Tag Archives: Macintosh

God I Wish… Ah!

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Apple Inc.At work I’ve been thinking about a particular system administration subject on and off for a few days now. When Mac is first installed all the “Optional Sharing Services” are all shipped defaulted to off, which makes sense and is fine. Generally speaking I’ve been fine with using Apple Remote Desktop to share the workstation, open System Preferences, and turning on whatever sharing bits I need to have on for the client workstations and that’s that. However that’s not really that elegant and I’ve been looking for a way to programmatically do it on the command line. As it is, Apple Remote Desktop can send Unix commands to connected workstations. All my client workstations are assembled in a neat little pile on my Apple Remote Desktop screen, as easy as you please. How can I turn on or off these Sharing services without having to upset the user. Ideally I want to turn these on without even sharing their workstation, to in a way, do it under the covers.

Enter the command systemsetup. G’duh. There’s even a handy-dandy template in Apple Remote Desktop that I’ve overlooked all these years that even has the details of the options laid out. So, in Apple Remote Desktop, select the stations you want to change, click the UNIX button, in there select the right template, change the user to root and send the command. Moments later, and in this case, SSH is up and running on the client workstation as easy as you please. Boom. No futzing with sharing workstations, no mucking about with System Preferences. Just simple, easy, like I knew had to exist. Now I know how.

This is actually the way I prefer to learn these things. This was something I sussed out, so it’s worth more than if I just spotted it in some bit of documentation. It took time and energy and it’s mine. The solution is worth something to me, and so I blog about it so I can celebrate Mac OSX and keep a little log in case I forget in the future. It’ll always be here.

Hooray for Mac OSX!

photo by: marcopako 

Installing a HP LaserJet 1505 printer on Apple OSX Mountain Lion

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What a problem this was! We had a user with a MacBook Pro that had a new copy of Macintosh OSX Mountain Lion 10.8.2 running on it. Plugged in a rinky-dink HP LaserJet 1505 and nothing. Even though there was the exact same printer installed before, from the user’s home, the system refused to reuse the connection for the printer at work. Obviously that has to be because the system notices it’s a different device and refuses to play along, which I find stupid.

Plug in the printer, try to add it, and the Add Printer function goes out to Apple Software Update to look for the driver and then comes back and tells us that nothing is available. Then commence zombie debugging via muzzle flare, wandering around in the dark trying to fix what shouldn’t be happening but apparently is beyond all logic and reason.

So how you do diagnose a Mac? Here’s a handy-dandy guide which anyone can use to fix their Macs. I seriously doubt any issues ever survive this particular procedure:

  1. Clear PRAM – Turn off computer, turn on computer while holding down  Command-Option-P-R. The computer will restart and you’ll hear the startup chime twice. Let go of the keys. ~ For this, just do it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think doing this will fix your problem, it will. Just shut your pie hole and do this. If you don’t do it, I don’t want to hear about your problems. It’s magical. I don’t care if Apple says it won’t do anything. This thing DOES EVERYTHING IN CREATION – apparently. That and it cannot hurt. Lots of fluids and plenty of bed-rest. 
  2. Repair Disk Permissions – Start Disk Utility, find your “Macintosh HD” and click “Repair Disk Permissions” and wait. Do this. Often. Regularly. Lots. Weekly. Now.
  3. Download Onyx. Pick which version of OSX you are using, download it, install it and use it. I recommend skipping everything it wants to do and going right for the Automation button. Uncheck “Repair Permissions” and “Display of folders content” and check the rest. Click Execute and wait. When the system asks for a reboot. Reboot. Everyone should do this weekly. Think of it like vitamins for your Mac. Plus, it can’t hurt.

At this point your system should be all spic and span and whatever niggling bit was bothering you should be dealt with. Of course, for the problem I had to deal with at work, there is one little thing extra, one thing more. Open Finder, click Go on the Menubar, then Go to Folder… and type in /Library/Printers and click Ok. You’ll see a list of folders. In this list find the folder named “hp” and KILL IT WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE. Y’arr! This !@#$ folder is at the very center of my hatred for all that is Hewlett-Packard. I’ve started to unceremoniously refer to them as Fudge Packard. Bastards. Anyways, killing the folder does the trick, it clears everything up and Mountain Lion can download software from Apple again for the HP Drivers – blah blah blah. I’d rather just get a sledgehammer and pound the HP LaserJet 1505 into foil, but hey, you have to cope or have some sort of attack. I regret buying HP. I regret the LaserJet 1505. What a piece of crap. Steaming.

