Apple Convert

More on Snow Leopard - Redux

2009-09-02T20:40:00.002-04:00

Well, I have finally converted all of my Macs to SL. I have one Mac Mini at work as well as my MacPro. At home I have two 2008 iMacs, one for work that is pretty plain and another that is my personal Mac. Every install went pretty well. As I have outlined below, the main thing that I had fail was the password vaulting program that I use. However, today I found something else that doesn't work and I've yet to find a reasonable solution for it. At my office we use Windows server 200 and 2003 as files servers. Mounting SMB shares has always been iffy with Leopard ever since 10.5.5. I was hoping that 10.6 might really address these problems... time will tell on that. However, I do use Office 2008 for the Mac as my document processing. I tried this twice today with different documents and I get the same problem.

I've mounted a Windows server share with SMB. I open an office document on that share and make some changes. When I go to quit and/or save Excel or Word tell me that for a variety of possible reasons it can't save the document. I gave up and finally went to my Fusion Virtual Machine running Windows XP and used Office 2007 to get the job done. I'll be working on getting this fixed as I only go to Windows when I absolutely have to.

The one program that I was a little worried about was VMware Fusion. Officially, Vmware says that the latest shipping version "Experimentally" works under Snow Leopard. Unofficially, it gets a thumbs up. My experience with it is that it's pretty solid.

More on Snow Leopard

2009-08-29T13:12:00.003-04:00

So, I continue to test and play with Snow Leopard. I found something else that didn't' work. I use 1Password as a password vaulting system. For those who don't know what that is, let me explain. We all have tons of passwords. So either we're not good at creating clever passwords or we write them down or we use the same one over and over and never change it. None of these are good plans. 1Password is a password vault where you can store in a secure fashion all of your user names and passwords. Then you create one hard to guess password to protect the vault. When you are on a web page that requires authentication you can select the site from the vault, you enter in the master password and the name and password for the site are entered in automatically. I tend to keep the vault open for a while so that I don't have to constantly enter in the master password. This allows me to create hard passwords and to change them frequently without having to remember tons of passwords.

Well, apparently the 1Password folks thought that they had a number of weeks to go before SL was released and Apple fooled them. Fortunately they are far along in their beta testing of a new version and if you have SL and are already a customer, you can get access to the Beta so that you can continue to use 1Password with your Mac. So I had to register on their site and agree to the NDA and now I can use the product, at least for a while until the new version is officially released. Then I'll have to buy the upgrade.

Snow Leopard

2009-08-28T17:26:00.002-04:00

Well, it's here and I've installed it a couple of times now. I pre-ordered it for work and also got a family pack for home. I am pretty trusting of Apple's OS releases, but not enough to just dump it on my production machines. At work, I installed it on a Mac Mini that I use for testing. This currently had 10.5.8 on it, but is a plain vanilla Mac with no third party apps of any kind of special utilities. It went in very easily and took about 45 minutes to install. I've done some minor testing with it and have seen several of the new functions working and have not had any problems.

Then I installed it on an iMac at home. This particular iMac is used for work as a support machine and has several other applications on it, but isn't so important that I couldn't afford to wipe it and start over if I had to. Install time was about the same. When it was done, it came up and ran just fine. It did prompt me to choose some kind of system file, which I canceled out of since I did not know what it was. I did a check on the Apple user forums and it seems like it has to do with a printer driver. I have a couple of printers set up on the Mac, but because right now it's on a different network segment without any printers, I am wondering if that had something to do with it. I have rebooted the iMac and the message did not come up again. And speaking of rebooting, it seems that Apple is true to its word that shutdown and boot up are faster than before.

I have tried a couple of applications and the only thing that hasn't worked right out of the box is my Microsoft Remote Desktop program. It did kick an error. A quick trip to the Mactopia web site and a download of the latest version seems to have fixed that issue. VPN also seems to work OK as does my wireless connection to my Airport.

I run Back To My Mac and was able to see and do a screen share to my other iMac without issue. One thing that I do notice though is when I see my other iMac in Finder I have the Share Screen button, but not the button to connect at a file sharing level. I found that stopping and starting BTMM on the Snow Leopard iMac fixed that problem.

iPhone GPS Update

2009-08-17T17:10:00.002-04:00

Well of course as soon as I post about the GPS, the app store makes me a liar. Apparently there are now some apps taking advantage of the ability to dp turn-by-turn directions for a GPS app. AT&T has one that you can download for free, but there is a $10 monthly service charge. Navigon has added this feature to their app which you can buy for around $70. And Tom-Tom has finally come out with their app that covers the US and Canada with no monthly fee, but the cost is $100.

Tom-Tom is supposed to also be coming out with a car kit to mount your iPhone, charge it and it includes a secondary GPS receiver. Right now there is no pricing or availability on this. Of course now that I've said that it will probably be available tomorrow.

iPhone User

2009-08-14T21:07:00.002-04:00

So, I've expanded my Mac world by getting an iPhone. I have the new 3GS and as a smart device it's great. The included apps are nice and I have added in some extra things like games and an entry into Facebook and some others. I made great use of it on vacation a couple of weeks ago. So we're in northern Michigan, a place we've never been before. We're looking for different things. Normally I would have opened up a browser on my old smart phone and looked up something, then written down the phone number and called. With the iPhone I asked for a specific place and it showed me if there were any within my immediate area. I could then click on the closet one to get an address or phone number and if I needed to call, I could call right from the info page by clicking on phone number. And if I needed driving directions, I could get that as well.

