Diary of a Mac Virgin

McV is now LuAn

2007-04-21T14:12:00.000+01:00

Although I've now moved my blogging over to my new blog at http://www.lunaticantics.blogspot.com/ I thought I'd better mention (for the benefit of anybody following an old link from when I was posting as McV) that I am now posting as LuAn.

Lunatic Antics

2007-01-11T01:47:00.000Z

Okay, so I lied: the previous post wasn't the last one. But this one is. Probably.

I did say in the last last post i.e. the one before this one, that I was thinking I might set up a new blog, and indeed I have. It's called Lunatic Antics and in addition to blogging about my further adventures with the MacBook I'll be writing up a whole load of even less interesting crap as well!

I bet you can't wait!

Where do I go from here?

2007-01-06T18:42:00.000Z

Forgive me reader for I have sinned. It's been a month since my last confession and I don't have much to say except that this could be my last entry!

I've found it useful to write this stuff. It's helped me to get thing straight in my head and a couple of days ago I found myself wondering "How did I do that thing with Automator?". Having it here to refer back to proved very useful.

I suppose the biggest issue is that I'm about to install Red Hat Fedora on an old PC because I want to learn more about the inner workings of the servers on which my various websites are hosted, and it occurs to me that a "Diary of a Fedora Virgin" might be useful. However, having just picked up yet another "For Dummies" book and observing the list of what's available in the range of titles, I'm afraid of where that might lead.

Another issue is: just how long can I go on claiming to be a virgin?

I guess it would make more sense to change the name of this blog and start using tags so I can cover the whole lot in one. But what would I call it? "Diary of [insert my name here]" might seem like an obvious choice however I prefer to maintain a certain level of anonymity (see my profile for fewer details). "Diary of a person who spends too much time worrying about minor details rather than just getting on with it" might be appropriate but it's a bit long winded.

Anyway, enough of that drivel. I guess that if this is the last entry I should finish of with some kind of summary and a conclusion about my MacBook:

Now, while I could rattle on for pages (read my blog) about the various things I like and the few things I dislike about this beastie, the fact is that as time has goes I find more and more things that I like and have gotten used to working around the very small number of things I don't like. The bottom line can therefore be summed up with a simple question and answer:

Q: If my MacBook got stolen, would I replace it, or go back to using a PC?
A: I'd want another Mac.

Putting a Spotlight on EasyFind

2006-12-05T16:22:00.000Z

On 24th November I was grumbling because Spotlight wasn't going to do what I wanted it to. The problem is that I want to search for text in multiple .php files, and while Spotlight can apparently be made to do it (it doesn't index .php files by default), you can't guarantee that it will find all occurrences of what you are looking for because it might not have indexed the files yet.

I concluded that I needed something else and I found it in the shape of EasyFind from DEVONtechnologies.

It's freeware and you can get it to search for file and/or folder names and/or contents for words, phrases etc. You can't search meta-data like you can with Spotlight, but who cares. The big advantage is that it does the search when you ask so you can rely on it to find everything.

A really nice feature is that you can tell EasyFind what file types to search in not one, but five lists, each of which has a checkbox next to it. The reason that I like this so much is that I usually want to search .php files but sometimes I also want to include any .html and .shtml files that may be in the project folder (and sub folders). There are also times when I want to include .css and .tpl (template files). By grouping the files onto the five different lists I can easily control which files EasyFind is going to search when I set it in motion.

It manages to search my larger projects with two or three hundred files in a matter of seconds and displays the results as a list of file names along with date last nodified, files size, and location, sorted into whatever order I choose. All I have to do then is to drag and drop the ones I want into Smultron and I'm off.

Oolite - Too Real?

2006-12-02T09:51:00.000Z

I'm not going to keep rattling on about Oolite but I had a 'strange' experience last night that's kind of interesting:

I haven't mentioned this before but the fact is that I had to give up normal work about 10 years ago when I got CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). It means that I'm unemployable because while there are days when I'm fine, there are many other days when I'm 'useless'. Working Monday to Friday would be impossible (I wouldn't be there half the time) and as I never know how I'm going to be on any given day it's also very difficult for me to plan anything or commit to deadlines. I always have to make contingency plans and/or reserve the option to back out at the last minute.

Anyway, back to Oolite. One of the new features is that you can convert some of the cargo space into passenger berths and at any given space station there are usually about half a dozen people wanting to get to other systems. The prices they are willing to pay and the times by which they need to be there vary. So, after checking the star charts to see where they want to go you can choose whether or not to take the contract to get them there.

Having spent a while running back and forth between Lave and Zaonce I'd added various upgrades to my ship and had a couple of thousand credits in the bank. I observed that there were two passengers wanting to get to systems that were about five systems away. So I decided to convert some of the cargo hold, take the contracts and plot a course that would allow me to buy and sell a few things along the way.

Suddenly, the whole thing changed because rather than flitting happily between systems trading goods in my own sweet time I was now under pressure to meet a deadline. It ceased to be fun and I nearly bit Dee's head off when she interrupted me to ask if I wanted another cup of tea. The sense of relief I felt when I dropped the passengers off (on time) at their destination was so huge that I sold the passenger berths (at a loss) and have vowed never to take on any more.

Too realistic?

Oolite until 2am

2006-12-01T23:38:00.000Z

It's over two decades since I achieved Elite status on the Commodore 64 version of Elite. For the benefit of the uninitiated, Elite was a space trading game. In a nutshell, you start out on a space station with a very poorly equipped Cobra MkIII spacecraft and 100 credits. You buy some stuff and fly to a new system where you hopefully sell it for more than you paid for it. The game has two major elements, the first being the trading part with maps and data about the systems to give you all the clues you need to decide what to buy and where to go sell it to make a profit. The other element is the flying which involves docking with rotating (2001 style) space stations and doing battle with pirates who are out to steal your cargo.

