I don’t usually do fresh installs anymore.  With the advent of Time Machine I usually end up having all of my applications, files, directories, etc there waiting for me after a restore.   This time, however, I had no easy way of doing that as the SSD is not large enough to house all my files.  This gave me the excuse, and opportunity, to clean out the cruft, start with a clean slate and have only those files and programs that I know I’m going to use.

That, of course, got me thinking and considering what programs I would need to download and install.   What programs do I feel are essential?  Thankfully, I found that to be incredibly easy to answer, and decided I would share my list of apps I can’t live without.

1. Dropbox:  Many of the applications I use are able to be kept in sync between my different computers by using Dropbox.  Beyond that, it provides me with a place I can put things and have it appear on all of my machines.  Since I started using it in early January it has become absolutely essential for me.
2. 1password:  Like most people, I find it incredibly difficult to remember many 15+ character passwords.  I found myself greatly sacrificing password integrity and strength, and using the same password everywhere.  Enter 1Password by Agile Web Solutions. Never before has an app made it easier to have large, complex, secure passwords,   but also can help you easily identify which sites of yours are using the same password, and easily help rectify that.   If you use a Mac, you should use 1Password.
3. Things:  Prior to using this beautiful app from Cultured Code I struggled to become, and stay, organized.  I was never able to find anything that clicked quite right with me until my friend Jason recommended I take a look at Things.  I’ve been smitten ever since,   and now entrust Things with nearly everything I have to do.
4. TweetDeck:  For those of you who are big into Twitter, I probably don’t have to explain why TweetDeck is great.  Aside from the fact that it runs on Adobe Air (a sin I can forgive it), it looks fantastic, works fantastic and just plain is fantastic – it makes managing Twitter a lot easier.
5. Kindle for Mac:  We all need down time, and this allows me to read my books from the kindle store on my mac over lunch.   Stays in sync with my Kindle, and my iPhone,   pretty damn awesome.
6. CoRD:  If you find yourself having to do remote desktop sessions into Windows machines often then you can benefit from CoRD.   The main benefit I see over Microsofts RDP client is that this makes it easy to “save” servers with the appropriate settings so that you just click a server and are logged in.
7. Alfred: This app launcher is still in beta but has performed incredibly well for me over the past few weeks.  Faster than quicksilver ever was and just seems to… work.   Added ability to initiate several web functions (wikipedia / google searches, etc) make it just a little bit more useful without adding in an intrusive amount of clutter.
8. Adium:   This is, by far, the best IM client I’ve ever used.   My only complaint is that its not available on Windows/Linux.    If you have a mac and use IM with any frequency,  you owe it to yourself to try Adium.

There are other programs that I use, naturally, but these are the apps that are my go-to apps for any Mac that I own.  I like Safari, so generally don’t NEED to have another browser (until Chrome is more stable I’ll stick with Safari),  I use Feedly in my browser for RSS and Apple’s Mail.app for email.  These 8, though, are guaranteed to be on any Mac I own.

There are, however, ways you can securely delete files from your computer.  These tools will overwrite the space on the hard drive where the file resided,  usually 7 or more times (and often the number of passes is configurable).  This morning my boss brought to my attention the fact that one such utility is available by default on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).   The command, srm, is used via the command line and will securely remove your files.

David (my boss) helpfully created an automator workflow, however, which when saved as a service on your machine will add an option to the right-click context menu in Finder that allows you to securely delete the file.

I – being in a sharing mood – have shared this automator workflow HERE for your enjoyment.

A few notes:   In the actual shell command – pay attention to the switches after srm.  Specifically, you may want to change the s in “-rsf” to an m ( so -rmf).  The s will do a single pass at overwriting the file, while m will do a full 7 passes.

This is provided as-is, though I will answer any questions I’m able to.   As always – use at your own risk, if it breaks your stuff that’s not my fault.

Special thanks to David Meade for providing the automator workflow.

[Update:  I forgot to mention that you can also securely delete files by moving them to your trash folder, and selecting "Secure Empty Trash" from the finder menu...]

[Update 2:  A friend of mine has pointed out that you can set it up so that Finder uses srm to securely empty the trash by default, to do this go the the Finder menu -> preferences -> advanced, and check the box for Empty Trash securely. Enjoy]

Since then, though, I’ve found that paying a little extra for some peace of mind is not a bad thing at all.   IF a component fails,  they’ll fix it for free.  I’m paying for the insurance that should something go wrong, I will be able to easily get it fixed.