The mail app works pretty well and I can keep up with my work mail and two personal email accounts. The games that I have downloaded all work pretty well, although that can seriously depend on the type of controls that the programmer has built into the game. There are two things that I don't like about the iPhone. The first, which is not directly Apple's fault. is that there is no built-in turn-by-turn GPS app. Apple has finally allowed that type of app to be developed, but as of this writing, I don't think that any major GPS vendor has stepped up. The second thing is the phone. The phone has some great features that work well, but the signal strength is inconsistent at best. If I am in the open and near some major population center 3G is good. But at my home just north of a major population center it's iffy at best. For example. I can be sitting in my family room with full bars and the 3G symbol showing. Then without moving, the signal will drop to 1-2 bars and the E for the older Edge network showing. I am almost never able to do anything data-wise in my home without connecting to my wireless network. In northern Michigan I always had a great signal, but never had 3G. Still, it was better than the phones my family use that are on Sprint.

Another Chapter in BTMM

2009-06-15T08:58:00.003-04:00

Well, this time I have some good news to report... I think :)

As I have chronicled here, Back To My Mac (BTMM) has been a very frustrating thing. I can get it to work between the one iMac I have at home on one circuit and the other one on another circuit, but that's pretty much it. We had a consultant in here about a year ago who was able to connect to his home iMac without issue through our network and he was using the same router at the home end that I was. But I could never get it to work. So I messed and messed with it, but basically gave up.

So I was having other issues with the router that I had chosen for my home router and I decided to replace it with an Apple Airport Extreme wireless router. I thought that this might even help some of my BTMM issues. So, after getting it running I attempted to do a BTMM from the one iMac to this one and it worked just fine. I didn't even try from my work Mac simply because I'd never been able to get it to work no matter what.

A week goes by and I need the file sharing capability of BTMM at home from the one iMac to the other so I fire up everything and am surprised that I can not get a connection... what's the deal? BTMM will not start without an error that it can't contact the service. I rebooted everything including the router and cable modem and could not get a connection. I opened a call with the Apple MobileMe tech support and they had me do much troubleshooting including hooking my iMac directly to the cable modem. When I did that it worked just fine and when I hooked the router back in it failed. So, it appears that there is an issue with the Airport. However I'm not buying that so I start a new thread on the Apple community forums. There is a guy there who really knows his stuff about BTMM, even more so than the Apple tech guys. He has me run some terminal commands and it appears that the DNS lookup is failing. His usual suggestion to folks is to replace the DNS entries that default to your systems with the ones from Open DNS (www.opendns.com). But I already had those in there so he had me remove them and let my ISP default back to the ones they want to use and lo and behold BTMM started working again. We both found this odd as I can't imagine my ISP would care whose DNS I used. So after I got it working I added back in one of the OpenDNS DNS settings and it still started up and worked OK. Then I added back in the other one and it still started up and worked OK. So I rebooted everything and checked to make sure that the DNS settings stayed and BTMM still starts without error and I can connect from my other iMac. I am back to the same settings I had before having the trouble. Weird... so I guess if I see it again, I'll mess with the DNS settings to see if that fixes anything.

Now the good news... I was sitting at my work Mac the other day and, as usual, I can see my home iMac in Finder, but I've never been able to connect. So I clicked on it to connect and was surprised when it prompted me for credentials and when I entered them I got connected to it. And the screen sharing is working as well. Great news... wish I knew why... but I'm good with this.

More thoughts on Parallels

2009-03-11T07:22:00.004-04:00

Earlier in my postings I chronicled some of my experiences using VMware Fusion and Parallels. For a variety of reasons I decided to stick with Fusion. However, I never like to truly limit my experiences unless the product or whatever is a complete dog. Parallels is definitely not a dog. The company recently released their new version so I purchased a couple of upgrade licenses and I have gone through the process of upgrading one of my installs. The first one didn't go as smoothly as I thought it should. I ran the upgrade wizard which seemed to run OK and I was able to get into the VM. However, there was already a patch so I started that process as well. For some reason the patch install got hung and I waited and waited and finally I forced the VM down. Now I was pretty well convinced that I had just totally messed up that VM... forcing it down while it was in the middle of doing an upgrade. To my surprise the VM started up just fine and I restarted the patch process which competed this time.

The product has some nice new features: (www.parallels.com) and I haven't had time to check them out completely, but as I do, I'll post more here.

But if you read back through my original posts you'll see that my complaints about Parallels weren't so much about the product as the company. In fact, I think that Parallels does some things way better than Fusion does. The purchase of the upgrades caught the attention of their sales folks since I bought this as a member of my company and not as an individual. I got called one day by an account manager for my area to see how I liked the product and how I was going to integrate it into our business. I told the guy that we have a couple of Macs and that's pretty much it. Since I had his ear I did relate to him the issues that I'd had earlier with tech support and that's why I had moved to Fusion and why I was not using Parallels more fully. His response was very telling.

I had expected him to say.. "Wow.. I'm sorry. That shouldn't have happened. Can I have some more information?" Or "I can't help you there, but let me hook you up with a technical manager and we'll see what we can do." Or "That's too bad and shouldn't have happened. We value all of our customers. I'll put you in touch with someone who can take your information so that we can improve the process." What I got was several moments of silence and then something like "Well... I mainly deal with corporate clients who are interested in rolling this out in their environment." 'nuff said.

More 10.5.6

2008-12-30T07:53:00.004-05:00

Well the good news is that it seems as though my two Macs at my home have stabilized from the upgrade and I haven't had any lingering problems.

