Mark Gilbert’s Blog

The website issues are finally resolved. The reasons for the problems are detailed below.

Well as some of you may or may not know I recently moved house. Since I was hosting the site myself for financial reasons it meant there would be a certain period of downtime while the phone line and Internet connection was sorted out. I was aware of this and could live with it.

What I could not have foreseen was that at the same time I would have an Install issue with my little MacMini server and would be forced to reinstall the only copy of OS X I have, 10.5 onto it for web serving purposes. On it’s own this was not a problem, obviously I have backups of the site and the database so just restore them and away I go. Simple. Except up until very recently MySQL AB did not produce a compiled version of MySQL for 10.5 on PPC, only on x86. I did attempt a few times to compile the database from source but with no luck. I was seemingly stuck. As a stop gap I used the drop in solution MAMP which worked for the most part other than a few little quirks, like sometimes the web server would stop running for no reason and MAMp would not be able to start it again as it still thought it was running. This created a problem where I had no control over whether the server was up or down, with no serious monitoring effort the server may fall over and I would be non the wiser.

That is what had been happening for the last few weeks, but now MySQL AB have pulled their collective fingers out and delivered a build of MySQL for 10.5 PPC, a quick install and it’s up and running.

Fingers crossed it will be ok now, time will tell though.

Cheers

The Web Standards Project has released the latest version of it’s acid test for browser rendering, surprisingly called the ACID3 Test.

Acid3 goes beyond the CSS tests implemented by Acid2 and tests a browser’s DOM Scripting capability, as well as continuing to probe visual rendering of CSS, SVG and webfonts.

The test itself can be found here along with the reference rendering.

The ideal score is obviously for your browser to score 100/100 and have the test rendering look exactly like the reference rendering, suffice to say there are no mainstream browsers out there that pass completely yet. Internet Exploder fails this test in a rather grand fashion, but then that is now the norm for any Microsoft browser and a web standards test.

Cheers

Yesterday AOL finally ended support for the Netscape browser. There will be no more updates, no even security ones from 1/3/2008. From it’s beginning as the Mosaic browser in 1994 right through to the height of it popularity in the mid-90’s, for most people Netscape was “the internet”. Internet Explorer has yet to take off, and Netscape offered the internet in a simple and easy package.

Somewhere along the way though it all went wrong for Netscape, personally I blame bloat. WTF was Netscape Communicator all about? The best thing they did was keep the source alive in the form of the Mozilla project. Then they also succumbed to the curse of bloat and spun off Firefox and Thunderbird. However while Firefox is the top dog in terms of alternative browsers now, their footprint has been growing steadily since the early pre-1.0 releases and they will seriously have to watch they don’t go the same way as their dear departed grandparent, Netscape.

If you long for the olden days when your browser did everything under the sun, including scheduling and e-mail, then take a look at SeaMonkey, it’s what remains of Mozilla.

Cheers

The most popular alternative browser on the web has just hit half a billion downloads. Internet Exploder is still the most common browser by a fairly long margin, but Firefox is gaining all the time.

Cheers

Windows Vista SP1 has been RTM earlier this week, but reports are now coming out that SP1 could cause more issues for users than it solves. Microsoft have admitted that there are some new driver issues in SP1, drivers that worked on the original Vista build may not work in SP1. Mike Nash who is charge of Vista product management was quoted as saying;

“Our beta testing identified an issue with a small set of device drivers, these drivers do not follow our guidelines for driver installation and as a result, some beta participants who were using Windows Vista and updated to Service Pack 1 reported issues with these devices.”

Basically with the changes to the core of Vista being brought about in SP1 drivers may cease to function correctly. Before SP1 is installed it will check for the drivers that have known issues and not offer SP1 to those users with the offending drivers, although Nash remained tight lipped at present as to what those drivers were.

This would not be the first time a major SP release has caused problems for Windows users, think back to the XP SP2 release a few years ago.

Cheers

Also quietly out of the door today was Microsoft Office 2008 for OS X. Updates to all the usual suspects are included however Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications is not supported in Office 2008, which some have suggested in Microsoft’s way of not fully supporting Office under OS X without explicitly having to announce that they are ceasing support.

