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RIP xServe RAID

By on 27/02/2008 in Apple, Technology

It is quite surprising how little news – or talk in general – there has been about the demise of the xServe RAID. I guess one reason for lack of discussion about the news is that most people never had any connection to the product or the product category in general.

Personally, I’m very disappointed with Apples decision to pull the plug. For the last year I’ve worked closely with one of these machines (along with an xServe) and come to really like the fact that when ever there was problems it was just one number to call to solve it. That was the single biggest reason why we went with it instead of getting a cheaper third party raid system. We didn’t want two manufacturers blaming each other in case we encountered issues. And, in fact, I think this is a major reason why so many people like their Mac’s; both hardware and the OS are made by one company giving Apple a head start on removing compatibility issues. (This reminds me of the time I was working at UCCA and we had to wipe 6 Dell PC’s and reinstall. We couldn’t find the original DVD that came with the machine, Windows XP SP2 wouldn’t work as there was so many obscure Dell specific drivers needed and it ended up taking us weeks to get new disks from Dell.)

Another reason why this decision is upsetting is the way Apple pulled the plug. It’s quite a lot of fun to follow Steve Jobs keynotes at Macworld and WWDC Expo’s to see all the new cool things Apple has created. It’s exciting as most of the new products they launch seem to come out of blue. Having this custom of secrecy drives curiosity making them a company worth follow. Curiosity, after all, is one of those things that separate apes, cats and men from rest of mammals.

But xServe RAID is – or was – not an iPod. iPod is something you buy because you want it or you just happen to get it as a birthday present. You don’t plan 6 months ahead on ‘investing’ in it. The xServe RAID is different. You have meetings about it. You allocate chunks of your budget for it. You evaluate different options. You talk to your managers about it to justify spending £10000 on something you will rely on for the next 5 years. You need that piece of metal and 14 hard drives to be supported for that period of time. Same goes for any other piece of enterprise hardware.

I’m not going to speculate on the reasoning why Apple decided on this move but I will offer two suggestions on how Apple should’ve done this differently.

1. Phase it out. Tell you customers 3 months before the product it due for cancellation that these are the last units to be made, they will be supported for the expected life time of about 5 years but no more will be made after February 2008.

2. Press release. Be open about the fact that you had to suck up and leave the competition. I know it’s shameful enough to have a competing product advertised at the spot where you used to have your own crown jewel but you should still address it.

Anyhow, the RAID is gone and only positive side of this is that we might start seeing these systems on eBay. They’ll make a fantastic bedside table.

–kristian

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The New Mac (Feeling)

By on 16/01/2008 in Apple, Technology

I’ve recently been having some issues with my MacBook due to a failing battery and a cracking wrist rest. Luckily I was smart enough two years ago to opt in for AppleCare so I booked myself in to talk a genius.

No problem, come back in two hours and we’ll have it fixed, said Mike.

Hour later they called up and told me that it was finished. Great. My second Tall Cappuccino was running low and battery on my iPhone was dying.

As I got my hands on the Mac I noticed the nice surprise, they not only swapped the case but also the keyboard and the trackpad*. Fantastic. Not only does it look and feel like a new Mac but it also smells like one. Sweet. I’ve always hated the way trackpads start to feel like after 3 months of heavy use. Of course battery life is great now, too. As I’m writing this, it’s on red and it still has 40 min time left. It used to have 40 min left when it was full.

–kristian

*Yes, I realise they must be embedded.

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Notes on the Keynote

By on 15/01/2008 in Apple, Technology

And I quote:

…software comes with the MacBook Air that allows you to “borrow” a Mac or PCs optical drive.

80 GB/1.8″ hard disk standard, 64 GB SSD as an option.

Sounds familiar? You must have listened to RND Cast episode 10.

other hits and misses:

  • 1.1.3 = tick
  • 10.5.2 = tick (I presume Air needs software support that isn’t in 10.5.1)
  • Mac mini and Apple TV become one = miss
  • more when the event ends and store comes back

–kristian

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Save Sleep Mode

By on 02/12/2007 in Apple, Technology

Just a quick tip for my dear reader(s).