There's a lot more to it than that and if it grabs you, which it did me, you end up leading a parallel life that can become strangely real. I still remember the baffled look I was given by workmates who asked what I'd been up to at the weekend when I told them, without thinking what I was saying, that I'd swapped the rear beam laser on my Cobra for a mining laser and been out harvesting asteroids.

Anyway, the point is that after a long absence from computer games - I gave up on them after a number of bad experiences with Windows 95 games that reconfigured my PCs graphics display to the extent that I couldn't do any proper work on the damned thing - I found myself wondering if anybody had ever reworked Elite for the Mac. Thus I discovered Oolite, a version for OS X written in ObjC (hence the name).

They've done a really nice job of it too. All the old charm with updated graphics (20 years ago they were wire-framed) and a bunch of new features. Consequently I was up until 2am last night shipping computers and foodstuffs between Lave and Zaonce in order to save up for a beam laser and an ECM system (don't leave your home galaxy without them).

Chances of me getting any 'proper' work done between now and Christmas: not much.

Spotlight - bright-ish... perhaps?

2006-11-24T20:18:00.000Z

The blurb about Tiger makes out like Spotlight is the best thing since sliced bread but my investegatory clicks on the little magnifying glass icon up there on the menu bar left me wondering why? It seemed to offer little more than a way of finding things whose locations I should already know if I'd stored them in a sensible place.

I was a little less dismissive after the first occasion on which I found myself wondering "where the heck did I put that letter to the Inland Revenue?". Spotlight found it for me in a trice along with a couple of older letters, a spreadsheet and a .pdf that mention them. By the third occasion on which it had located something that had "slipped down the back of my digital sofa" I had warmed to it quite a bit. It looks more interesting when accessed via the Find option on Finder's file menu as this allows you to specify a number of criteria on which to search.

A big disappointed however was the realisation that Spotlight was not indexing my .php files. Back on the PC (which has now been retired) I sometimes used my programers editor (EditPlus) to search all the files in a given directory (subdirectories too if I wanted it to) to find files where a particular function was employed. Smultron, my editor of choice here on the Mac does not have this facility and sooner or later, I'm going to need it.

My 'Rough Guide' book told me that plug-ins to allow Spotlight to index the files from various additional applications are available on Apple's site, but although there are plug-ins for a number of file types, I found no mention of anything to handle .php files.

A little searching on the web came up with suggestions for modifying the info.plist of the RichText.mdimporter or the SourceCode.mdimporter (installed with the Developer Tools) to deal with php files. I also stumbled accross a suggestion that messing with these without a proper understanding of them was perhaps not a good idea. While I'm inclined to agree with the latter I figured that if this was such a bad idea then hopefully there would be fewer suggestions on the web that it is a solution - a million lemmings can't be wrong, can they?

I didn't get as far as trying it however because many of these suggestions also said that the last step was to tell Spotlight to reindex the files and that this could "take a while". There was something about that suggestion that bothered me so I did a little more searching and came across all kinds of complaining about Spotlight doing an incomplete job. I haven't really gotten to the bottom of it but: Spotlight doesn't search for things when you ask it to search; instead it indexes stuff 'Google style', in the background, ready for when you do want to find something. It appears however that while some actions will cause a file to be indexed, others do not. I've seen it suggested for example that although saving a file causes it to be indexed, copying a file does not - so the copied file will not show in a search. I also get the impression that depending on what else is happening on the computer it could take a while even for a newly edited and saved file to be re-indexed.

It would appear therefore, that while Spotlight can be very useful for finding things, you can't RELY on it to find ALL occurrences. A bit like Google: it might find what you want, and frequently does, but there are no guarantees. Thus I will continue to use it when the question that needs answering is "where did I put x?", however it appears that it is not the thing to use if I want to "find every one of my .php files that makes use of function x so that I don't screw anything up if I change it". I guess I'll have to find something else for that.

Automator - First Steps

2006-11-08T16:39:00.000Z

I've got some .pdf documents, about 300 of them actually, that were used to create a printed catalogue by some friends of mine. I'm helping them to create an online version of the catalogue and amongst other things, we need to extract the images.

The documents are not locked so Adobe Reader (I don't have Acrobat) would allow me to select an image and copy it to the clipboard. The easiest way to get them from there seemed to be by going into Preview and hitting Command-N to create a new file using the image data on the clipboard. I could then rename it and save it as a jpeg however I would then need resize it to make sure that it was no bigger than 300 x 400 pixels. Given that the files probably contain around 3000 pictures I figured that I needed a faster way of doing it.

The problem with something like this is deciding how long to spend researching the possible ways in which to tackle it before you just get stuck in and do the slog. In this instance I figured that it would end up taking a couple of weeks doing it by the above method. It seemed reasonable to me that I ought to be able to at least halve that by using more appropriate tools, in which case spending a couple of days researching is fairly easy to justify.

In fact it didn't take anything like that long to find an interesting looking piece of software called File Juicer which is able to extract images and other 'data types' out of larger files. Amongst other things, it can pull all the images out of a .pdf file is one go. Better still, the author provides instructions on how to use Automator to create a plug-in for Finder such that you can control-click the .pdf and have an option to extract files appear on the menu.

Now I'm not new to scripting and automating things but I'd not yet found time to investigate Automator, Applescript, or any of that stuff. Given that discovering File Juicer had gained me a couple of days I figured that now might be a good time to see what it could do about the rest of the process.

I didn't get very far with it, but then I didn't need to as I very quickly discovered two rather interesting things:

The first is that although Preview does not provide an option to resize images it does make an action available to Automator to 'scale' them.

The second is that you can attach actions to folder so that anything you drop into the folder gets processed by the action.

