Dave's PowerBook Notes

[Image of a 17'' PowerBook]

NOTE: This page is quite out of date, no longer maintained, and unsupported.

It was suggested to me byLuis that I write up a piece on my experiences with my Powerbook (something like his Clié Journal). I splurged and got the 17 inch model. This journal probably won't be as insightful as Luis', but someone might find it useful (and it'll help me remember things as I tend to be absent minded).

Yes, I know that the page doesn't look the greatest. I'll work on the HTML / CSS / display later. Markup code fixing is now a work-in-progress. The look of the page will change as time goes on. (Hopefully for the better.)

For the most recent entries, go to the bottom.

Table of Contents

Inspiration comes from the act of writing.
— Steven Dunn

Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe
the history of the computer industry for the past decade
as a massive effort to keep up with Apple.
— Bruce Murphy, Byte Magazine (Dec. 1994)

First Week

Fri Oct 24 23:59:59 EDT 2003

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
— Ken Olson, President, Chairman and Founder
of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

I purchased the Powerbook on 17 October 2003 from Computer Systems Centre. I dealt with a salesamn named Jamie (who said he was very happy that he answered my call). I also picked up the purchased the three year AppleCare warranty (IMHO it would be very foolish not to get it for a purchase such as this).

Those who do not understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.
— Henry Spencer, Usenet signature, November 1987

[Apple's UNIX-based Logo] I've been thinking of buy an Apple for about a year now and finally decided to take the plunge. One major reason was OS X. As can be seen on my résumé I am very much a Unix person. As everyone has probably heard by now OS X is based on FreeBSD and Mach. Having acces to the CLI is a safety blanket for me. I must admit that Aqua is quite good and I don't mind using it. On my FreeBSD tower I use FVWM with a web browser (Firebird), Emacs, and a whole bunch of xterms.

In “preparation” for the purchase I started following many Apple and Mac sites on the web:

In addition to these, I ended up adding several weblogs to my daily reading list where the author used an Apple machine:

I guess that's enough name-dropping (for now).

If you're into Usenet, you may want to checkout comp.sys.mac.system (or at Groups.Google).

I'll let other people take pictures of opening the box up. I don't have a digital camera (yet?), and can no longer afford to buy one since I purchased the PowerBook.

General observation: the battery only lasts about two hours when I'm using it for general, non-heavy use. When it's hibernating (asleep?) I tend to lose 10% of battery charge per day (varies depending on how many programs are in memory when I shut the lid). When I open the lid I can start using the system within several (< 5) seconds. Luis is impressed by this fact. I can't tell how good this is since I can't even hibernate my work laptop (a Toshiba) because Windows XP won't allow it because of a graphics driver issue. (Yes, I am using the latest driver).

Things are very well thought out and I like the Aqua interface. It does not get in your way and I do not feel that things are clutter, something that Tom Yager also noticed:

What surprised me is that as I opened each of the windows I planned to use, I didn't feel the need to close others to keep things “clean.” It isn't a question of real estate or performance or capacity. It's subjective, and I haven't found a way to explain it to myself much less express it here.

It came installed with OS X 10.2.6 installed and I've ordered Panther (10.3). There are a whole slew of new features to look forward to. One reason I'm writing this page is so that my I do re-install, I'll know what things I did and I'll have all the links to the software and adjustments I made to get things where I want them.

[IEEE 802.11 Logo] Networking works quite well, with a minimal of fuss. I set things up with the built-in Ethernet at first because I couldn't get 802.11b (do not have a 11g router) working. I later got WLAN working when I remembered I do MAC filtering on my LinkSys: once I added the AirPort's MAC, things worked. (Yes, I am overly paranoid.)

 

 

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds,
their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels,
beneath the dust of habit.
 — Salman Rushdie

DHCP also worked when I hooked it up to the EE network (Luis was kind enough to setup DHCP for my laptop on the departmental DHCP server). It will be called gandalf on the EE network (and in general). The reason for this is that I have a PII-300 laptop called pilgrim that I purchased for my thesis. One of Gandalf's names in The Lord of the Rings is the “Grey Pilgrim”, and since the PB is silver / grey, and can roam about, it seemed appropriate.

The software I've installed so far:

Second Week

Sat Oct 25 12:53:55 EDT 2003

[Gnus & Emacs Logo] TerryP from the #emacs channel suggested I try using M-x clipboard-kill-region which worked for cutting the region from Emacs to OS X's clipboard. I will probably compile a native version from the CVS. I'm currently messing around with IRC with the Mac OS client Ircle. It was suggested on the #emacs channel that I try ERC out. Maybe when I get Emacs itself working the way I like it on the local box (and not through Apple's X11 suport (which is pretty good)).

I'm finding the touchpad overly sensitive even though I selected the “Ignore accidental trackpad input” button in System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Trackpad. I still haven't hooked up a mouse to the system since the touchpad is a decent interface. That said, it is getting very annoying when I'm typing something and all of a suddent the mouse jumps and selects some text. Something to be investiaged. There is no “sensitivity” setting that I'm aware of. I may get a regular USB mouse (with a scroll wheel), but since the laptop has Bluetooth that's another idea. Battery life may or may not be an issue on the mouse, but I do have a charger for the batteries for my Visor, so I could just get rechargeable batteries.

Sat Oct 25 14:31:31 EDT 2003

I'm attempting to compile a new version of Emacs. The binary that I download came in a .pkg file, and I used OSXPM to get rid of it. It's also necessary to install the Apple Developer tools: you need to register to get access to them. There's a 300MB download, and about 1GB of stuff is installed in /Developer. Apple uses GCC as its compiler.

