macshine

ihate snow leopard 7

2009-12-20T18:01:00.004-06:00

Now I've decided that there must be a conflict between iTunes and Finder. That's the only two programs that were running today when I twice had to do a hard reset. I know it's asking a lot to put together a burn folder at the same time I am inserting a CD. I should slow down and only do one thing at a time. And be happy with what I get.

Apple has put out a piece of junk.

I was really becoming a believer with Leopard.

It's really worse than that, too, because the seeds of doubt are already full on saplings. The reason I say that is because I see a pattern emerging. I also have an iPhone 3G. Not 3GS. 3G. When I first got that thing it was beautiful. It was fast and responsive. I got better internet speed. But ever since the 3Gs came out, the iPhone 3G has gotten worse and worse and worse. I have discussed this with several 3G users. My first assumption when electronics break down is that I've done something to mess them up. But every 3G owner in my informal survey has used the word "cranky" for their phone since the 3Gs came out. The user interface freezes, then jumps around to catch up. Google maps takes forever to load, as do other web pages. It doesn't slide smoothly anymore except on rare exception--now it skips to the next page in 4 or 5 hops, or it just skips the transition altogether and appears after a delay. All user input screens take forever before they accept any keyboard input (search, "instant" message, etc.). I would LOVE to make a commercial for AT&T/iPhone about how you can be on the phone at the same time as you order a pizza as you check your calendar. Unfortunately no one would buy their product/service if I did because no one is willing to sit through a 10 minute commercial.

Anyway, I thought it was me. But it's not. Everyone else I've talked to that had an iPhone 3G both before and after the 3GS came around has described the same experience. And why did this happen? Aha. When the 3GS came out Apple made a new Operating System (3.0) for it to exploit its improved hardware.

The iPhone got snow leoparded.

Is this what we are to expect from Apple in the future? If so I'm bailing and going back to PC. If I have to scrap my existence out of the dirt I may as well save a bundle doing it.

ihate snow leopard 6

2009-12-20T10:54:00.002-06:00

I like my mac and all, but should I really have to turn the thing off to get a cd out?

ihate snow leopard 5

2009-12-02T19:04:00.001-06:00

Hey. Apple...

FIX IT!!!!!!

We're all TIRED of the spinning rainbow!

microsoft writes lousy software

2009-11-06T19:08:00.002-06:00

I started to say Microsoft writes lousy software for the mac, after spending all day in Word for Mac. But really, Microsoft writes lousy software. They get lucky sometimes.

ihate snow leopard 4

2009-10-27T00:09:00.001-05:00

I can't tell you how tired I am of that damn spinning rainbow.

headset cleaning

2009-10-23T13:32:00.005-05:00

If you have these expensive apple iPhone headphones...the ones that came with the iPhone...
and if you wash and dry them in something like this...

they still work!!!

Disclaimer: I do NOT recommend doing this. But if you happen to find them hanging around in the drier, cross your fingers and give them a try.

ihate snow leopard 3

2009-10-19T08:36:00.002-05:00

The other thing that's bad about Snow Leopard is the lack of good multithreading. What I mean is that if one application "hangs" it affects others. For example, I connect to a remote desktop using the Citrix ICA client for Mac OSX. If that application has a problem, I frequently can't switch to my VMWare fusion image until the rainbow wheel is finished spinning a minute or two later. Entourage also has "hanging" issues that spill over.

I don't have a problem so much with an application hanging. Apple surely can't be responsible for crappy code from other companies--Microsoft may not write good software for the Mac. Neither may Citrix. Neither may the one-man shop with the coolest app ever.

But.

Apple is absolutely responsible for creating an operating system that allows one application's issues to hang the others. And if the reason for this is, "Apple upgraded the operating system and all its pre-installed software to a new 64 bit architecture and made all the existing applications run in some compatibility layer--once those applications are upgraded they will no longer hang themselves or anyone else..." then I say a pox upon you, Apple. You shot all these programs in the foot that were working JUST FINE before I "upgraded".

But maybe that's not the reason. Maybe my computer is sick with some virus or is crippled by something dumb I did without knowing it. But then, wouldn't that make it a PC?

ihate snow leopard 2

2009-10-16T13:11:00.005-05:00

Do you remember this?
Those days are over. Since the "upgrade" to Snow Leopard my Sprint card either (a) does not work at all, or (b) takes up to five minutes to initialize (WWAN menu only has one entry on it that says Initializing...).

