Optical Media Problem:
I ran into a "gotcha!" with Apple's elegant designs. I can't eject a bad DVD disk.
Macs, unlike PCs, do not have a CD/DVD tray that comes out. Instead, they have a slot that you stick the disk in to. Sort of liking sticking a piece of bread into a toaster. To eject the CD or DVD that is in the optical drive, you have to drag the icon representing the disk to the trash can. That tells the computer to eject the disk.
So what do I do when there is a disk in the drive and the OSX doesn't see it? Because it doesn't see it, there is no icon on the desktop to represent it. Because there is no icon, I have nothing to drag to the trash can to ask the computer to eject it.
I have no idea why it can't see the disk. I inserted a blank DVD-R disk that I planned to burn some files to. I suppose that I will have to reboot the computer in WinXP and hope that XP can see the disk. It should at least see the drive, which means I could ask XP to issue an eject command.
There is no manual override button to force eject a disk. What does Apple expect people who aren't computer gurus to do when it eats a disk and refusing to "see" it? Most people aren't going to install two OS's, like I did, to see if the other can fix the problem.
MacBook & OSX Help System:
While trying to solve the above problem, I discovered another problem. There is no comprehensive help system on the HDD. I had to go the Apple web site. What would I do if I was not connected to the internet? What if the problem that I was seeking help on was getting the computer to hook up to the internet? The OSX comes with a search utility called "Spotlight". But that did not find any sort of help data.
I did find a small Macbook user guide PDF. But it was very high-level and brief overview of how to do basic things. It was not comprehensive at all.
Strange... I would think that Apple would be sure to include a good help system. Perhaps they are so confident that their hardware and software are so perfect and easy to use that a help system is not needed. Well, they are wrong!
Bluetooth Mouse:
Yesterday I bought a small bluetooth optical mouse. The Macbook comes with a built in Bluetooth transmitter/receiver. This works great! And it works under both OSX and WindowsXP. So I now have a small little wireless mouse that I can use without tying up a USB port. I didn't buy the Apple mouse. They are over priced and do not have a right click. I'm not a Mac purist, so I refuse to give up my right click button. Personally, I find OSX easier to use with the right click.
Showing posts with label Mac OSX. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mac OSX. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Sunday, December 31, 2006
The Mac OSX Experience - Day 3
Well. I've run into what I consider some serious problems. I don't feel confident enough to migrate any data over to the new laptop until these are resolved. I've found that files are disappearing and being corrupted.
I copied over a folder containing about 600 pieces of artwork that I wanted to use as my wallpaper. When I checked them today, about 50 of them, all GIF's, were corrupted and could no longer be opened. I have not figured out what happened. I suspect that it might have to do with some subtle differences between how a Mac and a PC process GIF files. I'm not sure, so I will have to do some research into this later, when I get some more time.
Another odd thing is dissapearing files. Some have vanished, and I have no idea where or why. For example, my system Janice had left a video she made on the desktop before she mailed me my machine. That video is gone. I didn't delete it, move it, or anything. I can't find it anywhere. Thankfully, I had backup it up to an external HDD, so I still have a copy.
Usually in Windows, and in MacOSX, you can drag a file into an application to have that application open that file. I found that when I drag an image file into Apple's preview, it (1) corrupts the image that is currently previewed, and (2) deletes the original file. And to make matters worse, there is no "undo" command. I can't reverse the process. So the file I dragged is gone and no where to be found. It is not in the application to be saved. Instead it is imbedded somewhere in the original file, and seems to not be able to undo. What a pain in the neck.
I've decided to not spend any more time on the MacOSX side for now. In order to migrate to this new laptop, I need to establish a replica of the environment I have on my old laptop. So in that regard, I have spent the last day installing applications under WindowsXP on the Mac. So far, not too bad. Since I do a lot of development work, I have some pretty massive applications to install. These massive apps also have massive amounts of patches and updates that I need to download too.
I've installed OfficeXP Pro, my Macromedia/Adobe Studio 8, Cold Fusion Server, SQL Server 2000, Java Netbeans IDE, IIS, and a million smaller apps that I use. Since I'm running servers for development, there is a lot of configuring and security issues to iron out. It just very tedious.
For fun, I also installed a couple of demanding PC games that I own.. Doom3 and Counter Strike Condition Zero. These are both very demanding FPS (First Person Shooter) games that my old laptop could not handle. The video demands were simply too much and I would constantly end up dead simply because I could not react to threats quick enough. By the time the graphics engine would catch up with the action, I would have been shot or ripped to shreds by a monster. So I had ended up removing these games and setting them aside.
I tried them out last night. I cranked the video setting to max, the most punishing on the graphics card. The results were impressive. The game play was smooth, even will full texture rendering, shadows, high FPS rate, and large resolution. I could tell the Macbook was working hard because I heard and felt a fan kick in that I have no heard before.