My most recent experience with Applecare was regarding the laptop I’m writing this post on – an early (January) 2007 Macbook Pro.  I had managed to completely burn out not one, but TWO batteries with it.  This happened several months ago.  For some reason I had thought my Applecare was already expired so never bothered to take it in.  A few weeks ago though I realized it had not expired, so I made an appointment at the genius bar and took it in.   The genius looked at it and verified that both batteries were showing a maximum possible charge of 0, meaning they wouldn’t even hold a charge at all.   Since both batteries were so severely damaged (one of them having only gone through a dozen or so charge cycles) he offered to replace BOTH batteries.    So, in my case, Applecare was able to cover not just the original equipment – but also a battery that I bought a year and a half after I bought my Macbook Pro.   Nice.   The batteries aren’t cheap either,  so I’m definitely happy about how it all worked out.

I’m happy to report that both batteries are performing very well,   and the end result has been that I use this computer a lot more since I’m not tethered to a wall.

I’m sure there are those who don’t feel Applecare is worthwhile,  and don’t see a need for an extended warranty.   That’s fine, that’s your choice.   I’ve gotten it on each of my macs so far,  and each time I’ve been glad I did.

The reason for that is simple: for MOST things, and MOST people, Apple’s products just work.  And, when it doesn’t just work, it’s usually fairly easy to GET it to work.  It’s NOT perfect, and I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes it can be downright annoying when it doesn’t work. Overall, though, I find myself a whole lot less frustrated with Apple computers than I do PCs.

Apple just released late last week their latest upgrade to their venerable OS X lineup – OS X 10.6: Snow Leopard.  Many of the most important changes to the OS are under the hood and not easily seen by the average user, but will most definitely add significant performance improvements moving forward. There were a couple of things that were changed that had me excited – the most important of them being native support for Microsoft Exchange.

Like it or hate it, Exchange is a mainstay in the business world. In an effort to make Mac’s more business friendly, Apple has cleverly added in support for it into Mail, iCal, and Address Book.  Using Exchange Web Services (what we all assume will eventually replace MAPI, which Microsoft has indicated is now deprecated), these apps are able to provide a fairly good replacement for Microsoft’s own Entourage (which, up until VERY recently has not supported EWS).

I was excited to see it in action, and on Monday when I finally got a copy at work I excitedly installed it and – with the giddiness of a kid on christmas morning – I fired up Mail and created my Exchange account. And it just… worked. Mostly.

The accounts created just fine for Mail, iCal and Address Book. I could send and receive mail, I could look up Exchange users in Address Book, and I could see my calendar items show up properly in iCal.

A buddy of mine set out to test whether or not the meeting invite functionality worked as expected, and he sent me some meeting invites which I saw in Mail and accepted, and they showed up on my calendar.  The same functionality is available within iCal as well, and works well.  Then I ran into the one problem: I could not create iCal invites.

The following Screen popped up telling me that “iCal can’t save the event “New Event” to the exchange server.”

After searching online and finding practically nothing regarding this, I decided to look through Console and see if I could see any errors when I would try creating a meeting.  Sure enough, there were:

9/2/09 11:38:15 AM iCal[1299] -[EWSTimeZoneType:0x114d241d0 initWithStandardTimeZoneName:] TimeZone for US/East-Indiana is nil

9/2/09 11:39:28 AM iCal[1299] error = Error Domain=CalExchangeErrorDomain Code=-4 UserInfo=0x116217bd0 “iCal can’t save the event ‘New Event’ to the Exchange server.”

I remembered seeing in the Advanced tab of the iCal preferences an option to enable time zone support – so I went and made sure that was enabled. I thought perhaps, given the messages iCal was putting in Console, this was a timezone issue.  I checked the timezone settings in iCal to find it set to just Eastern Time, and didn’t seem to be set to use Eastern Time with Indianapolis as my closest city, so I configured it correctly in iCal.  I checked my system’s timezone settings and they too were not set (something in the upgrade must have changed this, as they were set before the upgrade), so I set those too.

After making these two changes I’ve been able to send meeting invites without any problems.  Now all is right in the world.

The Exchange support is pretty darn cool. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t offer feature parity with the likes of Outlook, but it’s not meant to. It certainly performs snappier and has a cleaner interface than Entourage. Plus – it’s just darn cool to get an Operating System (for $50 for a 5 machine license) that has native, out of the box, support for Exchange.

Now – to be fair and open and honest – to use these features you MUST be running Exchange 2007, WITH service pack 1 and security rollup 4 (or greater). It WILL NOT work with earlier versions – so don’t get it and get mad when it doesn’t work because you don’t have the right version of Exchange.