Sat Oct 25 15:21:37 EDT 2003

Recompiling Emacs didn't help. I'll have to hack-up a .emacs file to use the functions TerryP mentioned. More stuff on Dive Into OS X, a Wiki by Mark Pilgrim.

Found a document which lists all the keyboard shortcuts available on OS X.

Mon Oct 27 20:39:38 EST 2003

I found a much better IRC client called Conversation. The main issue I had with Ircle was that if it I set the focus to another program than the window displaying the chat wouldn't scroll. I'm sure there's a way to change that in the settings but it seems to be a pretty silly default. Conversation also “feels” better UI-wise.

I finally got around to tryout out some DVDs. I tried both “ Lawrence of Arabia” and “Léon”, and the picture looked a bit fuzzy. Perhaps the screen is too good for the video data stream?

[DVD Logo] I mentioned this to Luis and he said that when he watched “Wo hu cang lang” (a.k.a, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) it was much sharper. Since I had the “superbit” copy of it I decided to try it out. It was sharper than the other two movies. I guess there is a difference in how different movies are “saved” to DVD. (Which on reflection makes sense: for some movies the directors / producers / studios are willing to put more effort in. Especially if they're more recent releases.)

[Apple X11 Logo] I also just learnt that although I installed Apple's X11, I did not install the X11 SDK (bottom right-hand corner of the page, 4.0 MB download). There's also an update to the developer tools which installs GCC 3.3. I new about this update, but I just forgot to install it. There's a ABI breakage (I think when the version went from 3.1 to 3.2) in C++ binary format: I don't think I've installed too many C++ programs so hopefully it won't be an issue.

Mon Oct 27 22:09:10 EST 2003

Yeah! I compiled a native build of GNU Emacs, got TRAMP working, and have copy and pasting with the standard key-bindings without having to remap anything. I'm actually editing the file by telling Emacs to edit /remote.host.domain:public_html/pb/index.html.

For the record, I needed to set tramp-default-method to sshx, and process-connection-type to nil (found this info out on a mailing list posting). Sshx takes slightly longer than the value of scp that I used on my FreeBSD box, but as long as things work I'm happy (for now). I also setup password-less login through public keys.

Of course now I'm having trouble keeping straight when I should use Control-Y to paste, and when to use Command-V. Oh well, some trade-offs are necessary. (BTW, does anyone know if there's an HTML entitiy code for the “Apple” key? AFAICT, the Apple key is called the “Command” key.)

UPDATE (2003-12-21): Depending on the OS, browser and available fonts it is possible to render this character on a web page. Using Safari or Firebird 0.7.1, I can see the proper glyph between the two double quotes: “⌘”. The Unicode code point is U+2318: that's 2318 hexadecimal, 8984 decimal. The entity you can use is &#8984;. (There's a good introductory article about Unicode at Joel on Software.) It is officially labelled as “PLACE OF INTEREST SIGN”. Of course I can't put an entity in a <KBD> element for some reason.

Tue Oct 28 19:33:12 EST 2003

It seems that Mplayer is available for OS X. I've tried playing an Ogg Vorbis from the “Amelié” soundtrack (which I own the CD of) and it worked fine. I'm thinking of re-ripping my CD collection into FLAC (which is lossless), and then transcoding in lossy formats (Vorbis, MP3) as needed. There's a cool script call abcde which I've played around with and looks quite good. We'll see.

Firebird 0.7.1 was just released so I've installed that as well.

Week Three

Wed Nov 5 18:46:39 EST 2003

[The GIMP Logo] No major changes and/or progress to report. I've installed The GIMP through fink. It behaves the same way as on the FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris. At the same time, I've been playing around with iPhoto. It's quite good for what most people do, which is red-eye reduction, cropping, 'enhancement' and 'retouching' (air-brushing).

Of course this is software for the general public, so no fancy stuff like Gaussian blur in iPhoto, but for the family picnic it should do.

Once you have your pictures the way you want them, you can publish them through “HomePage” or “.Mac Slides” (both through .Mac), order prints through some Kodak service, e-mail them, burn them onto CD-R and DVD-R (through iDVD).

I know Jason used some type of service from Future Shop to print some pictures a while ago and they looked quite good (depending of course on the quality of the original JPEG). I've been to a couple of photogalleries on the .Mac site (e.g., Joi Ito's), and find it annoying that the slideshow always pops up the picture in a new window. I tend to agree with Jakob Nielson on this one:

Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer's carpet. Don't pollute my screen with any more windows, thanks (particularly since current operating systems have miserable window management). If I want a new window, I will open it myself!

Designers open new browser windows on the theory that it keeps users on their site. But even disregarding the user-hostile message implied in taking over the user's machine, the strategy is self-defeating since it disables the Back button which is the normal way users return to previous sites. Users often don't notice that a new window has opened, especially if they are using a small monitor where the windows are maximized to fill up the screen. So a user who tries to return to the origin will be confused by a grayed out Back button. [Emphasis original.]

swiggle looks to be pretty good from what I can tell. It's a quick way to put up decent (nothing special) galleries, and it does not mess around with your original files / data (which is very important in my books). If you hack the code a bit and add a DOCTYPE line at the top the HTML, the W3C Validator service will recognize it as valid HTML 3.2 or HTML 4.01 (depending on the DOCTYPE statement). This is nice if you're into that sort of thing.

In general, I'm mostly waiting for my copy of Panther (OS X 10.3) to arrive. I don't want to migrate all my data once, reformat and then re-copy everything. From what I hear I probably won't have to reformat if I do an “upgrade” install. I'm hoping that it will be more like FreeBSD (which I've been “upgrading” since about 4.1-RELEASE without fail). I also want other people to do the shake-down: as a general guideline I try to avoid “dot zero” releases (x.0). Panther is 10.3.0. I haven't even bothered installing the 10.2.8 update yet because of Apple's earlier mess up (and the fact that none of the security vulnerabilities affect (effect?) me).