Encrypted Time Machine Drive Botch in Mac OSX 10.8.2 Mountain Lion

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We had a Firewire 800 drive botch when it came to whole-volume encryption in Mac OSX 10.8.2 Mountain Lion. We lost the password and couldn’t recover it. The drive refused to erase, all the options were grayed out. I refuse to believe that a software change can render hardware junk, so there had to be a way, and I found it. Here’s the procedure:

  • Attach botched drive to computer, since the password won’t work, cancel the unlock dialog box
  • Open Terminal
  • Enter command: diskutil CoreStorage list
  • You will get a long list, you are looking for the UUID of the “Logical Volume Group” at the very top of the list, for the drive that is affected.
  • Enter command: diskutil CoreStorage delete [UUID]
  • The system will eject the volumes, destroy the grouping, erase the disk, then initialize the disk, mount it and finish.
  • Done!

Workflow with Pocket

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I have recently fallen into a peculiar workflow arrangement between various social networking applications and Read It Later’s Pocket application. When I am following the flow of status updates from my Twitter stream I prefer to stay in-the-moment with the stream and select interesting-looking tweets that have links attached to them, but instead of actually following them in a browser, I send them to Pocket. My preferred Twitter application, TweetBot makes this as easy as tap and select “Send to Pocket” with a happy little sound confirming that my action worked. This really works well for me and doing this has spread beyond the confines of Twitter out to Facebook – however there is no convenient interface between Facebook status posts and Pocket so the workflow is a little more convoluted. I command-click on perhaps-interesting Facebook posts and this opens them up in tabs. Then I switch to the tab, click the Pocket extension, send the link to Pocket and close the tab. I don’t really want to see the links right now, I’d rather send them all off to Pocket and then queue them up that way.

Another really neat web tool that I’ve fallen in love with is IFTTT.com. This site allows you to connect a huge collection of services to their site and then construct “If This Then That” rules. This has actually simplified the Twitter-to-Pocket interface, in so far that if I like a Tweet then that is plucked by IFTTT and sent off to my Pocket automatically. This particular bit does muddy the waters between TweetBot and Twitter itself, but it’s not really a problem, just a build-up of near-miss convenience. IFTTT in this arrangement shines when it comes to Google Reader. I have subscribed to quite a lot of RSS and ATOM feeds from various sites and manage them all in Google Reader. If I “star” something in Google Reader, then IFTTT notices and copies that entry to my Pocket for later reading. As I am quite fond of having my cake and eating it too I’m always on the lookout for multi-product synergy and convenience. I really do not like Google Reader’s web interface, in fact, I really don’t like many “Web Interfaces” for products and would prefer the gilded cage of specialized client software instead. So there is a nice synergy between Reeder on my Mac computers which presents my Google Reader contents in a visually appealing way as well as Flipboard, which is the preferred way to view Google Reader on my iPad. By using IFTTT as the middleman-behind-the-scenes I can funnel all the stories that catch my interest and collect them right into Pocket.

All of these things can also be done with Instapaper and I was an ardent fan of Instapaper for a very long while, but I’ve switched over to Pocket. I still regard Marco Arment and his product to be very good, but for me personally I found that Instapaper on my 1st Generation iPad would jettison too much for my liking. It wasn’t as much a problem with Instapaper as it was the iPad itself. Embarrassingly outclassed by the applications that I was trying to force on it. I’d be able to stand by this, but Instapaper on my 3rd Generation iPad also jettisoned. I didn’t really want to bother the author with the yackety-schmackety bug reports and Pocket edged out Instapaper when it came to displaying video and audio media. The core functions between the two are quite similar and the only other small feature that pushed me over to Pocket was the ability to search on my Pocket list and perform actions on multiple items. I have no doubt that Instapaper will catch up and may already have caught up. The money I spent on Instapaper was money well-spent and I would suggest that people look at both apps before deciding for themselves.

So back to the workflow, this is how I naturally started navigating my social network stream of information. In a way, I follow sources which curate the noise of Reddit and other news aggregators into categories that I find most interesting and then I self-curate the longer pieces into Pocket for later consumption. As I used this workflow it occurred to me that what was happening was an emergent stratification of curation. Living generates a noisy foam of information, which crashes on the coral reefs of StumbleUpon, Reddit, Engadget, HuffPo and the like. Information seagulls, like @geekami (for example) fly over these coral reefs of information and pluck out the shiniest bits, linking them to tweets and shipping them out. Then I come along and refine that for things I really find interesting and all of this ends up crashing into Pocket. Arguably, Pocket is the terminal for all this curation, but it doesn’t have to be. I could (but I don’t) cross-link Pocket and Buffer using IFTTT and regenerating a curated flow of information turning me into an information seagull. I suppose I don’t follow that path because I already have enough to do as it is, reading, comics, FOMO, work, gym… the list goes on and on.