I discovered something else that irritates me, but it is not deadly critical. I found that MaxOSX can't seem to figure out what time it is. Even though I have it configured to get the time against a time server, AND it knows what time zone I am in, it seems to always be off by 5 to 6 hours. I can only correct it by switching to a manual time setting. Windows doesn't seem to have a problem. It always comes up with the correct time. Logically, this means that Apple's time server is off. That would make every Mac on the planet off too. So it must be something is wrong with the time zone database on my machine. Weird.
Another thing that bugs me. I found that if I hibernate WinXP, when I wake it, the touchpad no longer works. So that means I have to reboot WinXP, or plug in a mouse. Like the time issue, what a pain. I prefer hibernate since I run server services. It just makes Windows come up so much quicker for me.
Next week, once Adobe's tech support opens, I can call them and straighten out some licensing issues with moving my Macromedia and Adobe products over to the new machine. So far I'm running on trial versions.
Well.... I'm gonna lock up the computer for a couple of days and celebrate the New Years.
I copied over a folder containing about 600 pieces of artwork that I wanted to use as my wallpaper. When I checked them today, about 50 of them, all GIF's, were corrupted and could no longer be opened. I have not figured out what happened. I suspect that it might have to do with some subtle differences between how a Mac and a PC process GIF files. I'm not sure, so I will have to do some research into this later, when I get some more time.
Another odd thing is dissapearing files. Some have vanished, and I have no idea where or why. For example, my system Janice had left a video she made on the desktop before she mailed me my machine. That video is gone. I didn't delete it, move it, or anything. I can't find it anywhere. Thankfully, I had backup it up to an external HDD, so I still have a copy.
Usually in Windows, and in MacOSX, you can drag a file into an application to have that application open that file. I found that when I drag an image file into Apple's preview, it (1) corrupts the image that is currently previewed, and (2) deletes the original file. And to make matters worse, there is no "undo" command. I can't reverse the process. So the file I dragged is gone and no where to be found. It is not in the application to be saved. Instead it is imbedded somewhere in the original file, and seems to not be able to undo. What a pain in the neck.
I've decided to not spend any more time on the MacOSX side for now. In order to migrate to this new laptop, I need to establish a replica of the environment I have on my old laptop. So in that regard, I have spent the last day installing applications under WindowsXP on the Mac. So far, not too bad. Since I do a lot of development work, I have some pretty massive applications to install. These massive apps also have massive amounts of patches and updates that I need to download too.
I've installed OfficeXP Pro, my Macromedia/Adobe Studio 8, Cold Fusion Server, SQL Server 2000, Java Netbeans IDE, IIS, and a million smaller apps that I use. Since I'm running servers for development, there is a lot of configuring and security issues to iron out. It just very tedious.
For fun, I also installed a couple of demanding PC games that I own.. Doom3 and Counter Strike Condition Zero. These are both very demanding FPS (First Person Shooter) games that my old laptop could not handle. The video demands were simply too much and I would constantly end up dead simply because I could not react to threats quick enough. By the time the graphics engine would catch up with the action, I would have been shot or ripped to shreds by a monster. So I had ended up removing these games and setting them aside.
I tried them out last night. I cranked the video setting to max, the most punishing on the graphics card. The results were impressive. The game play was smooth, even will full texture rendering, shadows, high FPS rate, and large resolution. I could tell the Macbook was working hard because I heard and felt a fan kick in that I have no heard before.
I discovered something else that irritates me, but it is not deadly critical. I found that MaxOSX can't seem to figure out what time it is. Even though I have it configured to get the time against a time server, AND it knows what time zone I am in, it seems to always be off by 5 to 6 hours. I can only correct it by switching to a manual time setting. Windows doesn't seem to have a problem. It always comes up with the correct time. Logically, this means that Apple's time server is off. That would make every Mac on the planet off too. So it must be something is wrong with the time zone database on my machine. Weird.
Another thing that bugs me. I found that if I hibernate WinXP, when I wake it, the touchpad no longer works. So that means I have to reboot WinXP, or plug in a mouse. Like the time issue, what a pain. I prefer hibernate since I run server services. It just makes Windows come up so much quicker for me.
Next week, once Adobe's tech support opens, I can call them and straighten out some licensing issues with moving my Macromedia and Adobe products over to the new machine. So far I'm running on trial versions.
Well.... I'm gonna lock up the computer for a couple of days and celebrate the New Years.
Friday, December 29, 2006
The Mac OSX Experience - Day 2
I installed WindowsXP on my Macbook Pro today using Bootcamp. Sweet! It runs smooth and fast. Now I just have a shit load of work to do to install all the security and applications that I need. So that will pretty much waste my New Years Weekend.