Thus by attaching the action described to a folder I how had the ability to drag and drop the output from File Juicer that I actually wanted (there are other images in the documents besides the product images that I need), into that folder.

Now of course 'scaling' isn't exactly what I wanted and as I'd noticed that Automator has the ability to import new actions, I decided to take a look what was already out there on the web. There is loads of stuff and it didn't take long for me to find an action called Save For Web which allows you to specify horizontal and vertical 'constraints' for the image i.e. it will resize the image if necessary so that it is no bigger than the stated width and height.

Half an hour of fiddling with automator and I had a system by which I could Control-Click on a .pdf and select the option to extract all the files to a new folder. Drag and drop the images that I want to a new folder, where they are automatically resized as needed and turned into jpegs. I can then rename them ready for upload.

It's not perfect but it took me about half a day and cost $12 for the full version of File Juicer (the trial version puts watermarks on some of the files). I could probably spend another day or two honing this to perfection but I figure that if we get stuck into using it as it is, we can have all the images processed before the week is out and take next week off.

SuperDuper - Backup Strategy

2006-10-31T16:29:00.000Z

As stated in my entry for October 16th, I'd already come to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to acquire an external hard drive for the purpose of taking a full backup or my MacBook's hard drive.

BiL pointed me in the direction so "SuperDuper" and "Carbon Copy Cloner" and with the realisation that either one could be used to create not just a full backup, but a clone one my internal drive, which could then be swapped in the even of a major disaster, I headed for eBay.

In the same way that I had found 512mb of memory wasn't enough for my purposes, it's unsurprising that other people have found that they've filled the hard drive that came with their MacBook a bit sooner than they thought. This isn't an issue for me because I tend to work with simple text files so despite the resource hungry apps that run on the Mac, my 60gb drive will, or would have been, plenty for a long time to come.

Anyway, the point is that I picked up an 80gb hard drive on eBay for 40 quid which had seen only a few months use before the owner had upgraded his own MacBook to a bigger drive. Add on another 8 quid for a suitable USB caddy shipped from Hong Kong (the first time I'd 'risked' that actually and I was VERY pleased with the result), and all I had to do was wait for the postman.

The hard drive arrived last week and the caddy came this morning. Assembling them was a doddle (the caddy even came with a tiny little screwdriver), and then it was on to the software.

SuperDuper promised easy of use but had a 28 dollar price tag for the full version after you've done the free trial (which does not have the 'smart' features), as opposed to Carbon Copy Cloner's request for a 5 dollar donation if you like it. I decided to try CCC first on the grounds that it seemed to offer a trial of all the facilities before I parted with any cash. Thus I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner, installed it and fired it up.

Problem 1 was that when it asked me where I wanted to copy from and to, the options were "Macintosh HD" and "Macintosh HD 1" (because the new drive had been supplied with a fresh installation of OS X as a means of wiping it). In the end I figured out that the former was the internal drive and the latter was the external drive but it wasn't especially clear and didn't fill me with confidence.

Problem 2 was that the 'smart backup options' for CCC are not 'built in' as they were not written by the author and require an additional download. There was a big friendly button that offerd to do this automatically but upon pressing it I was told that it couldn't find the download site and that I'd have to do it manually - with no indication of where I might go to do that.

Meanwhile, SuperDuper was pointing, laughing and shaking its head, so I decided to give it a chance.

It's called SuperDuper and it reckons it's easy to use. I reckon it's dead easy to use and I call it "Bloody Brilliant". It told me that I could copy from/to the same drives that CCC had offered but this time it gave me little icons, one of which was clearly the interal drive while the other was clearly an external USB type. It hand-held me though the whole process. Of course the initial copy took a while but within half an hour of it finishing I'd registered and paid them my 28 dollars. I guess you could say I'm a fan.

The final step on this occasion, was that I decided to swap the drives over as I figured that it made more sense to have the 80gb drive in my MacBook and use the 60gb drive in the caddy for use as a backup. This also went like a dream. The hard drive is user upgradable on the MacBook (instructions are out on the web) so as long as you have the necessary tiny screwdrives and star/hex keys it's easy peasy, and of course because the drives were cloned, my MacBook just booted up and carried on from where I'd left off. Brilliant!

Future backups should be a lot faster now that I've registered the software and got access to the smart backup options; which 're-synch' the drives to account for anything that's been added, deleted or changed rather than doing a full copy.

Anybody reading this and thinking of going down the same route should consider that while this backup strategy gives me an easy way to restore individual files that I might accidentally damage (I just have to connect the external drive and do a drag and drop exercise) and against a failure of my internal hard drive (in which case I just swap the drives), it does not protect me against fire, theft and/or terrorists armed with cups of coffee if the external drive is sitting on the desk next to the MacBook when the disaster strikes. A second consideration is that if a file gets damaged and I don't notice until after I've done a backup, I'm stuffed because I don't have a previous backup to refer to.

The first issue can be resolved by storing the external drive in a different location. Obviously they have to come together when they are being used but they can be kept apart at other times. How far apart depends on your cirumstances. In a different building is fine for most people but governments and international companies should store their's in a different city/country just in case one gets nuked (with a real nuke).

The second issue could be solved with additional drives however the issue here is really with data files so my plan is to archive them to CD on a fairly regular basis in addition to keeping the cloned hard drive up to date as protection against disk failures.

Two fingers to the trackpad problem

2006-10-30T20:34:00.000Z

About a week ago I wrote in a previous entry about a problem I was having with the trackpad. In a nutshell, the problem is that the feature in the system preferences to "ignore accidental trackpad input" makes it it so that the pointer can be slow to respond to the trackpad after typing on the keyboard. It's like it takes it a while to realise that you've stopped using the keyboard and have switched to useing the trackpad. I found it much more responsive after switching off the 'ignore feature', but was then having problem with accidental input. Well duh!