0:: [2008/01/13 17:33:02.224] -[SSyncEngine(private) _generateSyncJobs]: failed with exception “-[SSyncEngine(private) _generatePackageSubjobsWithWinner:loserStates:] (SyncEngine.m:1206): “‘((state.isAddJob))’”"

Obviously there was an error, but the messages in the logs were very much less than helpful. They were downright cryptic! After many hours putzing around trying to find a clue on the ‘Net as to what MIGHT be causing it, I noticed a directory in my home directory on my local machine called .FileSync. I remembered a while back a solution to a weird problem I had (completely unrelated) with shutting down my computer, it was to remove a directory and let it be re-created. So, since nothing ELSE was working for me, I decided to try removing that directory ( i made a backup copy of it first). As soon as I initiated a manual sync after removing that directory it fired through, found a ton of conflicts ( I told it to keep the versions found on my local machine over those on the server), and then it started syncing just fine. I’m still not entirely sure WHAT caused the problem in the first place, one day it was working the next it wasn’t. It could have been something I inadvertently did wrong (and I suspect I botched a conflict resolution somewhere along the line and caused problems) or it could just be the manifestation of a bug. Who knows. At least I know a trick to try should something like this happen again.

Really the rest of it was pretty easy.   After Leopard finished installing I created an account and did all the normal things you would need to do.   Once I was logged in I went to the Directory Utility to bind to my Open Directory server.  It’s really easy to do that,   just open directory utility (it’s in the utilities folder in your applications directory), and click the + at the bottom left of the screen.    It defaults to open directory so all you should need to do is put the server info here, either as a fqdn or ip address.   Once you’ve filled that out and submitted it,  your machine will try connecting to the server and checking that it’s all OK.  This is pretty fast,   and when done should display the server in the server list and say that it’s communicating properly.   Once you’ve completed that you can move on to the next step – logging in and setting up the mobile home directory.

It’s pretty easy – and most of it takes place on the server itself.   In workgroup manager.   Select the user you want to set this up for (there may be a way to do this globally, but I didn’t bother trying to figure out how),  then select preferences.   The one you are looking for is Mobility,   and you can set it up to your liking, but you want to create a mobile account and allow for mobile home directories.

Once all that was all set up (actually I already had that set up before i started the project)  all I needed to do was log in on the MBP.   When I logged in it asked me if I wanted to create a mobile account on the machine, with the mobile home directory.  I said yes, and it immediately started syncing the home directory on the macbook with the one I had created on the server.   I left it to do that, knowing it would be at least an hour before it was finished (as a note, you should be connected to ethernet when doing this, preferably on gigabit if you can manage that – there is a LOT of data to move here).   About an hour later the sync had finished and I was logged in.  Everything seemed to be working just fine.   I fired up iTunes to be sure my music library made the transition and was pleasantly surprised to find that it had.   I did have to authorize it to play purchased music on the computer (due to the reinstall of leopard), but that was expected.

I downloaded the apps I use regularly (adium,  visualhub, twitterific, etc) and was happy to note that once installed they picked up their preferences and settings as they had been before – that much less I had to do since I didn’t need to set up my apps how I like them.

I’ve not yet tried iPhoto,    I’m waiting on my iLife ’08 install media to arrive ( should be here tomorrow morning) so I can install it.     I’m confident, though, that it made it alright.  The only real hiccup I could see happening there is permissions, but that was taken care of by Sync, which set the permissions on the server during the sync process.  Very nice.

Overall – Mission Successful.
The general rundown of the process I took is thus:

1. create account on the open directory server and set up mobility settings , etc.
2. create admin account on my macbook pro
3. log in to admin account on macbook pro,  download and install synk
4. connect to the open directory server so I can access my users home directory, log in as the user account created in step 1
5. Using Synk , and running it as root,   selected the home directory I wanted to move to the server as the source,   and selected the home directory on the server as the destination.    run synk.
6. Once Synk has finished,  do a fresh install of Leopard on the macbook pro
7. Once the install is finished, bind to the open directory server.
8. Log into the macbook pro as the user created in step 1, and when prompted select to create the mobile account.
9. profit!

The process, while a little nerve wracking,  was actually pretty easy to do.    I owe my friend a big thanks for his thoughts and suggestions on a method to try,    it worked out well!

