Category: Macintosh

Seminar, Finished, Groovy

I got the chance to attend a Mac OS X Tiger/Tiger Server seminar today. Mostly it was an advertisement for the new features in the latest flavor of OS X, but there were a few subtle things I learned about. Mostly what was new to me were the features in Mac OS X Server. I could geek out for a bit here, but being that I probably won’t be running such a server anytime soon, I won’t.

Also today finally marked the conclusion of the journy that was building the math department a new website. The project had been just about complete for a while now, but we had to wait for a few things to happen before moving it over to the permanant server. Then when loaded on the new server, naturally, nothing worked. So after manually editing EVERY php file, twice, I was down to only 2 minor headaches, which could be lived without for a day or so. One, the photo album would load the expanded pictures, this was a simple fix to add _GET[”] to the variable declaration. Two, the random image rotator was seemingly completely broken. Somehow the line endings transformed themselves to DOS format, and a mystery character decided to rear its ugly head. Thanks to help from Hans, this got taken care of today as well.

On May 6, 2005, at 5:15 PM, Jonathan Brundan wrote:
Perfect.

I think you’re done…
Thanks for all your work!!!

Jon.

Yay! Thanks Jon!

Lastly, I updated my pr0tfolio with a short description of my latest web project, and now I’ll have some free time to put up some of my photography and other art works I’ve been working on. w00tles!

Good Morning Tiger

So Friday night, 6pm, the latest version of Mac OS X came out, version 10.4, codenamed “Tiger.” I got to the bookstore about 5:30pm, and I was about the 3rd or 4th person in line. Shortly after I got there, several of my coworkers got in line (Joey, AJ, and Patrick). My department authorized me to buy a copy for them, so I just brought it home and installed it. (My University has a site license for Mac OS X, so it’s free for affiliated people to use, and costs $15 for the media if you need it) Sure, I don’t own the media, but I don’t need to. Plus I can always get another copy later, or burn a copy at some point.

I installed it when I got home, and I’ve been running it exclusively ever since. I’m running it on both my 667MHz “gigabit” Titanium Powerbook (with 512MB RAM + 16MB RAGE gfx card), and my 1.42GHz Mac Mini (with 512MB RAM + 32MB Radeon gfx card) at work. Now this Mini’s processor is over twice as fast as any Mac I’ve ever used for an extended period of time, but it is noticably faster on my Powerbook [than 10.3 “Panther” was].

I have some issues with Mail.app in Tiger. I have all kinds of rules that sort my mail into folders on the server for me. The settings for which folders these sort into don’t stick for some reason. I’ve talked to another early adopter who has the same types of rules/filters set up who hasn’t had any problems with them. I, on the other hand, am having the same problem on 2 different computers– one of which was upgraded from Panther, the other was a brand new fresh installation. I DON’T GET IT.

What’s the best feature? Why should you upgrade you ask? The answer is simple. Screen shots are now in PNG format, rather than PDF. While PDF is great for sending multiple page documents, it’s one of the worst possible formats for screenshots. Yay it’s worth the retail price for this one feature alone! 🙂

Undoing Apple’s meddling.

Why I’m compelled to undo things that Apple changes in their UI, I’m not really sure. I like getting new things, rather than having old things rehashed and resold to me. Click this thumb for 2 screenshots of the result.

I don’t really feel like explaining every little step I did, but I will share the links of the references I used I guess.

The Mac OS X Hint – Proof of Concept, and most of the instructions.
Anatomy of a PrefPane – to customize the icons.

Also having a 10.2 machine handy gives you access to the icons from 10.2 when these preferences were seperate. And finally, I don’t think this was mentioned in the hint above, hide the original prefpane by changing permissions by u-r, or to I think 355.

Also, obligatory warning, backup any files you change, and be careful! Whenever altering system files, it’s really easy to hose your system. Enjoy 🙂