I figured I could probably train myself to use to using the keyboard without ever nudging the trackpad but after several days of trying and numerous accidental closures of windows, selections, deselections and other fun things, I gave up on that idea. The MacBook's trackpad is rather sensitive and you really do need to have the ignore accidental trackpad input feature switched on when you are typing.

Alas there is no hotkey to toggle it on/off so I wondered if I might be able to do it programatically, with a widget perhaps. What I needed was a way of saying "Hey, I really do want to use the trackpad now". Tapping the trackpad or clicking the button would not be a good move as nine times out of ten I'd end up clicking on something I didn't want to. But then it dawned on me: two fingers!

You can use two fingers on the MacBook's trackpad to scroll the screen content and let's face it, you'd be hard pressed to 'nudge' the trackpad in a manner that could be confused with a 'request' to scroll... and it works. The MacBook does indeed recognise and respond to a two fingers when it might be inclined to ignore one as accidental input. I'm finding that a horizontal scroll is best because most of the time, what I have in the window is full width so it doesn't actually scroll, it just 'breaks' the cursor out of 'keyboard mode'.

MacBook Memory Upgrade

2006-10-27T20:54:00.000+01:00

My memory upgrade arrived this morning. Installing it is pretty easy as per instructions that are out on the web. One thing I would say however is: make sure you really do have a teeny-weeny cross head screwdiver to hand as you'll get nowhere without it.

Having installed it I'm finding that I can have all of my normal working software fired up, plus NeoOffice in case I need to refer to something in a spreadsheet (I have a few where I keep information about the various sites I maintain), and I can still fire up GIMPShop without it starting to swap stuff to disk.

To be honest it all seems to fit into 1gb of memory so I guess I would have gotten away with upgrading to 1gb instead of maxing it out to 2gb. I reckon however that the extra will come in handy if/when I start mucking about with audio visual stuff. Another issue of course is that I had to remove the 512mb that came in the MacBook in order to install the upgrade and if I'd gone for 1gb I'd have had to removed that at a later date had I wanted to go up to 2gb. Thus I decided to go for the full 2gb but I'm still a bit miffed with Apple for shipping it with only 512mb. 512mb might be enough if you just want the thing for answering email and browsing the web but I anticipate that most people who buy a MacBook will want to do a little more with it than that, and given the number of fun toys on here, I can't really see how Apple could doubt that?

Counting the days, or not

2006-10-24T20:40:00.000+01:00

I've taken the plunge and ordered a memory upgrade so I'm counting the days until it arrives. I'm also awaiting the arrival of an 80gb Seagate Momentus drive and a USB caddy that I've acquired via eBay and will use to create a backup. More about those when they arrive.

In the meantime I decided to stop putting a day count in the titles of my blog entries. I was going to leave it until the end of the month but then I thought it might be fun (yes, I know I should get out more), to put a counter at the top of the page and do it now.

The Javascript date functions are not something I use very often so I took a look at what The Javascript Anthology (ISBN 0-9752402-6-9) had to say about it and found that the code I needed was right there in the book. There's no point reinventing the wheel so, if you care to look at the source for this page, the two Javascript functions that you will find in the header are pretty much copied from the aforementioned source. The single line of code at the top of the body section, that calls the functions and says how long I've been a Mac user, is all my own work.

Oh, the strain. I think I'd better go for a lie down.

Day 18 - Trackpad Problems - ish

2006-10-22T20:24:00.000+01:00

I've noticed a wee problem over the last few days in that when I've wanted to switch from keyboard to trackpad, the pointer has been unresponsive. Filling in forms is the worst. I have a data entry form on one of my sites that where I type text into a couple of boxes, then I might click on something before filling in another box and clicking something else. I've been using that form quite a lot recently and as I said, I've found the 'puter unresponsive when switching from keyboard to trackpad; the pointer seems to 'stick' for a second or so before responding to the trackpad. Today, I went looking for a solution.

The reason for the problem is rather obvious when you know about it: in the "Keyboard & Mouse" section of the System Preferences there's an option to "Ignore accidental trackpad input". Having it checked prevents the pointer from responding when you accidentally brush the trackpad while typing. The down side, as I have discovered, is that the 'puter then take a little while to realise that you've stopped typing and are touching the trackpad on purpose.

Swiching it off made the problem of unresponsiveness go away...

...and gave me a new 'problem' instead:

6 times while I've been making this Blog entry I've 'brushed' the trackpad and the cursor has jumped to wherever the pointer happend to be at the time. Grrrrr.

Day 17 - I love Smultron

2006-10-21T18:00:00.000+01:00

Well not only did Mr Borg come back to me PDQ about the Command-G thing but I also mentioned that I'd like to see an option to turn line wrapping on and off in the toolbar, and he's coded it into the latest version! Try getting service like that out of Mega-Corp.

Just in case you are wondering, the reason I like quick access to it is because I like to code things like SQL queries as a single line. Most of the time I'm not interested it seeing the whole thing so it's convenient to have them disappearing off the edge of the screen. However, when I want to edit one, I switch on the word-wrapping so I can see it, and then click it off again when I am done.

Day 16 - Mac Myths

2006-10-20T20:50:00.000+01:00

BiL sent me the following information in an email and I thought I'd reproduce it here for the benefit of my rabid readership (and so I can find it again when I find myself thinking "Didn't BiL tell me something about that?").

2 big myths of the Mac World.

1. Repair Permissions. You see this being recommended all over the shop, as a panacea. Often recommended before and after applying patches. Bollocks. It doesn't fix or prevent anything.

2. CleanUp scripts - Windows needed maintenance. Hence products like CleanSweep or RegistryClean etc. Not so in Mac OS. It has a bunch of scripts that it kicks off in the background to rotate logs and cleanup caches, etc. Just let it do its job.