As always,  if you try this on your own don’t hold me responsible if things don’t work for you – be sure you have a backup (preferably a FULL backup) of your mac before you try this, if something fails you’re going to wish you had it.   I will try to provide hints or suggestions if you find yourself stuck, but don’t expect miracles

Enjoy

[tags] Apple, Open Directory,  OS X Leopard Server,  OS X Server, Leopard Server, Portable Home Directory, Mobile Home Directory [ /tags]

Ever since getting the server and playing around with Leopard server I’ve fallen in love, so to speak (no Ann, you don’t have competition). I’ve found that tasks that would take a long time in Linux take a matter of minutes in OS X Server. Administration is really a breeze in most cases – IF you know what you’re doing and are able to do a little self help. Apple’s website has a veritable treasure trove of guides and documents explaining the finer details of the various services available in Leopard server, as well as how to get them up and running. All you have to do is read.

My friend, who is very skilled at running Apple servers, helped me get everything set up to use my xserve as my gateway, and to get open directory set up (and using kerberos nontheless) . Using open directory and Samba, both of which come standard as part of OS X Server, I was easily able to set up network user accounts and home directories that are able to be used on both windows and mac clients on my network. While that was nice, there was ONE thing really holding me back from taking advantage of all that – my macbook pro. I’d been using my macbook pro as my main computer for quite a while now, since I got it really. All of my music, all of my photos, all of my documents were located in my user account there. How, then, could I get that data and put it into my open directory account?

I struggled for a while to find a method that would enable me to do it, and finally broke down and asked my friend for his help again. He preambled that I should only try this if I have backups – something time machine has thankfully made available to me (and something I’ve been taking advantage of for several months now). He then suggested creating a new admin account on my macbook, then using some software called Synk to sync what’s in my main user home directory to the home directory on the xserve. So that’s exactly what I did. After that it’s a matter of setting up in workgroup manager to allow the home directory to be a “mobile home directory” meaning a copy of it exists on both machines, and are synced between them in the background.

So, Synk seemed to work just fine. It took a good long while (~1.5 hours) to sync all of my data to the server, and that’s over gigabit ethernet. After it completed I logged into my network account from my powerbook – all of my files and folders were there, my itunes library worked just like it had on my macbook, iPhoto SEEMS to be ok, though i wasn’t able to open it (the version on my powerbook is older than the version on my macbook, and informed me it couldn’t open the library until I upgraded it – so at least it SAW the library and noted it was a newer version).

The next step of the puzzle, for me anyway, is to repave the macbook with a fresh install of Leopard. That’s happening as I write this. Once I’ve completed the install I have to join the macbook to the open directory server, which takes all of 1 minute, and log in with my network account. It should ask me if I want to enable mobile home directory for that account on that machine, and once I say yes, begin the long process of syncing all of my data back to my macbook.

With THIS setup I’ll always have my data available, regardless of which machine I choose to log into.

I will post tomorrow about the success or failure of the process. Should it fail not all is lost, my time machine setup should enable me to restore everything to it’s initial state without much trouble should something go wrong. Having a safety net is the ONLY way to go with things like this.

Hopefully tomorrow brings good news

[tags] OS X, Leopard Server, Open Directory, Apple, XServe [/tags]

A quick google search showed that this isn’t an isolated issue, but rather one that – while not necessarily widespread – is certainly more common than I would have anticipated.

This strikes me as rather ironic – the hardware and software in both my parents house in florida and my house in Indy are all apple.   They have an AEBS and an iMac,   I have (two) AEBS and a macbook.   Even using a 100% apple solution this kind of problem still occurs?    It happened way too often to be a fluke,   and it seems that the FLUKE aspect would be when it actually DOES work.

Both computers involved were updated with the latest patches,    and the AEBS on both ends has the latest firmware.      It doesn’t appear to have effected my Dads AEBS, as he didn’t have it reset – just mine.

Anybody else have any issues like this?   If so,  were you able to resolve it?    What did you do to fix it?

Once we got things to work it was neat as hell to be able to talk to my dad and see him too, and then control his screen and SHOW him (while still talking to him) what I was talking about.   It made troubleshooting an incredibly easy process.    If I could get this to work reliably it would be phenomenal.

I do have a second AEBS that I am going to try to swap out to be primary – perhaps this one won’t suffer from this “glitch”?

[tags] iChat Video,   Airport Extreme Base Station,  Airport Extreme Base Station Crash,   iChat Video crash [/tags]

media device: failed to create a lockfile on device /media/bazzle

Yes, I named my iPod  “bazzle”.    Regardless, I had a conundrum.  While I could READ the files on the iPod, I could not yet write to it, which was a major part of what I was trying to accomplish.   After a few quick searches I finally figured out what the issue was:  The filesystem on the iPod.    Since I’ve used my iPods only with Macs they were both formatted with the HFS+ filesystem.   By default journaling is enabled on the HFS+ filesystem – unfortunately the Linux HFS+ driver can’t write to journaled volumes.    The solution is pretty easy, actually:  Turn off journaling.     This can be accomplished by hooking the iPod back up to a mac and issuing a single command via the terminal:

diskutil disableJournal /dev/<diskidentifier>

In this command, <diskidentifier> is the identifier assigned to the ipod.  You can determine what yours is by issuing the command “diskutil list” on your mac with your ipod plugged in.    Mine was disk2s3, making the full command for me “diskutil disableJournal /dev/disk2s3″.