Personally I think there is very little that MS Office 2008 can offer that current alternatives such as NeoOffice and Pages cannot.

Cheers

The lovely Transmission Bittorrent client available for OS X, Linux, Unix and Solaris has now reached version 1.0. I have been using Transmission for a while now on OS X and it really is great, small lightweight, everything a BT client should be, unlike the increasingly bloated Azereus.

Just like most OS X apps it just works, drag a torrent to the windows or double click it and the download starts. No fancy bits, just simple effective torrent handling.

I suggest you check it out if your on one of the supported OS’s

Cheers

Shawn Blanc has an extensive review of Panic’s Transmit FTP application. Have a read over on his blog at shawnblanc.net.

There are many/ things that make Transmit stand out as my Mac FTP application of choice, mainly I have never had it crash, unlike Cyberduck which crashes on a very regular basic when uploading stuff to my webserver. It also is much much faster than Cyberduck for large numbers of small files and just generally a lot nicer to use.

I suggest you check it out.

Cheers

At the end of October I wrote a little bit about my experience with Leopard, and the little problem I managed to make for myself by not backing up data before an install. I also promised a more detailed look at Leopard itself rather than just my problems with it. Someone pointed out to me last week that I had yet to do the follow up, so here it is.

Personally I think Leopard is ahead of Tiger in most respects. Things are better organised and in a more logical fashion, for example, firewall settings now come under the ‘Security’ section of the preferences, rather than ‘Sharing’ as they did in Tiger. Parental controls now have their own section, rather than being hidden away in the accounts settings.

The look of the OS has changed too, the menu bar is now semi-transparent, rather than the older opaque style of Tiger, and the same applies to the Dock, it is now semi-transparent and reflective. No just shiny reflective but real-time reflective. Nice features both of them, but they serve no real purpose other then iCandy.

The bigger features include the much anticipated Time Machine, Boot Camp, and Spaces.

Time Machine automatically backs up everything on your Mac by default to an external hard drive of your choosing. It can be either USB or Firewire and does not have to be present all the time, obviously Time Machine will only back up to there when the drive is connected. You can specify which files are excluded from the backup so that pointless files are not wasting backup space. The whole process is absolutely seamless, it really is a case of set and forget. Running quietly in the background files are copied, with the oldest backup being erased once the drive gets full. Backups are done hourly and are incremental once the first full backup has run. All this leads to a solution which is much more likely to be used by the average user, which can only be a good thing. Your machine can be completely restored from a Time Machine backup with the help of the Leopard install disc, complete with permissions intact.

Spaces is Apple’s implementation of virtual desktops. The number of spaces can be configured right up to a 4 x 4 grid of them down to the simple 2 spaces. Moving between them is simple enough, control and arrow keys move you around, or click the spaces icon to see an expose-esque overview of all spaces and click the one you want to switch too. Applications can be bound to a specific space so that each time you open that application it runs in a particular space, which is a nice touch.

Boot Camp, everybody knows what it is by now, so I’ll not go into that. What I will say is that it is included with Leopard and no longer available for standalone download. It remains essentially the same as the downloadable version, but with an updated driver set and some minor bug fixes.

The interface for Front Row has seen a revamp, with the large reflective spinning thing gone, and a new, rather more minimal interface in it’s place. Personally I like it, it ties in nicely with the Apple TV interface and makes navigation easier. Some people don’t like the new design and have even reverted back to the FrontRow build that comes with Tiger, but for me, I’m sticking with it.

Printing has been massively simplified, adding my networked printer really was a doddle, I had no problems at all with all the required drivers installed automatically for me.

There have been a whole host of UNIX changes under the hood which I wont go into here, and security has been revamped, again I wont go into that here, but have a read to find out what changes have been made.

Sadly since upgrading to Leopard I have seen more crashes. Application crashes in Safari in particular I’m seeing more frequently than with Tiger, but the 10.5.1 update seems to have fixed most of these.

I’ve had only minor problem with application compatibility, and nothing like the problem users of Windows Vista have been experiencing.