My Mac Pro at work still seems to be an issue though. I came in the other day and was continuing to have problems with the SMB share mounting. Someone on the Apple support forums said that the SMB stuff really wasn't the problem, but merely a symptom and that the real problem had to do with Kerberos authentication. He said that I could look in my log files to confirm. I did as was suggested and didn't see any kerberos messages. However, I did see a number of messages dealing starting out with DFX:. OK... not sure what that is. Still I continued to do research and someone said something about reinstalling any third-party apps that interacted with Finder. I only have one: Default Folder X (ah ha... DFX). So I removed it and reinstalled and all seemed to be well with the world.

Well that lasted for a week or so actually. Then yesterday I came in to work and was unable to mount any SMB shares... again. I stopped DFX... still no go. I finally unbound my Mac from AD and then rebound it and eventually SMB shares started working again. Now I've got DFX running again and all is good. This is frustrating because I don't have any direction to go in order to really solve the underlying issue. I'd like to think that it's fully fixed, but I don't have any great sense that it really is.

10.5.6

2008-12-18T09:04:00.004-05:00

Here's another update on my experiences with 10.5.6. So far, my initial problem "seems" fixed. But I do have a weird thing happening. When I originally bound my Mac to AD, I didn't set up the mobile user feature. So, when I would get the login screen, I would have two options: local user or Other. Other would prompt me for credentials, I would enter AD credentials and I was on. In the past several months with some testing I've been doing, I activated the mobile user feature so I now also have a login icon that has my AD user name in it. It allows me to login into AD with my AD credentials just like Other.

When I was having the trouble I documented in the previous post with even being able to connect to an SMB share, I was using the Other login. As I documented, I finally got it going. Today, for some reason, I logged in using the mobile user icon. I got onto the desktop without issue, but noticed that my SMB shares didn't mount in Finder. When I tried to do it manually I had the same issues that I had the day before. I immediately logged out and then back in using Other and the problem vanished. That's really odd, considering both icons take me to the same user profile and home folder...

Holding My Breath and Knocking on Wood

2008-12-17T21:44:00.003-05:00

Just installed 10.5.6. Of course scoured the update list looking for mention of anything to do with my SMB problem... nothing. Still I've had pretty good luck with Apple updates, so I bit the bullet and installed it. Nothing immediately seems wrong. So I go to run my test for the SMB problem... Hmmm... now I can't connect to any SMB share. This isn't good. When I attempt to do a Go To Server from Finder, I get nothing.. just the window that says it's trying to connect. Or I get a prompt for my credentials... weird since I'm using AD binding and an AD login... but anyway, I input my credentials and nothing.

I know that I may have complexed things because in the last day or two, I've done a sync on MobileMe and I'm wondering if things in my keychain may have gotten overwritten or ... I don't know... anyway. I unbind my Mac and then rebind it... still nothing. So I replace the keychain with a new one. This doesn't seem like the answer either. Finally, I am able to get "connected" to an SMB share when I do Go To Network and browse the network, but still can't when I do Go To Server... odd. So, I delete the "new" blank keychain and put the old one back. All of a sudden it's all working. Not sure if the keychain thing was the answer... shouldn't have been, but perhaps, or maybe OS X and AD just needed to get in sync again. At any rate I am good again, so I finally start my test.

As before I mount and unmount several SMB shares quickly in succession for about 7-8 times and no Kernel Panics. So, I take the big leap and add back in my AppleScript to my login items to mount the shares. This seems to work OK. Since doing all of this, I have logged out several items and rebooted my Mac as well as accessing several documents on these shares and so far (holding my breath and knocking on wood) it's working OK. I also had the weird video display problem and that too, hasn't reappeared. I'll reserve judgement until I run with this for a week or so, but right now it looks good.

Is the Apple Green?

2008-12-01T08:38:00.002-05:00

Just read a blog post over on MacWorld's MacUser blog about how Greenpeace is still giving Apple less than a green rating.

I'll be blunt... who cares what Geeenpeace thinks? Most, not all, but most of the whackos in the green movement have totally lost site of reality. Is Apple a totally green company... no, but they have made great strides towards that end.

I think that the main problem that green movement folks have is that none, or almost none, of them were alive during a time when things with the environment really were bad. I was alive during the 1960's and 1970's when air and water quality in the US was really bad. Back then, when the EPA got started and people really started to take a look at how we deal with our environment, we really did a fairly poor job of dealing with the land and the air and water. I don't have any numbers in front of me to share with you, but the reality of my experience says that water and air quality today is way improved over what it was 30-50 years ago.

Now, does that mean that we can't do any better, no, of course not. But my guess is that the collective inexperience of the whackos in the green movement keeps them from appreciating the great strides that we have made in the last 30-50 years. It's the same shortsightedness that keeps my kids from understanding that there was a time without computers and game systems.

There was a story that I heard several years ago about some body of water that was heavily polluted. Environmentalists got going and started a campaign to clean up this body of water. They succeeded and at the time of the story, it was estimated that the water in there was now somewhere around 95% clean. But that wasn't good enough for these folks... they wanted it to be something like 97% clean. It appears that they had no real appreciation for what had been done or to the fact that gaining that extra few percentage points of cleanliness would most likely be a massive financial burden to those responsible for the water and not really noticed by those using it.

