currently the process to put photos into a gallery is:

1. Choose photos in iPhoto
2. Export chosen files to disk
3. Create new WordPress post
4. Add media via WordPress uploader

This isn’t too bad, especially for a geek who’s used to lots of arcane workarounds to accomplish simple goals. But… for my wife or others who don’t want the hassle, this is basically annoying.

I had this error popup today on my Mac OS X Lepopard 10.5.4 machine.

This is not cool as, well, I NEED MY VPN TO WORK!

Thankfully google came to my rescue. The solution is to execute the following in Terminal:

sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

Thanks for the answer, VirtuallyShocking.com.

I just stumbled onto the coolest little app for Mac. Plainview is a web browser based on WebKit (also the guts of the Safari browser). What’s unique is it’s intended to NOT have chrome (the name for all tose fancy navigation bars, address text boxes, menus etc). It’s slim… so slim the chrome is non-existent. This is a full-screen mode web browser, intended to utilize the full screen real estate for presentations! Essentially, instead of having to take screenshots of websites and put them into power point or something, you can just demo the site. It’s awesome… and i’m not even explaining it as well as they did… but I am tired. 🙂

I’m not really a Microsoft fan, nor do I consider myself a Microsoft hater. I generally like Linux and free Open Source software, and as a network and software engineer type I really like the power and flexibility of Unix-like operating systems. I made the switch to Mac because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and if I would benefit from a “Unix like system that just works.” Though there were a few bumps in the road, I’m pretty happy overall. Sometime maybe I’ll post about my Mac experience and thoughts in a broader sense.