Apple Convert

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

2011-10-06T12:21:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a very sad day for me and for a lot of you as well. I never met Steve, although he's one of a handful of people that I would have liked to have spent some time with. I'm just a little older than he and I grew up watching the likes of him and Woz and Bill Gates, among others, turn the world upside down. Too many of you can not appreciate a time when there were no personal computers or cell phones or MP3 players. My kids just go to their computers like I went to my radio or B&W TV; it was just a fixture in the home. But the computer was a mystery box. I remember my first one, a Commodore VIC 20. I remember sitting down with some books and learning why and how and what this thing was. I remember creating small programs in a memory space so small it's a wonder that anything ran.

People like Steve were on the cutting edge of that time and saw the future and worked hard to bring about their dreams. And whether you're a Mac or a PC or whether you love or hate Apple, there's no denying that Steve Jobs was a visionary and a genius. One of the first systems that I worked on in my job was an Apple IIE. I learned to program it in Apple Basic and did some great things on that computer. I watched as the Macintosh was introduced wondering how it would make it with the "limitations" that Apple built in. But they really weren't limitations; it turned out that Steve just saw things better than the rest of us did.

I always kind of wanted a Mac to learn on and play with. But I could never afford it or justify it in my work or personal environment. Then a few years ago, a friend gave me an old iMac. I spent a week with that computer and one day looked at my wife and told her that if I never ever used a Windows machine again it would be too soon. It just makes sense from an IT guy perspective as well as a personal one. I'm the kind of person that Steve would have liked, at least from a business perspective. I am a true convert, as this blog name alludes to. I now live in an Apple environment with my iPhone and iPad and my kids have iPods and I have two iMacs at home and a Mac Pro at work. I still have to run windows, but I do that on top of my Mac. I will never go back. And I push the Apple message whenever anyone asks me; and sometimes when they don't :)

Steve saw the usefulness of the Graphical User interface when we were all happy with DOS. He saw the usefulness of the 3.5" floppy and then it's end of life. He saw SCSI and firewire when no one else really did. He saw what a music player could be and how to create a really good smartphone. And most recently he's seen the ending of life of the optical disk. Yeah sometimes I did question and still do I guess. But the other day I was installing something on my kids' PC and the DVD drive wouldn't open. I was concerned because it's a really nice drive and I hoped he hadn't broken it. Turns out that the issue was that it hardly ever gets used; so perhaps Steve is right...again.

I'll miss Steve, even though we never met nor have I ever seen him in person at an event. I'll miss that insightful enthusiasm that he brings to the table every time you see him. I hope and pray that Apple has enough of his DNA in it's soul to continue to innovate and push the envelope into the future when so many other companies are prepared to follow or play catch up.

This is his last "One more thing"

God bless you Steve

Why Buy a Mac - Part IV

2011-08-15T08:21:00.000-04:00

The hype surrounding Mac's and their apparent vulnerability to viruses or other malware is legendary. But is it deserved? To a certain extent, yes.

As most Windows lovers will point out, Windows is everywhere, OS x - not so much. And if someone is going to take the time to write a virus to harm people, they're going to go where they can get the most bang for their buck. And there is a lot of truth to that statement. But Macs are gaining in popularity and so are they more targeted now than yesterday. In short, yes. But the longer answer is more complicated.

I pretty much stay away from sites that I know will infect my computer. But, most viruses are distributed from email or sites that are more innocuous. I'd never ever consider running a Windows-based computer for very long on the Internet. My son still hasn't installed any AV software on his Mac and he's been using it for almost 5 years without incident. I ran for 6-8 months without issue, but I did finally succumb to the thought that I probably should have some kind of anti-malware product on my Mac.

Modern Macs at their core are based on UNIX, which is a more stable and virus resistant OS. There are only a few pieces of malware that target Macs and you usually have to do something really stupid to get infected, but it's still possible. And since Macs now run on Intel processors and many Mac users also run Windows either in a dual-boot configuration or as a virtual machine, it's possible that your Mac could harbor malware that could be spread to others. I've tried a variety of free and pay programs over the years. I started out with iAntivirus (www.pctools.com) which seemed to run OK, but occasionally it would seem to get a little heavy, So I moved on to something else. I tried MacScan (macscan.securemac.com), another nice program, but this one has no real time protection and the scans always seemed to take a really long time. What I am using now is a free product from Sophos (www.sophos.com). It has real-time protection as well as a scanner and it has found things on my Mac that it has identified as malware; although all of them have been malware targeted at Windows.