All in all it’s a most worthwhile upgrade for users of Panther and Tiger, and Apple’s attractive pricing on their family packs makes the purchase very tempting for users with more than one Mac in their house.

Cheers

I haven’t posted in a while, I’ve had a lot of other things on my plate. I’m here now though so that’s the important thing.

I read a wonderful tongue in cheek review of the upgrade benefits of Windows XP when compared to Vista.

To be honest there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft has really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly.

Have a read of the whole thing, I find it’s great, a little biased as one would expect but funny all the same.

Cheers

With Windows XP Service Pack 3 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 both on the horizon people have started benchmarking the two. The Florida based software development company Devil Mountain Software showed that XP still outperforms Vista with the new service packs applied to both OS’s.

Apparently Vista took 80 seconds compared to 35 seconds for XP SP3. The SP1 update for Vista made little or no difference to speed, SP3 for XP on the other hand gave a 10% performance increase over an XP SP2 machine.

So it would seem that a year after launch Vista is yet to live up to it’s hype. It is still outclassed by the 6 years old Windows XP and many people simply want nothing to do with it.

Well 2008 may bring new things for Vista, or it may simply be more of the same crap that has plagued the OS since launch, time will, as always, tell.

Cheers

Well as I expected I bought Leopard on launch day. I was wanting to go away with my other half somewhere for the weekend, so Birmingham seemed like a good choice. So at 17:30 I was in a large queue outside the Apple store in the Bullring. Time went by and the Queue which I thought was big as it was, got even larger, about double the size it was when I joined.18:00 rolled round and the doors opened, and people were let in in small groups, maybe 50 at a time. I was in there earlier so I just went in, bought the family pack for £129 and got out, besides I had a table booked for dinner at 21:00.

So we got back to the hotel and I had some time, so I decided I would have a go at installing it on Kay’s laptop.  You have to understand I was quite excited at this point, being the little boy inside that I am, and I broke two golden rules. These rules are “always backup” and “repair your disk before attempting an upgrade”.Things did not go well, I ran the installer, used the disk utility to do a permissions repair but not a disk repair, chose an upgrade install and the installer stopped with an error before getting anywhere. So I rebooted and was going to Google the problem, but the chimes came, as did the Apple logo and the spinning gear, then the unit powered off. Tried again, same thing. “Shit, Kay had all her first year Uni work on there” was the thought that went through my head. I booted off the Leopard disc again and ran disc utility, tried a disk repair and it failed with an error in the catalogue file.The install would now only give me the option of erase and install, instead of archive and install and upgrade. I could not erase the drive, I hadn’t backed anything up and erasing the drive and installing a new OS would make chances of data recovery small. I had to get the laptop up and running again with no data loss, losing everything was not an option. So I tried a safe boot, nothing from that, ran fsck from the terminal on the installer disc, and still nothing. Finally I knew I would have to wait till I got home, put the laptop into target disk mode and copy the data off using my iMac.

So when we got home I put the laptop into target disk mode and plugged it into my iMac, but the disk didn’t mount. It showed up in disk utility as being available but the partition couldn’t be mounted. My only hope at this point was to try something hardcore. If the disk was appearing as a volume but wouldn’t mount I could still perform tasks on it to try to fix it. Disk Warrior was my weapon of choice and after a lot of thinking and grinding disk warrior managed to have a go at repairing the volume. To my relief Disk Warrior repaired the drive and when I turned the laptop back on it booted into Tiger. At this point I backed up the main user folder and tried again with another upgrade install. This time the install went through as normal and after a little while the unit rebooted back into Leopard.

With mine I made no such mistakes again, all data backed up and an erase and install option, after an upgrade gave problems with software I already had installed under Tiger. So I sit here typing this from Safari 3.04, not the beta with my lovely Leopard OS. It is very nice, the user interface is much more consistent than with Tiger, Time Machine makes backups easy and really is a set and forget backup solution. Spaces makes organising your desktop easy, complete updates of many applications such as Safari, Mail, Front Row, and others. Have a look at the full 300 changes at Apple’s website. Well, I’m pleased with Leopard and it was worth the wait, I’ll give a more full view after a few weeks.

