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

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

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

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

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

For the last few days Asus’ website asus.com.tw had been providing it’s users with not only drivers and BIOS updates, but also the new Windows .ani exploit.

The virus is apparently hidden in an iframe and exploits the viewers system.

According to reports the exploit has been coming out of Asus’ website for the past 3 days.

Nice.

Apple today released Boot Camp 1.2 which adds, among other things, Vista support. Boot Camp 1.2 also updates some drivers for trackpads, AppleTime, audio, graphics, modems, iSight camera
Support, and the Apple Remote which now works with iTunes and Windows Media Player. A Windows system tray icon for easy access to Boot Camp information and actions has also been added. The list of changes does not stop here, but more can be found at he above link.

Cheers

Apple yesterday released the latest update for their impressive OS X 10.4 OS. This update has been a long time coming and fixes some general bugs as well as adding some more specific improvements which are detailed at Apple’s site. The update is on both Software Update and as a stand alone download, so happy updating.

Cheers

Yes it is indeed true, Apple have advised people to wait off on upgrading to Vista. Not because there’s really nothing new in Vista, but because iTunes 7.02, the most current version of the software doesn’t work correctly under Vista. Users are reporting that they cannot play some purchased music and are having problems synchronising with their iPod’s.

I must say I’m a little disappointed in Apple on this one. They have had a lot of time to prepare a Vista compatable version of iTunes and it makes me really wonder why they haven’t got one ready. Seems sloppy on their part.

Cheers

A leaked e-mail from Microsoft has revealed that they plan to release a service pack for Windows Vista in the second half of 2007.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) will be a standard service pack that will include security updates, hotfixes, as well as limited other changes focused on improving quality.

I assume that this wil be very similar to the kind of security fixes that came along with Windows XP SP1.

So relating to my poll on the right, when will you upgrade to Vista? Will you wait for the imminent service pack.

Cheers

Just a little thing to make the blood boil over here in the UK, Vista pricing.
On the Amazon US site Vista costs $379.99, while the Amazon UK site did have Vista for sale at £369.99. Now at a current exchange rate of 0.5323 Pounds to the Dollar that means the Amazon US copy of Vista costs £202.26. WTF means that we in Britain should pay £167 more than the US for the same software? It is a piece of software, it costs no more to sell in the UK than it does in the US. This sort of extortion, and it is extortion plain and simple, cannot be allowed to continue. This kind of disparity in pricing on software is profiteering, with Microsoft making silly profits from me and my fellow Britains for no good reason. If someone can come up with a valid reason for this price difference then please add your comments to this post.

Cheers

F-Secure have told of a way in which a browser can be opened from other applications. iAdware seems to be some kind of rogue input method available to Cocoa applications. F-Secure are very scant on details and don’t give any thing like a demo. They simply say it can be done. Why is it all details on OS X exploits are so scant? I want details for godsake. I want to know how it happens and how I can prevent it from happening to me.

On the other hand this could be F-Secure drumming up business as they prepare to release an OS X based product. I always seem cynical when I hear of exploits but no demo. F-Secure currently have no OS X product in their line up and with the growing populariy of the platform they could be looking to move into the market.

Cheers