So, yes, I think that the Mac is a more virus resistant platform. but I'm also not stupid and I'd always recommend that you install some kind of anti-malware protection.

Bottom Line

So what is the bottom line for me? Let's review this series of articles. Mac hardware is second to none; period. This not only can be seen in the design, but in the functionality. Tech support, when you need it, is fantastic. And because Apple controls both the hardware and the OS, you don't spend time playing the finger pointing game between the OS vendor and the computer vendor. The OS is, in this man's opinion, way more intelligently designed and implemented. This can be seen from a user's standpoint, but even more so from an IT guy's perspective. The Mac is a more secure device out of the box. It's not invulnerable, but there are just not the headaches that come with Windows.

Is the Mac a perfect machine? Is tech support flawless? Does the OS never ever fail? No, of course not. The devices and the software are made by fallible people and put through their paces by even more fallible people. And there is the cost - Mac's cost more. Although when was the last time you saw Microsoft put out ANY version of Windows that you could install on all your computers for $30 - I'm betting never. But for that cost you get a "better" machine, better tech support, and a better overall experience.

Ultimately your choice of computer and OS will be based on many things; cost, need, app availability and other things. I can use my Mac for just about everything I need. I only need to got to Windows on my personal Mac about once a week because there is an app that I really like for which there is no really good Mac equivalent or if I want to play a game that is not made for the Mac. Other than that, I live in OS X and I'm loving it.

Why Buy a Mac - Part III

2011-08-15T07:50:00.000-04:00

OK, so we've looked at hardware and tech support as good reasons to buy a Mac. In this post I'll take a look at the Mac from an OS perspective.

As an IT guy, I live in the operating system (OS) of what ever computer I'm working on at a pretty significant level. So, while for the majority of you reading this the OS may just be the thing from which you run your apps, for me it's the thing that can make my life easier or harder...much harder.

When you think of Windows from an IT/OS perspective what things come to mind as the biggest pains in the...? For me it's the DLL's (DDL Hell), app sprawl, and uninstalling programs.

DLL files are files of information that program can use to run within Windows. The problem is shared DLL's. On the one had this is a good idea because if someone has already invented this great DLL, why reinvent it or why have a copy of it for every app that we have installed... saves on disk space. The problem is that shared DLL's can misbehave and can affect more than just one program. This also ties into my second most hated thing; app sprawl. In the old DOS days, each app lived completely in it's own set of directories. If you had two apps installed, app1 and app2, there was an app1 folder and an app2 folder and everything that the app needed to run and interact with DOS was in its folder. Except for where the app touched DOS, nothing was shared. Fast forward to Windows where so much of everything is shared code. If you needed to move an app from one computer to another,it was as simple as moving the folder. It you tried that under Windows, because of shared DLL's, app sprawl, and the registry; making such a move is impossible. And that ties in with uninstalling apps, Doing this through the Control Panel should be a simple thing and once you highlight your app and click on uninstall, you should have no worries. And for the most part that works, but when it doesn't, it usually messes up in a big way. One company's app that I used to use did the dumbest thing when you started to uninstall it. The first thing it would do would be to wipe out the uninstall info so that if the uninstall failed, and it did every so often, you have absolutely no way to go back and rerun that uninstall. The only recourse you had was to go to their web site and find the information about manually uninstalling the app and then spend anywhere from 30-60 minutes culling through the registry and multiple file folders deleting the things that the uninstaller should have deleted...what a mess.

So how does Apple do it? Well, first off there are no shared DLL's (or the Apple equivalent) no registry and no control panel uninstaller. When an app is installed, it typically creates a "folder" or a package in the Applications folder and just about everything that the app needs to run lives in that folder or package. Having said that, the app may create other files, such as a PLIST file which is equivalent to the INI file in the old DOS days. Typically installation is much easier and faster than with Windows. And when it comes time to uninstall...say it with me...delete the app's folder or package and it's gone. Boom, how simple is that. Now, to be honest the one thing that doesn't happen unless the app happens to have an uninstaller is that any extra files, like the PLIST file, will not get deleted; which I do find is a weak point. But there are apps you can buy that will gather up everything associated with an app and politely throw it all in the trash and the app is gone. To me this is such a better and more efficient way to do things. There is no wizard to run, no waiting for it to gather information - whatever that means, or examine disk space; the app just gets deleted.