The good news is that if I hold the power button down for about 10 seconds, the whole computer powers off. Then I can power it back on again. And after I log in, the Sprint Card will start working PDQ (less than a minute). Of course the flip side of that is that I lose all my unsaved changes and risk corrupting my loaded vmware images. But at least I can get out to the internet and check my email!
I hate Snow Leopard.

ihate snow leopard

2009-10-16T10:22:00.003-05:00

I hate Snow Leopard. It's cranky. It's cross. It's sluggish. I get that damn spinning rainbow wheel again and again and again. I never had any of these problems with Leopard. And I have hard reset the blasted computer at least once a day since the upgrade.

I don't know if Snow Leopard just isn't ready for prime time, or if Apple wasn't successful in getting developer adoption - meaning getting everyone who has written software for mac to upgrade or patch their software for the new technology.

Anyway, I hate Snow Leopard. I hate the unpredictability and instability of it.

double-dipping again

2009-09-15T09:18:00.003-05:00

I had a weak internet connection (Sprint Aircard in a concrete building). As a result, Microsoft Entourage got confused again and doubled all of my emails and calendar appointments. Nice.

How many times can I get dipped before I get out of the water?

iPhone conference call problem revisited

2009-09-04T12:07:00.004-05:00

Just a quick update on this topic for anyone who may stumble on this page with the same problem.

ALL AT&T cell phones are supposed to be able to initiate 5-way conference calls. Even though AT&T and other providers commonly refer to this feature as "3-way calling" (a throw back to the 1980's when the feature was first introduced for home phones), all AT&T plans support multi-party calling with up to 5 lines. If your iPhone is not able to do this, and if your battery begins to run down too quickly, it's the SIM card. Go to the AT&T store and get a new one.

If they try to charge you for it, prove to them it's defective by having them try a new one in your phone, or by taking your SIM card and putting it into another phone. Feel free to direct them to my previous post about this, or to print it off and take it with you. It's here: http://macshine.blogspot.com/2009/08/conference-call-problem.html

Now that I got a new SIM card I am happily hosting 4-way conference calls again, and only recharging my phone at night (instead of 3-4 times a day).

snow leopard's footprint

2009-09-04T11:14:00.006-05:00

One of the coolest things about Snow Leopard is that it's lighter on its feet than Leopard. This is quite unusual. It's unusual for an UPGRADE that performs better, has an enhanced User Interface, and has more features to be HALF the size on disk. According to Apple I think it's 15 GB for Leopard and 7 for Snow Leopard. The pickup is apparently because they've re-engineered the OS and it's components to take full advantage of Cocoa and the other OS X standard API's.

I put it to the test last night by upgrading to Snow Leopard. I made sure I was backed up, and then ran WhatSize (a cool little utility you can get pretty cheap here). Here are the results (before then after):

Before installing Snow Leopard: 186 GB used, 46 GB free

After installing Snow Leopard: 178 GB used, 53 GB free

So, all I did was put the Snow Leopard install disk in, double click the icon to start the upgrade, supply my admin password, and then sit back and wait about 50 minutes while it removed Leopard and added Snow Leopard - all automatically. I logged in and voilà. It's a new world. With more room.

The other thing I noticed is the Developer tools are smaller, too. Apparently they get the same lift. For example, the iphone 3.0 SDK for Leopard is 2,000 MB, while the same package for Snow Leopard is 450 MB. Nice.

iPhone conference call problem

2009-08-26T12:11:00.006-05:00

I was having problems with my iPhone's conference call feature. I could call one person, call a 2nd person, merge those calls, call a 3rd person, and...not merge the 3rd call into the first 2. I used to be able to do this. But it quit one day. This is kind of a problem since I host a weekly conference call with 3 other people.

My business partner's iPhone 3G had no problem doing this, so he has had to host the calls for a few weeks.

Frustrating.

Especially since I knew that everyone is going to blame everyone else for the problem, and someone was probably going to even question whether the iPhone 3G supports a 4 way conference call. Sure enough. All of the above.

When I was at the Apple store a few weeks ago buying my son a Mac Mini, the salesperson suggested that I do a restore. I did that Sunday night. When it didn't resolve the problem I scheduled an appointment at the apple store genius bar.

My appointment at the genius bar was for Monday at 5:40 pm. At 6:30 pm, the genius, who had clearly been on her feet all day and was exhausted, called my number. I told her the problem. She straightaway said that she had seen this before, and that every time it was resolved by the customer calling AT&T who flipped a switch or something.