Day 15 - Busy, busy, busy.

2006-10-19T20:19:00.000+01:00

Day 13 saw me transfer my programing stuff accross from the PC and getting on with some more serious computing. It's taking me a bit longer to do things (because I'm not used to the tools) but I'm getting there. My fingers are starting to find their way around the keyboard without me having to think about it. I have a vague recollection that PC's have a thing called a "delete key" but I can't remember what it might have been for.

As the programing stuff was going well, I decided to move everything else accross, and so far most things are fine. Part of the reason for that is that most of my data was in the form of text files and common image formats. I had a few PaintShop Pro files that needed converting into jpegs but not much else to cause me any grief. The only real downer is with my Excel files.

Now I'm not a big Excel user. Not in the sense of using it a lot anyway. I use it to keep track of my credit card bill and a few shopping lists. I also use it occasionally to rip data files apart and stick them back together in a new format. Actually I did this last week with a table of 9000 product items in order to convert the data from an old database format to a new one; but it's the first time in a while and I could have done it with a script if I hadn't already had Excel on my PC. The point is that I don't use it enough to justify shelling out the dosh on the Mac version and in any case, BiL had already suggested I check out NeoOffice.

Alas my experience thus far has not been joyful as NeoOffice uses over 100mb of active memory before you open any data files with it. It seemed slow to load and updating my credit card spreadsheet had the page out figure on the Active Monitor going tick-a-tick-tick-tick (and it's not like I've spent much this month - so it's not a big file). I'm not happy. I suppose I could look for a smaller solution to my spreadsheet needs but the bottom line seems to be that 512mb is not enough memory for OS X. Why the hell Apple are shipping all three version of the MacBook with only 512mb beats me. It needs more.

Day 12 - Updates & Backups

2006-10-16T21:15:00.000+01:00

A couple of days ago I got a message telling me there were software updates available. I was busy at the time so I just told it to go away however today I opened up the Apple menu to see what it was on about.

There were a good number of updates available, the most noteable being OS X 10.4.8 (my MacBook came with 10.4.6 installed). As I say, there were other things but that little upgrade was 300mb of download all on its own and even with broadband, that was a lengthy job. It set me thinking about backups.

The chapter about backups in my newly acquired 'rough guide' book started out by saying that the only way to make sure you don't miss anything is to back up the whole hard drive, but quickly moved on to suggesting that a more efficient strategy might be to just back up the user directory. This should cover 'personal data' but may well miss things like application settings, toolbar preferences and such. If efficient use of backup media is yout goal however, the down side of this strategy is that if you've loaded even a part of your CD collection into iTunes you're going to be backing up a whole bunch of stuff that you already have 'backup up' on the original CDs. With a little more selectivity we could ignore the music that we have on CD, burn CDs of music we've downloaded, photo's, and other things that we are likely to want to keep for a long time, and copy files with a shorter lifespan to a USB pen. This strategy would make it feasible to use a combination of CD burning and USB memory pens but it takes more organising (which probably means it won't get done as often as it should) and it does nothing to address the issue of software updates.

At 12 days out of the box, my machine has probably spent more time since its manufacture sitting on shelves in warehouses, so it's probably fair to say that there were more updates available at this point than I am likely to see again for a while. However, should I need to start again from scratch for any reason, it's a big ol' chunk of work that'll have to be done again, and it's only going to get worse as time goes on an more updates are released.

I wondered if there was a way to isolate the downloaded files such that I could burn them onto CDs and keep them with the CDs that came with the machine, but I can't find any information about that. In fact it seems kinda difficult to find anything at Apple amongst the tasters and blurb about Leopard (originally schedulled for 2006 but now schedulled for Spring 2007). A little searching around the web told me that since the creation of OS X, Apple have released new versions every 12 to 18 months with an upgrade usually costing around £80. So, there we have a solution: just buy the upgrade every 12 to 18 months and you need not worry about having an ever increasing number of updates to track down an install should your hard drive decide it's had enough.

On the other hand, and bearing in mind that a) I just bought the MacBook as a replacement for a 7 year old PC running Win98, b) buying and installing new operating systems is not my idea of fun, and c) I'm as poor as a church mouse who just got an enormous tax bill on the very same day that his wife left him and took all the cheese, I can't see that happening.

In reality anybody who puts music and photos (never mind video), on their Mac is going to find that the amount of space needed to backup the user directory pretty much rules out burning the stuff to a CD, uploading to a web server, or using a USB memory pen. To do the job properly were talking external drives here and the good news is that an external drive big enough to back up the whole of the MacBook's hard drive several times over can be purchased for less than the likely cost of upgrading to Leopard.

I'm not rushing down to the shops just yet, but it is looking like my letter to Santa may well read like an advertisement for PC World. The irony is that I could really use a new pair of slippers.

Day 11 - Smultron Hash

2006-10-15T19:25:00.000+01:00

I had a little programming job to do this morning and given that I now have a usable FTP client I decided to try doing it on the Mac instead of the PC. Downloading the files I wanted to work on was no problem but it didn't go too well after that.

The first thing was that I needed to comment out a couple of lines of PHP code; so, I reached for the hash key... erm, guys? The hash key?

No hash key on the MacBook! Now I know I can use // but, although I'm no great fan of UNIX (I can type), I do follow the principles of Tai Chi where possible and see no point in using two characters to comment out a line of code when one will do. Surely it had to be on here somewhere?

A quick web search told me that alt-3 is the answer, and here's one to prove it: #

Lots of other 'special' characters are also available in this manner however remembering which is which could be rather difficult if you needed many of them. I guess however that most people will only need two or three of them. In my case © (alt-G), ~ (alt-N) and ˚ (alt-K) in addition to the # (alt-3).