Am I suggesting that Apple or we consumers should just ignore our environment just because we've made great strides? Of course not. but to be blunt... who is Greenpeace and who put them in charge of anything? Apple needs to keep doing what it can to be a good steward of the environment, as do we all. So I say let Greenpeace keep giving out their ratings and let's just ignore them and let's use our own good judgement to see if a company is doing due diligence in doing their part for the environment. If a company is not being a good steward of the environment then we can vote with our dollars. And if we ignore organizations such as Greenpeace... perhaps they'll just go away.

A respondent to the article on the blog about Greenpeace's rating of Apple said it best: "They won't be happy until Apple use tree limbs, leafs, and acorns for their products.

Personally, I'd like to know what kind of computers Greenpeace use that are so environmentally friendly."

The Shine is Off the Apple

2008-11-20T13:27:00.006-05:00

Now even though I am a big convert to the world of the Mac and even though I have replaced all of my PCs with Macs, I am under no delusion that the Mac or OS X or even Steve Jobs is somehow descended from Heaven. Steve's just a guy like me, and the Mac and OS X are just systems created by people and are subject to failure. Yeah, I know that borders on heresy, but it's true.

I have been using Macs for over a year and I have not had any of the oddities or issues that seem to plague Windows systems. For the most part I turn on my Mac, it quickly boots up, does what I need it to do and quickly turns off when I am done. Updates go in without a hitch and we just move on... that was until I updated to 10.5.5.

Here is my scenario. I have a Mac Pro at work that I have bound to Active Directory (AD) and I am logging on with my AD credentials. After upgrading to 10.5.5, I started getting Kernel Panics (KP) usually when either logging off or restarting my Mac. I did some research and didn't find much, but I did find that at least one person was relating this back to his mounting of SMB shares to Windows computers.

I have an Applescript that I use to mount three different shares, plus my windows "home" folder gets mounted as well. As a test, I took the Applescript out of my login items and the instances of KP dropped, but didn't go away. I also removed the mounting of my windows home folder. As long as I didn't do anything on any Windows share from my Mac I was OK. However, the problem still occurred because anytime I would access any Office document with Office for the Mac it mounts a share in Finder. I can make the KP happen by either mounting or unmounting a Windows share... usually only takes 2-3 times of doing this to make the KP happen.

I called Apple and the tech support person and I worked through a number of things. He even had me do an Archive and Install back to my original version (10.5.2). At this level I was unable to reproduce the problem. As soon as I did the combo update to 10.5.5, the problem recurred. We did discover that if I was logged in as a local user I could not get the problem to occur, but as soon as I logged back in as an AD user the problem occurred. I also tried logging in as a different AD user and I still got the problem.

So the problem seems to be a combination of a Mac bound to AD, logging in as an AD user, having 10.5.5 as the OS, and mounting SMB shares to a Windows server.

Their next suggestion was to do an Erase and Install, but I don't have the time to do that kind of surgery on OS X. So, I went to another Mac that I have as a test box and installed 10.5.5 fresh on it, bound it to AD and then logged in with my AD user... got the problem... glad I didn't go through the pain of an Erase and Install.

Right now there appears to be two fixes. One is to unbind AD and login as a local user. You can still mount shares by providing AD credentials for authentication to the shares and then save them in your keychain so it isn't a major pain. The other fix, if you have already upgraded to 10.5.5, is to do an Archive and Install, patch the applications back up and then download and install the 10.5.4 combo update.

Please note that this is not an official Apple sanctioned fix. It's just what I have determined works for me in a consistent manner.

BTMM :(

2008-11-20T13:21:00.002-05:00

Well, I've come to the conclusion that BTMM just won't work from behind my network here in my office... although I did have a consultant connect to his from behind my firewall. I've even gone so far as to take out my UPNP/BTMM compatible router and replace it with an Airport Extreme... which should be very friendly to BTMM and I can not connect to my home iMac. I'm down to the point of reviewing Wireshark captures to see if I can figure out where the problem is.

BTMM Yet Again

2008-10-21T13:35:00.002-04:00

Well, the problem wasn't fixed like I thought it was. Mostly BTMM works as long as I am not behind my equipment at work. I am still trying to figure out how the consultant was able to get to his home Mac with his Airbook and I can not with my Mac Pro both going through my network. I'll post some specifics here soon. But the bottom line is that there is still an issue.

Back To My Mac (BTMM) Revisited

2008-09-23T11:38:00.003-04:00

I always hate when I have to back track on something, but that's how we learn.

A couple of posts back I did a post on my experiences with trying to set up remote control access to my home Mac from my work Mac. At that time I said that I was unable to get BTMM to work from my office... Please read that post to see what issues I was having.

Well the other day we had in a consultant who's a big Apple user. We had a break in our work and were talking about our experiences with our Apple products. I mentioned to him the issues that I was having getting to my home iMac from work. He looked at me with a slightly puzzled expression and flipped up a window on his AirBook. He was attached to his Mac at home and doing screen sharing all while connected to my network. Wow!!!

How was he doing that? He confirmed what I had thought originally... that as long as the remote endpoint was correctly configured to work with BTMM and there were no errors at that end it should work. This does assume no block on your corporate firewall. Well, since his was working OK, that validated my thought on that and that my corporate network was not blocking the connection. Since I got no errors at the remote end when activating BTMM, that left only one possibility; my home router. I had checked to see if the model of router was on Apple's BTMM compatible router list and it appeared to be. However, when he was able to get to his, I knew that there was something amiss with my home router. The first thing that came to mind was that it's a Vonage router... yeah I know... that probably should have occurred to me ages ago. I looked on my shelf at work and found that I had a couple of other generic routers that were on the list.