We talked about it for a bit because I wasn't convinced. I wasn't upset or anything, I just wanted to talk it through. She called for a test phone. Someone presented a clean iPhone 3G from the back. She pulled my SIM card and installed it in the clean phone. Sure enough the problem followed the SIM. I was convinced. It was an AT&T problem. Great. Now I had to call AT&T.

After 35 minutes on the phone with AT&T, talking to 3 people, and telling the story 3 times, the technician finally had an aha moment and realized that it must be the SIM that needs to be replaced. Ya think? So he added a note to my record and told me to go to an AT&T store, where they would swap out my SIM card for free. They did and now it's working!

I don't expect the receptionist or customer service rep at AT&T to be able to solve my technical problems. And I do understand that they can't send everyone with an issue straight to a technician (there's plenty of I.D.10.T problems out there). But I do expect the "technician" to have access to more internal resources than I have on Google. After "researching" it for about 10 minutes he came back to me and said that he couldn't find anything to suggest that the iPhone plan I was on supported more than 3 lines on a conference call. He came to this conclusion because the name of the feature on the plan was 3-way calling. OMG. If I were at my computer I could have sent him the link to the AT&T web page that clearly showed that the current 3G plans all support 5 line conference calling, but that AT&T has discontinued their formerly offered plans that allowed up to 6. But fortunately I was not at my computer. I knew better. For my mental health I was in my car driving in rush hour traffic. With nothing better to do than wait on hold.

I also expect Apple and AT&T to work together, since they are partnering to provide the iPhone product offering--the monthly plan and the pricing and the bundle is practically a joint venture. Apple proved to me that it wasn't a problem with the phone. They were willing to give me a brand new one, and almost did because I'm also having some (possibly related) issue with my battery draining too quickly. And Apple rescheduled me a genius bar appointment for tonight to give me a new phone in case my issues are not resolved. As for AT&T, I was told, "Oh sure, Apple blames it on us." Those aren't the exact words, but it is a very good translation from what TWO different people I talked to at AT&T said.

Finally, I would like to recommend to AT&T and all the companies out there with customer service centers that you DO NOT play commercials with a perky girl trying to sell me more of your stuff while I'm waiting on hold for excessive amounts of time. Every time that thing loops I want to strangle her. Instead, try to play something soothing. It could really help people calm down and not count the seconds of their life they've lost while your people try to work the system you've subjected them to. And I'm not talking about elevator music here. Good music. With a really long loop so I don't hear the same thing over and over.

pass the keys, please

2009-08-24T21:32:00.003-05:00

I couldn't stand it anymore. I bought the super-size mac keyboard.

And when I say I couldn't stand it anymore, I don't mean I just HAD to have one. I mean typing on the MacBook Pro keyboard is a WHIPPING. I don't know if I'll travel with it or not.

force quit dammit

2009-08-23T23:33:00.001-05:00

Will somebody please tell Apple that Force Quit means Force Quit? I've got no bones AT ALL about killing the power, but why should I have to?

entourage is going, going...

2009-08-21T08:04:00.002-05:00

I can't tell you how great it is to wake up and find that all of your emails have been duplicated. That's the nifty feature in Microsoft mail products where it gets confused about the identity of your POP3 account, so it re-downloads all your messages.

As an email developer it was so exciting to see how they kept up with which messages they had already downloaded, and even more exciting to see how they screwed it up.

And now I'm off to find and delete 250 duplicate emails.

I'm done with this product.

microsoft and their entourage

2009-08-20T12:28:00.002-05:00

This is my favorite message. It must be my favorite message because I keep getting it over and over and over. About 3 times a day.

american airlines fail

2009-08-06T20:38:00.025-05:00

Well I haven't posted anything on the macshine lately, but I've been thinking about it. I still mean to post my solid state hard drive performance benchmarks and comparatives. But in the meantime...I've been traveling. A lot.

So I get this ad in my email from American Airlines. I call it the Buenos Aires Fail. Here's why in storybook form:

1. Buenos Aires will Sweep you off your feet!

Go on.

2. Here's an exotic video to prove it. Closing line, "Ready to make your Buenos Aires getaway? Redeem those advantage miles today."

Yes I am. Where do I sign?

3. The caption reads: Ready to go? Search for flights.

Oh. Wait. Buenos Aires is not in the list. Never mind. I'm done.

But I do have to give American Airlines credit. My flight was ON TIME today. Both taking off and landing! According to American Airlines' "fare rules and on-time flight information" this flight is on the move! It's up to on-time 40% of the time now!

