What's it all about, Alfie?

Last week my son told me that the Mac Mini's keyboard wasn't working. It's the kid's computer, and it's used a lot by everyone in the house. It probably should be upgraded to a nice iMac, but that's a different story. I went to look at the machine and it was in major trouble. Light, Fan, but no start-up chime. Yikes. So today we took it to the Genius Bar at the Schaumburg Apple Store.

I knew the warranty was close - it'd been a year, give or take a bit, and just needed to get everything off the computer hoping it was not the hard drive. So I expected to pay - I just really needed it to be fixed. Knowing that this weekend was the launch of the iPhone, I decided to wait for Sunday and let all that excitement die down.

We made the Genius Bar appointment Saturday afternoon for 1:30 pm the next day. Good enough - we're in line.

We show up at 1:25 pm and we're #2 in line for the Mac services. Not bad. We have to wait a little while to have someone get around to us. I explain the problem, he checks it out with a monitor, keyboard, and power supply. The first test is that it's still not working, and it's not the power supply. That's some relief, anyway. Next, so takes it in the back to reseat the RAM. I've already done this and it didn't help, but I'm not going to get in his face about this, so I let him take his own path in the debugging cycle.

He comes back and that's not it. He looks at his laptop - which I'm guessing has the decision tree for debugging Mini problems, and then comes to the decision that it's the main logic board. This was one of the two things I had found would be the problem from my Googling - the other was the power supply, and we'd already ruled that out. So it's the logic board. Now what?

"Yeah, it's the logic board, and it's about a month out of warranty - but we're going to cover it for you. We have to order the replacement, it'll be here on Wednesday and it'll be a very fast replacement. We'll call you."

Simple as that, it's going to get fixed. I am completely overjoyed. I can't believe my luck. I'd heard that the guys working at the Genius Bar had a lot of leeway with the warranty work, and they didn't like people getting in their faces, so I had played it very cool for this reason. Now that it was looking like it was going to get fixed, it was dancing in the streets time. I could not believe it.

This experience, in addition to all the others I've had with Macs and Apple, in general, makes me a customer for life. I know there are some that have bad experiences... bad products... but I'm not one of them. I feel good every time I'm in that store. I know that just about anything I get will be top quality and will work wonderfully, and if it doesn't, the guys at the Genius Bar are going to give me a fair shake. You can't beat that.

So... all we have to do is wait for a couple of days for the call and then go pick it up. I'll make sure to pick up a big drive as well to make automated backups with. I'll put the same crontab I have on frosty on the Mini, squirt, so that the kids won't need to worry about losing anything should this happen again.

It's still 5 days from launch, but it seems that there's a ton of folks that are talking about how wonderful, and horrible, it's going to be. I have to say it makes me giggle to see so many people talk as if from a position of fact on how good (or bad) something will be when they haven't even touched it. I know that the Apple fans are saying what a wonderful device it is, and how it will revolutionize the cell phone industry, and that's to be expected. It's standard cheerleading. Vista, Windows, OS X, Linux, editors, religions - it's all about point of view and opinion. But what's interesting is the negative press as well. It's as if it's the Crusades and there's the catholics and the heathen. It's not enough to allow them their cheerleading, they must actively be put down.

Honestly, I like Apple stuff, and I'd love it if Steve had another hit. But I'm not going to buy one anytime soon. I have a laptop and a phone and with these two I don't need to have a small-screen phone/computer. If I didn't have the laptop, I might consider it, but I can't imagine being without the laptop, so that's a long ways off.

Likewise, I don't care if the Zune sold as many or more units than the iPod. If it's better, then the market will decide and that will make Apple's products better. But I can see that the cell phone companies like Motorola, Nokia, etc. are much more interested in the iPhone than another iPod - this is their game, and if it takes off they are going to have to respond to it or be left behind on the high-end.

It'll be interesting who turns out to be right and will they eventually accept their mistakes. It'll be fun to watch.

Well... I happened to really like the MacRumors coverage of the WWDC keynote through IRC. I didn't think it'd be that different, but the response time is, of course, very fast for a chat connection, and even with the AJAX version of the web page, it's much faster to send just the text in chat than to update part of a page. So, I read the chat transcript and then looked at the pictures on the web page. Pretty nice.

