Driver Baloney

Apple moved to CUPS (common unix printing system) for Panther. That’s all well and good, but in order to do so, they blotted out currently installed vendor drivers. That might have been all well and good, but some of the CUPS drivers aren’t as capable as the commercial versions. Which meant that Amy’s color Epson no longer had a gamma control, and no longer had an option to use black ink only.

Panther means nothing to Amy. She doesn’t care about a new Finder, doesn’t care about Expose, or any of the other “150 new features.” Things were fine in Jaguar, and now her printer was broken, while she was in the middle of a long-term printing project.

Operating system upgrades should add features not remove them. Apple could at least give you the option of using one driver or the other. Fortunately, I discovered that the old drivers do still work, but you have to remove the CUPS driver first. Here’s what I did:

Go into /Library/Printers/Epson and find SP890.plugin.
Ctrl-click | Make Archive to create a zipped version.
Delete the plugin.
Reinstall Epson’s downloadable driver.
Restart.

Back in business, but what a crock.

Music: Soul Sauce :: Cal Tjader

Panther Notes

I’ll skip the detailed Panther observations — plenty of excellent overviews and reviews out there. A few scattered notes after working with it for a few days:

– Move over sliced bread – Expose’ is even cooler.

– Finally, Cmd-Tab works exactly like Windows Alt-Tab, not just kinda.

– Everything is snappier. Boots faster. Probably a result of the fact that journaling is now on by default.

– The new Finder took a bit of getting used to, but I’m down with it. Glad it’s finally switched from aqua to metal. The layout is great, and improves with tweaking. But I have no idea what they’re thinking with network vols accessed via browse not mounting on the desktop (they still do when accessed via Connect to Server). Inconsistent, weird, not helpful. There must have been some logic there, but I’m not sure what it is. And I still can’t get links to network vols to work across boots without breaking, so I still have to mount shares manually after each boot. Not sure what I expected when they bragged about improved networking. There’s more compatibility, but less usability. Feh. I’ll live.

– Something no one seems to mention in reviews is the addition of a “Create Archive” option on context menus – zip anything in place, no need for 3rd party stuff. I’ve missed this from BeOS.

– Open/Save panels are just dynamite now. Switching today between Mac and PC, doing a task that required a lot of open/save operations, and the difference was almost painful.

– Dedicated panel for keyboard shortcuts. Set any shortcut for any system-wide or application specific action. A world of possibilities here.

A lot of cool stuff I’ll seldom use, but will be glad for when I need them: Built-in faxing. Fast user switching (apps aren’t quit when logging out); cool rotating cube effect while switching users. Color labels in the Finder. iChat AV (still gotta clear time to play with that one).

All told, totally worth it.

Music: The Mekons :: Poxy Lips

rsync backup

Working on new backup systems based on the tremendously flexible rsync, which ships with OS X and Server. Clever details here on utilizing hard links for incremental backups. The trick is shifting gears between contexts all the time; nose buried in man pages one moment, then helping a student discover the magic of File | Open (no kidding) the next, then lugging projectors and plugging in cables ten minutes later. Such a schizo job. Seldom build enough momentum to really sync into a task.

Music: Marvin Pontiac :: Wanna wanna

iTunes Collection Plate

The problem isn’t downloading, it’s making sure the artists get paid. The EFF has produced a swell silent short to illustrate the point (and to solicitate your support).

Speaking of making sure the artist gets paid… iTunes for Windows is out (Apple’s homepage read “Hell Froze Over” and introduced “The best Windows app ever”).

At work I use an OS X (primary) and Win2K machines side by side. Installed the Win version of iTunes and was impressed at how the two mirrored each other pretty much feature-for-feature. The Rendezvous sharing is awesome – enable music sharing on the Mac and the Win machine sees and plays the entire library and all playlists.

Of course the only reason Apple does this is the runaway financial success of the iTunes Music Store, which is now available to a vastly larger audience. For a while, the sexy integration of iPod and iTunes was the draw so compelling people would supposedly quit Windows for the Mac. Then it was the draw of the amazing music store. Suddenly the strategy changes – people aren’t going to come to church, so why not bring the collection plate to their doorsteps?

Music: Cocteau Twins :: Little Spacey

Curious George at the Apple Store

The repair permissions trick ultimately didn’t work (I knew it wouldn’t), so back to the Apple Store to drop off the box for repair. Irks me no end that Apple will not give you a SuperDrive to install yourself. Ten minutes and problem could be solved, but no, they want the whole machine, want to ship it to Infinite Loop or wherever their repair monkeys live, and ship it back. I can appreciate that they want to “control the experience,” top to bottom, reduce injection of foreign objects into the hardware, but shoot, I’d be willing to sign a waiver. It’s both insulting and a waste of time.

Anyway. Took Miles with me. When he was there a week ago, we showed him the Curious George game on one of the eMacs, and he seemed to enjoy, even though he’s too young even for the preschool levels. This time he started pointing and grunting as soon as we got in the store. Persisted until I put him down. He ran across the store and plopped himself down in front of Curious George. Started whacking at the keyboard, smiling ear to ear, squealing. Uh-oh.