Week Four

This week was mostly a write-off as I had a fever / virus / something, and was laid up in bed and didn't feel like writing anything. (Caught up on a lot of reading though.)

Week Five

Sat Nov 15 09:42:35 EST 2003

Since I was in bed most of the time, the laptop and WiFi network were very handy.

Music is a moral law— it gives wings to the mind,
a soul to the universe, flight to the imagination,
a charm to sadness, a life to everything.
— Plato

[Ogg Vorbis Logo] Being in said bed, I wanted to listen to some music. All of my digital music is in the Ogg Vorbis format which iTunes does not support natively (yet?). I found a hint about an extension to iTunes. All you have to do is visit the webpage, download a file, and copy it over to /Library/Quicktime. You're done.

There's another hint about having iTunes encode directly to Ogg Vorbis as well.

OS X also comes with Flash installed by default which works in Safari, Firebird, IE. There's a way to get Flash on FreeBSD (through the ports) but I never bothered with it. The main reason being that, although now I can enjoy things like “Ninjai” and the new animated “Dr. Who”, I now have to put up with all the Flash ads. I don't think the extra aggravation is worth it. As Jakob Nielsen puts it, Flash is 99% bad:

Although multimedia has its role on the Web, current Flash technology tends to discourage usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks with the Web's fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site's core value.

Sat Nov 15 11:43:13 EST 2003

John Wiegley sent me a link on some notes / tips he's made regarding Panther (X.3).

Sun Nov 16 16:21:25 EST 2003

Luis sent me an e-mail regarding an extension for Mozilla Firebird that allows you to block any type of “object” in an HTML page. This is useful for the issue of Flash ads, but only under Firebird. What about Safari? Firebird also has the nice feature of “block image from site x”.

[CSS Logo] Things can be solved in Safari by defining a user CSS. Usually CSSs are only defined in the HTML of the page that you are viewing. However, what Safari (and other browsers, including Mozilla) allow you to do is define your own that will allow you to define how to change your display. So if you have bad eye-sight you could setup high-contrast colours, and large text to always be displayed.

How does this solve the Flash ad problem? Simply put the following in a local style sheet: 

embed [ type="application/x-shockwave-flash"] {
  display: none !important;
  visibility: hidden !important;
}

and it will tell the browser that anything (!) with a MIME type of application/x-shockwave-flash will not be displayed. (This isn't quite true. Even with this entry I can still watch the Dr. Who animation mentioned earlier. This may be related to JavaScript. It works well enough though.)

Of course there are style sheets available that also block general banners as well. So ads from (say) doubleclick.net are blocked, as well as stuff from directories called /banners/ and /ads/.

The advantage is that this is multi-browser solution. In Mozilla you create a file called userContent.css, and use the same file in Safari and Opera. (Don't know about IE.) When you update the contents of one file, all the browswers that you may use will have the new settings.

Week Six

Fri Nov 21 18:12:09 EST 2003

For those who don't know, recent Macs use IEEE 1275 (Open Firmware) as the “BIOS” of the system. 1275 is more commonly known as OpenBoot from Sun Microsystems. There's also an effort for an open-source implementation called OpenBIOS.

I found a PDF document (local copy) which explains the boot process, and how get to the PROM. There's some official documentation from Apple available as well. O'Reilly has an useful article on the subject too.

For people who know Suns, yes, you can set the password and various security levels. Apple even has a GUI utility so you don't have to touch the PROM prompt to change the password.

Thought some people might be interested in this information.

Fri Nov 21 21:59:30 EST 2003

The quantum universe is static. Only timeless Nows exist. […]
The appearance of motion and a flow of time are both illusions
created by very special structure of the instants that we experience.
— Julian Barbour

I found two small tools that can be quite useful. They're both countdown timers / reminders.

Tea Timer is the more basic of the two. You launch it, give it a time, and it will countdown in the Dock and then pop-up with a sound and a display to tell you that time's up.

[Fob Logo] Fob does the same thing in a general way: a countdown timer. It is a bit more advanced though. When launched it shows a large analog clock with a list of pre-defined events that you can start counting down, a list of events that are currently runninng and a place to add new events. The program comes with two pre-defined events: broil halibut (20 minutes) and soda in freezer (45 minutes). If you have several things that you keep coming up it's quite easy to launch it, choose the event and then hide the program so it gets out of the way.

I also found some programs that will go through your iCal database, and do countdowns (“x days left until…”) to events. I don't have a use for these types of programs so I didn't bother investigating much. They are out there if you care about such things.

Fri Nov 21 22:16:59 EST 2003

I've installed 10.2.8 and nothing broke (that I can tell). I also installed the 2003-11-19 security update. There's actually a document that is kept up-to-date with all recent security updates. It only starts in September 2003; if you want earlier (August 2003 and before) the above document points to this one (which cross-references the first so you know about it).

Documentation tends to be the least glamorous and fun part of any project, and it's nice to see that Apple is keeping up on theirs.

Sun Nov 23 16:08:05 EST 2003

It's possible to use Ogg Drop to convert AIFF and audio CD tracks to Ogg Vorbis files. It uses FreeDB for track information. Haven't used it myself (yet). The fact that it hasn't been updated since 22 September 2002 may, or may not, be an issue.

Mon Nov 24 20:21:28 EST 2003

Found a site which allows you to update the SuperDrive's firmware to support burning CD-R at 16x and DVD-R at 2x. This doesn't apply to me as much as all PowerBook models made from 16 September 2003 onward use the drive model UJ-816 which supports these speeds by default. People of older model PowerBooks may be interested though. As a safety net, there's also a utility to bring back the firmware to the original version.