Most of the keynote was Leopard, and the new features: new Finder, new dotMac integration, and the new features that had already been shown in previous keynotes. I have to say that it was a nice presentation, but nothing really surprising. It's nice to see that Leopard is going to have the features that warrant a $129.00 upgrade price, but there's not a lot that's really horribly wrong with Tiger (10.4) right now.

And that's when it hit me... this is very much a consumer update. This is so that the apps look more uniform, that iChat has more features, Finder is easier to use, backups are automatic with Time Machine, stuff like that. This is an update for my Mom. It's got nice things for me, but nothing compared to what it'll be like for my Mom. In that sense, it's going to be really exciting. She'll like it.

The new MacBook Pros hit the Apple web site today and while they are a nice upgrade, I don't think I'll be getting one as my existing MacBook Pro isn't that much different from these guys. The biggest changes are the screen - you can get more pixels, which is always nice, and the graphics card, that's nice. Oh... and now you can get it with 4GB RAM while mine only holds 3GB. Nice, to be sure, but even all together, it doesn't justify the upgrade. But something else hit the wires this week that will - the quad-core Intel mobile chips due out next year. Yes indeed... put four cores into the MacBook Pro 17 and it'll be something to get. That will be an upgrade I'll make.

It's been a while since I started using NetNewsWire, and primarily as an efficient way to look at a handful of sites like Slashdot and Freshmeat, that I had been following for a while. I just got tired of all the adds I had to watch, and while I know where the money comes from, it didn't make it any quicker to go to all the web sites, read what I wanted and then move on. Also, I had to make a mental note of the last article I read on each site, and that made it most convenient to have the sites up all the time. This was a mess. The for some reason I read an article about NetNewsWire and decided to give it a try.

I started with the 'lite' version and after about a month decided that this was the kind of software that I should be supporting with money. It did exactly what it said it did, smoothly, cleanly, efficiently, and didn't try to be the end-all-be-all application. It did one thing, and it did it extremely well. I was sold.

Ever since then, and this may be back in the 1.x days, I can't remember exactly, I have followed the development of NetNewsWire and really enjoyed it's progress. Now it's in version 3.0, and it's as good as it ever was. One of the things I like most about it is the fact that even though many of it's users like to have a nice, big window up for all the lists, etc. I prefer a nice, little window with just the specifics. And NetNewsWire looks and works as well in the small window format as the large window format. Very nice app.

Today has been a good day for coding... I've fixed several issues with the Server and they will test tomorrow and then deploy, and I've seen the new MacBooks from Apple. I have to say, the hype on the rumor sites this morning played this up a lot bigger than it turned out - yes, the speed is nice, and the drive size increases are nice, but really, it's a little move and not something that's really earth-shaking.

It was fun to watch the diggnation podcast today. Those guys are so like how I used to act with my friends that it's always worth a good laugh. The stories are sometimes disturbing, but that's life. Also, the weekly News from Lake Woebegone podcast came out today and that's another giggle.

Pretty calm day... coding... giggling... not bad at all.

I love the Mac OS X Hints hint about getting iSync to work with the Motorola V710 phone without the USB cable. When I first got my phone, I needed the USB cable because I didn't want to manually populate my phone with all my contacts because the keyboard is a mess, etc. So I was very glad to see the hint.

With 10.4.7, Apple has once again undone this wonderful hint and I had to re-apply it. Worried that one day the link might vanish, I decided to add it here, so that I'd always be assured a copy exists that I can find. So here it is.

In a terminal window type:

  cd /Applications/iSync.app/Contents/PlugIns/ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/
      Contents/PlugIns/PhoneModelsSync.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources

it's all one line, but it's a biggie, so be careful. Then edit the file: MetaClasses.plist and look for the tag:

	<key>com.motorola.V710</key>

and then the text needs to be:

	<key>InheritsFrom</key><array><string>com.motorola.usb-bt.0x22B8/0x2A62</string></array>

Simply make sure that's the value and save the file. It'll work with iSync now.