I took one home, temporarily put it in line right after the cable modem, configured it and attached my Mac to it. I was able to test this config and BTMM now works pretty well.

I still need Vonage to run, so I hooked my Vonage router behind this one by connecting the Vonage router's WAN port to a LAN port on the new router and after a few minutes I could call out again. Problem solved!

Silverlight

2008-09-16T13:55:00.003-04:00

In my previous post about Mojave, I mentioned Silverlight. Now, it's probably a nice addon and when it's finished I might install it on a Windows PC. And I really wanted to see what the Mojave folks were being shown about the "new" Windows. But MS is not known for creating high-quality browser products. I personally think the last one that they did that was really stable was IE 5.5. To their credit SIlverlight is cross browser compatible, which is great and not like their usual approach. But I really wasn't interested in installing a beta version of a MS browser addon to my production system just to see the Mojave videos. Some of my biggest troubleshooting headaches are with IE issues stemming from non-standard things like Active-X or the fact that IE is integrated into the OS. IE is the only app that we use that when it gets corrupted the main way to fix the problem is to reload the OS... who thought that up?

Mojave: The Other POV

2008-09-15T11:22:00.005-04:00

Microsoft has a new set of commercials for Vista in which they ostensibly have shown an unsuspecting audience a new version of Windows called Mojave. The upshot is that the people in the commercial really seem to love it... then they are told that it's Vista and they are all amazed.

So, let's analyze this. From the commercial that I saw, you don't know what they were shown. What applications did they see? Were there any non-Microsoft applications? How real-world was it? Now, Microsoft does have a web site called www.mojaveexperiment.com. Unfortunately to get the full extent of what the site has to offer, you have to download and install Silverlight (another MS program).. There's a non-Silverlight version, but when I ran that under IE 6 on a Windows XP system, I could not see any of the videos. I don't want to download yet another non-standard MS plug-in to my system; especially something in Beta mode. We'll discuss my concerns about this later.

Anyway... Let me give my perspective. Vista looks great. It does run. I played with pretty much all of the Beta versions and even some of the alpha versions. I really was looking forward to using it when it came out. So, I can imagine sitting there in front of a Vista machine and coming away thinking that it's really cool. I got a new PC in at my company and I purchased Vista Ultimate when it first came out. I loaded it and yes it ran and the eye candy was extraordinary. Then I tried to find things. Some things were actually pretty easy to find, but others were not. For example I was trying to find the button/link to either reboot or shutdown Vista (can't remember which) and I couldn't find it. Eventually. by going through some non-intuitive paths, I located it. The new names that MS had given to some of the common things that people have done since Windows 2000 were puzzling.

And then came the apps. Probably at home, these are not major issues and in truth some of them are just as much the fault of the manufacturer of the application as they are of Vista's. I had to have a special version of Acrobat reader and a special version of Norton AV. I could not run IE 7 out of the box in our environment, even with our normal tweaks. At least one of our major applications would not work at all. The bottom line is that there was just no major reason to move from XP to Vista.

SP1 has helped some of these things, but again... here is just no major reason to move away from XP. One of the MAC/PC commercials makes fun of the fact that PC running Vista has to ask for permission to do just about anything. Now, that's a slight exaggeration and in fact OS X does the same thing, but to a much smaller degree. It's one feature that I have mixed emotions about. On the one hand, it's annoying. On the other, it's a good idea because it's helping to keep the PC safer.

Vista didn't make massive improvements over XP, it may be safer, but an XP Service Pack may have been able to address those issues. It changed too many things for no apparent reason, it was not compatible with many current versions of applications and hardware, and there was no real reason to release it except that MS hadn't released any new OS for what they considered way too long. Vista reminds me a Windows Me, but with a cool looking interface. And the behind the scenes, under the hood things, that would have made the OS something worthwhile from a technical standpoint never made it into the product.

I'm actually looking forward to seeing Windows 7... hopefully MS has learned their lesson and the new Windows will really be something to buy.

For me, though, I've moved on. I'm an Apple Convert. I really like OS X and the Apple hardware. It's not perfect and there's always the issue with getting good applications that will run under OS X. I'll work with Windows 7 when it comes out because it's my job and I really like all things technical. But I'll be more interested to see Snow Leopard and keep looking forward to the day when all applications are made in both Windows and OS X versions.

Remote Control Options for Mac part II

2008-09-15T11:03:00.003-04:00

In this post, I"ll continue to talk about the various remote control options available for the Mac.

Logmein (free version) works pretty well. It does run as a "service" so that it's always there when the Mac is on. I've always been able to connect to it. However, running from my local Mac, I get less than sterling response from the connection. I get random disconnects as well, although I am always able to get the initial connection going. I've tried a couple different settings on my local Mac to get it running and it's OK, but not consistent enough and stable enough to make it the supreme program I'd like to see. Connecting from my Windows-based PC seems to work better, but the idea is to do as much from the Mac as possible. I've not contacted tech support about these issues yet, but there's not a lot to configure here.

When I was doing my research on my BTMM problems I thought I had found the answer when I stumbled on Share Tools... wrong. Seems like a nice program, but requires the same UPNP or NAT-PMP that BTMM requires.

Using Dynamic DNS (DDNS) is always an option. But I have to do special setup things in my router, which isn't a major thing, but I'd like a simpler thing like GotoMyPC provides.

Speaking of them, my option would be to use GotoMyPC, but they don't make a remote connector that works on a Mac, so I am toast there.