I'd be more interested in a firmware hack that allows me to play DVDs from any region. This is because I'm interested in anime and many DVDs are only available as region two (which includes Japan). Of course, these same DVDs are spoken in Japanese which I don't understand at all.

[PithHelmet Logo] On the Flash front, the above CSS doesn't always work because many sites use the <object> tag. Especially with the a classid of clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000. I haven't been able to figure out a way to specify things so elements with those characteristics are not displayed. As a last ditch effort there's PithHelmet, but it applies hacks on top of Apple's WebKit framework which I'm kind of uneasy about. I'd prefer not to mess around with the libraries of the system it at all possible.

Tue Nov 25 18:17:18 EST 2003

There's an individual who took apart his 17'' PB. (The URI is to an IP address so I don't know permanent that link is.) Another person did the same thing to his 15''.

The O'Reilly network has an article on Panther maintenance tips. The main points are:

They also mention a discussion on Apple's site regarding installing Panther.

Speaking of Panther, I got my credit card statement and the charge for the Panther media wasn't there. I originally FAXed a paper copy in, but since they messed that order up I re-ordered the media using the web site. Hopefully this will go through. By the time I actually get the CD-ROMs 10.3.2 will probably be out. I'm happy to let other people do my beta-testing for me.

Tue Nov 25 20:49:48 EST 2003

The man(1) pages from Apple are available online (sorted alphabetically). Personally, I prefer FreeBSD's online man page interface better (OpenBSD and NetBSD have similiar setups). Though the output of the BSDs isn't the greatest since the text is simply put in a <pre> element.

Wed Nov 26 19:17:21 EST 2003

For those people extra worried about security with OS X, Bastille Linux has ported their script over to OS X. Bastille is a system hardening script. They cover a couple of Unix systems, as well as several Linux distributions. If you run an OS X machine in an hostile environment you may want to look at it.

Wed Nov 26 20:42:43 EST 2003

Like most computer techie people,
I'll happily spend 6 hours trying figure out
how to do a 3 hour job in 10 minutes.
— Rev. James Cort, ASR

[Sendmail.org Logo] There's a good utility called Sendmail Enabler which allows you to activate sendmail on a Jaguar installation, as well as modify some options. I think I'll look into installing this because Mail.app's SMTP server is brain dead at times. It sometimes has troubling sending mail; after a while I give up on it and simply log into my FreeBSD tower, start up mutt, copy-and-paste the e-mail and have sendmail send it to Sympatico's SMTP server. Of course, Sympatico's servers are flackey (sp?) some of the time.

Under Panther the SMTP mailer server was changed to Postfix, which of course called for the release of Postfix Enabler (which sports a brushed metal look). I think this was done because Postfix has a better security record than Sendmail. (Of course, Postfix (and other more recent mailers) got to learn from sendmail's mistakes.)

Thu Nov 27 21:37:19 EST 2003

Oh drat these computers,
they're so naughty and so complex.
I could pinch them!
— Marvin the Martian

Well, Sendmail Enabler generally works, but some of the settings for sendmail itself are dumb. UPDATE: O'Reilly has an artile on setting up sendmail on Jaguar.

First off, there's no way to delete SMTP servers from Mail.app under “Preferences”. You have to edit ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist using your favour editor, and then restart Mail.app.

Next, sendmail (both the main daemon and the “submit” daemon), startup with options flags of -q1h which means to go through the mail queue every hour. Why would I want e-mail sitting around for an hour? You can edit how sendmail starts up by editing the file /System/Library/StartupItems/Sendmail/Sendmail which is the startup file (instead of putting it some place sane like /etc/rc.d). The contents of /System/Library/StartupItems are:

Accounting/           DirectoryServices/    Portmap/
Apache/               Disks/                PrintingServices/
AppServices/          IPServices/           SSH/
AppleShare/           LDAP/                 Samba/
AppleTalk/            LoginWindow/          SecurityServer/
AuthServer/           NFS/                  Sendmail/
BIND/                 NIS/                  SystemLog/
ConfigServer/         NetInfo/              SystemTuning/
CoreGraphics/         Network/              mDNSResponder/
CrashReporter/        NetworkExtensions/
Cron/                 NetworkTime/

AFAICT, /etc/rc (the normail startup shell script under BSD) does a whole bunch of stuff at startup, and then runs /sbin/SystemStarter. This some kind of binary which carries on the startup.

I'm sure there's a good reason for this complicated mess, but I miss the simple BSD /etc/rc. Even the new “RCng” system in NetBSD and FreeBSD 5.x is fairly straight forward compared to this. At least you can look into the shell scripts in question and figure out how things work. There's a reason why the “Unix way” is to have everything (or at least a lot/more) of the things in plain ASCII files.

Or it may be that I'm set in my ways.

The paper describing the logic behind the “rc.d” system of NetBSD can be found at Luke Mewburn's site. Update: NetBSD also has some official documentation on the subject.

Week 7

Fri Nov 28 21:14:04 EST 2003

Per yesterday's comments on the boot-up process, a description of the way OS X starts up is also up. A lot of intersting stuff at Apple's documentation page.

Sun Nov 30 15:15:22 EST 2003

In order to try to get sendmail working properly, I've taken the flags from FreeBSD's startup script (found in /etc/default/rc.conf) and put them in OS X's startup script. The lines that run sendmail are now:

/usr/sbin/sendmail -L sm-mta -bd -q30m
/usr/sbin/sendmail -L sm-msp-queue -Ac -q30m

Of course since Panther went to postfix this will be moot soon.