Cheers

Due to some kind of cock-up Microsoft have managed to inadvertently send the Windows Desktop Search program out through Windows update. What’s more it was pushed out to be installed through Software Update Services even if the application had never been installed before and SUS was set to only update apps.This obviously has created a lot of problems for many people, since when Windows Desktop Search is installed it will automatically begin indexing the machine’s hard drive drive contents slowing the PC down. Not so bad you might think but when you’re a business who needs machines to work quickly at the start of a working day then it does become an issue.So well done Microsoft, you’ve managed to foul up yet another Windows update casting even more doubt onto the service.

Cheers

Apple have now officially confirmed Leopard will ship on October 26th at 18:00. I presume that will be Pacific time making the launch time 11:00 in the UK if they stick to the same schedule. The UK Apple site simply states October as the release date and doesn’t go into specifics. There’s time yet to get all the details out though, I’m sure we’ll know soon enough, and as usual I’ll post it here.

Cheers

I already posted about the fact that Leopard would hit sometime at the end of October, but now there is some serious momentum to this rumour. Both ifoAppleStore and ThinkSecret have had some confirmation from their sources  that October 26th will indeed be Leopard release date. Apparently a 18:00 launch looks likely as Apple did previously for Tiger. Roll on the 26th when Apple can finally let the cat out of the bag.

Cheers

According to ThinkSecret Apple OS X 10.5, known to most as Leopard could drop sometime in the week beginning 22nd October. As usual sources are not disclosed as I’m sure people may lose their jobs over the leak, but they seem fairly sure. So all being well all us Mac users should have a new kitty cat to play with by the end of the month.

Cheers

According to Apple, their new Leopard OS will feature the ability to safe sleep your OS X session when switching to Boot Camp, then when you come back from Windows your OS X session is restored to where you left off. Hardly earth moving but cool non-the-less. It’s a feature I would use, I hate having to end my OS X session when I switch back to Windows to play any games.

Cheers

I had reason to create a spreadsheet today, for reasons which i wont go into, and having no suitable application at my disposal I decided to get Open Office, or at least it’s OS X counterpart, Neo Office.  Now I have used Open Office before, back sometime around the 1.0 release, but not  much after that.  I spent a whole year in a particular job using it because the company couldn’t afford MS Office.  I found it rather well featured if a little ugly back then.  Boy, how times change.

 The 2.2 release which I had the pleasure of using is a joy.  The interface on my Mac was very nice and well laid out with all the right buttons in very intuitive places.  I found everything I wanted very quickly and with minimal fuss.

I cant fault the ease of use.  Anyone who says that MS Office is better simply hasn’t really used Open Office.  The help files are very useful, covering everything you could need, including more advanced features like functions and formulae.   I am not intimately familiar with spreadsheet functions, so for me the help file was invaluable.  I am normally very sceptical of how useful a help file can be, but in this case after some time Googling for the answer I thought I may as well try the help file.  My God.  It gave me what I wanted quickly and with enough syntax and examples to get me where I wanted to be very quickly.

 As for getting what I wanted done, it all took less time than I had expected.  I really cannot recommend Open Office an Neo Office highly enough.  These two applications are yet another example of what can be done with FOSS.  Admittedly I only used the Calc application this time, but I have used writer at work and found it o be of the same high standard.  People who are thinking about buying MS Office 2007 Basic, Student & Teacher or Standard should really give this a go.  It doesn’t cost anything so you’ve got nothing to lose really.  If you don’t like Open Office then you can go and spend your money anyway, but please, at least give it a try.

 Cheers 

Last week I decided that I was fed up with Safari. It annoyed me, and it bothered me so much that I decided the time was now to find a new browser. So off I went, first of all stopping to check out the latest beta of Camino. Now dont get me wrong, I do like the Mozilla based browsers on Windows but on my Mac it just didn’t feel right. Somehow it just didn’t give the Mac experience which I’ve now become accustomed to.

When using Camino I missed some of the features I loved about Safari, such as the ability to type in the address bar and have my bookmarks searched as well as my recent history. It’s a feature I find sorely lacking when using IE7 or even Firefox at work.

