apple
Rumour Roundup: the Apple Tablet
Jan 16th
A cool mockup/rumour guide about the alledged Apple Tablet:
Syncing my iPhone with Snow Leopard Server with Address Book — Not!
Dec 13th
I have some contacts I wanted to share with other people so I figured let’s put them into Address Book Server on my Snow Leopard Server. I moved the group on to the server and everything was great. Contacts show up in Address Book on my macbook.
I synch my iPhone as usual. Next day I get a call from a familiar number but no name (I can’t remember phone numbers if my life dependent on it)! I check the contacts on my iPhone and none of the ones I moved are there!
After much fiddling and googling it turns out it doesn’t work! That doesn’t make any sense. How could Apple fail at something so basic? I imagine they want the iPhone to sync remotely to Address Book Server much like iCal and mail. Reasonable philosophy but it doesn’t do that! In the interim, I’d expect iTunes to be able to sync — after all, it’s in your address book. Not only that, they already handle Google sync using CardDAV, right? So why isn’t it in iTunes until they get it working on the iPhone!
From ForkBombr:
> Sadly, this isn’t the case. Address Book Server works beautifully between Macs. It’s fast and reliable. However, the iPhone OS doesn’t support CardDAV, the technology behind Address Book Server, meaning these contacts cannot be synced over the air to an iPhone like iCal or Mail data.
And the relevant discussion:
> ABS does not sync OTA or have push changes. The iPhone supports LDAP access. This means you can lookup contct info stored in your WGM for users in your company. It does not support CardDAV.
ABS is Address Book Sync; OTA is over-the-air; WGM is Work Group Manager (aka Apple’s LDAP server); CardDAV is how to share contact information.
Visualizing disk usage (Mac OS X)
Dec 12th
I downloaded GrandPerspective to visualize disk usage on my laptop. It uses the tree visualization algorithm to show the directory hierarchy and the size of the hierarchy.
Each “bump” represents a file with the area reflecting the relatives size. As you move around, a series of nested rectangles are highlighted. Each highlighted rectangle represents a directory and the nesting of the rectangles the directory hierarchy.
Xcode: notes
Nov 29th
To reset Xcode to the default settings:
$ defaults delete com.apple.Xcode $ rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Xcode
First, I dislike having a lot of popup windows so I set the layout to “All-In-One” to keep most things within a single window:
And my usual indentation style:
I like having the files autosaved on build:
Seeing /opt in Mac OS X Finder
Nov 22nd
DVD Ripping
Nov 21st
I’ve been watching more movies on my laptop while commuting to work on the train. I’d mostly been happy either buying them from iTunes or just playing the DVD. However, lately I’ve wanted to have a couple available and decided to try some of the dvd rippers.
I’d used “Mac the Ripper” but it’s getting rather dated and since I upgraded to Snow Leopard I’ve been avoiding installing Rosetta to run old PowerPC binaries. So it was out.
I tried Aieesoft’s “DVD Ripper” but the demo wasn’t that impressive and I didn’t like the way the movies were organized. Why no titles?
I ended up trying Ripit and it does just what I want: insert a DVD and it copies it and names it appropriately.
It worked pretty well.
Price is $19.95 and you get 10 free conversions to try it out. It’s based on the open source Handbrake decoders.
SproutCore
Jan 1st
I’d looked into SproutCore and sort of liked the idea. I see Apple is doing more with it — the gallery of MobileMe looks pretty cool.
Here’s an interesting video (jump to the 20min point and listen for about 20min) that argues why we should move more business logic to the browser and use a higher level framework like SproutCore.
Gmail, Apple Mail, and IMAP
Dec 26th
I’d noticed my Apple Mail wasn’t always getting new messages in a timely manner. My iPhone would frequently get it before Mail!
- Setup gmail, apple mail account as per google’s suggestions
- These imap settings from google combine how gmail works with Apple’s mail. Read the extra details and the settings make sense.
- It took 25 minutes to download all the email
While I was at it, I went ahead and setup syncing with google calendar. Recently, Google and Apple improved it so it could be two way:
Finally, it turns out that contact info between Apple’s Address book and gmail (and Yahoo!, for that matter) are doable:
Mac OS X (Leopard) and ssh-agent
Dec 17th
I had SshKeychain installed before and am trying to get back 10.5’s ssh agent to work. I found this article which pointed me to the solution and this fascinating file
~/.MacOSX/environment.plist
From How to get Leopard ssh agent to work:
The solution is to use terminal, go to your home directory, cd to .MacOSX and look and see if there’s an environment.plist file. In there will be some XML to set this persistent string for SSH_AUTH_SOCK. You need to take that out. If there’s other stuff in the file, like a CVSHOME entry, hand-edit the XML to take out the SSH_AUTH_SOCK entry. (How to do that is beyond the scope of this post.) If the only thing is that entry, just delete the environment.plist file.”
And this is an even better article that describes the the past situation, how it works now, and the integration with launchd
Mac OS X (10.5), NFS, and Linux
Dec 11th
I got around to getting my MacBook to mount an NFS filesystem from my Linux server. There’s a nice set of instructions on using the Directory Utility to do so. The problem stumping me was:
kernel: nfsd: request from insecure port (10.0.1.197:57367)!
And the bit of magic that eluded me before was adding the “-P” option:
Unfortunately, my uid on my MacBook is 500 and on my Linux server it is 1000.
There’s an option for more recent implementations of NFS that allow the
/etc/exports file to include a ‘map_static=”/etc/nfs_map”‘ option to specify a
uid mapping but it’s not available in OpenSuse.