So, my bad consumer urges took over my brain and forced me to buy a 1TB Hitachi external hard drive. The drive works great connected directly to my Macbook Pro running Leopard, however, it barely works at all when plugged into my Airport Extreme base station. The first time I plugged it in, the Airport Extreme’s name showed up under the “SHARED” drop down in Finder, but clicking on it revealed an empty folder. Investigating the base station using the Airport Utility revealed that the drive was indeed recognized. With that in mind, I decided to reformat the 1TB partition using journaled HFS+ thinking that would trim all the FAT off. Unfortunately, it took about six hours to recopy the 500GB of data from my old external Maxtor drive to the Hitachi after the format. After all of that, I hooked-up the drive to the Airport again, and … nothing.

Clearly, there should be a drive listed here.

The only logical course of action that I could think of at this point was to pickup the drive and throw at the wall as hard as I could. My theory was that the impact would probably “reseat” the faulty memory chips inside the disk. Dinner was ready at this point. So, I surreptitiously recorded this idea into my Moleskine for later consideration.

After dinner, I decided to delay the swift-and-blinding-violence tactic, and wade through Apple’s discussion site for a while. I learned that you could mount the drive by selecting “Go”, then “Connect to Server…” and then typing in the Airport Extreme’s IP address. This allowed Finder to access the drive, and it worked well for about an hour, but after that it became slow, then unreachable. Then, I rebooted the Airport Extreme base station, and then rebooted Leopard. Again, the drive worked for a while, but after a period of idle, the drive was inaccessible again. The Apple discussions mentioned that downgrading the firmware from 7.2.1 to 7.1 seemed to fix the issue for a few users. Unfortunately, my base station would only allow me to downgrade as low as 7.2.

This kind of snafu is very un-Applelike. Thankfully, this is the first major problem that I’ve had with using Leopard so far. It’s hard to believe that something as basic as using an external hard disk with the Airport Extreme would work this poorly with Leopard. I mean, 10.5 has been out for over two months now. If any of you kids out there know how to do the magic dance to make my disk work with the Airport, please drop me some comment gold.

I love my Macbook and basically only use Windows now for watching DivX video and syncing my iPod (because I’ve been too lazy to link it to my MBP’s copy of iTunes.) No platform is a utopia and OS X is no exception. I’ve grown to love OS X more than Windows, but with the love comes some annoyances.

• You can add a person from iChat into your address book, but the avatar doesn’t get copied over into as the user picture. As a matter of fact, I can find no way to drag or copy/paste the image over from iChat to Mail.app outside of using “Grabber” to copy the entire window. Actually, copy/paste works, but you have to leave the iChat Get Info page’s image editor open, hit copy, and then paste the image into Address Book. I think it should just automatically do this if an iChat avatar exists.
• Why doesn’t iChat support other protocols than AIM?
• Why doesn’t iSync work with my Verizon RAZR? (I’ve tried all the “seem” edits to the RAZR’s firmware already).
• If I copy from a Terminal and paste into TextMate or Mail.app, sometimes, the newlines are lost.
• My MBP sometimes sporadically shuts down when the battery is low (without running on reserve). I can turn it back on after hitting the power button or clicking the mouse button a couple of times. My Powerbook running the same version of OS X does not do this.
• OS X doesn’t use ls –color by default. Red Hat has had this since like 1997. I had to compile a new version of ls from Fink to get this to work.
• Keyboard shortcuts are inconsistent. <Command>-R is “Refresh” in Safari, “Rotate” in Preview, and “Reply” in Mail.app. On Windows, <F5> is “Refresh” everywhere. Window navigation is also quite strange. In Terminal.app and Firefox, you can do a <Command>-1,2,3,4,.. to access each of your sub-windows, but none of the other apps support this. Fortunately, <Command>-<`> seems to cycle through all of the windows in most apps (except Firefox).
• Digital video is a bigger mess on OS X than it is under MS Windows. You have to pay for Quicktime Pro if you want to view a full screen video file (or use VLC which doesn’t integrate with Firefox or Safari). Also, Quicktime doesn’t support esoteric codecs and when it encounters one it doesn’t understand it forwards you to an apple.com help page of little use. Just yesterday, I tried playing an MSNBC video in Firefox, and it didn’t work even though Flip4Mac is installed. Arrrgh.
• Package management is rather broken. Darwinports and Fink work sometimes, but most of my development tool chain had to be manually compiled using instructions for Hivelogic and others
• Preview.app doesn’t resize PDFs when resizing a window. It defaults to a pretty much unreadable Zoom-level
• The only Flickr Uploadr fucntion comes from the ConnectedFlow FlickrExport iPhoto plugin and costs 20 USD
• Holding down <Shift> and using arrows to select is counter-intuitive. If you do a <Shift>-<Down>,<Shift>-<Down>, then <Shift>-<Up> selects the two files below and one file above. To my mind, it makes more sense for <Shift>-<Up> to unselect the last one selected. This interaction paradigm is supported by Microsoft Windows and Gnome. Perhaps, my mind can’t adjust to the Mac-way of doing things
• I don’t love Finder or Spotlight. Microsoft Windows Explorer with the Google Desktop Search seemed to do the job a lot better on Windows XP.
• Why don’t they have a docking station yet? That’s one thing that I really miss about my Thinkpad.
• Changing icons is fairly unintuitive. You have to “Get Info” on a Desktop icon, and then drag a new icon over to the image within the Get Info page. Very strange considering that there’s no breadcrumb that indicates that this is even possible from that interface.