Of course we know why they put the "fare rules" on the same disclaimer as the "on-time flight information". They want you to know that your contract included full disclosure of how badly they perform in case you thought about copping an attitude after pacing in the terminal for 3 or 4 hours. Or sitting on the tarmac for 5 or 6.

return of luke warm corners

2009-07-02T21:39:00.002-05:00

Expose stalled again. Again. Just like the last time. I decided to log out and log in to see if that resolved it. But that took too long. After about 3-4 minutes I just on/off'd it. It takes 2 seconds to force power off the system and 40 seconds to boot, including login. Compare that with 4-5 minutes to log out. Hmm. It seems like a no-brainer to me........

movie power

2009-07-02T21:37:00.001-05:00

I watched two movies on the plane on the way from Philly to DFW (Lethal Weapon 3 and 4). I still had 2 hours of battery life left.

sprinting together

2009-06-28T08:36:00.012-05:00

You can share your internet connection from a mac. This is something I researched and attempted unsuccessfully for years on PC. This means that I can connect to the Internet with my Sprint aircard and route that internet connection wirelessly to computers within range so that we can all get on the Internet.

Brilliant.

And here's just how easy it was.

I wondered if this was possible since apple does everything well, and since this is something that seems SO simple and reasonable. So I googled "share internet connection on a mac". The first hit was Sharing your Internet connection on Mac OS X 10.5 Help. In the digest it referred to Windows computers doing a "network bridge", so I knew I was on the right track.

OS X help said that I should go into system preferences, click the connection I want to share, and then share it. It said that if I wanted to share an Internet connection with WiFi clients, I would share my AirPort, specify a WiFi network name to create, and give it a password. This looked very promising.

Sure enough, I connected with the Sprint Aircard, told it to share, made a new network, and it looked like it was working.

Now for the test.

I fired up one of my Thinkpads to see if the WiFi network I made was out there. The name I chose was "SSC MBP". Sure enough it was. I double-clicked to connect to it. When you connect to a secure network for the first time, Windows prompts you for a password. But it didn't. It threw some message about not being able to connect because the wireless network was maybe out of range. Believing Windows (silly me) I moved the Thinkpad right next to the MacBook Pro and tried again. No dice. So I went in to the Wireless tab on the Thinkpad and configured it manually. That was pretty simple. I specified the network name and WEP key.

Thumbs up. It works!

So now when I'm at a client site with some other consultants in my company, I'll connect to the Internet and then create a little WiFi network for them to share.

The Internet is too big not to share.

As I said, I've tried forever to do this on PC. The concept of Internet Connection Sharing exists over there. But it's just not the same. There are two reasons why I have been unable/unwilling to do it over there, although I have tried:

Internet Connection Sharing works through a wizard that sets all kinds of things on your computer and enters it into an altered state. Turning it off requires going through the wizard again to set everything back, basically reversing the process.

(I did this for my dad. He travels a lot, so he takes his Dell laptop with him. He has a real clunker of a Dell PC that sits on his desk at home most of the time. He connects to his home town ISP over dial up. DIAL-UP. Yes, folks, it still exists. And the name of his ISP is our-town.com. I kid you not. Anyway, I set up Internet connection sharing for him. His desktop dials our-town to get online. His PC shares that over wired Ethernet. That runs to a Linksys wireless router. So now when he comes in from the road he can connect to the Internet and he can print on the desktop's shared printer wirelessly. And he can surf the Net wirelessly, too. At dial-up speeds. When he got his own Sprint aircard it made this not so valuable for him (he was too cheap to get one for the longest time, until I gave him one for Christmas, now he HAS to have it). But he still prints anyway. The point is that it works as long as you let Windows put a spell on your PC with its internet connection wizard.)

Lately I believe PC has gotten better about this, and offers something similar to mac. This process is achieved by selecting two connections (control+click), and then choosing "bridge network connections". This would probably have worked for me except...
Sprint Aircard works by setting up a custom driver. That driver installs itself as a modem rather than a LAN card. You can't bridge a modem using this technique. Only a LAN connection. Why MS makes this distinction or why Sprint decided to have the driver appear this way is up to them. Maybe they knew people would probably share the connection, so they crippled it to force everyone to buy their own card for $60/month and clog the cell tower space.

But maybe there's a good way to do it on PC now, and I just haven't spent enough nights and weekends to figure it out. Or I haven't purchased the upgraded plan from Sprint that has an even more customized driver with a user interface to share the Internet connection by taking over Windows to create a WiFi network its own secret way.