Note that for this to work, your ipod has to be mounted.  I had a bit of trouble getting this to happen until I enabled disk mode via iTunes.   To do this just select your ipod from the sidebar in iTunes and on that initial page that has info on your iPod select the “enable disk mode” option.    The iPod will then be mounted as a disk.

Once I issued that command it told me journaling was disabled,   I ejected it from my mac and took it back over to my linux machine and plugged it in.    It worked without any problems and I am now able to move music and playlists onto the iPod as easily as I could on my mac.

This is an issue likely to crop up for anyone who has a mac formatted iPod,   but is also incredibly easy to resolve.   Using an iPod in Linux without iTunes is not only possible, it’s downright simple.

[tags] Apple, iPod, Ubuntu, Amarok,  iPod in Ubuntu,  HFS+ Journaling [/tags]

It caused me to think for a while about what it was suggesting.    First it was suggesting that iTunes + iPod is a monopoly because in order to sync to the iPod you have to use iTunes.   Same for the iPhone.    Ignoring for a second the small fact that the author is wrong (I am able to sync to and use my iPod in Ubuntu Linux – for which iTunes is not even available – out of the box with no hacking ),   why would this constitute a monopoly?    He likens it to when Microsoft was getting in trouble for abusing monopoly power by bundling IE with Windows.   The problem there is that he’s comparing apples to oranges.   itunes + ipod is nowhere NEAR IE + INTERNET,    why Microsoft got in trouble was because they were bundling their browser with their OS (in fact, making it an integral part of their OS so that you coudln’t even REMOVE IE ) and trying to abuse their market share in such a way as to make using IE the only viable way to surf the ‘net.    In short, they were abusing their monopoly on the desktop computer OS market to further their own agenda and prevent competitors from gaining a hold.    iTunes + iPod doesn’t really do that.    For starters, there are plenty of other alternative media players out there – and every one of them has specialized software to sync them – and in most cases a music store to use.    Look at the Zune and the Zune marketplace, for instance.   What Apple has done is not uncommon,  and in actuality is common practice.

Where the author DOES have some interesting points is that, should you in the future want to switch to a different media device other than iPod you won’t be able to play music purchased from iTunes on it.    He’s right, of course, and while there are ways around that problem (burning to cd and then ripping ) they are time consuming and SHOULDN’T have to be done.   He does, unfortunately, blame Apple for this limitation – unfairly.   The reason one can’t transfer the music to other devices is a little thing called DRM (Digital Rights Management) that is mandated by the RIAA.    Because the music has  to be encrypted with DRM it can’t be played on players that don’t understand the encryption.    iPods are the only ones that understand the iTunes drm encryption.

Apple has stated openly that it’d be more than happy to sell songs DRM free,    and in fact all of the music available from EMI on iTunes can be purchased DRM free.    If you want to get rid of the ridiculous restrictions DRM imposes on you then you should take your fight to the RIAA – not Apple.

Some have complained about the lack of ability to upload ring tones to the iPhone.    Apple recently added the capability of ringtones to iTunes.    You can now BUY ringtones there.   Even as an Apple fanboy (it’s true, I am one, and I can admit it) I don’t really like the way they implemented it.    That’s not to say I blame Apple for that, though.

To get a ringtone from iTunes, you have to select one of the 500,000 tracks available for ringtones.    You have to buy both the actual full song , likely 99 cents,    then the ringtone for an additional 99 cents.    Personally, I feel that if I want to make a ringtone out of a song I PURCHASED, I should be able to do so without having to pay more money (after all, you’re basically paying the same price you paid for the full song , for the privilege of playing 30 seconds of it when someone calls you).   I don’t blame Apple for this,   as I realize that it’s this way because the record companies want it to be.

It’s easy to look at these things and blame Apple – after all they do own the iTunes store.    Unfortunately,  while they ARE the leaders in online music distribution – they are still bound by terms set by the big music companies.

I like iTunes.    It handles my media very well and makes it easy for me to do a lot of things.   I’m NOT a fan of DRM,  though,  and that certainly sours some of my experience with iTunes.   I don’t blame Apple, though.