Various versions of VNC work, but there's no security unless you go to the pay version and I'm really looking for something cutting edge which some of these other solutions ought to be able to provide, but as you can see, they do a very mixed job of that.

Finally, I can connect via VPN, but I can't establish a working VPN out from my company because of security concerns so that really isn't a viable solution.

Summary:

I've been really spoiled working in the PC world in regards to remote control solutions. There are many good options that work really well on Windows-based PCs. Some are free and some cost, but they are really pretty solid. In the Mac world, I've yet to find that same level of stability and consistency while not having to perform some ancient ritual on my networking equipment in order to get it to work. Of all the things I've tried, I think that Logmein is probably the best. But I am still looking for that program that provides a good, stable, secure remote control solution at a reasonable cost.

Remote Control Options for Mac part I

2008-09-03T13:03:00.009-04:00

In today's world having access to your files and systems from anywhere is almost a necessity. But we also need to maintain a high level of security. This isn't as easy as it sounds and I think it's a little harder for Mac users.

There are lots of ways to get control of your remote Mac. Some allow syncing of files and contacts and calendars while others are just for getting to the desktop, although once there, you might be able to transfer files back and forth.

Some of the major players are Back To My Mac, Logmein, TeamViewer, Share Tools, Various versions of VNC, DDNS, and using a VPN. Yes, I know that I haven't covered all of them, so don't send comments about your favorite unless it IS the answer come down from Heaven itself for this issue.

Back To My Mac (BTMM) is Apple's attempt to come up with some cool remote control software. Unfortunately it falls short. It was born as a part of the now defunct .MAC service which was reborn as MobileMe. So first off, you have to subscribe to the service at $99/year in order to get this feature. OK... so you sign up, install the software and sign in. Then you activate BTMM and get this little error message that... well it can't be turned on because the router you have doesn't have UPNP or NAT-PMP turned on... assuming that your router has this at all. And it gets even worse in a corporate environment behind who knows what equipment. In my case, my home router does support UPNP so I was able to get the service running. However, from my office I have been unsuccessful. And what happens when you're on the road.. how many hotspots will have one of those protocols turned on? Hmmm... not as useful as you originally thought is it? I think that BTMM has some great potential, but Apple needs to do something at making it more usable without sacrificing security.

While researching these BTMM issues I ran into a post from someone about software that would allow you to connect to your Mac remotely without needing to buy the MobileMe service. It's called TeamViewer (www.teamviewer.com). There's a paid version, but for home use it's free and the company just recently added a Mac client. I'd been looking for something like this for my company for another project and after testing it felt that it was the answer and the costs were very reasonable. So we purchased it. Of course I wanted to use it for my Mac as well. So, I installed it in my Mac and started testing. OK... the good news is you don't need UPNP or NAT-PMP... it just works. The bad news is that it works sort of :(.

First, unlike Logmein, TeamViewer doesn't run as a "service" so you have to log into the remote Mac while you're still there or have someone at the remote site do it for you and start the service up. OK... I guess I can deal with that, I'll just make it a login item. Well... that also only sort of works. When I log in, the application starts, but it fails to come up completely and doesn't connect to the company's servers in order to register with them. To solve this problem I've had to resort to starting it up by hand... which always works. So now I go to my office and do some work for awhile, but eventually I attempt to log into my Mac from my office Mac... no go...no connection. I've had someone at home watch and it appears that the two connect, but the final handshakes aren't made so no remote connection. I've had the person at the remote end stop and restart the application and then magically it works. I've had some other inconsistencies that I don't seem to find in the Windows version which runs very nicely as a service on the remote computer. Tech support has been responsive, but they've really been unable to solve these problems and I have a fairly vanilla setup on my remote Mac.

Rethinking My Virtual Options

2008-09-03T12:47:00.006-04:00

I wrote a post some months back expounding on the various ways that one can include Windows in a Mac environment. One of those ways is to run a virtual machine. There are two main players in that market; VMware Fusion and Parallels. At the time of that writing I was definitely leaning towards the Parallels product even though I am a big fan of VMware's products. I couldn't point to any major thing that I really liked super better in one over the other or anything that I really hated on one. I just had a personal preference for Parallels.

I've since changed direction on that opinion. As I've spent more time with Parallels, I started to run into little issues. Nothing major and nothing that compromised the VM. But I had to open several tickets with their tech support and that's where I think things started to breakdown. In almost every case the initial time for tech support response was OK, but nothing exciting. Then in almost every case the initial response from tech support was always off-base. It was as though they really hadn't read my email so that their understanding of the problem was wrong. Then I restated the problem and waited a couple more days for a response that may have been on the right track on still as off as the first. I finally decided that if every time I had a problem tech support was going to be this lacking, I needed to take a hard look at the VMware product.

I ported over my Parallels VM to Fusion and got that running. I've been using it for the last month or so and so far I am really happy. I still think that there are a couple of things that Parallels does better, but I've not really needed anything from tech support which is a plus. VMware tech support probably isn't as accessible as that from Parallels, but accessibility isn't worth much if you can't get the issues addressed. I still think that Parallels is a good product and does a fine job of virtualization on the Mac platform. But at least for the moment, I'm sticking with Fusion.

AirPort Extreme and Wireless in General

2008-07-16T20:43:00.005-04:00

Wireless is that cool technology that everyone wants to work. I know people who just can't survive unless they have a wireless keyboard and mouse. I know people who have set up their entire network as wireless and wouldn't have a wired connection if you paid them to do so. Now, I've nothing against either technology...they have their place. But from posts that I've read on some technology sites, wireless network connectivity is just not quite ready for prime time.