UPDATE: I just pressed the button on the MBP’s battery and noticed that it gives you a five LED indication of its own charge level! That makes up for all of these troubles.

I was talking to the infamous bumper the other night about how OS X is killing the open source desktop movement. Gnome and KDE seem to have lost their appeal to a lot of the moderate Penguinistas. A lot of these people are using OS X hotness now. Apple has been doing a bang-up job innovating on the desktop for the past 5 years while my Gnome Desktop still looks like a third rate clone of Windows 95. I’ve used recent versions of KDE too, and it fairs no better. Xgl is a step in the right direction, however, it still is fairly alpha right now.

I think the Mac might not be just killing the Open Source desktops, but the OSS movement itself. I don’t care very much about compiling stuff and trying to make it work on a Linux desktop anymore because everything that I could possibly want to use on Linux already works on OS X. So, I don’t spend time evangelizing Linux on involution.com. I’m too busy having a blast on my Powerbook much like an 8-year-old mesmerized by a large tank of colorful plastic balls. OS X comes in the back door because “IT’S BSD,” but way prettier. After that, you’re not coding Gnome widgets anymore. You’re sitting down with a latte, posting pictures to Flickr and using the word “cognoscenti” on Livejournal.

The problem has only gotten worse since I started using NetNewsWire. This fiendish little Mac program allows me to keep track of thousands of RSS feeds at once. I’ll be eating breakfast hitting next over and over again like a crack addict taking hits from the Macpipe. I’m starting to understand why Donald Knuth totally gave up email in the 90s. He could see the writing on the wall for how distracting this big old party can be. He could have never imagined Email+RSS+Livejournal+Flickr+IRC on a Mac (+ Starbucks in RL). I blame him for all of this in a lot of ways. Him and bumper.

* This post is ridiculously old, I typed it up months ago, but never posted it. I quit IRC and Starbucks thrice since writing this.

I paid 25 dollars in actual cheddar for the NetNewsWire RSS aggregator on my Powerbook. It’s pretty much the most Appleriffic feed aggregator on the planet. My one month trial was up yesterday, and I was really jonesing to see what was going on in the world of Intraweb irrelevance, but I couldn’t. So, I ponied up the 25 clams over to RancheroSoft. This is the second piece of software that I’ve purchased for the Mac. The first was the venerable Textmate. I’m just speculating here, but the third and fourth pieces of software that Imma buy is iLife and iWork ‘06 when I get around to it.

Dang, the OpenAFS people seem to be hiding their release candidate packages. It took me a good hour of rooting around to happen across this one squirreled away in a hidden back alley of the intraweb. I even pinged their mailing list when I tried to build my own package and failed miserably. Oh well, now I know how to build and checkout branches of OpenAFS which probably isn’t a bad thing.

Hmmm, suudsu was raising quite a ruckus about “This volume does not support symlinks” when I tried to install Fink today. Then, I wasn’t able to find much on teh google about this one. So, I broke out some mad OS X command-line foo to solve this problem.

sudo Installer -pkg /Users/jperrie/Desktop/Fink\ 0.8.0\ Installer.pkg  -target / 

Now, I’m just assuming Fink software should go into /sw…

I just hacked up the CSS some more tonight to make it look shinier under OS X. I may try to hack some better looking fonts for Mac OS X-only using the centricle hacks. All of my Wordpress themes can be downloaded here.