Author: Tim Jarrett

I’ve been tired

It’s been a fairly turbulent seven days. I worked hard for about two months on a strategy project only to have it taken away, and am pretty much starting from scratch trying to learn about a new market, product suite, and set of job skills. I have regained a little balance over the past few days, which is critical because I have to be executing pretty hard now.

The strategy project is probably in better hands now. While I had been looking forward to going onto the next phase, we had reached a point where all the decisions needed to be made at a higher organizational level. I’m looking forward to the challenge of redefining what I can deliver and doing some execution. It’s been a while.

Jaguar Roundup

CUPS: MacNN has a tutorial on enabling CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) in Jaguar. After reading the tutorial, I would guess it wasn’t implemented by default because the UI sounds sketchy (printer configuration through a web interface on port 631 rather than through Print Center, for instance). The interesting thing is that it can support printing via SMB (Windows printers), though you have to do some terminal-jockey things to make that option available.

Prebinding: I always wondered why people claimed you had to update prebinding so frequently–and why there were about ten tools on VersionTracker to provide a GUI to a relatively simple command. Bill Bumgarner says that you never need to update prebinding yourself in 10.2, and that most people weren’t getting anything from doing it in 10.1.

Radio madness: I continue to have intermittent access to
Radio through its Desktop web interface. Right after starting Radio, everything works fine, but after a bit I start to get “connection was refused.” Next step is to play with the firewall settings and see how things go.

Manila Envelope (and other SOAP based AppleScripts): I was pretty freaked when Manila Envelope failed to work for me the first time I tried it. I’ve since gotten it to work reliably. However, iTunes2Manila appears to have an issue–haven’t figured out what the problem is. If you’re having problems with any of my scripts under Jaguar (or for any other reason), contact me.

Weekend update

The Seattle International Beer Festival was a good time but smaller than I expected. The main focus is international beers, meaning that the biggest representation is from importers rather than local brewers working in international styles (although there were some good examples). Brewery reps weren’t on hand either. But I did meet the ops manager from RealBeer.com (and signed up for a club subscription!). Standout beers included Lindeman’s Frambozenbier, a Polish porter from Ziewicz, and Harvieston’s Bitter & Twisted, along with the usual excellent Belgian brews.
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Well, never mind.

I was all fired up to write how I couldn’t connect to my Radio desktop news aggregator under Mac OS X 10.2. Which was true on Friday, but no longer true today for some reason. Maybe Manila Envelope will work today too?

Hmm…

So Manila Envelope doesn’t appear to work as is under Mac OS X 10.2. In fact, even rebuilding it doesn’t do the trick. Never fear, I’m working on it, but I can’t figure out what the hell is wrong…

Housework and beer

Lisa weeded this morning and ripped up a dead tree while I cleaned the house and cleaned up the garage. Nice having a space where you can just pound a nail into the wall or screw in a hook, hang something up, and youíre done.

Weíre going to head into town to pick up some Fiano di Avellino at the Pike and Western, then stop by the Seattle International Beerfest. Looking forward to seeing if it’s as good as itís hyped, but given the number of Belgian brews it should be worth the price of admission.
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First impressions

Yes, it’s a slow day at the office. But it’s a faster day on Mac OS X. Jaguar absolutely launches faster, multitasks better, and seems generally cleaner.

One or two complaints:

  • While the Help engine launches much faster, it takes longer to retrieve help for an individual application the first time; second time is much faster. The Help Center is now a drawer, which is both good and bad. Good–you can jump to any help book you want at any time. Bad–they forgot a scroll bar in the drawer and to see additional books you have to resize the parent window.
  • I very much dig the new address book. One or two glitches: it opens a “Converting” window on first run and takes forever to close it (stays with a full progress bar and the message “Saving…” for a long time). Not clear from the new UI how you have a card in more than one “group” at a time. I liked being able to categorize someone as “UVA Alum,” “Glee Club,” and “Old Friend”; this functionality appears to be gone.

Still looking at other things. Mostly I’m just glad my machine is working again.
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I never thought I’d quote Jake Lloyd…

..but “it’s working! It’s working!!!!”

After verifying the hard disk repairs, I removed one big chunk of packaged software that I wasn’t using and had a CD for reinstall if I needed. I was concerned about not having enough free disk space to continue the install. Then I put the upgrade disk in, switched my boot disk to my OS X partition, and rebooted.