I got a new iMac this weekend and wanted to get sshd running on both the standard port 22 and port 2224 that I'll use in my firewall to redirect requests from outside. Common practice, really. I want to have the machine act normally within the network of my house, but I also want to be able to directly get to it from outside as well. The problem is that sshd is not run as a daemon on Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), it's run from launchd more like telnet.

There are configuration files - plists, that take the place if the xinetd conf files indicating what to run when a message comes in on a certain port. However, in this case, I needed to add an extra port to the configuration. If you look in the file /System/Library/LaunchDaemons directory you'll find a file called ssh.plist. In it's original form it looks something like this:

    <key>Sockets</key>
        <dict>
            <key>Listeners</key>
            <dict>
                 <key>Bonjour</key>
                 <array>
                     <string>ssh</string>
                     <string>sftp-ssh</string>
                 </array>
                 <key>SockServiceName</key>
                 <string>ssh</string>
            </dict>
        </dict>

It needs to be modified to look like this:

    <key>Sockets</key>
        <dict>
            <key>Listeners</key>
            <array>
                <dict>
                    <key>Bonjour</key>
                    <array>
                        <string>ssh</string>
                        <string>sftp-ssh</string>
                    </array>
                    <key>SockServiceName</key>
                        <string>ssh</string>
                </dict>
                <dict>
                    <key>SockServiceName</key>
                        <string>sshalt</string>
                </dict>
            </array>
        </dict>

The key is that for launchd the value for Listeners can be a dictionary or an array of dictionaries. It was in the man page for launchd and that's what lead me to the breakthrough. You also need to add a line to /etc/services for the new service 'sshalt' (ssh-alternative) which references the port number that you want to monitor as well.

Now I can control SSH with the standard tools, it won't run until a user comes to the box and it's all in-line with the Mac OS X way of doing things.

I started using networked computers in college in the Fall of 1981. OK, it's been 20+ years, and I'm still using them, but hey... I've got experience. 🙂

As I was saying, back at Purdue I used the amazing tools - ftp and rn. Yes, this is when the Internet was called the ARPAnet and ftp was considered safe because there weren't script kiddies and most of the users had their own systems to admin, and they all existed on a mutual trust system. Alas, that's not possible anymore. Anyway... I would get files from remote ftp drops without a search engine, without the web. But the newsgroups functioned as message boards as well as places to find things organized by category. It wasn't perfect, but it was wonderful at the time.

It was always true that certain newsgroups had higher signla-to-noise ratios than others, and when AOL came online with the newsgroups a lot of folks ban lists included AOL. But there were still folks that preferred the groups to the newly created web-based message boards like Slashdot, etc.

I liked to keep up with the groups, and recently I've gotten tired of the crummy newsgroup service from Comcast and decided to try something different. The guys at Panic created Unison a next generation news reader and provides a news service for it as well. Since I was tired of bugs in the code I was using and liked the things I've used from Panic in the past, I decided to give it a whirl.

I'll say that it isn't perfect, but for a 1.0.2 product it's pretty darn nice. I like the basics, and while there are a few things in the UI related to navigation that I'd like to see - or at least know were there if they were already in the application, it's nice and solid. Also, one of the things I know of Panic is that they update their software when they find things to fix/add. This means to me that it's only going to get better.

Everything old is new again... gotta smile at that.

OK, good news. The latest version of NetFinder seems to know about FTPS, which is what the protocol is called when FTP does SSL/TLS, and does the connecting automatically. This is good news because I now have at least a functioning secure uploader for the time being. Hopefully, Transmit will add this if it's not already in the works now.

Interestingly, I had a hard time figuring out that NetFinder did this because the documentation was pretty darn bad. That is to say, the documentation that came with the program. When you go to their web site, the docs are quite good and complete - which is where you learn that SSL/TLS is tried automatically and if it's successful, a small locked padlock is shown at the upper right corner of the screen. But to figure that out took me a while.

Maybe I'm slow.

In any case, until something better is found, I'll stick with NetFinder and let is go at that. Whew!