Interestingly, while there is no indiation on the keyboard of the availability of these characters, alt-2 is used to access the Euro currency symbol and this IS clearly marked on the keyboard! Perhaps Apple know something about British politics that we don't?

A bigger problem, big enough in fact to cause me to switch back to the PC, came when I wanted to find where a particular variable was being used in the code. Typing the name into Smultron's "Live Find" immediately moved to the first occurrence but pressing Command-G, as described in the Smultron help, would not take me to the next occurrence. I re-read the help, searched on-line, but couldn't find any information to solve the problem. Alas this wasn't getting the job done so I switched back to the PC.

After finishing the work I came back to the Mac and fiddled some more; but I still couldn't get it to work. It seemed really odd that I couldn't find any mention online of what seemed to me to be a real pain in the bum of a bug.

In the end I emailed the author of the software and was very please to received a reply only a few hours later with a simple solution to my problem: the cursor needs to be in the main text for Command-G to work. Thus if you type something into the "Live Find" and the first occurrence that it finds is not the one you want, you need to hit 'tab' to move the cursor into main text. You can then Command-G to find the one you want. Simple!

The author did also mentioned that: "it has a slight bug which can return focus to the live find field under certain circumstances, this is fixed in the next version which will be released within a few days".

So, at the end of the day I'm a happy bunny. :-)

Day 10 - Firefox

2006-10-14T15:24:00.000+01:00

It's not that I wasn't getting along with Camino, but having said that, I was happy enough with Safari before that. The thing was this damned FTP problem. I'm looking into why my server is so slow to grant a connection but in the meantime I'm unable to get Cyberduck to connect to it, and while there are other clients I could try, it all seemed a bit pointless when I knew that FireFTP would do it. I mean it's not like I don't have a hundred and one other things to explore and get used to.

So, I've "given in", installed Firefox along with the FireFTP plug-in, and both are working just fine. Of course FireFTP is slow to connect the my server but that's because of the server. At least it connects.

It's also occurred to me since installing Firefox that I probably wouldn't have got too far into doing programing stuff on here before I'd missed Firefox's Javascript console, which is rather useful for debugging Javascript.

Day 9 - Book Shopping

2006-10-13T20:58:00.000+01:00

I decided not to bother with the 30 mile trip to the nearest decent bookshop and did the 120 mile trip to the REALLY BIG bookshop instead. The results were surprising.

I'd anticipated spending a few quid and coming away with at least a couple of different books about the MacBook and OS X but in the end I only bought one, at a cost of ten quid: The Rough Guide to Macs & OS X version 10.4 Tiger. ISBN: 1-84353-553-X.

The shop had about three dozen books about Macs and OS X. Some related to Jaguar and Panther, and of the Tiger books most seemed to do little more than give the same kind of overview that's in the Help files or on the Apple website. The others offered to show me how to get to grips with the underlying UNIX system. Erm, not just yet I don't think.

I chose the "Rough Guide" because while I was assessing the other books I found myself reading this one. I looked things up in the others but with this one I found that interesting things were catching my eye as I flicked though it. It's also stuffed full of links to websites for Mac related stuff and therefore promises access to much more information than is contained on its own pages.

Of course this did leave me with small the problem of what to do with the rest of the cash that I'd anticipated spending however my partner managed to solve that one for me.

Day 8 - Free and Inactive Memory

2006-10-12T18:03:00.000+01:00

Day 8 huh? I guess it won't be long before I start counting in weeks or, more likely not bothering to count at all.

I haven't solved my FTP problem yet. I did use the command line FTP program via the Terminal to get a connection to the server (in London) where my websites are hosted. Nothing radical but it adds weight to my theory that Cyberduck won't do it because the server takes too long to respond. I'm looking into that.

In the meantime, BiL pointed out that free memory isn't really the issue on OS X as the Activity Monitor also displays "Inactive Memory" which is memory containing things that are no longer being used, but are being kept there just in case you want them again. In other words is 'free memory' that's being used because there's nothing else wanting it right at the moment.

The thing to watch, BiL tells me, is the 'outs' part of the "Page ins/out". This indicates how much stuff is getting swapped in and out of the virtual (on disk) memory and as such is proper indication of whether you have enough RAM. If you do, then the 'puter won't need to swap stuff and the 'outs' figure will be zero. If it's having to swap stuff...

On my 'puter it's currently 85922 but I think I'm right in saying that the figure is a total since the last re-boot. I've been watching it while I've been 'pottering about' today and with only a few apps open, it doesn't increase. However, if I open Camino, Smulton, Cyberduck and the Terminal all at the same time (a setup that would represent a typical 'working environment' for me), and leave iCal open at the same time, the outs figure starts to climb. Fire up iTunes and iPhoto (not unreasonable additions to the working environment) and although I'm not seeing any noticable loss of performance, the figures indicate that the system would appreciate having a little more memory at its disposal.

In the short term I guess that means I'll keep a close eye on how may apps I have open and forgetting about the weather widget. In the slightly longer term I'll be writing a letter to Santa.

To anybody about to go shopping I would say: see if you can get a deal on an upgrade at the point of purchase (although from what I've seen on the web it appears that the cheapest option is to buy the memory seperately and do the upgrade yourself). Either way you'll end up with 2x 256mb memory sticks going spare and according to eBay they are worth zilch. They do look kinda funky though and as my partner indicated that she might like some jewellery for Christmas, she might well find a pair of hi-tech ear-rings in her Christmas stocking.

Day 6 - Widgets & Memory

2006-10-10T08:39:00.000+01:00

Hit F12 or click the dashboard icon in the Dock, and up pop the widgets. A collection of useful (?) little programs that can be made to go away again with equal speed. By default there's a world clock (that can show you the time anywhere in the world), a calendar, a calculator... you get the idea. Clicking the option to manage them presents an option to go to the Apple website and download even more, and there are hundreds of them.