For all the apps and people I mentioned in this blog entry, I really do recommend that you Google them and see if any of this fits in your life as it did mine. If It works for you, or you found a better way of managing this flow of information foam, please comment with your workflow description. Just more curation. Lexicographers and Encyclopedists eat your heart out. ;)

Gartner: Macs invading the enterprise | Macworld

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Gartner: Macs invading the enterprise | Macworld.

First off I think Gartner is just about as useful as a bag of hammers. They style themselves as a company that somehow assumes that it can set precedent. Much in the way that people over-rely on snopes when it comes to debunking urban myths and internet memes, IT management over-rely on Gartner to do their thinking for them. The best way to evaluate isn’t to listen to some murky third-party but to talk to your network of peers and see what they recommend. If any of my peers asked me, I’d tell them the same thing I’ve been preaching for years – not only does Apple belong in the Enterprise space, but they should be absolutely dominating it!

Why do I say that? Because purchasing Macs and supporting these machines is a breeze in comparison to the nightmare existence of being stuck with Microsoft Windows. The cost of Macs are slightly higher than their PC counterparts however my argument is that even if the initial outlay is higher, you make that difference up and then a boatload more in the long term when you realize that the machines are built exceptionally well and in-and-of-themselves work almost flawlessly. Much of this is all about the Apple way of doing things, the computers are built with the OS in mind and the OS is built with the computers in mind. There aren’t any “Third Party” drivers or bloatware shipped with a Mac. Everything comes from Apple and you have the option of buying third party apps, but they are primarily mediated through the App Store. This irks a lot of people, especially the open-source types who get bent whenever they even catch a whiff that there is control over their online experience whatsoever. I have abandoned the open-source group and I’ll tell you why. Open source is meant for computer geeks, the people who professionally understand their computers on a very intimate and personal level – and these people are not the majority. The majority of people don’t give a damn about what is inside a computer, they just want to get their work done with a minimum of fuss and muss. Having Apple stand in as a traffic cop, or perhaps a better metaphor would be big brother is actually a very wonderful thing. The open-source mavens would chide me for being a bird in a golden cage, well, this nightengale is one very happy bird. I love my Apple cage. Because Apple stands guard on the App Store I don’t have to worry about sourcing applications, or the quality of those applications. Apple does all the gumshoe work for me! It’s a kind of executive abstraction that I absolutely love. Sandbox those apps, screw the developers to the wall, prevent them from being so clever that everything shakes to pieces and flies apart! It’s all about safety and sanity. I feel safe, so I am sane.

The other big point that I like to make about living in the Apple Golden Cage is that supporting 60 Macintosh computers is an absolute cakewalk! iChat runs and users can instant message, trade files, and request help using the iChat interface! Every once in a while iChat lets me down, I admit it isn’t perfect, but to cover the deficits of iChat (and I suspect it has more to do with our junky in-the-wall-behind-lock-and-key network, sorry guys) there is Apple Remote Desktop, or ARD. I love ARD. After I use ARD I want to seek out the team that wrote it and do favors for them. I want to hug them, I want to shower them with money, I want to buy them expensive beers and liquors and as many ladies-and-gentlemen-of-the-mid-afternoon as I can. This tool is heaven in a box. I can see each workstation and I can do whatever I like to each station! I don’t have to walk, sit down in the users chair, and upset them. As a sideline benefit, I don’t have to be exposed to their questionable hygiene or unique biology which helps me not get sick by having to use their keyboard and mouse. Support this way is heaven because the user can either hop on iChat or we can use the phone and ARD and they don’t have to stop and wait for me to walk out to see them and lose their train of thought. It’s good for the support staff, it’s good for the users, what isn’t to love?

When you sit back and think about all the technology and refinement and attention to detail that goes into Apple products, that they “just work” and do so with a minimum of fuss and muss, that they haven’t spread like wildfire in the enterprise segment baffles me. The only thing I can think of to align what I see in the world versus the absurdity of it is that people must be addicted to suffering with their technology. They accept that Windows is a headache, that it never works properly, that it lets you down just when you need it the most, and that it’s a nightmare to support. When I left Windows professionally it was like a breath of fresh air in a room previously filled with noxious fumes. It felt *exactly* like that! Even to this day when I hear coworkers pining for Windows I look at them like they are aliens that fell off the turnip truck. Are you seriously telling me that you’d prefer to go back to using the reboot-several-times-a-day oops-your-files-are-corrupted we’re-going-to-need-to-reformat-every-six-weeks way of life? Seriously? Now that we have Macs, and when I run into this sentiment it strikes me as a deeply upsetting thing that people actively seek out suffering and revel in it. We’re using Macs, if you want to suffer here’s a hammer, just smack yourself in the head with it and you’ll get your fix!