And then there is the registry. Who thought that up? The registry is basically a massive file that contains just about all of the configuration settings for not only most applications that you install, but also Windows. In the Windows NT days, this was the most likely place to have a failure within the OS and recovering from that was almost impossible; can you say wipe and reload? The "fix" for many things in Windows and various applications are modifications to the registry. And every instruction to modify the registry is replete with warnings about editing the registry and make sure you back it up before modifying. OS X just doesn't have such a thing. Sure there are files that are responsible for configuring the OS, but I've yet to have to go looking for them or modify them. And, as previously mentioned, apps may have .plist files but that's pretty much it and each app has it's own. This is just a more intelligent way to do things in this man's opinion.

Why Buy a Mac - Part II

2011-07-25T13:46:00.000-04:00

In the last article we looked at Macs, and other Apple devices, from a hardware perspective. In this post I'm going to take a look at tech support.

This is another area where Apple shines. They consistently get the highest ratings from PC Magazine's reader poll on tech support.

I've not needed Apple tech support often, but when I have, it's been great. Apple has a great support community on its web site. But if you need more and have an in-force warranty or AppleCare agreement, you can talk to them directly. Each product has it's own type of support. Some are email only or chat, or some have a choice of chat or call. You can set up a time for Apple to call you and within a 15 minute window of that time they will call you. I've used most forms of tech support and found them all to be top notch. Here's an example of a call I had dealing with my son's laptop problem. I did some troubleshooting ahead of time, since I a tech guy I love to solve my own problems if I can. After running into a brick wall I got on-line and set up a time for Apple to call me. When they did I was speaking to someone most likely in the U.S with a great command of English. This is NOT meant to disparage tech support in other countries, most notably India. But, when I need tech support on my expensive Apple product, I want someone I can speak to directly and who can solve my problem. I do not want someone who is working from some script and who keeps telling me thank you and with whom my every other statement is I'm sorry I didn't get that.

In the case with the laptop, I quickly went over what the problem was and what troubleshooting I had already done. He had me do a couple of other things and then quickly decided that this was more than we could do over the phone. I am fortunate enough to live in a place with an Apple store so he set up an appointment for me with the Apple store while I was on the phone. I took it to the Apple store the same day and they quickly diagnosed it as the video card problem. I left it with them and within a week had it back, fixed and running well.

One thing that I like about Apple is that they control both the hardware and the software. Yes, I know there is a group of you out there who hates that fact. But I never ever have to have MS and the PC vendor playing the finger pointing game while I, the paying customer, sit in the middle getting nowhere.

Why Buy a Mac?

2011-07-25T13:23:00.000-04:00

As you can tell, I'm a Mac fanboy. No, I'm not some mind-numb salivating Steve Jobs' clone, but I have come to appreciate the high quality of the hardware and the OS and the fact that Apple controls them both. The advantage to that? When you have problems you don't have some guy in India who works for Microsoft and some guy in India who works for Dell or HP or whomever pointing fingers at each other.

Is the Mac or OS X perfect? Of course not. It's a machine and an OS that are developed by people and made by people and people are fallible. I'm going to do several fresh articles on why I think the Mac is superior. In this first one I'll concentrate on the hardware.

Apple not only makes some of the most visually pleasing hardware, but some of the most robust as well. When the PC vendor we were using at my work went belly-up we were looking for a good replacement. While we debated the relative positive and negatives of current vendors, we decided to make an investment in Mac Mini's. I couldn't use OS X because we are a Windows shop, but I invested in the hardware anyway. I bought about 20-25 Mac Mini's over time and have not been disappointed in one of them. They pretty much run 24X7 and have been flawless. We loaded Windows on them and away we went. We eventually went with a Wintel vendor for our PCs because the Mini's were a little under powered and under ported for some of our needs. But I do not regret that investment and we still buy them when we have a need for a really small computer. We have also started buying MacBook Pros for some of our laptop users for the same reason; quality hardware.