Sure enough, the installer came up and told me that I needed to insert Install Disk 2. As I write this, it’s finishing the installation of the additional applications.

I think I dodged a bullet.
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Thank God for Norton

The longer I’m a Mac user, the more I’m convinced that disk repair utilities are like money. The more of them you have, the better.

As reported previously, during the install of Mac OS X 10.2 my OS X partition went blooey. I ran Disk First Aid repair three times, which still left three reported errors: “Invalid BTree Header,” “MountCheck found serious errors,” and “Volume header needs minor repair.” I pulled out an old copy of Norton Utilities and ran Disk Doctor. It appears to have fixed all the errors–I’m cross checking with Disk First Aid now.

What’s next? Well, I’m bloody well going to back up my user data. Then I’m going to try the upgrade again. This time if it fails I’ll have to wipe the partition and spend the weekend reinstalling applications.

Ashcroft v. “Secret Court”: Court 1, Ashcroft 0

Washington Post: Secret Court Rebuffs Ashcroft. In an almost unprecedented decision, the court that oversees the Justice Department’s requests for wiretaps and search warrants refused to give the Justice Department broad powers because they’ve done such a bad job providing evidence to date. Apparently this is the first time the FISA court has ever unanimously voted to release an opinion.

According to the article, the court “alleges that Justice Department and FBI officials supplied erroneous information to the court in more than 75 applications for search warrants and wiretaps.” As a result, the court felt that giving Justice carte blanche under Ashcroft’s proposed new procedures would “would have given prosecutors too much control over counterintelligence investigations and would have effectively allowed the government to misuse intelligence information for criminal cases.”

When even your rubberstamp court of record is telling you they don’t trust you with extended powers, your brain, if you were Attorney General, might dig up something long forgotten from your civics classes. Something about checks and balances, perhaps, or limits of government power. Probably not anything about the Bill of Rights, but hey, we can always hope.
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The sound of a thousand ISPs wiping their brows

Slashdot: BT Loses Case Over Hyperlink Patent. Thankfully the judge saw that what had been patented and what was being claimed as a violation were apples and oranges. I love the statement in the opinion:

“I find that as a matter of law, no jury could find that Prodigy infringes the Sargent patent, nor that Prodigy contributes to infringement of the Sargent patent, nor actively induces others to infringe that patent,” McMahon wrote in Thursday’s opinion. “I therefore grant Prodigy’s motion for summary judgment.”

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Trouble with a capital T, Part II

I was thrilled to find my pre-ordered copy of Mac OS X 10.2 (“Jaguar,” or “Jag-wire” as Steve inexplicably likes to call it) sitting on my front porch when I got back from watching the game last night. Naturally I wanted to install it right away, but Lisa wanted to finish watching Fellowship of the Ring (she never saw it in the theatre), and my Powerbook is the only DVD player we have. So after the movie finished, I popped in the upgrade disk, went through the first reboot, and started the upgrade process.

The installer reported that I was about 100 MB short on my Mac OS X partition, but I deselected half a dozen language packs and the Lexmark printer drivers and kicked off the upgrade. Then I went to bed. Did I do a clean install? Did I at least opt to back up my old system? Heck no! I’m a statistical wunderkind! I won’t have trouble!

This morning I came down to find the machine on with the new gray Apple startup image and a frozen “progress ring” indicator below it. Uh-oh. I listened for disk activity–nothing. I crossed my fingers and rebooted. Nothing. I took the CD out and rebooted–nothing. No action at all. Despairing, I put the CD back in and rebooted. This time it booted the CD and went into the upgrade again. I tried to use the Installer’s built in disk repair to see if there was a problem. My hard disk didn’t show up.

A-ha, I said, or words to that effect (only more colorful), and tried to boot from an old copy of Norton. Too old for my machine, alas. Finally I powered it down and took it into work, where I tried to boot from the Apple Hardware Test CD that came with the PB. I didn’t hold down Command-C, and it booted the machine from my OS 9 partition. Thank God.

So I’m running Disk First Aid, OS 9 flava, and it’s reporting things I’ve never seen, like “MountCheck found serious errors” and “overlapped extent allocations.” The repair is going now; we’ll see what happens. When it’s done, I’m backing up my data (which I should have done to begin with, obviously), freeing up some more hard disk space somehow, and trying again.

I haven’t decided yet at which point I start making jokes about being co-dependent on this machine…
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