But for the recond, the -L text tells sendmail to use text as program “title” when writing to syslog. So on start-up, the following log entry is saved:

Nov 30 15:09:04 gandalf sm-mta[18338]: starting daemon (8.12.9): \
    SMTP+queueing@00:30:00

Previously, “sm-mta” was simply “sendmail”. I do not know why sm-msp-queue is not in the log since it is running, and on my FreeBSD there's a log entry showing its startup. I've compared the configuration between the two boxes and I don't know why this is happening. This is probably another reason why in Panther they've decided to go with postfix.

The -Ac option in the second line tells sendmail to use the /etc/mail/submit.cf file. Finally, the -q30m tells sendmail to try clearing the queue of any saved messages every 30 minutes. This may be one of the reasons why messages that were “deferred” did not leave my system. (Why Sympatico's mail server gave me a 421 in the first place is beyond me.) However, when I tried to clear the deferred-queue manually by running sudo sendmail -q things did not clear (despite the fact that I could telnet to the SMTP port just fine and manually send e-mails).

You can definately tell which parts of the system Apple made easy to use and “intuitive”, and which parts they did not. Unix is Unix (mostly), but there are differences between them. It's probably best not to get too used to doing things in a certain way.

Week 8

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.
— Bill Watterson, “Calvin and Hobbes”

In the words of Jerry Pournelle, this week was devoured by locusts.

Mostly due to work (including one all-nighter).

Week 9

Sat Dec 13 11:39:44 EST 2003

[Macstumbler Logo] Not much to report. I've reached a position of steady-state with regards to most things. I recently installed Macstumbler. AFAICT there are no other WiFi networks around me. Or, at the very least, they aren't broadcasting their SSID. Macstumbler does not have a “monitor” because the drivers from Apple do not allow the use of the chipset in promiscuous mode. From the FAQ:

Why doesn't MacStumbler detect my closed network?

MacStumbler works by sending out probe requests and listening for access points to respond. Closed networks by definition don't respond to these types of requests.

Other wireless auditing programs can detect closed networks by putting the card into monitor mode and sniffing raw 802.11 frames. When legitimate clients try to associate with the closed access point, the SSID can be sniffed. Currently there is no known way to enable this type of monitor mode on Apple's driver, so it can't be incorporated into MacStumbler.

UPDATE: There's also Kismet, but at the time of this writing (2003-12-25) it does not support Apple's “Airport Extreme” (802.11g) because of driver issues. It's multi-platform (Windows through Cygwin).

I recently came across a paper (PDF, 126KB local replica) that argues that it's pointless to disable SSID broadcasts:

SUMMARY

Contrary to a common belief that the SSID is a WLAN security feature and its exposure a security risk, the SSID is nothing more than a wireless-space group label. It cannot be successfully hidden. Attempts to hide it will not only fail, but will negatively impact WLAN performance, and may result in additional exposure of the SSID to passive scanning. The performance impact of this misguided effort will be felt in multiple WLAN scenarios, including simple operations like joining a WLAN, and in significantly longer roaming times.

Trying to hide the SSID does not strengthen security in WLANs. The scarce resources of today's WLAN administrator are better spent tuning WLAN performance and operations with full SSID usage, and enhancing WLAN security by deploying modern security technology, such as link-layer encryption, and IEEE 802.1X authentication.

Interesting hypothesis and it makes sense. The SSID is in every packet AFAIK, so you can just grab it from there with a wireless packet sniffer. Of course you could encrypt your packets, but WEP is useless (more). If you really want to protect your packets over the air you'll probably need to use IPsec or SSH.

[Xpdf Logo] To cut a paste the above text I've just installed xpdf through Fink (need to be running X11). I can't figure out how to copy and paste text from Preview (Apple's PDF viewer).

I'll probably be receiving a copy of Panther (finally) since a charge from Apple Canada showed up on my credit card bill. I'm debating whether to do an upgrade install or start from scratch. I haven't had the system long so there's not much cruft to get rid of. Even my FreeBSD tower, which has been “upgraded” for several years (since 4.1-RELEASE) doesn't have cruft.

One thing I like about Unix-based systems is that there's less junk that clutters things up. The main issue is /usr/local on systems that have things installed manually. The entropy can be minimized through good-practices like using symlink farms (either manually or through programs like stow and Slink, or through package managers (apt, FreeBSD Ports, OpenPKG, etc.)).

Who knows how things are installed in Windows (the dominant non-Unix OS). How many different spyware finding programs are there? Is it really possible to trully know what's happening on a Windows system? Is the system trully deterministic? I'm sure my opinion / bias is evident.

Mon Dec 15 20:02:23 EST 2003

Ran across an interesting way to make FLAC / Vorbis / whatever files readable by iTunes (or any other media player for that matter).

It turns out that Samba has a filtering mechanism. So when you read a file, it's first passed through the filter (server side) and then the byte stream is sent to the client. Someone put up instructions on how to do this. Since OS X comes with Samba already installed (2.2 on Jaguar, 3.0 on Panther) you could simply serve the files to yourself.

As a side note, I wonder if it would be possible to use the plug-in mechanism envisioned for ReiserFS to do the same thing?

Wed Dec 17 20:08:36 EST 2003

No major updaes, just making a note about changing the background colour of an image using The GIMP. Carry on.

Week 10

Fri Dec 19 21:42:58 EST 2003

Installed some updates that were released this week (iTunes 4.2 and QuickTime 6.5). Another update is a Battery Update (1.1; support/info document). According to this article there is a specific way to calibrate your battery.

Supposedly each battery has an internal microprocessor that estimates how much charge the battery has. The Update updates the software for more accurate reporting. However it needs calibrating every so often. I have never calibrated it and it may be a good idea if I do that.

I just finished charging the battery and when it was still at 100% the time said 6 hours (Wow!). Then at 99% it said 4:34. Now, at 94% is says 3:54. I think I'll let it completely discharge tomorrow and follow the procedure mentioned in the above article.