Are they more expensive than something I could buy from most Wintel vendors? Sure, but, as they say, you get what you pay for. My current laptop vendor of choice is having issues with their mouse buttons around the trackpad and the cases just aren't as sturdy. I'm betting I'd never have that kind of QC issue with a Mac.

My oldest son is using a four year old MacBook Pro that we bought him when he started college. He's been hard on it, but it's kept up. We did fall prey to some graphics bug that Apple fixed for free, but other than that, it's been solid. He's still using it and it was his primary machine, running Final Cut Studio that he used to create a movie for his College capstone. I use a Mac Pro at work and have two iMacs at home and have never been disappointed in them.

Apple also has some of the most attractive hardware from a design perspective. One only has to look at any Mac product or iPhone or iPad to see the high level placed on design. Of course, on the one hand the design may not speak to how it works or how it holds up, but in Apple's case it does. Not only do their devices look nice, they are incredibly robust and functional.

If you've never looked at a Mac or other Apple device, I'd urge you to do so. If you are fortunate enough to live near an Apple store go check them out.

Mac Pro Sleep and Login

2011-07-11T14:12:00.002-04:00

Well I think that I've finally solved the sleep issues on my Pro. I ended up just doing a reinstall of the OS and for the last month or so, it's been going to sleep just fine.

A somewhat bigger problem then erupted; waking up. Most times when I take the Pro out of sleep, I get the login icons and I login and all is good. But about once every week or so, I get the icons, but when I click on one to login the login hangs with the spinning BBOD. And I've not been able to trick it by restarting or trying a local user ID or putting it back to sleep and then reawakening it. I looked over my log files in the console and I kept seeing messages either about some network connectivity or something to do with kerberos. Since the Mac is on an Active Directory domain at my office I surmised that might have something to do with it. After much searching I decided to call Apple. Got some wonderful tech support and the tech guy suggested some things to try. I ended up doing a repair of the disk and permissions and some other things, but none of them seemed to work. Unfortunately since it appears that the problem had to do with connectivity to AD, the Apple guy was not able to help, unless I wanted to open a pay ticket with the Enterprise group. I decided that it was not worth the effort.

But at least I had some reason that I could work with. Someone advised me that I might want to look at some third-party AD binders instead of the built-in one. I looked at Centrify, ADmitmac, and Likewise. All of them had free trials and I played with each of them. I think they are all fine programs, but two of them, Centrify and ADmitMac, screwed with my user folder too much. If I was setting up a new Mac and had never been in it with an AD user, all of them might have worked OK. The two in question installed OK and bound to AD OK, but created a new path for the user folders to sit in and when I logged in with my AD credentials, I had a whole new set of folders and all my things were gone... well not really gone gone, but they were living in the old folder structure. I assume that I would have been able to move these, but since I was just testing different products, I hated to make that severe of a commitment. So I uninstalled each and moved on. Likewise was the only product that I installed that left my user folder structure alone and when I logged in I had the desktop, etc. that I expected. I've stuck with that and since I did that I have not had one instance of hanging on bringing the Pro out of sleep.

Hopefully this topic is closed.

More Mac Pro Sleep Issues

2010-12-01T10:22:00.000-05:00

Well, it appears that my sleep issues with the Mac Pro are still a problem. Doing what I did below to the VMware Fusion network connections really helped, and helped my overall Mac performance, but I still occasionally got issues with the Mac Pro hanging when I would bring it out of sleep. I did some more looking through the console logs and noticed that Parallels (another VM program) also had some network entries about vnic0 and vnic1. I did some research on these and it seemed like I really didn't need them so I deleted them from one of the Parallels plist files and now they also no longer show up. I've also gotten in the habit of just restarting the Pro at the end of the day which also seems to clear things.

Things seem to have improved substantially since this last effort. Here's one thing that gives me hope. I have my login screen on the Mac set to show user icons. So I have one for the local admin and one for my network user's "mobile" account. Normally when I bring the Pro out of sleep, these are the only two that are showing. After a few seconds, an "Other" icon will appear and that is the one I use to log into my network. I assume that this appears after the Mac makes a connection my my AD domain controller. My clue that the Mac was going to hang was when I brought it out of sleep if the Other icon was already there. Recently when I bring it out of sleep I see the Other icon already there so I was concerned that the problem was back, but both times that this has happened I have been able to log in without issue. Hopefully this means that this issue is solved. And it has to be something specific about the Pro, I have an iMac at home that sleeps all the time and I never have this problem.