My first thought was that even though I'd fiddled with it, the default weather widget wouldn't show me the local weather. The closest I could get was the weather in London which is about 200 miles away and therefore of no interest whatsoever. A quick look through the downloadable widgets and I found one that reported the weather courtesy of the BBC capable of displaying the weather report for my home town.

Then there was a widget that would tell me the phase of the moon, another for tide times. There were quick links into Wikipedia, function references for PHP, you name it, there's a widget for it, and it didn't take long before I had a screen full of the little blighters.

The down side came a little later while investigating the Activity Monitor in the Applications folder; it told me that most of my MacBook's 512mb of memory was in use and I didn't have any apps open apart from the Activity Monitor... or so I thought.

As well as the totals, the Activity Monitor gives a list of what 'processes' are running and how much memory they are using. Silly me had forgotten that hitting the red button at the top left of an apps window doesn't always close an app completely; some of them just shrink down into the Dock and sit there ready for use. I actually had half a dozen apps running including iTunes, iCal, Camino and Smultron.

The real surprise however was the amount of memory being used by widgets. Most of these little dudes were only a megabyte or so of download but were using 20mb of memory in order to be available at the click of a button!

The experience has resulted in my coming to two conclusions:

1. While 512mb of memory on the MacBook sounded like a lot to somebody moving from a Win98 PC, it would seem that given all the things that this baby can do, it isn't. I guess OS X also uses quite a bit of memory to 'isolate' apps into their own little environments and thus protect itself from crashes. I don't know for sure but my point is that I am now wondering how long it's going to be before I start shopping for a memory upgrade.

2. Given that it looks like a memory upgrade would set me back around a hundred quid I decided that I didn't really need single click access to the phase of the moon, tide times and a heap of other stuff for which I'd downloaded widgets. I also closed down the clock and calendar; I have my 'local' time and date on the main screen anyway. In fact I'm now down to the calculator (using 6.44mb), and the weather report (8.77mb), neither of which I really need but without them I'd have nothing at all to pop up when I hit F12.

Perhaps I'll enable a few more widgets later, perhaps I'll splash out on a memory upgrade. At this stage, as I'm not yet using this baby for my normal day to day stuff, I can't really say what resource I need and what spare/extra resources I might have/need.

Day 5 - Moving Forwards

2006-10-09T19:49:00.000+01:00

I didn't make an entry on here yesterday because I spent most of the day doing so programing stuff for one of my websites; for which I still need my PC until I'm fully set up on here. I did actually download and install the Camino browser and Smultron (a programers text editor), but didn't do anything more with them until today.

My brother-in-law (BiL) suggested Camino saying it was fast. I didn't really see that at as a big issue, Safari seemed fine to me, but I'm already starting to be impressed by Camino. It is in fact so fast I was afraid at first that it was showing me cached copies of things, but it isn't. It really does seem to be ultra-quick.

Smultron was one of four editors that BiL suggested I take a look at. I chose to try Smultron first out of the four because it looked the least cluttered; vaguely similar to EditPlus that I use on the PC. Although there have been occasions in the past when I've owned and used feature rich editors I generally haven't used the 'extra' features as I prefer to do most things myself. I haven't given it a thorough testing yet but it looks like Smultron will do what I need.

The only other thing today is that I re-calibrated the battery. You know the thing where you charge the battery right up, then run it down to flat? The thing the manual says you should endeavour to do within the first week of ownership and then every couple of months after that to prolong the life of the battery? And yes, before anybody comments on it, I KNOW I'm the only person on the planet who bothers to do that. I take backups too; how square is that?

Day 3 - 2 steps forward, 1 step back

2006-10-07T22:14:00.001+01:00

Probably the most interesting thing since yesterday is that I discovered few things I could do with, and have therefore made a few changes to, the dock. It's now in a column at the left edge of my screen. I've added a shortcut to the Applications folder and gotten rid of a lot of the Dock's shortcuts to things in the Apps folder that I'm not likely to use much. The overall effect is much tidier and gives me more height for windows in the central area of the screen.

Another discovery (after a late night exchange of emails with BiL) is that I can use the Terminal in the Utilities folder to access the web server on which my sites are hosted.

Although I could use it for FTP as well, I'm used to a GUI interface for that. BiL suggested Cyberduck for FTP and a few other things like the Camino browser and a couple of suggestions for programing editors.

It's at this point that I've taken a step back because its occurred to me that I'm taking on too many new things all at once. Obviously a lot of it is unavoidable but amongst other things, I've been using Firefox and FireFTP on the PC so presumably there is some sense in going with the Mac version of them, at lease until I get a bit more settled with some of the other stuff.

Day 2 - The Morning After

2006-10-06T12:17:00.000+01:00

Well yesterday was kinda fun of course although I had a bit of a false start. I'm a read the manual kind of guy as I don't like having to invent wheels when somebody else can give me a blueprint. The printed material that came with the Mac didn't tell me an awful lot however and certainly didn't prepare me for what happened with my wireless LAN connection:

I had a joy-joy moment when the MacBook fired up and said "Hey, I can see a wireless LAN", told me the SSID, and asked me if I wanted to connect. All I needed to do was enter a password.

"Password?"

"Yeah, you know, password?"

"You mean the passphrase that generated the WEP key?"

"No."

"How about the WEP key itself?"

"No."

"The password for my broadband connection?"

"No."

"Hell, how about the PIN for my Visa card?"

In the end I gave up and told it I'd deal with it later. Everything else was a doddle. I even got it on to my home network and the Internet simply by connecting it to my router/modem with a cable. But could I get it to use the wireless?

In the end I discovered that my brother-in-law (BiL) was online and it turned out that it did want the WEP key but that I had to tell it to use a WEP key (as opposed to a WEP Password) before it would work. Thus it is now working fine and I owe BiL even more beer than I did before.