Sun Dec 21 14:37:53 EST 2003

Kirk: “Spock, where the hell's the power you promised?”
Spock: “One damn minute, Admiral.”
— “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”

After updating the battery “firmware” and doing the calibration the system reports a battery time of 3—3.5 hours. Haven't verified it by paying attention to the clock though. If true, it's quite an improvement over the two hours initially observed.

With type as with philosophy, music and food,
it is better to have a little of the best
than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.
— Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

[Bitsream Logo] I've also just installed Bitstream's Vera fonts. These fonts were donated (?) to GNOME and the open-source community in general. They're freely available, and there are instructions available on installing them under several operating systems.

They were designed to look good on multiple systems (Windows, Linux/X11, OS X), so if a web designer specifies them (and they're available), a page should look similiar (font-wise) on all OSes.

I thought about making them the default font-family in CSS, but when I view this page on Safari it's much wider than with the default setting of serif. With a setting of max-width: 75ex, Vera Serif goes across the entire width of browser window (at its current size), while serif goes for about three-quarters of the width. Of course it's quite silly to worry about this too much, since every browser / OS combination will display something slightly different. (IE6/Win doesn't even display horizontal rules from the <HR /> tags on my work laptop.)

Microsoft used to have its “Core Fonts” available for download but was forced to take them down because of licensing issues. They're still available on SourceForge though. Don't know whether there's much point in installing them. UPDATE: Also found an article entitle “The Scourge of Arial”: Arial is basically a rip-off of Helvetica. Also, spotting the differences between the two fonts. Finally there's a fairly popular journal about typography available.

Week Eleven

Fri Dec 26 22:53:12 EST 2003

Some applications put entries into the “Services Menu”. This can be handy: it allows easy access to certain feature so you don't have to dig through several layers to (say) e-mail a file to someone. But what happens when an application puts something in the Services menu and you want to get rid of it?

I managed to find the answer. (Also printed to 465KB PDF file in case the original goes away.) The basic steps are:

  1. Ctrl+click on the app that installed the service you don't want and select “Show Package Contents” from the contextual menu.
  2. In the new Finder window that appears, navigate to: Contents > Info.plist then open that Info.plist file with Property List Editor. (The PLE is from the Developer Tools and is installed in /Developers/Applications/.)
  3. You'll get a window that lists all the properties. Find the property called “NSServices” highlight it, hit the “Delete” button and save.
  4. Log out and log back in to see the changes. It takes a minute for the Finder to scan all the Info.plist files from all the apps so wait a bit to see the changes.

There's also Service Manager which supposedly does the same thing. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work. YMMV.

Week Twelve

Sat Jan 3 15:37:45 EST 2004

We use this version because we know all of its bugs.
A new version means new bugs.
— Benny Cheung

I finally got my copy of Panther. It turns out that it was delivered to my “suite” (read: P.O. box) on 2 December 2003. When something comes in they usually call to inform me but either they didn't, or I never got the message. So hopefully in the next few days I'll be upgrading.

There's a page on what to do before installing Panther. I don't have any “real” data on the laptop (yet) as I've only copied stuff from my FreeBSD tower. I knew that I would be installed Panther so Jaguar (and all my data) could go poof.

I use IMAP instead of POP so all my mail is safely on the server (though you can configure most clients to download messages and remove them from the server). I've also read Usenet using Gnus from by tower (through X11). Most of the programs I've installed can be downloaded again. And I know where since I've been keeping this page (and it was one of the primary reasons for starting it).

Sun Jan 4 18:42:44 EST 2004

[Mac OS X Panther box] The upgrade to Panther (X.3) went fine. For better or for worse though Apple only sends “upgrade” CDs if you don't buy the full retail version. Basically that means that if I ever want to re-install from scratch I have to either (1) go back to Jaguar (X.2) and then install Panther, or (2) buy the full version of Panther. Kind of dumb IMHO.

The look is different in some places. For an extensive list of changes (which by this time has been hashed over many times, in many places) I'll direct you to Mark Pilgrim's “What's New in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther” as well as Ars Technica's analysis of Panther.

The one thing that did break was my local compile of Emacs. I tried to re-compile it but it didn't take for some reason. I simply downloaded a pre-compiled DMG image that someone was kind enough to make available. It seems to be working well enough to make this post so I'm happy. There's also the Emacs on Aqua project, and the Porkrind site.

Another thing is that Mail.app now does checking of the certificates sent from servers that use SSL/TLS. EE doesn't pay an extortion maintenance fee to certificate authorities but just generated their own: this cause Mail.app to complain. After a bit of a search there's an Apple document on this. Unfortunately Mail.app hangs when I try to drag the certificate icon. I had to do a “Force Quit” on Mail.app (equivalent to kill -9 AFAICT).

Doing a Google search I found a weblog entry on what you have to do. It's almost correct, but it fails to tell you that you have to decode from Base-64 to binary. So the steps are:

  1. Open up a Terminal and run the command openssl s_client -connect mail.example.com:993 -showcerts (this is for IMAP).
  2. Copy the gobbli-gook between the BEGIN/END CERTIFICATE lines (but not those lines), and paste the text in a file called cert.txt.
  3. You must now decode the base-64 text into binary with openssl base64 -d -in cert.txt -out cert.crt.
  4. Double-click on the cert.crt file and the Keychain Access utility will launch.
  5. For the keychain pick “X509 Anchors”. You will be asked for an administrator username and password.

That should work if Apple's method does not.

Fast user switching (FUS) is pretty good. (A demo movie is available in QuickTime.) I've now de-activated the administrator priviledges on main account since I can easily go to another user without quiting applications. It's even available through the command line. Though if you put FUS on the menu bar it takes up a bit of space depending on your full name. Hopefully Apple use the idea of FUS++ in a future revision. There's also FUSe which does the same thing. FUSe supposedly requires MenuCracker to operate.

