Archive for the ‘leopard’ Category

10.5.3

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

So Leopard 10.5.3 is out, tipping the scales at an unprecedented 536M for the combo updater! Unfortunately, Radar doesn’t mark my own pet bug – sporadic crashing of LoginWindow, causing the user to suddenly lose their whole session, upon user switch – as being closed. Whether it has been fixed under a different ticket remains to be seen, I do hope so, it’s been a serious issue for me.

Those commentators proclaiming that Leopard has been the most unreliable version of OSX they’ve ever used, however, are way off the mark and only dating themselves as recent Mac converts. While the bug I’ve experienced has been serious, 10.5 is so far ahead of the early OSX 10.0 and 10.1 that these all-encompassing statements are laughable on their face. For me, Leopard has demonstrated instability problems worse than anything I can remember since 10.3 .. but version prior to that were so different, in so many ways, that comparisons seem ridiculous. 10.1 was pretty unstable and 10.0 was barely functional at all. Anyone who compares Leopard unfavourably to either of those prior versions is simply proving they obviously never used them.

That said, for me, and many others, 10.5.x has been significantly less stable than 10.4.x and has reawakened some unwelcome fears of triggering a crash by performing some action which has sporadically caused a crash in the past – very OS9-esque. The sooner this nasty bug is squashed for good, the happier I’ll be.

UPDATE: Not fixed, happened again last night. Symptoms: long pause upon selecting another user to change to, screen turns blue and then the login window appears – the user’s session has been unceremoniously dumped.

Posted in leopard, mac | 4 Comments »

Interesting words in your OSX Dictionary

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

Using Leopard? Try this. Look up the word esquivalience by selecting it and choosing dictionary from the contextual menu. Read the dictionary definition, then the wikipedia one underneath : )

Tags: dictionary, esquivalience
Posted in Language, leopard, mac | 2 Comments »

More Mail.app RSS freezes

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

108 MB Attachment

Thanks Mail.app, for completely freezing up while you download this large attachment to an RSS feed against my will. There is no option to turn off downloading of these attachments, and since the blog is mostly text there’s way to read it in iTunes or similar. There is no way for me to cancel this download without force-quitting Mail.app.

You can’t see the beachball in the picture, but I assure you – it’s there!

UPDATE: It was an amazing movie though, slightly quenching my fiery rage. I do want to download the attachments – just when I choose to, and in another thread.

Tags: beachball, mail.app, RSS
Posted in leopard, mac | No Comments »

PubSub is incredibly unreliable

Friday, November 30th, 2007

I really like Leopard’s new RSS functionality in Mail.app. I strongly prefer to have my RSS feeds collected in Mail – I find it far less distracting than have constantly-incrementing numbers in my Safari bookmarks bar, as I feel compelled to look at them and clear the distraction – I’ve migrated almost all* of my RSS feeds to Mail.

But the PubSub framework, which is responsible for updating and storing those feeds, is extremely unreliable. According to Mail.app, there hasn’t been any new RSS items in my collection in over 24 hours – through manual checks I know this to be untrue. Manually updating does nothing, as does restarting Mail.app, and I’m reluctant to forcibly restart PubSubAgent, fearing it will leave data in an inconsistent state (I believe it uses SQLite3). Only a restart seems to cure the problem, and I don’t use a Mac so I can restart it every now and again to regain crashed functionality …

Let’s hope Apple can address this soon.

* I left RailsCasts in Safari’s RSS menu. This is the only way I can find to not have it attempt to download every single movie attachment in the feed – several gigabyte’s worth of files I already have!

PS. Seems “RSS” is fast becoming, or has already become, the catch-all umbrella term for any “feed” service, whether it’s served by the actual RSS format or not. Personally I prefer the Atom format, but seemingly everyone refers to that as RSS as well – including Apple, and, I have to confess, me. Just one of those things I guess – there’s no other simple, commonly-understand name that refers to the concept, so RSS it is, even if it’s ambiguous at best and wrong much of the time at worst. C’est la vie.

PPS. Another annoyance with RSS (hehe, there I go again, ok “feeds”) is in implementation. Some sites don’t supply the whole text in their feed – just a summary, or the first few words. This seems to defeat the point – I don’t want a “notification of updates service”, I want the whole thing archived so I can examine at my leisure. No. 1 offender: Google Groups.