 

Review of Macintosh OS X Lion

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This past Wednesday I was prompted by some coworkers in regards to some news that had leaked out of Apple regarding their new Mac OSX Operating System codenamed “Mountain Lion”. This new operating system was supposedly going to take more of the riff against iOS that OSX Lion took, including a new version of iChat called Messages which integrates the iMessage framework into the desktop experience on a desktop computer.

It’s very clear to me the path that Apple is taking. They have a very good mobile operating system in the guise of iOS 5.0.1 and they are trying to establish themselves as a end-to-end digital experience purveyor. I don’t wish them ill for that, it’s a very valuable pursuit and frankly as I see it is the way the entire industry is starting to bend. There was a time back in the late 80’s when the rage was thin terminals, then when the 90’s came the pendulum swung the other way and computers got fat again. Now that the network is the centerpiece, we’re seeing that pendulum swing back to thin terminals once again. Computers are just appliances that you use to manipulate resources on the network, nothing more, nothing less.

Now we have Mac OSX Lion. I started this on Thursday, purchasing a copy from the Mac App Store for $29.99. I’ve never been one for “in-place upgrading” and I find great value in the “blow away and reinstall” method of installing a new operating system. To me the complete zeroing out of a hard drive means that you start form a position of known cleanliness. There isn’t a gremlin hiding in some deep dark directory folder waiting to spring out and catch you when you need your computer the most and then ruining your day. So I downloaded the 4GB file and followed instructions on the net for opening up what Apple provides to get at what you need to copy the data onto a external FireWire hard drive for speedy installation. This copying of the OS to a FireWire hard drive is something that I witnessed once when I was at a Genius Bar at an Apple Store, so I knew for a fact that it was an accepted Apple canon procedure. Once I had what I was after, and dear reader, please note a very distinct new flavor is entering into the Apple experience, that of “sidestepping the mothership” in order to get what you want accomplished done. Apple is no longer thinking ahead of the end user, making provisions for easy this-or-that, but rather making a popular installation method as annoying as possible. There is a darkness here that I will breach later on in this story, so keep your eyes peeled for it, you’ll know when you reach it.

So once I had Mac OSX Lion on a FireWire hard drive, specifically the affectionately termed “piece of shit” Iomega FireWire drive, named so because unless the drive is using FireWire 400 or FireWire 800, it’s a giant flaming hunk of shit – I’m looking at you retarded USB. Yes, if you plug this drive in using a USB cable it is a sorry piece of shit. FireWire, ahh, but I digress. So plugged into a test machine I was able to get Lion installed relatively quickly. I ran into my first small nugget of dismay. Unlike the previous big cat (Apple OS’s are named after big cats, so the previous one to Lion is Snow Leopard) there was no delightful animated movie with a catchy song that had a great hook. I was half hoping for the renowned Apple spit-and-polish and I was let down. No big bombastic “Welcome Message”, nothing like the Discovery channels boom-de-yada or anything like that. The nebula featured in the Snow Leopard installer was thematically replaced by the Milky Way Galaxy. Apple could have done something adorable perhaps even a powers-of-ten “Welcome” presentation at the outset but they chimped out. Missing this made me sad, but I was willing to soldier on.

The installation worked well, more polished than Snow Leopard in that it presents you with Disk Utility instead of making you go fish for it yourself. Lion started well enough and dumped me into a fully functioning Mac computer, right at the desktop, a picture of the Milky Way making me grin like a fool. I started in on some of the big features first, like Mission Control and Launchpad. Here are some big changes that Apple has made, and Mission Control is the most elaborate change you can see right off the cuff. Older big cats had Expose and Spaces. Lion merged these metaphors together into what is called Mission Control. A central vignette featuring an expose view of all the apps on that screen and then a parade of Spaces-based extra Desktops along the top of the screen. Apple engineered this interface quite well, especially with randomized wallpaper pictures on desktops and multiple monitors. Launchpad is the first patch of dull tin that you run into with Lion. Everything Apple makes is shiny. It’s white, it’s chrome, it’s polished and thought out and developed until it screams and moans with exhaustion. The interface has always been like this, when you expect to catch Apple with their pants down you find out that to your glad chagrin that they did develop even out into the edge-use-case that you find yourself accidentally exploring. This is why Apple succeeds and wows the cranky like myself, because they spend the time to flesh out all the possibilities and in so doing leave the user breathless. I’ve grown used to this particular feeling around Apple technology and have grown to assume that it will always be present. Launchpad is the first place where this feeling of polish and shiny appears to have gone out for a protracted lunch and left a “Back in 5 minutes” sign behind. I know why Launchpad exists, it’s a crib off of the menu launcher for iOS devices set as an optional interface on the desktop metaphor. It’s extra, it’s meaningless, it’s ignorable. The venerable Dock DOES THIS ALREADY and so Launchpad is for all real arguments a kind of iOS-inspired afterbirth. Nobody likes it, it sickens most people and the only people who appreciate it are the pedants who have hope that it may turn into something compelling down the pike. It’s jarring in that it’s express function is so extraneous. Who cares? I certainly don’t! I couldn’t imagine myself ever actually using Launchpad, so right off we’ve got a feeling of meaningless feature-creep that is reminiscent of… well, we won’t go there just yet. Bear with me for a while longer, please.