Firefox on OS X simply doesn’t do it for me. Back when I used Windows Firefox was my browser of choice, I liked the extensions, I much prefered it over IE and had been using it since roughly 0.6, just after the name change to Firebird, which was sometime in the middle of 2003. Somehow though on OS X I couldn’t get on with it. The PPC build I found slow and just generally didn’t like it, so I changed to Safari at that point, leaving me knowing two years on that I wouldn’t enjoy Firefox now either.

So with Safari, Camino and Firefox out, I went to see the Opera in Norway, or should I say i went to use the browser called Opera from Norway. I liked Opera when I first used it, I had dabbled with it under Windows but it never really replaced Firefox for me although it was a very capable browser. Coming back to it under OS X was not such a big change. I used the latest 9.2 version and immediately found it likeable, it was fast and had the ability to search bookmarks from the address bar. The speed dial feature was nice, and I did use it quite a lot, however there were a few things I didn’t like so much. The first one is really petty, but I was seemingly unable to alter the default behaviour so that a command + left clicked link is opened in a new background tab. Command + shift + left click does it, but I don’t want to have to hold shift too. I know middle click does it but I don’t like middle clicking, see I told you it was petty. It didn’t integrate with the OS X Keychain, which Safari does and as you can imagine has a lot of details stored for me. So I found myself constantly opening keychain utility to retrieve passwords to use in Opera. While this is a workable solution, it’s less than ideal.

I should add at this point I have completely forgot what it was I didn’t like about Safari, so i now have no idea why I was looking for another browser anyway, but I pressed on regardless.

I was now very short of options, which is when I remembered OmniWeb.

OmniWeb is a browser developed by the Omni Group. It uses WebCore as it’s rendering engine, the same rendering engine Apple’s Safari browser uses, therefore you get the same high levels of standards compliance seen in Safari. Omni Group then make significant alterations to WebCore, as well as adding their own javascript rendering engine to the mix, instead of using the standard Webkit JavaScriptCore. All this leads to a very fast browser.

Omni Group also have more time to work on the browser UI since they don’t have to work on the HTML rendering aspect of the package. As a result of this you get a very nice package, all the best aspects of Safari but with more user orientated features such as better control over tabs and easier and more fully featured bookmark management, as well as a rather odd tab implimentation. There is no tab bar, but a slide out drawer which contains thumbnails of all open pages. This approach has several advantages over a standard tab bar method, the first being that you can actually see the pages that are not currently being viewed in the main window, the second is that a more visible green tick appears on a thumbnail when it is done loading. This is more visible than the spinning wheel that stops spinning when a page is loaded.

The one area where OmniWeb does lag behind Safari is in the Adblocking stakes. Safari out of the box is worse than OmniWeb, however safari can fall back on PithHelmet to cover its arse. Having used this combination it is most effective, and OmniWeb simply does not have a plugin that I am aware of which offers the same standard of blocking. OmniWeb has the ability to perform blocking based on known URLs but these have to be added manually one at a time, or as I discovered can be done as a job lot with a little tweaking. After this blocking does work very well with the Filterset.G rules, but I have to admit, it’s a far from perfect solution.

A feature I do like a lot is the ability to configure individual site preferences. Certain webites simply do not like to be so tightly controlled in terms of how they display and what elements of the page are blocked, so site preferences are a nice touch.

Overall I am really enjoying my time with OmniWeb and will continue to use it for a while to come. I may never know why I wanted to find another browser in the first place, but I am most pleased I did find OmniWeb.

Cheers

Since news gets to me a little slower here in the middle of the French countryside, the cows are not big on tech news, I only just learned that Apple have announced that they are delaying OS X Leopard until October 2007. They cited the reason for the delay as having to pull key developers and QA people off the OS X team to work on the iPhone. As a result Leopard has been delayed so the iPhone can be released on time.

This does go against what Apple previously said as late as March, that Leopard was still on for an early June release.

Oh well, at least I’ll have more time to save up for both the iPhone and 10.5.

Cheers