UPDATE: Quitting PubSubAgent in Activity Monitor (or kill from the terminal) works fine to restore functionality without a reboot. No need for a force quit so hopefully it’s exiting cleanly and DB corruption won’t be an issue.

Tags: Atom, PubSub, PubSubAgent, RSS
Posted in leopard, mac | 2 Comments »

Safari 3/Leopard does not support RFC4709

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Even though the IETF approved RFC4709 back in November 2006 – and Leopard has a far improved WebDAV implementation compared to Tiger (well, it beachballs less anyway) – the simple proposition of 4709, the addition of a MIME type to handle automatic WebDAV mounting to the desktop via Content-Type: application/davmount+xml hasn’t yet been implemented.

Pity. I’d been kind of hoping it got in. Hadn’t gotten around to checking it but just assumed it would work – it doesn’t. Maybe in 10.5.2? ;-)

UPDATE: It’s included in /private/etc/apache2/mime.types, so at least the bundled server implements the RFC …

UPDATE2: I want to implement this to enable ultra-simple asynchronous filesharing between me and my friends.

Posted in leopard, mac | No Comments »

Speech recognition still useless in 10.5

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

I’d been hoping for some speech recognition improvements in Leopard. Not because I plan on laboriously commanding the mac to do things I could do by myself easily enough using the native mouse interface, but because I’ve long wanted to write a ruby program that takes a (say) mp3, reads it to the speech interface, and gets something useful, like text, back. It might be too error-prone to really be useful, it might be much harder than I think – but at least I’d like to know the basic capability is there!

Alas, not. In a spirit of freewheeling experimentation, forgiveness of past sins and water under the bridge, I turned on Speakable Items and spent the next few minutes trying to make the useless thing recognise a single thing I said. It, of course, could not, no matter how slowly and careful I enunciated each word, or imitated Steve Job’s californian drawl.

Speakable Items is such a worthless piece of crap I wonder why they even bother including it. Ah well .. roll on 10.6!

UPDATE: Amusingly, 10.5 underlines “Speakable” as I type this, claiming it’s a spelling error. Apple are so ashamed of their retarded child they didn’t even teach its name to the internal dictionary!

Posted in leopard, mac | No Comments »

Stupidest Quote Ever

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

Via my good buddy Hans at Daring Greaseball comes an amazing quote, from this Wired article:

“Apple’s day has finally come, and Apple users are going to get hit hard,” security researcher Gadi Evron said. “OS X is the new Windows 98.”

That is the dumbest fucking quote I ever heard. It basically makes me want to punch Mr Evron right in the gob. I think that if I was standing in front of “Gadi” with a gun when he caused those dumbfoundingly moronic words to be issued from his mouth, I wouldn’t even be conscious of my arm raising and shooting him right in the face – it would just be a natural, normal reflex action for the good of oneself and the world at large.

OSX is the new Windows 98! What a stunning insight, and I wholeheartedly agree. The two systems could not be more alike – if, indeed, they were ever anything other than completely identical in every way. I just don’t know why Mr. Evron didn’t go further – after all, OSX isn’t just the new Windows 98, it *is* Windows 98. Literally. First Edition.

I could read this wonderful update from Hans due to a rare condition I recently experienced on this Mac – a cosmological alignment of sorts, by which through an obscure combination of unseen and likely unknowable factors, a one in a million chance really, I was able to read my RSS subscriptions in Mail.app, along with another couple of email messages that managed to run the gauntlet and make it onto my local machine. However, I’m really hoping that Apple doesn’t act quickly to fix Leopard mail’s utterly broken IMAP implementation – I’ve come to enjoy watching it endlessly, pointlessly attempt to synchronise my inbox over the last three days. No, what I really want is for Apple to update iTunes with new features for iPhones!

UPDATE: that article has even more stupid quotes:

But Carl Howe, an Apple analyst at Blackfriars Communications, disputes the security researchers’ theories. He thinks that OS X’s Linux heritage makes Apple systems less vulnerable to attack than Windows-based platforms.

Oh yes, the much-vaunted Linux heritage. But hang on – now I’m getting confused! Is OSX based on linux, or Windows 98? Or could it be .. both!!!

Oh .. maybe linux is based on Windows 98 .. and OSX is based on linux! OK, now I understand.

“I don’t care if you have to type in your admin password,” Eckelberry said. “If you are asked to install a QuickTime plug-in, you will.”