After these two big features were plumbed and found moderately compelling and extraneous in turn, I started to explore some really important and in-depth system requirements. My use of Lion is to support the use of a specific set of applications, one of which is Aqua Data Studio to fulfill my professional needs as a DBA for a SQL Server 2008 database at work. ADS requires Java, so when I first started it Lion informed me that no Java was installed with it’s basic install but it would help me get a version to install from the network. Lion then promptly gave me a terse error stating that Java was unavailable to get at that time. So I opened up Safari and did a Google search and found the Java installer for Lion and downloaded it and installed it. ADS worked well from that point forward. But that indicates another glaring problem with Lion. Why is a Java Runtime Environment not shipped by default with the operating system itself? Why is it a secondary download? To keep the OS slim and tight? Come on, that is no excuse. It is stupid and softheaded and it’s something that you’d expect … ahh… getting closer to it, but still not yet. Bear with me a fair bit more, please.

The next big thing I need is to bind workstations to an Open Directory domain hosted from our Mac OSX Leopard server. Yes I know it’s an old server, but I cannot accept the risk of trying to upgrade it and losing user data. In a way this server is a basket with all the eggs in it. If you keep all your eggs in one basket, as Mark Twain said, you keep your eyes on that basket! So I have an Open Directory domain and I want to make an authenticated bind to it from a workstation. This act is required so that it correctly registers the computer in the OD domain so I can then assign it parameters in the domain to manage it easily. Anyone who manages domains, OD or AD knows that this management makes the world far easier to manage when it comes to client computers. On Snow Leopard this is a non-issue, it takes about 2 minutes to do and is very straightforward. On Lion I progressed the same way as I would on a Snow Leopard installation except this time, and to my now-aching chagrin it turns out that Lion refuses to establish an authenticated bind on an Open Directory if it’s run under Leopard. Even still, at this point I was willing to imagine ways to compensate for this shortcoming and still move forward with Lion. Life could go on without binding to OD in the way that I wanted. This feeling of coping and compensating is something I’m very familiar with when it comes to… ahh… again, wait for it, please.

I continued forward with Lion and discovered to my chagrin that the previous installation of Server Administration Tools for Leopard are grossly incompatible with Lion. So my remote Server Admin toolkit that I use almost daily is a dead duck. I can cope, as I can use ARD to control the server itself and use the tool kit there. It’s not as graceful as it was on Snow Leopard, but. I. can. compensate. At this point in the game I have switched over to my own iMac from the test one and I’m trying to make Lion work for me. Even saying that stings if you are used to Apple products as of late, but I digress. Once I got Lion up and running and past all these little problems I installed the Messages beta and tried to get it to work. I logged into my user account which still had the Library from Snow Leopard. Lion accepted this as gracefully as a panicking albatross accepts having hot tar thrown at it. Nothing worked. Messages was a Force Quit bonanza, along with iCal, Mail, Addressbook. Every app caught a whiff of my Snow Leopard Library and flipped it’s insides with it’s outsides. So, in the spirit of filthy wretched attrition I compensated by ditching my Snow Leopard Library and creating a new blank one. Lion was very happy to fill the new empty Library with everything that it needed and so I had the unenviable position of having to re-authenticate to everything I use on the network, all over again. I did get everything to work finally and Messages did start and work well up until I started to fill the iCloud settings panel with all the accounts that I use on a daily basis. Five email accounts, six calendar resources, and four chat clients including iMessage. Lion handled iCloud services like a champ and the rest were acceptably easy enough to set up except for IMAP resources which disgracefully belly-flopped the user back into Mail.app to polish off the setup there each time you wanted to set up an IMAP account. I was on the road to getting Lion up and running and then I tried to set up Evernote, at first my Snow Leopard copy of Evernote was a flaming mess, and then I dumped the Evernote bits from the Library and downloaded Evernote from the App Store and tried again. Evernote struggled for HOURS and never really was a success on my Lion installation. Another application that I use a lot is Dropbox, and this too also suffered for Lion and was an agony through struggle-town. Dropbox never got off the ground either. The only application that worked very well was iCal. The experience was devolving faster and faster and was pounding headlong towards resembling… yeah… not yet.

