Favorite OS X utility of the month

Without AppleTalk, OS X does a reasonable job of auto-detecting and auto-configuring network printers that support the Bonjour family of TCP/IP services (based on the IETF Zeroconf effort). I miss AppleTalk, but when I was listening to Apple pitch this idea back in 2000-2001, it seemed like the most reasonable way to make TCP/IP usable.

However, today I found a really cool freeware utility that makes Bonjour more usable: Bonjour Browser from TildeSoft.

Here’s how I used it: in a strange office, I wanted to know what printers are available. Apple’s default “add printer” feature will do that, but it hides the IP addresses from me.

If I use Bonjour Browser, then I can get the IP address for any or all of the printers. And if they’re HP LaserJet printers, I can throw the IP address into a web browser and thus browse all the useful printer information: status, configuration, installed accessories, etc. etc.

Of course it has other uses. And the price is right.

Don't buy Snow Leopard

If previously I was equivocal, now I’m clear: buying Snow Leopard was a mistake.

Sure, I was already irritated that Mac OS X 10.6 deletes AppleTalk and PowerPC support. However, a few people may not have a need for these technologies. I was running it on my Intel-based iMac which needs two printers, neither which of changed in the past 6 years.

But today, trying to scan a document for my tax return, I found that 10.6 breaks existing scanner drivers. Trying to re-install the scanner software, it refused to install one of the kernel extensions (kext), implying that some or all 32-bit kernel drivers are toast.

Sure enough, my scanner is known to be incompatible with OS X 10.6 and it’s not on the list of scanners HP plans to support for 10.6. This is the second time Apple’s broken drivers this decade, a record that seems to surpass Microsoft.

Facing this, I wasted most of the afternoon re-installing 10.5, copying user files and preferences, re-configuring printer and network settings, and installing post-10.5 updates. And I paid $50 for the privilege of having to do so. (If this had been OS 7,8 or 9, the re-install would have been done after 20 minutes).

As a systems programer and standards strategist, I can see why Apple developed 10.6 to help the Nexties force a transition away from legacy architectures and APIs. It appears to have succeeded wonderfully here.

However, unless you own a large-RAM desktop or server CPU, I can’t see why anyone would pay to buy this less capable software. Wait for the new one that actually does something new.

Snow Leopard: 2 steps back, and …

Like a lot of Mac fanboys, I went out and bought Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) when it came out. It was cheap ($49 for the family pack, $29 for the single copy) and supposedly was faster and more compact.

After installing it on one computer, so far as I can tell, there’s no there there. Yes, it’s 64 bit — which makes sense for a server but not my underpowered laptop or bottom of the line desktop.

What’s clear is that there’s two major ways that 10.6 is less than 10.5. The first is eliminating PowerPC support. OK, we knew it was coming, they announced in the runup to 10.6, and these are the oldest machines around. However, at our house, half of the machines in daily use are PowerPC (not counting two archaic laptops we keep in reserve). This makes the economics of the family pack more suspect.

It was also interesting that Rosetta — the PowerPC emulator for Intel Macs — is not installed by default, although the OS will install it for you when needed.. Given Apple’s desire to wipe out compatibility mode as quickly as possible (cf. PowerPC, Classic, etc.), I suspect that Apple is trying to find out how many Macs actually have it running — e.g. from crash logs — and then will use that to decide how quickly they can kill it.

Which brings me to the other major step backwards. Snow Leopard deletes AppleTalk.

I know the Nexties who came to Apple in the reverse takeover of 1997 have been wanting to kill AppleTalk for years. When I was a developer, I heard numerous speeches that justified killing “legacy” code. So I can’t say they didn’t warn me.

Without AppleTalk, almost any laser printer can be used via LPR/LPD. But this is a giant step backwards, because it provides no feedback — paper out, paper jam — which is something that has been available on Mac network printing for 25 years.

The bigger problem is that AppleTalk is the only way to discover most older printers — including my 2002 laser printer at home. So if I go to a strange office and don’t have AppleTalk on my laptop, I won’t be able to find the printers unless I can manually figure out the IP address of the printer. This is very un Mac-like.

So right now the 10.6 is installed on the iMac where it does little damage, but it’s definitely not going to mess up my main machine, the MacBook Air. Paying more for less? Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

A curious lingering Leopard bug

On September 15, Apple released OS X 10.5.5. WIthin 24 hours, some MacBook owners noticed that their external monitors were no longer usable. The bug seems limited to MacBooks (Intel-based laptops) and to those connected via the DVI rather than the VGA port.

I saw this one myself, with my MacBook Air and one of the first Apple LCDs ever made, which I bought back in 2000. It showed up with 10.5.5 and went away when I went back to 10.5.4. Obviously, no one expected a software upgrade make their external LCD worthless.

Thus far, there are more than 125 posts on the main thread and 43 posts on a second thread, but there is no fix on either thread and there is no 10.5.6.

What I find odd is how long it has continued, given how prevalent it is. (If there were a few postings, I’d guess that it’s hard to reproduce, but that would appear not to be the case.) I’m guessing it’s being combined with everything else in 10.5.6. A beta of 10.5.6 was rumored a month ago, and new rumors suggest it will be finished before Apple shuts down for Xmas.

Update Dec. 28: The OS X 10.5.6 update (released on Dec. 15) corrects the problem, at least on my computer

Nothing beats a good backup

Non-Mac owners can skip this.