Virtual Machines on the Mac

2010-11-05T07:52:00.000-04:00

In my work world and private as well, I still need the ability to run Windows. The obvious choice, since I am a Mac guy, is to run a Windows virtual machine on my Mac. The two main players in this arena are Parallels and VMWare with their Fusion product. I've written below about them and have bounced between them over the years, although I had settled on Fusion.

The problem was that my Fusion VMs were giving me fits. I had two different XP VMs on two different Macs and both seemed to be starting and running poorly. Long story short, I started looking at the disk space that the VMs were taking up and found some serious issues. When I had created the VMs I had specified that they could grow to some large size; 120 GB in one case and 40 GB in another. I had specified that Fusion would create 2 GB files as it needed to grow and there is nothing wrong with this. The problem with this, though, is that they never automatically shrink. However, in both cases I had never put more than 20-30 GB of data on the 120 GB one and probably never more than 10-15 GB of data on the other one. When I looked at the size of both of them, Windows saw the "available" space, but I was only actually using 10-15 GB on each VM. However, in both cases, the actual disk space being used on the Macs was equivalent to the space that I said they could grow to. I have no idea why this has happened since I've never had anywhere near that amount of data on either VM and the VMWare people were confused as well.

I decided to do the shrink process, which was a pain in order to get space back. I deleted all temp files and cleaned up the disk. Then I ran a disk defrag. Then I downloaded and ran Mark Russinovich's SDelete to zero out the unused disk space. I finally ran the shrink tool from the VMWare tools library to do the shrinking. When I got done, I was using Mac disk space that was more in line with what the Windows VM said I actually should be using. But this whole thing just put me off Fusion.

It was about this time that Parallels came out with their Version 6. I bought a couple of new copies and installed them, migrated over my Windows VMs and fired them up. So far Parallels has not given me any real problems and it does seem much faster than Fusion. To be fair, the shrink process did resolve my speed issues with Fusion, but for the moment, at least, I sticking with Parallels.

Mac Pro and Sleep

2010-11-05T07:34:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I know it's been a long time since I have written anything, but, hey, my life is busy :)

Wanted to start out with a fix that may benefit other users. I have a Mac Pro from a couple of years ago as my work computer. It's running latest version of Snow Leopard. The one thing that I do at might is to sleep my Mac. I usually just log off and after a time it goes to sleep. For the longest time that worked really well. Then all of a sudden I started having problems. The Pro would go to sleep OK, and would wake up OK, but when I would go to log in, it would hang with the spinning wheel and I would be totally stuck. I would have to push the power button in order to shut it down and then I could reboot and all was OK. Talked to Apple tech support about this as well as other "in the know" Mac guys. We never came up with anything of value. Of course I looked at my console logs and there were errors there, but nothing ever really popped for me.

I even tried putting it to sleep myself, thinking if I was not at the login prompt perhaps it would work OK, but no, that didn't help. I tried doing a restart instead of just logging in, but that failed as well.

I finally got tired of this and one day when it happened I decided to go looking for the reason. Once I got the Mac back up, I really looked closely at the console logs and I noticed several entries relating to issues with some kernel processes all starting with vmnet. Now, I am running VMWare Fusion, although I have actually move to Parallels (another post at some point). But the product is still installed and is there for my use. Now I didn't understand why these processes were running when I wasn't using the program. And I had kind of come to the conclusion that there was some networking issue at play here and this kind of confirmed it.

But how to dump these processes? I eventually found a post from someone about how to get rid of them. There is a file in /Library/LaunchDaemons that runs at boot that starts these things up. The fix was to remove that plist file from this directory. I did that and then rebooted the Mac. When I checked the Activity monitor they were not running. Then the acid test; I logged out of my Mac at the end of the day and let it go to sleep. Since then I have not had one problem with the Pro sleeping or waking up or hanging.

Now the problem is that I need to occasionally run Fusion and these processes are essential to that working. So I found someone who had written a couple of scripts to start up and shut down these processes. I modified them to work for me and now when I need to run Fusion, I can run the start up script and then start Fusion. When I am done, I can run the stop script and it stops the processes. Wonderful!

More on Snow Leopard - Redux

2009-09-02T20:40:00.004-04:00

Well, I have finally converted all of my Macs. 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.