As I was struggling along with Lion I noticed some other rather nasty developments that Apple brought to this big cat. I was puttering around my home folder and suddenly felt very strange as I couldn’t locate my ~/Library folder. It’s in Library that many settings and caches are kept and it’s the first place that a IT guy goes to look to resolve application problems. I couldn’t find it however when I used Terminal and issued the command ls -lah I could see it just fine. Something was hiding it from the GUI. It turns out that Lion aggressively issues this command every time it starts: “chflags hidden ~/Library”. This application, chflags adds an extended attribute to whatever file it works on, turning on or off various fine-print features. In this case, the “hidden” attribute hides a file or folder from the GUI but not from the filesystem. So what Apple has done is actively hidden the Library to keep people out by not letting them see it plainly. This is what an asshole does to piss off IT guys. Yes it’s fine to pull this shit on end users but what if you know more than Ma and Pa Kettle? Go fish! This was the first time that I felt Lion resembling… no… not yet. Don’t worry, it’s coming.

Along with this little Library gem I found what Apple did to the Finder to be abominable. They took a system that worked well and hammered out it’s ankles so it just hobbles around. This intentional hobbling of the file management subsystem is exactly what… grimace. No. It’s not time yet. What else is there? Ah yes, the vaunted gestural operating system! In Lion various gestures done with a Magic Trackpad or a brand new Apple Mouse do a host of new things. I happen to have a Magic Trackpad and I like it quite a bit. The gestures? They hurt my fingers. Okay, what else? Scrolling. Lion flips the sense of scrolling so that you scroll the same way that you would on an iOS device, with the direction of scroll instead of against it. This is supposed to be more natural but in practice causes confusion and upset, as users have been scrolling in a certain way for so long that the brain just can’t correct for this new 90 degree flipflop. It’s supposed to feel natural, it feels horrible – like someone is forcing me to wear my left shoe on my right foot and my right shoe on my left foot! What else is broken in Lion? How about Trash removal? I tried in vain to remove Trash, even Securely, to get rid of 17 items. I let it chug away for two hours and no good. I eventually had to “sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash” and that only temporarily solved the issue, once I put more things in the Trash removing them became a waste of effort. I let the system try to remove 50 items OVERNIGHT and it could not accomplish it. I tried to set up network attached printers. Apparently all the CUPS drivers for all the various printers, HP and Savin that we use at work all went out the window! Nothing like a good firm cavemanesque regression to really catch someones attention! So it’s either generic PostScript or generic PCL. Whatever.

Then we get to the why of Lion. Why bother with this wretched pile of insipid monkey spit? Apple would have you believe that iCloud is reason enough. iCloud is supposed to tie all their devices and experiences together so that your iPod Touch, iPad, iPhone and Lion-based computer all have the exact same information on them at all times. That your contacts and your email and your calendars all will jive from system to system to system. This is the holy grail of cloud computing, which is to say making user data available everywhere and on everything they use. It’s what iCloud was designed to provide. Is it compelling enough to switch to this big cat? Absolutely NOT. I am angry. I am angry at Apple. They released iCloud and then in a fit of pique they actively sandbagged all their customers who were using Snow Leopard making using iCloud on the desktop experience something you can only get with Lion. The argument is, you can surely afford $29 to get Lion, so why not upgrade? Meanwhile Apple hands Windows 7 customers an application to add iCloud to their OS for free. What if you are an Apple fan using Snow Leopard? Tough shit, Sherlock! You’re fucked six ways to Sunday! This is the modus operandi of… ahh… now we can get to it.

Apple, through their expression to people like me of their newest operating system called Mac OS X Lion is turning into Microsoft. They are turning OSX into Windows Vista. This is what Microsoft does. This is how Microsoft let explosive diarrhea and ignorance of the smell lead to a squishy and repellent end-user experience. This is the first time I’ve been savaged by an Operating System and felt as frustrated as I did when I fruitlessly scrabbled at the abomination that was Microsoft Vista! This Operating System, this Lion, this is crap and is NO GOOD, APPLE. If I had such struggles, and I know what I am doing! Then what the hell will the end users do? All the fancy chrome parts that you spent all your time shining left all the other parts you forgot about to lie in the dark, festering. What you did to Finder was HORRIBLE, what you did to scrolling is an abomination in the eyes of God! The fact that the system reaches an idle state at all after installation is a miracle!

And so we get right to the heart of it. Apple has peaked. Much like Microsoft did with Windows 2000, a product I wish they would have grabbed, and really refined and made that their flagship product instead of the insane clown paint and bullshit that became Windows XP and later on Windows Vista and Windows 7; Apple should have refined what was in Snow Leopard and not followed Microsoft’s well worn path of throwing insane clown paint on what is an excellent Operating System! I wish Apple would take Lion back. Give everyone their money back and offer to help them downgrade (nee upgrade) back to Snow Leopard and express to everyone how sorry they are and how they are going to go back to the drawing board and refine Snow Leopard into the proper next-big-cat we should be getting instead of this flea-ridden abomination known as Lion.