Another annoyance I (and it turns out others) have is that iTunes stops playing when you switch users. This can be a good thing in the sense that one person's music doesn't bother another person. Unfortunately if you are the main person using the system, and the users are for compartmentalization purposes it's pointless. There should be at the very least a toggle that the administration can set. Also, if one user is running iTunes no other user can use it until the first one quits it: something that Apple has to work on.

Postfix Enabler also worked fine to get a local SMTP server running.

All of Max OS X Hints' hints for Panther are available under one article for easy browsing.

More reports as I use Panther more.

Wed Jan 7 18:47:56 EST 2004

[Be Logo] I came across “story” of how a BeOS user came to OS X. Interesting read since before switching to OS X he first tried Windows (2000) and also Linux. Some of his observations are interesting even though it was written a while ago (December 2001).

In the “Redux” to the article someone reponds to the critique that HFS+ should be case sensitive. The person who sent the e-mail (Brian Tiemann) first gives the reason why Unix-type people usually want things to be case sensitive:

Case-sensitivity seems like a great idea to UNIX-heads. These are people who want every possible command and workflow to have a distinct, deterministic result -- the kind of thinking you expect from an academic/research environment. Synonymous workflows that arrive at the same result are anathema to science. Students filling up directories with lab data like for there to be a difference between "a.dat" and "A.dat" and sorts them according to ASCII value rather than orthography. It's a sure-footed, obedient scheme, one where the computer does exactly what the user wants it to do -- because the user is one who has the expertise to issue instructions that are very clear and precise and speak the same internal language that the computer does.

In my books, as a general rule, determinism is good in computer systems and networks. However, most people don't care about that:

But that's not who desktop OSes are written for. In a desktop OS, there is no conceivable reason why you would want to have two files in the same folder that are, for all intents and purposes, named the same thing. "Picture1.jpg" is the same thing as "picture1.jpg". No, really -- it is. It's the metaphor by which you organize the people in your address book. Would you consider "john thomas" to be a different person from "John Thomas"? Would you be unconfused by a set of introductions at a party with both these fellows in attendance?

Mr. Tiemann wrote more, but the first two paragraphs I think have the main points. Both the original article and the redux are interesting reads.

Also, on Slashdot, there was a story about someone who wrote up a “paper” answering the question “What is Mac OS X?”. He has a good, clear explanation of how kernel-space is organized, and how the BSD layer relates to it. (I really like the layout of his site as well.)

Lastly, on MacInTouch there's a whole bunch of reader reports on various things regarding Panther.

Week Thirteen

Mon Jan 12 21:39:57 EST 2004

Found out that converting from a “Mac file” to a “Unix file” entails changing the Mac's EOL character into the Unix one. For Macs it's ASCII character 13 (CR or ^M), while Unix uses ASCII 10 (LF or ^J). The easist way seems to be to do a tr '\r' '\n' <macfile.txt >unixfile.txt.

Tue Jan 13 19:46:45 EST 2004

This month's issue of AskTog is about Mac. There are three articles:

In the “Monster Machine” article he talks about productivity, and gives four utilities that will increase the usefulness of an OS X above that of either Mac OS 9 or Windows XP. The utilities are:

Bruce Tognazzini spent 14 years at Apple (he was employee number 66), several years at Sun, and now does consulting work. Someone to listen to on useability and design.

Wed Jan 14 21:55:12 EST 2004

The above article by “Tog” appeared on Slashdot. A lot of the usually stuff about people not understanding what he meant. Also some people making valid rebutals. 590 comments at this time which is an above average number. I might go through the comments when things have settled down a bit.

[Apple Mail Logo] Mail.app does not have a GUI way of adding customize headers. However there's a hintup. The hint for adding headers isn't the “real hint” (which uses a script), but it's in the comments: you use the defaults program.

To add a Reply-To header you do: defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"Reply-To" = "reply@to.me";}'

You can add multiple headers at once: defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"Reply-To" = "reply@to.me"; "Bcc" = "another@over.there";}'

I've linked to a fast user switching demo above. There's also a demo of Exposé in case anyone hasn't seen it yet.

Week Fourteen

Sat Jan 17 15:27:46 EST 2004

[Willow Design Logo] I bought a bag for the PowerBook. Mostly I wanted something that could hold all the accessories (power adapter, cables, etc.) and the laptop and not look too much like a laptop bag. The Vermillion “slipcase” still looks like a laptop bag but it's not as blatent as other ones I've seen. If fits the 17'' PowerBook extremely nicely. (No surprise since the bag was specifically designed for it.)

Also just noticed that Willow Design is a company based out of Burnaby, British Columbia. A lot of what they make is specifically made for Apple machines. Heck, they have carrying cases for 20'' iMacs, G5s and 20'' monitors.

Week Fifteen

Fri Jan 23 19:40:18 EST 2004

Having problems with sending mail; it's the same problem that I mentioned before. So it's happened under both Jaguar (sendmail) and Panther (postfix). The problem also occurs when I try to send directly from Apple's Mail.app. And yet for years I've run sendmail under FreeBSD fine, without any issues.

If I relay through my FreeBSD tower everything works fine though. I'm really stumped.

To (hopefully) get around the issue I'm thinking of using a thrid-party relay service (like DynDNS' MailHop).

If I was still working at EE I would have access to the SMTP server there and try setting up SMTP AUTH on a non-standard port. Of course I don't, so I can't.

The last alternative would be to continue relaying through my tower and just have it on when I want to send e-mail. It's usually off now because of noise reasons.