Seems pretty simple...set up a router or access point, set up some security, do the same to your laptop and bingo there you go. Unfortunately reality isn't quite as simple. Let me give you a couple of examples. At my office we've set up a small wireless network so that sales folk who aren't normally in the building can connect when they are there. We have security set up and I have two access points in the facility so that they can connect where ever they are in the building. At least once a month one of them comes to me with a connectivity problem. Usually a reboot solves the issue, but the question is why and why not all the time? We are even using really good and somewhat expensive access points so that's even more puzzling.

At my home, I have a wireless connection to a backup broadband connection that my wife uses for work. I have the same high-end access point and my PC and Mac are in the next room with nothing major between them and the acess point except one wall. Even with that closeness my PC never has anything better than a low to good signal strength rating. The Mac is a little better, even though it's farther away by a few feet.

For no apparent reason, the PC and sometimes the Mac will just lose connectivity to the wireless access point. Rebooting usually does NOT solve the problem so I just switch back to my wired connection.

Becuase I am moving away from my PC to my iMac, I bought an Apple AirPort Extreme base station. I set this up and put it in exactly the same spot as my old access point. My PC now never gets anything less than excellent on signal strength and both it and the Mac are on wireless all of the time without issue. And, I did check and I did not have the radio transmission turned down on the old access point...it was at 100%. I am seriously thinking about replacing these two access points at work with a couple of AirPort Extremes and see if that helps out issues there as well.

Mixing Windows and Leopard: Part II

2008-04-22T22:41:00.003-04:00

OK, last time we looked at a couple of different ways to mix the Windows OS and Leopard. I'll continue on by discussing the other two.

3. Bare Metal

In a bare metal setup you would completely remove the Leopard OS and replace it with XP or Vista. OK, the obvious question is "why?", and it's a good one. If you took the time and probably some extra money to purchase a Mac, why would you want to rip out that wonderful OS to replace it with Windows? At my company we are primarily a Windows shop. For better or worse, when the company was formed it really made the best sense to go that direction. We have been with the same PC vendor for over 10 years and have found their boxes to be quite good. But recently they have undergone a merger and that's not always a good thing. On top of that, I was given someone who is the worst salesperson I've ever dealt with. I told my CIO that I really couldn't deal with him and we needed an alternative. My team and I looked at the major players and really discounted all of them for one reason or another. And then I thought of Apple. Their boxes seem to be pretty solid and from what I can tell they get good marks for tech support. So I invested in a Mac Mini just to see what it could do. One of the tests I did was a bare metal install of Windows XP. The reason being that in our environment, as much as I'd like to, I can't do away with Windows. So, if I was going to buy a replacement box, why not see if we could go all the way? And I did. I dropped in my XP install disk and went through a normal install, formatting the hard disk and doing all the things one would do in a normal Windows install. When I got done, I inserted the Leopard disk and I was able to install all of the drivers that I needed...just like I did in Bootcamp. And as has been reported elsewhere, I found that XP seemed to run even better on the Mac than it did on my normal PC...that is a subjective opinion and I've no data to back it up with...but I was impressed.

The obvious downside to this scenario is that Leopard is completely gone from the Mac.

4. Remote Desktop

The last way that I know of to mix the two operating systems is by using a remote desktop environment. VNC works OK, but it's always been plagued by video refresh issues. I was looking for something a little more stable and responsive. Microsoft has a beta version of a Remote Desktop Client for the Mac. I downloaded it and installed it on my Mac and was able to access my Windows machine with very little trouble. It's pretty responsive and just really works. Now, since it is a beta copy I have had a couple of problems with it. The original beta that I tried (2.x) was subject to some intermittent disconnects. But since I've moved to beta 3.x, those have disappeared. I have two issues that still plague me a little. One is a problem getting a label design program to display correctly when I am designing a label. When I am in that mode with the designer program I have to go back to my native Windows desktop. The other thing is that occasionally, but not very frequently, the RDC will become unresponsive and I have to disconnect and reconnect. But I can go for quite some time before that happens.

The downside to this method is that you have to have a Windows machine running somewhere to connect to. If you're going to go to that trouble, one of the other methods probably makes more sense.

Mixing Windows and Leopard

2008-04-16T17:40:00.000-04:00

OK, so at least at work, I still have to use Windows to some degree. What is the best way to do that? Well, there are several. Apple's decision to move to the Intel platform has opened up the possibilities for making use of Windows. Here are your options:

1. Bootcamp
2. Virtual Environment
3. Bare Metal
4. Remote Desktop

1. Bootcamp

Bootcamp is a feature of Leopard which gives you the ability to very easily set up a dual-boot environment between Leopard and Windows (XP or Vista). One starts up Bootcamp in Leopard and it partitions a part of your Mac hard disk. After that it reboots your Mac and you load in a Windows install disk (yes you have to own one) and you go through a normal Windows installation. Once done, the Leopard disk is used to load in Windows-based drivers for the Mac hardware. After this is done, you can choose to boot between Windows and Leopard. I was very impressed with how easy this was to do and how well XP ran on my Mac. I did this on a Mac mini with 1 GB RAM. Still Windows booted and ran well and I had no issues of any kind running XP on the Mac hardware. The downside of this is that when you "need" Windows, you have to boot out of Leopard.