And I’m computerless for a week, stealing time on Amy’s machine after hours.

Fix It Right The First Time

Sometimes things work, but are neverthelesss not the right solution. This is a philosophical problem of approach to problem solving that has come up repeatedly at work over the past few weeks. Group A wants to do things the most effective way. Wants solutions. Now. Likes to do a lot with a little. Likes simpler solutions. Likes not putting energy where it will be wasted. Group B wants to do things the right way. Never mind the cost. Straight to the top. All the time, no matter what. Assumes that amount of money spent always equates to amount of quality in the solution. There’s a lot to be said for that, but note that Group B even has trouble believing that open source / free software products can be high quality too.

One might think that questions of technology have right answers, but in the end, neither approach is necessarily more correct. One is more idealistic, one more realistic. One is only more right than the other depending on assumptions, contexts, budgets (time and money), immediacy, difficulty, etc.

Results count too. Related but unrelated: My SuperDrive has been failing intermittently — not recognizing CDs in iTunes. Burning coasters or having buffer underruns. Finally took machine in to the Apple store. I have AppleCare, but they won’t replace the drive until they’ve tried alt.solutions in the store. One of the Apple Geniuses recommended running Repair Permissions from Disk Utility. This made no intuitive sense to me — it’s an intermittent failure, how can perms on a kernel extension make the difference? (Note: You must boot from CD or external FW if you want Repair Permissions to be fully effective – some perms must be skipped on the boot drive).

And yet… we repaired permissions and sure enough, a test disc I brought that previously would not mount now mounted, and we were able to burn a test CD. Freaky deaky. And yet… something inside me told me this was not the right solution, that there was some fluke involved. Sure enough, days later I’m experiencing the same difficulties and need to bring the box back for a drive replacement. Ultimately, they wasted my time and theirs with a “solution” that I knew was not the correct solution and now I have to go spend more of my time and theirs to get it done right for reals.

Music: Link Wray :: Rumble

Rush Mac Whammy

Poor, poor Rush. First the flap over possibly racist remarks that resulted in his resigning from ESPN. Then it turns out he’s been investigated for involvement in a drug ring from which he may have been purchasing oxycontin in massive quantities.

Now I learn that Rush is a huge Mac fan. And he’s been begging Apple to let him do a Switch ad for them. And that Apple hasn’t gone for it, presumably because Jobs’ and Limbaugh’s politics don’t mesh. Quel surprise. Now he’s telling listeners that Apple’s marketshare is stagnant despite their superior products because Jobs is too obstinate to let Limbaugh buoy their sales with his fame.

The episode did make me wonder: Why is it surprising to learn that Limbaugh is a Mac fan? I guess it’s because most Mac users are pretty liberal. I had never really thought about it, but there seems to be a distinct leftist political leaning that accompanies Mac use, and I’m not sure what to make of that. Theories?

Music: The Specials :: International Jet Set

Under the Radar

MacObserver studied McAfee and Virex virus data, and found that “out of about 71,000 viruses, only 579 were for Macs, all but 26 of those were MS Word & Excel macro viruses, and none affected OS X.” Is this phenomenon strictly related to the size of the installed base, or inherent to security infrastructure on either platform? Jason Deraleau at O’Reilly says Size Doesn’t Matter.

I’m not sure the question is easily answerable, but in the end, Mac users fly under the radar. Though we do still have to deal with inboxes flooded by sobig and friends.

Music: Modest Mouse :: Life Like Weeds

iPhoto’s Lame-Oh Randomizer

   

Shot over 300 images over the Minnesota vacation, then whittled down to 120. The Achilles’ heel of digital photography is that there’s no risk/no expense, which encourages you to shoot five variants of everything, rather than one well-conceived shot. Nobody has any time, so the collections never get edited properly and you end up with mountains of superfluous bits to surf through in the future. With analog, each shot costs (financially, environmentally), so the image is conceived in the mind before being committed to film. Analog images are somehow less disposable.

It’s kind of like the difference between composing at the typewriter vs. the word processor (I wrote most of my college papers with a typewriter, only started using the UCSC mainframe during my senior year). When typing, mistakes are costly. So you roll your eyes, lick your lip, scratch your head, and conceive an entire paragraph mentally before committing to paper. Work from an outline so the pages come out in the right order. With word processing, you enter the process of infinite revision, spray your thoughts all over the page and let god sort ’em out (or do it yourself). Thoughts are more malleable with a word processor.

Anyway. Discovered last night that if you set iPhoto‘s slide show feature to randomize the images in an album, you’ll start seeing the same images over again very quickly.

– Displayed images are not dropped from the random queue
– The algorithm clearly favors some images, skipping others

Above: Miles at 11 months on the shores of Gull Lake, MN. Cousin Roya with famous goofy elastic mug.

Music: Etta James :: A Sunday Kind of Love