I am nearing the end of the recovery from the March 25 hard disk failure that turned my professional life upside down. I spent 2 hours last night and an hour this morning manually merging between three backups for all my research, including papers in progress and the book.

From a technical standpoint, my main mistake was to rely on the Unix rsync command, which (until OS X 10.4?) doesn’t copy both parts of a Mac OS file (i.e., the resource fork). Fortunately, my March rsync backup is supplemented by a November 2007 finder copy and a few ad hoc .zip files. Also, a friend at Apple recommended FileXaminer, which can be used to fix the file creators (e.g. text files without .txt) of an entire folder of files.

I have a few object lessons that apply to Mac and non-Mac owners a like:

• When you have multiple gigabytes and thousands of files, a great backup solution is much better than a good backup solution.
• You should never rely on a single backup solution: a single type of software, a single piece of hardware at a single location, a single process.

My main backup is now Time Machine, which is convenient and automatic (other than I have to plug the hard disk in). I think my secondary backup will be probably be using a discrete backup solution (like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper) to a $150 hard disk from Fry’s stored at the office.

Free Public WiFi

I’m here at McCarran International in Sin City, en route home. Unlike some airports, they are nice enough to provide free Wi-Fi, with the logical SSID “McCarran WiFi”.

However, when looking around for a hotspot, I saw the ubiquitous “Free Public WiFi” node. From the OS X menu bar, it’s obviously another computer (turns out it’s Windoze) and not a real hotspot. A quick Google (on the McCarran Wi-Fi) showed this explanation from TechBlog which sees it as more benign than a ZDNet posting).

To be on the safe side, I never connect to these peer networks, which points out a security hole in OS X 10.5 (Leopard). When you go to a new location, OS X puts up a window showing all available Wi-Fi connection options, and does not indicate (or give a warning message) for those that are peer-to-peer rather than legitimate base stations. So at the menu bar, the risky connection options are segregated, but not in the screen that everyone sees first.

Put a Leopard in your tank

All but my fellow Mac bigots can skip the rest of this post. I upgraded my Mac to OS X 10.5 today and had a few observations.

One is that the branding of the software package says “Leopard” with “10.5” in smaller print. I didn’t get the sense that this was true with Tiger (10.4), so I guess Apple has concluded that using the code name to build buzz beforehand creates a brand that’s worth using after launch.

10.5 has brought some fawning reviews but also a few noting the key omissions (notably Classic). Today’s immediate problem was the loss of NetInfo Manager.

Without NetInfo Manager, I had to solve two problems:

• Enabling root access, using the new “Directory Utility” program.
• Moving my home directory — I have multiple System partitions on different volumes, but share the same user directory across these systems. The answer is to use the dscl command to map the user directories.

In our printer driver days, we used to have multiple system configurations installed (it was much easier under OS 7.x-9.x). Still, my former coworkers thought I was nuts to set up multiple configurations on my laptop — in this case, two versions of OS X and one with OS 9.

It turns out it’s already paid for itself. When my 10.4 partition died 6 weeks ago en route to the airport, I switched my 5-year-old laptop back to OS 9.2.2 and then 10.2.8. Rather than drop everything to salvage the 10.4 partition, I decided to wait until I could do a clean install of 10.5, which turned out to be painless (other than the $70 purchase price).

Much as I like Apple’s stuff, they can’t make the hard disk more reliable. And this little episode had a good side-effect: I bought an up-to-date copy of Disk Warrior, which worked like a charm. Even my wife (Palomar’s then project manager and procurement officer) remembered how the product bailed us out of jams in the pre-OS X days. It’s a good insurance policy to have on hand.

iPhone more important than upgrades

I guess being busy last week with my day job, I missed the big Apple announcement — the one that they gave everyone but didn’t put on their website. Apple is pulling all development resources from OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) to push the iPhone out the door, delaying 10.5 from June to October.

Tom Yager of InfoWorld.com has the best argument in support of the decision, which presumes that existing users don’t care all that much about getting a 64-bit operating system with minor feature enhancements. On the other hand, delaying Leopard either means delaying new Macs (such as the rumored MacBook Pro, iMac or new subnotebook) or means doing incremental update releases of 10.4.x to support the new model(s). As an Apple ISV, I remember how Apple used to do this all the time in the early 1990s, obviously wasting a lot of R&D, QA and support resources to handle these incremental releases rather than matching the new product intro to the existing OS schedule.

Before the Leopard slip date announcement, Citigroup was very bullish on iPhone sales while now American Technology is quite bearish. They can’t both be right, so it will be interesting to see who ends up with egg on his face. (Interestingly, the same American Technology analyst who’s bearish on the iPhone also is predicting the subnotebook, so he could either hit two home runs or two strikeouts).

One thing I didn’t see remarked is what this says about OS X on the iPhone. Yes everyone says the iPhone runs a “slimmed-down version of OS X” — hopefully WWDC in June will reveal what this means. But, given the mythical man-month, the idea that engineer-hours are fungible enough between OS X and the iPhone to do some good suggests that the development environment, kernel and many of the UI and app layers are pretty similar.

As long as this is my first iPhone posting in more than a month, I might as well mention that I’m now an official academic “expert” on the iPhone. One paper (co-authored with Mike Mace) has been accepted at the DRUID Summer Conference in June, and I’ll also be doing a dry run a couple of universities before then. One of us will also be presenting a second paper at the LA Global Mobility Roundtable.

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