The Mac OSX Experience - Day 1
Since I've opened up the new MacBook Pro and started getting it working right. I have a lot of work to do on it.
Now I want to state for the record that I hate Mac bigots. These are the Mac people who are always slamming Windows, telling everyone how perfect Macs are, and looking down at us non-Mac people with distain. I've been working on computers for almost 30 years now. I know that non are perfect. I feel sorry for these Mac bigots. They remind me of cult members who simply can't open their minds up enough to see the real world.
So it has been a day of working on the Mac. For those who claims that Mac's work perfectly out of the box, well they are lying. I've run into a lot of problems. It appears that I am really going to have to roll up my sleeves and dig deep into the OSX to figure out how to do what I need.
USB Thumb Drive Lock Up: My Macbook Pro locked up tighter than a drum when I plugged in one of my USB keys. I had to reboot. No error messages or anything. It just froze and stopped working. I took the key over to my WinXP laptop and reformatted it as FAT. Now the Mac will read it and not lock up.
No TrueCrypt: Damn! This is very disappointing. I love TrueCrypt. It use it to secure my USB keys incase I loose them. It turns out that there is no version of TrueCrypt that runs on a Mac. That means I can't use my TrueCrypt secured USB keys on the Mac.
I prefer TrueCrypt because it is open source public project with the best security and encryption methods. It is the only one that I ultimately trust. What is going on?
No Western Australia Daylight Savings Time Support: Hello Apple! What the hell is going on? Microsoft got right on the new DST for Western Australia. I noticed that Apple doesn't have it. Their advice? Tell your Mac that you are in Japan, or manually change your machine twice a year. Nice. How hard is it to update your clock files to support DST here?
No SpinRite: Another Damn! SpinRite is a critical program for the prevention of hard drive failures. It actually runs under FreeDOS. You have to boot a diskette, CD-ROM, or Thumbdrive with FreeDOS and SpinRite to get it started. I am seriously worried now. Running SpinRite on my drives allows me to sleep better knowing that the best program in the world has been watching them for problems.
No Java IDE: Hells Bells. It turns out that Sun doesn't make a Java compiler that runs under Mac OSX. They have them for most other OS's. Just not Mac. Why? Java is supposed to be a Write-Once, Run-Anywhere language. I use Sun's NetBeans IDE for Java development on my WinXP machine. But I can't use it on the Mac. I now have to learn a new IDE, Apples.
I blame this one on Sun, not Apple.
Firefox Profile Manager: Boy, Apple doesn't make it easy to customize the way programs start. I don't feel like learning a new browser. So I installed Firefox on the Mac. However, in order to start the Firefox Profile Manager, I have to drop into to Unix shell under MacOSX and manually enter the start line.
That is not that big of a deal. But what I can't do is then create a quick start icon under OSX that will fire off the Profile Manager for me. I can do this easily in Windows by editing the properties of a shortcut. No such animal on OSX that I can see. It tooks like I will need to spend a lot of time figuring out how I can tweak that command line parms that OSX passes to the underlying Unix system.
So in the meantime, I have to go through the profile manager everytime I start Firefox. I prefer to have it set up like I have on my WinXP box, when I go into the profile manager only when I need to.
Bootcamp: I downloaded and installed BootCamp from Apple in order to prepare my Macbook for dual boot. But after I run the install program, Bootcamp just goes away. It doesn't issue any messages that it is done. I finally figured out what it had done when I ran into Bootcamp hidden in the Utilities folder under the Applications folder.
Jeeze... you would like that the install program would at least tell you that it finished and to go find the app in that folder. Instead, it just disappears.
Quicktime Can't Play AVI files: This made me laugh. Mac bigots often speak of how Mac's run perfectly out of the box. Well, Apple's Quicktime video player can't play my AVI files. I had to go install the 3rd party player, VLC, which plays them fine. What is the computer idiot who bough a Mac cause they don't know computers supposed to do with stuff like this?
Adobe Bridge Tryout: Thanks Adobe! I downloaded and installed the Mac version of Photoshop CS2 Tryout version. It comes with Bridge, their image browsing product. But it won't run because of licensing restrictions. How in the hell am I supposed to "tryout" your product when your trial version won't let me?
This is stupid Adobe's fault, not Apple's.
Adobe Photoshop Tryout: Thanks again Adobe! The CS2 version of photoshop can't read Canon RAW files from my 30D. According to your website, CS2 has the Canon RAW support built in. But no..... it won't work. Nor can I find the RAW plug in to download and install after the fact. I want Photoshop CS2 software for RAW processing. That is what it is supposed to be able to do.
Grrrrr.
Font Problems: Oh man. This one sucks. I noticed that when I browse web sites with a lot of text (such as news sites), the top of some sentences get shaved off here and there. This is not good. I am going to have to do some testing and call Apple to solve this problem.