It took me 10 minutes to figure it out and set it up on my Mac.

And as for performance, it's not too shabby. Here's what speakeasy.net says when run from my Thinkpad through my Mac:

So the only problem now is that I'm working up in the Northeast. And if you're in the Northeast and don't have Verizon, you might as well be on dial-up. AT&T and Sprint haven't figured out how to tap into that little market up there, I guess.

you too?

2009-06-27T00:48:00.004-05:00

I had a neat encounter in the airport while I waited for American Airlines to get their act together for several hours.

I was sitting next to a guy with a Dell D610. I know the config well. He was playing internet poker. For money? Maybe. Anyway, he was using one of the two outlet plugs. I took the other one.

Then another guy came and sat next to him. He reached over with a magsafe airline adapter and asked me if it was mine. I said thank you, that it must be, and that it must have fallout out of my bag. He said, "it had to be either mine or yours." It was at that point that I realized that he had a MacBook Pro, just like mine. And I found out as I queried that it was just—like—mine.

I asked him if his was the 17". He said it was. I noticed that he was running vmware fusion like me, and that like me he had 3 virtual images in his library. Uncanny. I pointed this out, and he said the thing you really need is the SSD (solid state drive) for over-the-top performance. I told him I had it. We exchanged thumbs up and smiles. I didn't even have to ask if he had upgraded to 8 GB of RAM like me. It went without saying.

I imagine he is a kindred spirit, come to the same conclusions as me, with a similar story as mine, a similar set of interest and desires. He looked to be about the same age as me.

We both went back to our own little virtual worlds while we waited to board. If I run into him again I'll talk to him more. But at the time I didn't want to blow it, to ruin this perfect stranger encounter.

It was very validating to know that I'm not the only one thinking this way, and I'm not the only one willing to put money in the same spot as mouth. And I'm not the only one living the dream.

And one more thing. On the 4 hour plane flight home, I watched a movie, listened to some iTunes, and did some writing. As I kicked back, dimmed the screen, and listened to my Genius playlist, I thought to myself, "My laptop is bigger than yours." And I meant that in all its adolescent glory.

I'm not sure why it's so important to me that I've got a computer that covers me when I'm under fire, that is always there for me, that will never let me down. Maybe I need a shrink to help me unpack my issues. But it was so, so good to find a "friend" to whom I could say, as C.S. Lewis said of friendship in The Four Loves, "Oh, you too?"

those pesky guests

2009-06-27T00:45:00.001-05:00

I turned off the guest network on the Time Capsule and it solved all the problems. I can get to webex now.

time capsule webex update

2009-06-26T23:17:00.002-05:00

Now I rebooted and tried again to connect to webex. It's getting further, like the little engine that could, chugging up that mountain, except in my story, the little engine throws the towel in and slides backward down the mountain.

What I mean is this. The first part of the web page now comes up, but then it times out. here's the screen shot:

no webex

2009-06-26T22:08:00.008-05:00

I intend to get to the bottom of this. This is quite vexing.

I am unable to get to webex.com since I set up the Time Capsule. At all. I don't want to have to send the Time Capsule back, but I will if I have to.

But this is a very vexing problem, and here's why:

I cannot get to webex or any webex site (like v.webex.com my company's webex site) from my MacBook Pro over Wifi, neither using Safari nor Firefox.
I cannot get to webex from my MacBook Pro with a wired connection either.
I cannot get to it from my iPhone over Wifi.
I can get to it from my iPhone over 3G.

Naturally, this leads me to believe it's a problem with my network, and since the only thing that has changed is the Time Capsule, I have a very likely suspect. But...
I can get to it from my wired Windows Vista computer.

Which naturally makes me suspect some apple-related issue. But...
I can get to it from Jill's iMac over Wifi.

So in review, I know it's not a Wifi issue; it's not a wired issue; it's not an apple issue, it's not a router issue. The only two ways I cannot connect are on my iPhone over the Time Capsule and on my MacBook Pro over the Time Capsule. The only logical conclusion at this point, the only thing these two device connection have in common, is me. My own home network hates me.
And now, to further prove it out, I have circumvented the Time Capsule and connected to Webex using my Sprint aircard. I can connect over the aircard.

Now the only logical conclusion at this point is that Time Capsule hates me. That or I'm caught in the crossfire. Maybe webex hates Time Capsule or Cisco hates Apple or vices versa, and I'm the cat getting kicked.

No matter what the result's the same. I can't get to webex.