2. Virtual Environment

There are two competing programs that create a virtual environment for Windows to run on top of Leopard. They are Parallels and VMware Fusion. VMWare is probably the most well known player in the Virtual Machine (VM) market. We run a number of our servers in a virtual environment and it seems to work well. I've used their desktop product for years and love it. However, Parallels was really the first to market in the Mac environment. There are differences between the two products, but the premise is the same. A VM is basically a file that lives on the host Operating System (OS); in this case Leopard. When you create the file from within the VM product it creates a virtual computing environment; with a certain size "hard disk", allotted amount of RAM and the like. When the program first accesses the VM file, the screen shows what is, for all intents and purposes, a PC booting. You drop in your Windows (or other OS) disk into the Mac's drive slot and when the VM boots it sees the disks and starts a Windows installation. All of this is taking place in a Window running on the Mac OS desktop. You run through a normal Windows installation and when you are done will see the Windows desktop sitting in a window on the Mac desktop.

The obvious advantage of this setup is that you have access to Windows without having to reboot your Mac. A disadvantage is that the VM can use a fair amount of disk space and can use upward of 700MB of RAM or more depending on the parameters you used when you set it up. Remember that a VM is like a real computer and uses resources as such. Both Parallels and VMware Fusion have a "transparent" mode which makes the integration of Windows and the Mac even more seamless. In this mode, the window that holds the VM disappears and the Windows taskbar can, if you wish, become a floating bar on the Mac desktop. Then each Windows' application, when opened, floats in within its own window just like it would on the Windows desktop. So imagine Safari and Internet Explorer sitting next to each other on the Mac desktop; way cool. When you minimize a Windows app, it drops down to the dock just like a Leopard app. There is also some sharing of resources between the VM and Leopard. For example you can store all of your documents on the Mac, outside the VM. In the VM the My Documents folder is still there, but instead of pointing to a folder within Windows, it points to the Mac documents folder...very nice.

Well, that's all for today...come back next time when I look at the other two options for mixing Windows and Leopard.

Can I Use the Mac for Work?

2008-04-05T17:43:00.001-04:00

One of the first tests I wanted to do was to see if I could use the iMac for work things. I do tech support for my company so I wanted to see how much I would be able to do just using the iMac. Remember that this is an older iMac running Panther (OS X 10.3.x), The first thing I needed to do was to get connected and to do that I needed to create a VPN connection. This was actually very easy and I was connected quickly. In fact, I was able to connect to a VPN connection that was giving me trouble when I attempted to do that via my PC. Once connected I tried to map a network drive...that worked. Then I tried some remote control items using our IP-based KVM and that worked as well. Although FireFox and Safari allowed me to do some web-based things, we have at least one or two applications that unfortunately only work well or at all in IE...fortunately the version of OS X that came installed on my iMac was old enough to still have a copy of IE so that problem was solved as well. Unfortunately, current shipping versions of OS X no longer have IE as an available app since MS has stopped production of IE for the Mac. We occasionally use VNC, but that was a little problematic until I discover Chicken of the VNC. This is a great VNC application...much better than just about anything available for the PC. Built-in VNC is also available on newer versions of OS X.

The bottom line to all of this is that I can do about 95% of all troubleshooting of my network and desktops using my old iMac. I didn't have to jump through any hoops to make it happen and it worked really well.

Welcome to the World of an Apple Convert

2008-04-02T16:15:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the world of an Apple Convert.

I've messed with computers since the days of the Commodore VIC-20 and the Atari 400. In the early days I had the opportunity to play with an Apple IIE, but never had anything more than a passing glance at anything in the Mac line. When Macs first came out they were too expensive for my meager computer budget and...well...let's face it, the Mac was not really compatible with very much "standard" software. The PC, whether rightly or wrongly, had captured the hearts and minds of corporate America and eventually consumers.

I am a DOS jockey from way back and have used just about every iteration of Windows with the exception of the very first one. It's a love hate relationship. On the one hand it's very powerful, almost every program that anyone would want to own will run on it and it does many things well. On the other hand, it can be incredibly unforgiving, the registry and the shared DLL Hell that most of us experience is a pain, and Microsoft has just never really gotten one version totally working before moving on to the next and a whole new set of problems.

I can't remember how many times I've said to myself...if there was only something really really better I'd switch to it. I've played around with several versions of Linux from Red Hat to Linspire to Kubuntu. They are all really interesting, but they just didn't have the polish that I've been looking for...then it happened!!

I've always wanted to play with the Mac, but I never seemed to have the excess cash to lay out on something that might end up being a doorstop. In the summer of 2007, I was blessed to be the recipient of the gift of an old iMac CRT version...one of those single piece units with the 15" CRT with the charcoal gray case. I had absolutely no idea how to use it or the OS. But I fired it up and went about learning how to use the iMac and OS X. I bought some OS X disks so that I could upgrade to 10.3.9 which is the last version my particular model will support well, I purchased more RAM and a book to help me figure it out. After a week of working with the iMac, I told my wife that if I could I would never fire up a Windows-based PC ever again. I found the Mac to be so very intuitive; things worked on it like I wish they did on Windows. I set out to see exactly how far I could get on it and eventually came to the conclusion that about the only thing that I couldn't do on this was play many of the games that I like to play. One morning I wanted to check my email before going to work and decided to do in on the iMac. I booted it up, logged in, read my email and shut it down faster than I would have been able to do that same set of tasks with my high-power Windows-based PC.

I'll write more here as I chronicle my conversion to the Mac, but suffice it to say that anyone reading this should seriously consider checking out the Mac.