Now I want to state for the record that I hate Mac bigots. These are the Mac people who are always slamming Windows, telling everyone how perfect Macs are, and looking down at us non-Mac people with distain. I've been working on computers for almost 30 years now. I know that non are perfect. I feel sorry for these Mac bigots. They remind me of cult members who simply can't open their minds up enough to see the real world.
So it has been a day of working on the Mac. For those who claims that Mac's work perfectly out of the box, well they are lying. I've run into a lot of problems. It appears that I am really going to have to roll up my sleeves and dig deep into the OSX to figure out how to do what I need.
USB Thumb Drive Lock Up: My Macbook Pro locked up tighter than a drum when I plugged in one of my USB keys. I had to reboot. No error messages or anything. It just froze and stopped working. I took the key over to my WinXP laptop and reformatted it as FAT. Now the Mac will read it and not lock up.
No TrueCrypt: Damn! This is very disappointing. I love TrueCrypt. It use it to secure my USB keys incase I loose them. It turns out that there is no version of TrueCrypt that runs on a Mac. That means I can't use my TrueCrypt secured USB keys on the Mac.
I prefer TrueCrypt because it is open source public project with the best security and encryption methods. It is the only one that I ultimately trust. What is going on?
No Western Australia Daylight Savings Time Support: Hello Apple! What the hell is going on? Microsoft got right on the new DST for Western Australia. I noticed that Apple doesn't have it. Their advice? Tell your Mac that you are in Japan, or manually change your machine twice a year. Nice. How hard is it to update your clock files to support DST here?
No SpinRite: Another Damn! SpinRite is a critical program for the prevention of hard drive failures. It actually runs under FreeDOS. You have to boot a diskette, CD-ROM, or Thumbdrive with FreeDOS and SpinRite to get it started. I am seriously worried now. Running SpinRite on my drives allows me to sleep better knowing that the best program in the world has been watching them for problems.
No Java IDE: Hells Bells. It turns out that Sun doesn't make a Java compiler that runs under Mac OSX. They have them for most other OS's. Just not Mac. Why? Java is supposed to be a Write-Once, Run-Anywhere language. I use Sun's NetBeans IDE for Java development on my WinXP machine. But I can't use it on the Mac. I now have to learn a new IDE, Apples.
I blame this one on Sun, not Apple.
Firefox Profile Manager: Boy, Apple doesn't make it easy to customize the way programs start. I don't feel like learning a new browser. So I installed Firefox on the Mac. However, in order to start the Firefox Profile Manager, I have to drop into to Unix shell under MacOSX and manually enter the start line.
That is not that big of a deal. But what I can't do is then create a quick start icon under OSX that will fire off the Profile Manager for me. I can do this easily in Windows by editing the properties of a shortcut. No such animal on OSX that I can see. It tooks like I will need to spend a lot of time figuring out how I can tweak that command line parms that OSX passes to the underlying Unix system.
So in the meantime, I have to go through the profile manager everytime I start Firefox. I prefer to have it set up like I have on my WinXP box, when I go into the profile manager only when I need to.
Bootcamp: I downloaded and installed BootCamp from Apple in order to prepare my Macbook for dual boot. But after I run the install program, Bootcamp just goes away. It doesn't issue any messages that it is done. I finally figured out what it had done when I ran into Bootcamp hidden in the Utilities folder under the Applications folder.
Jeeze... you would like that the install program would at least tell you that it finished and to go find the app in that folder. Instead, it just disappears.
Quicktime Can't Play AVI files: This made me laugh. Mac bigots often speak of how Mac's run perfectly out of the box. Well, Apple's Quicktime video player can't play my AVI files. I had to go install the 3rd party player, VLC, which plays them fine. What is the computer idiot who bough a Mac cause they don't know computers supposed to do with stuff like this?
Adobe Bridge Tryout: Thanks Adobe! I downloaded and installed the Mac version of Photoshop CS2 Tryout version. It comes with Bridge, their image browsing product. But it won't run because of licensing restrictions. How in the hell am I supposed to "tryout" your product when your trial version won't let me?
This is stupid Adobe's fault, not Apple's.
Adobe Photoshop Tryout: Thanks again Adobe! The CS2 version of photoshop can't read Canon RAW files from my 30D. According to your website, CS2 has the Canon RAW support built in. But no..... it won't work. Nor can I find the RAW plug in to download and install after the fact. I want Photoshop CS2 software for RAW processing. That is what it is supposed to be able to do.
Grrrrr.
Font Problems: Oh man. This one sucks. I noticed that when I browse web sites with a lot of text (such as news sites), the top of some sentences get shaved off here and there. This is not good. I am going to have to do some testing and call Apple to solve this problem.
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