Funny thing that hard drive space is, no matter how big it is, there’s always only few gigs left of it. Sunday is my hard drive clean up day, the day of the week when I try to free up about 10 Gb to be able to go through the week. One utility to visually see where all the space has gone or what taking it up is Disk Inventory X. Check it out. Reason why I’m bringing that up is because I noticed an evil 2 Gb file lurking in /private/var/vm/
Disk Inventory X.jpg
The Sleep Image. sleepimage is file that stores all the data that is currently in RAM. It’s written when the computer goes to sleep. (You can notice this by looking at the light in the front. When it slowly blinks it’s a sleep but before this it’s permanently on while it writes stuff on the disk. You should be very careful moving your computer while this is being done as you might damage the hard drive.) Purpose of the sleepimage is that if your computer runs out of battery or power fails while asleep, it can recover to the previous state without having to restart. The space is always reserved for this so it can’t run out. There’s three good reasons not to use save sleep. It takes longer to fall asleep, it makes the whole process less staple and I just rather have the space in active use.

To disable save sleep, all you need to do is run these two commands in Terminal:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

First disables it, the second deletes the sleepimage file. To re-activate it just run the first command but with 1 instead of 0 in the end. If you’ve just upgraded to Leopard you should check what state it’s on; it’s on by default and even with regular upgrade install it seems to go back to default.

–kristian

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Disk Encryption

By on 27/11/2007 in OS X

Just posted a new episode on RND Cast. Be sure to check it out as it’s about a very topical subject, data encryption!

–kristian

ps. to subscribe to the RND Cast click this iTunes link and you’ll never miss an episode!

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AppleScript To Connect To Your Time Machine Backup

By on 18/11/2007 in Apple, OS X, Technology

Time Machine, no matter how some might say it’s only meant for grandmothers and alike, is so simple and secure to use, it’s would be silly not to. Even if only as an extra layer of data security

For me, the ideal setup is that the Time Machine backup drive lives on my home network rather than directly connected via FireWire or USB. All though Leopard has a simpler way interface for connecting to computers on your network – compared to Tiger – it would be nice to for this to happen automatically. After all, it’s not automatic if you have to think about it.

I’m really just a novice when it comes to AppleScript but luckily it’s a nice and easy scripting language. I wrote the script below to run at login. All it does is it checks which wireless router you’re connected to and if it’s the one you’ve predefined as your home network it then connects to a drive on that network.

set SSID to do shell script "/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport -I | awk '/ SSID: / {print $2}'"
if SSID is "xxxx" then --replace xxxx with your chosen wireless network name
tell application "Finder"
mount volume "xxxx" --replace xxxx with the address of your drive. you can find that by 'Get Info' on a mounted drive
end tell
end if

I know this is really basic and could have more features by adding functionality like connecting via the Internet if not at home (I’m actually not sure if that would work with Time Machine) and maybe connecting hourly, rather than just at login. If you want to improve it in anyway please feel free to do so and post your findings below (I’m looking at you Alex).

–kristian

ps. Thanks to StefanK at MacScripter BBS for the SSID bit of the code.

[update] Further investigation reveals that Time Machine automatically connects to networked drives, thus removing the need for the script above. In any case, the script still works, and can be used for other drives you might want to use on a specific network.

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First 72 Hours With the iPhone – Grapes and Gripes

By on 12/11/2007 in Apple, iPhone, Technology

IMG_6794.jpg

Disclaimer: I’m aware that a lot of the points I’m making in the following article must have been made by various other reviewers. I wanted to start my iPhone experience from a clean plate and decided not read up on it too much lately.

Grapes.

It is the best mobile phone ever made.

It is so fantastically intuitive that you can’t believe it until you use one. Most things work just the way you might imagine them to work. As a proof, my – not really technical – girlfriend hasn’t asked me for advice once. It just works.

I like most of the apps but here’s few that surprised me positively:

- Safari is the best mobile browser there is. Double period. Lock on top and lose the key. Nothing comes anywhere close.
- Google Maps, works fast enough even under EDGE.
- Mail, no setup needed, just syncs your account detail from your Mac and starts ticking away. Also, with Gmail’s IMAP support (which, to me, remains a little buggy) if I read some of the mail on my iPhone, it gets tagged as read on my Mac. Good good.
- I didn’t realise the Notes.app had been included, I don’t think it was there when it first came out in the States. Anyhow, I’m using it all the time.

Gripes.