So, first impressions?

Well I'm not going to rattle on about what it looks like or any of the other things you can see on the front page of the Apple website. As it happens I think the shiny white colour makes it look like a piece of bathroom furniture and the chunky icons in the Dock (the equivalent of the Windows task bar) reminds me of Rayman on the Playstation, but that's not why I bought it.

There are some nice things on here. Some interesting looking software and some nice 'ways of working'. Hitting the F9 key for example makes all open windows shrink and arrange themselves as 'tiles' so you can select the one you want from those you have open. Yes, I know that Windows does 'tile' but the difference with the MacBook is that the shrunken windows are 'images' and when you choose one, they all go back to full size with that one on top; much more convenient than the Windows way of doing things. The 'down side' however is that I 'stumbled' across that little gem while reading deep in the help files. I was kind of anticipating that this thing would have an option for Mac virgins to click so it would give us a gentle intro. It doesn't. It has lots of things to play with but it pretty much expects us to know what to do with them and why we should want to.

The keyboard layout is also throwing me a bit. I'm missing the 'delete key' (the MacBook only has a 'backspace'; no 'delete' key), and having to think about it and look at the keyboard anytime I want something other than QWERTY. I'll get used to that of course but I reckon it could be quite confusing if one were to be switching between Mac and PC on a regular basis. That is something that I will be doing for the next few weeks. Maybe I'll feel differently in a week or two but for now I anticipate that it will be confusing.

I also felt that the touchpad was unresponsive but a quick visit to the settings page and sliding the response speed up to it's maximum soon solved that.

Some of the differences in the GUI are throwing me too and at this point I feel OS X is NO MORE intuitive than Windows. For example in the top right of WIndows windows you have buttons to shrink, maximise and close the window but they are not obvious what they mean; you have to discover it. On the Mac you have red, amber and green buttons at the top LEFT that do pretty much the same thing but again, there is nothing to tell you this. Furthermore, the red button doesn't always close the application. It closes the window, but the app stays open in the Dock. To close the app completely you have to use the close option from the file menu; but that's only with SOME apps.

I also seems to be without an FTP program and SSH client although I have a sneaky feeling that they are actually on here and that I just can't find them. I've seen a suggestion that 'Finder' can do FTP downloads but not uploads. I'm having trouble finding out. I had a look into what programs might be available for things like SSH, FTP, spreadsheets, etc and there seem to be loads available. I haven't yet found a decent resource for information about them though (without pestering BiL).

So where does this leave me?

Well after writing this this I'll have to switch back to the PC to do some 'proper work'. I am sure that I will manage to switch to the Mac but it's probably going to take a couple of weeks to sort out the various issues. I'm thinking that I might do a 30 mile trip to the nearest major bookshop as I reckon I need a book or two to help me get into this. I've looked at Amazon but it's hard to tell the difference between the ones that start with, and don't get much beyond, "this is the screen, this is the keyboard" and those that dive straight into re-writing chunks of the operating system. Hopefully a couple of hours in a BIG bookshop will give me what I need. Finding a decent online forum would help too.

Obviously it is VERY early days yet. I will master this thing and there is evidence to suggest that it will be more convenient and reliable than a Windows PC when I have.

Even at this very early stage however I can say with a fair degree of certainty that a MacBook is NOT a solution for technophobia. My friend Aitch is watching with keen interest because as somebody with a number of failed attempts to get to grips with a Windows PC behind him, he was hoping that the acquisition of a MacBook might provide a solution. It won't. Whatever else the MacBook and OS X have going for them, they are not the easy option. Having said that I haven't seen anything to indicate that they will be any harder to get to grips with, and I've seen plenty to suggest that they are a damned site more reliable.

Watch this space.

Day 1: - It's here!

2006-10-05T19:07:00.000+01:00

My new MacBook arrived today. Yay!

Before we get started though I feel that I should confess that although I describe myself as a "Mac virgin" I did actually use an Apple Mac briefly while at Art College some 20 years ago. In the greater scheme of things however, it was little more than a quick snog behind the bike sheds. Certainly nothing for my new MacBook to be jealous of and absolutely no reason that it should assume that I know who is supposed to go on top or what gets plugged in where.

I should also confess that I have had quite a bit of experience with Windows PCs. Having worked as a programer and network administrator, and currently spending a good chunk of my time looking after a couple of rather large websites.

The reason I mention all of that is that although I am a Mac virgin it is true to say that am not entirely clueless. That is to say that I probably have a good idea of what I want to do with this thing, even if I don't yet know how to do it.

So why the move to Mac?

Well at the time of that almost forgotten first encounter the Mac was streets ahead of the PC in terms of its user interface and although the gap has been narrowed, I get the distinct impression that it still is. It's more a question of why I haven't switched sooner and the answer to that it that most of my IT career was spent looking after systems for accountants, production controllers and the like i.e. people who use PCs. If I'd been working for publishers, musicians and the like then I guess I'd have moved years ago. Another factor of course is that a Mac is, and always has been, more expensive than an 'equivalent' PC. Given that in my line of work I was used to dealing with the Windows blue screen of death on other people's computers on a daily basis, it didn't seem too much of a hassle to be dealing with it on my own computer as well.

I no longer work in IT but I do spend a fair amount of my time logged into a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) server at the other end of the country playing with the various web sites that I maintain as a hobby. Thus the continued battle with my means of accessing the web has become a great source of irritation. I mentioned this to my brother-in-law (those who regard me as a something of a computer wizard should think of him as a god) and his answer was simple: "Use a Mac". Obviously I did a little more research before parting with 750 quid of my hardly earned cash but that just lead to me getting bored with reading the phrase "it just works" over and over again. Thus I figured that it was probably about time I found out for myself.