Yeah, you will if you’re a FUCKING MORON. Seriously, anyone who gets infected with this stupid trojan deserves it. You’d have to be an absolute idiot to download and install – as root! – some unknown program from a free porn site. Good riddance, I say.

But Eckelberry (another LOL name) doesn’t care if you have to type in your admin password. You hear that? He just couldn’t give a shit, and that’s the end of the matter. All through this article I’d been waiting for the word from the Meister – “Yes yes, Windows 98, trojans, Linux .. get to the bit telling us what Eckelberry thinks!” said I. And there you have it – the final word. Eckelberry couldn’t give a flying fuck if you have to type your admin password, so get lost.

I’m amazed at the quality of these quotes. Where do they find these people? Do they specifically seek out the “idiot view”? How can these presumably prominent IT industry people be so ignorant – and the supposedly informed WIRED reporter can’t see it?

Posted in external reference, leopard, mac | No Comments »

ZFS Read/Write Developer Preview 1.1 for Leopard

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Apple has apparently released a developer preview of Read/Write ZFS for Leopard. Excellent news.

But I’m still disappointed we won’t see R/W capability in the 1.5.0 release. Typically, it’s the first release DVD that one uses for installations – having ZFS unavailable in the DVD will preclude formatting the boot volume as ZFS without resorting to prior disk-swapping tricks from a working install. Assuming that booting from ZFS is supported in a future point release, which seems reasonable, we’ll have to wait for an updated boot DVD before we can cast HFS+ out for good.

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Posted in leopard, mac, technology | No Comments »

Leopard getting lamer by the minute

Wednesday, June 13th, 2007

Seems the larcenous relationship between Redmond and Cupertino can flow both ways, with Apple taking a page out of MS’s Vista handbook – the page entitled “cut all the good features before launch so nobody cares anymore!” Great page to steal, that one.

Don’t get me wrong, I love MacOS, I’ll be using it no matter what. But where’s the features? A new dock? A new finder? We waited almost 2 years for that?

One of the improvements I’d been hoping most for is full OS support – hopefully bootable – of Sun’s revolutionary ZFS file system. After a thankfully short-lived rumour that ZFS support had been dropped entirely, we have this clarification from Apple:

As a result, we have included ZFS — a read-only copy of ZFS — in Leopard.

Wow!!! Read-only access! That’s the best type!

You know what? That is a fucking worthless non-feature and they may as well not include it at all. Can someone tell me the point of a read-only hard disk? To say I am disappointed would be an understatement.

What next? It seems every second RSS update from the mac news sites are about some other feature being pulled. Just in from macrumors, about a cool-sounding fast restart feature in bootcamp:

I have it on good report from someone attending WWDC that this feature has been nixed.

Why?? Don’t they have enough people or something? The things I care about that will definitely be in Leopard are now these:

  • better, multithreaded finder – care factor 10/10
  • 3d dock with “stacks” – care factor 8/10
  • updated internal, especially multicore scheduler – care factor 7/10
  • quick view and spaces – care factor 6/10

I had to go look at the features list because I couldn’t even remember anything else. All the updates to iChat, etc are routine incremental updates to what amounts to commodity client software – I rarely use iChat since it doesn’t properly support GTalk/Jabber. It can’t even do a fucking file transfer. Mail? I don’t need “stationery” and actually dislike it when people format emails with HTML. Don’t really care about any of the other apps, I’m looking forward to iLife updates more than any of them.

It’s horrible to say but this is beginning to remind me of Vista. Delay, delay, delay, for no good reason – and all the interesting stuff gets cut. In the absence of any truly amazing interface improvements, the number one thing I was looking forward to was first-class ZFS support, and with that out of the picture, my anticipation has plummeted. I still look forward to it, sure – but genuine excitement has turned to routine “oh yeah, I’ll upgrade when it comes out, if I don’t hear of any major problems …”

UPDATE: OK, OK, after re-reading this it does sound kind of childish. I’m just pissed off god damn it. Every serious problem I’ve had with my computer in the last 5 years has been something to do with the fricking filesystem. Corrupt headers. Directory mismatch. Laboriously booting to DVD for the thousandth time and running Disk Utility from there, wasting half an hour. That’s why I was so hyped for ZFS .. and so disappointed when it doesn’t seem like it’ll be in. It’ll still be great, though. Just maybe not as amazingly great as I had been hoping.

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Posted in leopard, mac, rant, technology | 4 Comments »