I think the biggest gripe I’ve revolves some what around that there’s no copy and paste. Now some of you might be thinking either:

1. There’s no copy and paste as Apple has designed the system so that copy and paste becomes irrelevant.

2. It would be hard to design the interface to be as intuitive as it is if you had to be able to select i.e. passages of text and then have interface for either copying it or replacing it.

or

3. Many other smart phones don’t have copy and paste.

Quick answers to these:
1. But I’m still limited.
2. Work a bit harder.
3. Poor excuse.

Longer answer:

Having copy and paste (C/P) would fix some of the limitations I’ve faced so far. For example, you can’t forward an SMS or add many recipients. C/P would help by allowing me to type a note, then C/P the text in to a new SMS and send it of. Or select text from an existing SMS and paste it into a new one. With C/P I could take images from emails and copy them to my image gallery. You see what I’m going for here? These are all features that are, for reason or another, missing.

Apple’s idea behind not including copy and paste was that what ever you might want to do with information on screen, the options you most want, are made available for you. I.e. On a website, if you click on a phone number, the phone will ask you if you want to call that number. Same with texts and emails. Images in the gallery can be emailed or attached to contact. It’s a very interesting concept and I’d be all for it if it worked with everything. At the moment, you can’t save images from, as I said before, email or from the web. I find this limiting.

What I’d like to see Apple do to fix this in a point release:

Tap and hold on top of text, you enter text selection mode. Tap once on the first and last words of your selection and a contextual menu appears. There you could have options like: copy, paste (but only if possible, you can’t paste in to website, obviously), create new contact, attach to contact (if it’s a phone number or email address) etc. Same could work with images, tap and hold to save it in Photos.app or email it or what ever. I don’t think this kind of extra functionality would cripple the intuitiveness of the interface.

Conclusion.

I know the Gripes sub-heading in this article is a lot longer than the Grapes one. This, I guess, is because it’s easier and more fruitful to discuss about problems and improvements that I feel that would help development of this already fabulous platform.

All in all, it’s a fantastic web browser, email client, iPod and a great phone. If this blog gave star ratings consumer products, it would get five out of five.

–kristian

PS. I was going to include a paragraph on which 3rd party apps I’d like to see. I didn’t. It’s a whole other story. Stay tuned, I’ll put it out in few days time.

[update 1] I’ve just noticed that on a photo of an iPhone from early July, there indeed is an icon for Notes.app which means it must have been there from the beginning.

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Bit More on Leopard Guest Accounts

By on 06/11/2007 in OS X

Another thing I found about Leopard Guest Accounts while I was researching on my previous post about the logs: It’s really easy to change the default which is used to make this account.

Say you want a certain document or a link to a website to appear on the Desktop each time a new user logs in. Remember that you can’t just copy items on the Desktop directly as they get deleted at logout. All you need to do is to add the files/folders you want in this location:

~/System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/Desktop

That location is for a English speaking user and its Desktop folder. Again, admin rights are needed.

–kristian

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About Leopard Guest Account

By on 06/11/2007 in OS X

Upon installing OS X 10.5 a new user is created on the system. A guest user. By default this user doesn’t need a password and the parental controls are turned on. This user is not meant to be used for day to day usage and as Apple says, the home folder is deleted at logout. Thus meaning that the user is always ‘fresh’ when next person come to use it.

One thing that is not mentioned in the documentation, is that the activity logs for this user are not deleted, allowing the administrator of the Mac to monitor activity on this user account. There’s also no explicit way of removing the logs. After doing a bit searching, and not finding results, I thought I should figure out how to remove these logs. All though preferences for the user are kept at

~/Library/Managed Preferences/Guest/

, deleting these wont delete the logs.

To remove them, you need to delete folders and files in:

~/Library/Application Support/Apple/ParentalControls/Guest/

Notice that you need to change file permissions in order to reach that directory and use the secure empty trash to delete them.

–kristian

[update: to clarify, the logs hold information such as applications used and websites visited]

tag: Delete OS X 10.5 Leopard Guest Account Log

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Leopard Roars 26th Oct

By on 16/10/2007 in Apple

Not even Gold Master yet, but it’s starting to seem more and more evident that Leopard will be out on the 26th Oct at 18:00.

Make a note of it, if I’m not doing something a lot more important, you can find me at 235 Regent Street from about 17:30 that night. I’ll also bring my brother in hope that some of that positive energy will reach his fraying soul and he’ll end up ditching his PC. If you believe it, it will happen.

–kristian

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