This experience fucking breaks my heart! I had such hopes for the next big cat! I was hoping for a kinder more gentle Apple now that Steve Jobs is in the ground, but it’s apparently not in the cards. Apple is turning into Microsoft and that my friends is a very nasty slope covered with axle grease and human shit. It may be that Apple’s greatness was just how a later-in-life Steve Jobs shined through it. Now that he’s gone, we see this awfulness start to bubble up from beneath us all. Apple should be ashamed of Lion. The way they have treated their Snow Leopard customers should be a shame in and of itself. Turning your backs on half of your installed service base as Lion wasn’t as hot-to-trot as you hoped it would be will come back to bite you Apple, and more than the little chunk missing from your logo!

I cannot recommend Macintosh OSX Lion for use in enterprise settings where there are domains, a pre-existing user base, or any other situation where an upgrade path is indicated. There is no compelling reason to switch to Lion, the technologies included do little for the end user that basic training and responsible computing shouldn’t already be able to address.

Wisdom?

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Just got a mailer from one of my favorite campus locations with the headline “What are you spending your tax return on?” and a subheading of “Spend it wisely at…” and it has a cheap piece of junk Dell Vostro Mini-Tower featured for $429.

So here is where I catch a touch of the twitch. It’s the notion that buying a Dell is wise. Is it wisdom to buy something you’ll need to have reformatted every 2 to 6 months? Is it wise to buy something that is confusing and sluggish and poorly designed?

Yes kids, this is another Anti-PC rant.

If you have a nice IRS Tax Return to spend money on, why not spend it really wisely and buy a Macintosh instead of a Dell Piece Of Shit. (Capitals are important) Shit it is, shit it will always be. Shit it has loaded in it, so much so that brown mush oozes out of every port. I would only advise people to buy this incredible piece of crap if you like suffering. If you truly enjoy smashing your hands with hammers, jabbing awls into your eyes and running at top speed headlong into brick walls then FINE. Go ahead and buy this epic piece of flaming junk.

Learn a lesson from my mistakes. I lost TWENTY YEARS of my life to epic loads of junk like this. Twenty years of struggling and agonizing, being told that “they’ll fix that in the next version” and “The next one will be so much better” when I could have enjoyed a Macintosh for that length of time. I keep on screaming this at the top of my lungs and I always will. Microsoft is not good for you! Stop suffering with Windows, break your addiction to pain, break your addiction to endless headaches and eye-burning agony. This sort of thing isn’t meant for human consumption.

Yes Macintoshes cost more. But trust me on this, what you buy is WORTH EVERY RED CENT. What would you rather have? A box full of shit and suffering or a computer that works, is a pleasure to use, and actually puts a smile on your face?

Your answer will determine your path. Choose wisely.

Unbearable Technology

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Today I have helped Scott’s mom tackle some of the annoying technology that dogs her. First it started with a very old Dell Dimension 4500 Computer which is really too slow to use but still limps onwards. Scott’s mom wanted me to help her tune the junk mail processing on that machine and the version of Outlook, part of Microsoft Office XP doesn’t actually have any centralized Junk Mail processing, so there isn’t any point in trying to fix the unfixable and to let sleeping dogs lie. I felt like a broken record when I kept on pushing Macintosh as a solution that would resolve nearly every issue that plagues her, at least with computers.

The second problem we ran into was that her Ford Sync (by Microsoft) wasn’t charging her iPod as it was plugged into the on-board USB port. After fiddling with the controls and not really doing anything I apparently fixed the problem. What did I fix? I have no idea. It’s Ford, it’s Microsoft. It’s… bygones. I suppose I should be happy that I somehow got it to return to charging, even though I don’t understand what I did to fix it. It used to really upset me, when technology defied logic and cause-and-effect. It doesn’t apparently bother anyone else, so … bygones.

The third technological problem was helping Scott’s mom manage her television, cable converter, and DVD player. These devices are designed poorly, everything from the firmware interface to the design of the remote controllers. My home setup is beyond abominable but I’m a geek, so it doesn’t bother me in the least. As I was writing instructions to help Scott’s mom get basic things done it struck me that she doesn’t care about AV2, or Component1, that the menu system in the Motorola DVR box from Charter isn’t fit for human use. So I struggled while wrestling with the basic instruction sheet that I was writing. Watching the steps form I marvelled at the insane awkwardness, the labyrinthine agony that had to be followed just to get basic things done. These devices are too complicated by far for use in this environment. These devices need a simplified menu system and massively simplified remote controllers shipped with the items, but alas, the manufacturers aren’t interested in simplification, they’re interested in only complication. As I was writing it struck me, the inherent bullshit in the DVD player for example, I’ve never used “Alternate Angles” bullshit, why should the remote have 75 god-damned buttons? I find myself musing that these god-damned manufacturers are devoted to provide solutions in search of problems, not the other way around! Just because you CAN do a thing doesn’t mean you SHOULD do a thing. I suppose the lessons from Frankenstein never reached these silly manufacturers. Chief amongst them is Motorola. The impossible-to-use menu of this DVR is beyond repellent, beyond agonizing. I set up about 20 channels of Favorites for Scott’s mom, but it was a death-slog-for-geeky and I couldn’t ever expect any regular person to even try something like this.