Tue Jan 27 21:16:57 EST 2004

New software updates. They include security update 2004-01-26 and AirPort 3.3. A reboot is required.

Week Sixteen

Sun Feb 1 13:10:41 EST 2004

Four weeks of uptime:

gandalf:~/Code/lisp/slime% uptime
13:12  up 28 days, 33 mins, 3 users, load averages: 0.36 0.28 0.33

Of course I have to reboot because of Tuesday's update. What will become 10.3.3 has been “seeded” to developers and reports say that that there quite a few speed improvements in Safari and OpenGL.

Week Seventeen

Sun Feb 8 14:11:42 EST 2004

A couple of new software releases in the past week from Apple:

None of the updates are really critical so I'll let them soak a bit with other people.

A nice hint about saving and restoring tabs in Safari. Useful when you have a whole bunch tabs and windows of sites and you have to logout or reboot. A more elegant solution would be a “save all tabs to folder” when you're bookmarking à la Mozilla/Gecko. (The accented character was found in the character entity reference for HTML4.)

I'll also be trying out uControl in the next little while to swap my CTRL and CAPS LOCK keys. I prefer the “Unix keyboard” layout. After installing, uControl needs a reboot so I'll probably install it, and all the above udpates at once and hope eveything comes back on reboot. Microsoft had the right idea when it incorporated the file revisioning system in Windows XP. It's fairly handy at times. (I know someone where it saved them a re-isntall after an automatic Microsoft update messed up their system.)

I've also been investigating Lisp in the last little while. I've installed the following software (best to do it in the following order):

  1. ASDF
  2. asdf-install
  3. SLIME mode for Emacs (though Jabberwocky as an IDE is supposed to be pretty good as well)

The following Lisp implementations are installed (in no particular order):

For auto-indenting (GS) after you hit Return in lisp-mode, put the following in your ~/.emacs:

(add-hook 'lisp-mode-hook
        (lambda () (local-set-key "\C-m" 'newline-and-indent)))

On the Lisp front again, the following books are what I've looked at and read so far (they're all freely available online from their authors):

Mon Feb 9 21:02:21 EST 2004

[Firefox Logo] Version 0.8 of Firebird Firefox has been released. Looks much better with the new pin-stripe theme by Kevin Gerich (OS X screenshots). Thunderbird 0.5 was also released. I mainly use Safari and Mail.app at home, but at work it's a different story. IE mangles this site horribly and I don't use it at all (or only when I'm forced to). After working all day on Windows XP it's quite refreshing to come home to my PB. (Yes I know, I'm a computer geek (or other definitions)).

Week Eighteen

Tue Feb 17 19:10:26 EST 2004

Rediscovered a composition by John Siracusa on the Finder. Also Matthew Thomas' observations on OS X after using it for 48 hours. Obviously some people are much more perceptive than me.

Week Nineteen

Tue Feb 24 18:09:14 EST 2004

Another security update was released yesterday: 2004-02-23. Fixes stuff in “DiskArbitration”, IPSec, PPP and tcpdump.

Week Twenty

Mon Mar 1 21:04:43 EST 2004

Week twenty means five five months of use. I'm happy with my decision to purchase the PB, and quite satisfied in what it provides.

Way back when a Mr. Wiegley sent me a link to some hints he had regarding Panther, I've implemented the one on local DNS caching.

You can follow his instructions and things should work. As an addendum though you don't have to restart your machine to get named running. Just open a terminal and run the command sudo SystemStarter start BIND. Once you run that, you can check to make sure the daemon is running via a ps auxwww | grep named; the output should look similiar to:

root    5220   0.0  0.2    76728   1204  ??  Ss    8:57PM   0:00.03 named
admin   5224   0.0  0.0     8860      8 std  R+    8:57PM   0:00.00 grep named

If there are problems, they will be logged in /var/log/system.log.

Posts will probably become more and more sporadic since I've more or less reached a steady-state regarding OS X (for now). I'll probably give up on the “weekly format” since I'm tired of keeping track of which week it is relative to when I purchased the PB.

Fri Mar 5 18:05:22 EST 2004

Back in January Amit Singh released an explanation of OS X. Well, he's at it again and now he's posted “A History of Apple's Operating Systems”. From the beginnings of Apple in 1976, all the way up to Panther.

Exploring his site more, he also has a 1.33 GHz 17'' PB and has posted a review. (He also had a “revision A” PB.)

Sat Mar 6 14:37:24 EST 2004

Mac OS X Hints has information up about not having connections die when a machine goes to sleep. The trick is to uncheck the “Sleep Hard drive when possible” checkbox in the System Preferences > Energy Saver pane. Works great for keeping SSH active; though it does take a couple of seconds for the connection to realize it should respond.

Sun Mar 7 14:32:02 EST 2004

It seems that I haven't printed in quite a while from my PB; at least since I upgraded to Panther. Now CUPS does not use reserved ports in Panther, so if you're trying to send something to an lpd(8)-based system, the destination will reject it. By default (under FreeBSD at least), the sender has to be connecting from a reserved port (<1024).

To get around this issue, we can either tell the CUPS system to use a reserved port, or tell the destination server to accept jobs from any port (the -W option on FreeBSD's lpd(8)).

Mon Feb 7 21:17:42 EST 2005

Now this is not the end.
It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
— Sir Winston Churchill, November 10, 1942

As is quite evident I really don't update this page anymore. I never meant it to continute indefinitely, or become some type of weblog, but rather a short- to medium-term page where I could keep track of things.

Quite a bit of the information is now out of date and no longer valid. For all intents and purposes you can consider this page end of lifed and no longer supported.

Copyright © 2003-2005 David Magda <dmagda+pb@ee.ryerson.ca>
Last update: 2005-02-07; XHTML 1.0, CSS valid