I think a good portion of what leads to me being so upset about all of this is my exposure to Apple. When you use an Apple product you see good design in action and it sets the standard and you don’t even know that’s happening. Now when I see anything that doesn’t meet the bar that Apple set I become impatient and enraged. All I want to do is pull all that horrible impossible to use technology out its little hidey-hole, run down to Charter and throw it through their plate-glass windows! … Find-happyplace-happyplace-happyplace.

Now that all the items are crossed off, and instructions are written and technology explained (without any defense of its unbearable odiousness) I can fly back home knowing that I’ve left things slightly better than I found them.

Loving Macintosh

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I have a regularly scheduled task at work that I have to complete every Friday. I missed the last one because I was sick, but I catch up on the next Monday, which is today. The task is that I have to copy an 11.6GB backup of my production SQL database to a local storage area to keep the data in case I need it in the future. I mounted the database server using SMB and I sat in front of a terminal window and faced not so much of a problem as an urge to find a convenient way to copy the data, then pass that copied data to a compressor, and then copy it to a storage area, and while that is all going on in the terminal window I want terminal to make a sound so I know it’s done.

I’m familiar with bash shell programming to know that I can link multiple commands together on one line, as a procedure, that’s not a problem. But how do I make the terminal beep? I looked in vain for commands like “beep” and “alert” with no luck. Then I shook my head and remembered the ‘say’ command. So with one line:

cp /Volumes/DB/database.bkp /temp; say ‘Copied’;bzip2 /temp/database.bkp;say ‘Compressed’;mv /temp/database.bkp.bz2 /Storage;say ‘Stored’

I just enter that and press the return key and my Mac starts to churn through the data and at each checkpoint I get Alex (my preferred Mac Voice) telling me when my machine is done with each step.

Then I go on to other tasks while this is chewing along in the background. bzip2 gnaws for a fair while on 11GB worth of data and takes it down to about 1GB. That I can make a procedure with vocal feedback like this, it makes me just one ounce happier. It’s these little wins, these convenient little solutions waiting to be taken advantage of throughout the Mac OS that makes me such a rabid and passionate Macintosh fanboy. People ask why I push Apple and Mac so hard, it’s because the products are polished, elegant, and incredibly pleasant to use! When I compare it to what I used to use, it makes me very sad about my past, but really happy that I discovered Macintosh when I did. I only regret all of that horrible past where nothing worked properly because of Microsoft.

So. Happy. :)

Enter Sweepstakes, Stab and Turn!

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I entered the REIMAGINE ROI Sweepstakes at Hewlett-Packard with this tale of ROI:

On June 19th, 2009 I helped migrate my entire department to Apple Macintosh. We replaced all of our wretchedly awful Dell computers running the horrid Windows XP Operating System for bright and shiny new 24″ iMac computers. Behind the scenes we eliminated our HP DL380G5 Server as well as two other smaller Dell PowerEdge servers for an Apple xServe. Our return on investment of $80k was incredible, we had eliminated in one deft stroke our vulnerabilities to malware and adopted a system that was both easy to use and an absolute dream to support. Our mobile staff are secure and getting their work done and even our Help Desk staff can run support from home so they do not have to make that tragic decision between their employment and their children. We have also replaced many of the Hewlett-Packard printers, due to Hewlett Packard’s gross disinterest in pursuing us as customers, we have instead switched many of our production printing devices over to Savin. I cannot express how much more efficient and pleasant it is dealing with Savin, now, than ever we had with Hewlett-Packard. We have recently also switched our digital imaging needs away from Hewlett-Packard because Hewlett-Packard does not support the Apple Macintosh competently or adequately. By selecting Hewlett-Packard’s competitors we have truly realized a better working life for our entire department. Because of our experiences with Hewlett-Packard, we will most likely never purchase anything from them ever again. That alone, and the freedom from the enemy of productivity, Microsoft, has made our working lives a veritable garden of Eden. That’s some return on investment.

Suffice it to say, I don’t think I’ll be ‘leader-of-the-pack’ when it comes to winning the HP Sweepstakes. I do have the peace of mind to know that it’s the truth, and not bullshit reinforced by an echo chamber.