Tiger so far

My experiences with Tiger so far, after a few hours’ playing:

  • The installer refused to install anything at first, failing after the hard disk verification stage with the everso-helpful message “There was a problem with the installation. Please try installing again”. Luckily I knew where to look for the install log when I rebooted, whereupon it claimed it had encountered the dreaded Error -9972. Not wanting to take any chances, I backed up everything and did a clean install.
  • Things do generally feel somewhat snappier, as promised.
  • Spotlight does what it says on the tin, but for me, not quite as elegantly as Quicksilver, at least as an application launcher. Biggest annoyance in that regard is that you hit the shortcut (Cmd-Space, rather that Quicksilver’s Ctrl-Space, but that’s fine), type the first few characters of the app you want to run, and the results come back. At this point, Quicksilver will show you the closest match and you can launch it straight away ny hitting Enter. Spotlight, however, always pre-selects “Show all matches” rather than “Top hit”, so you have to arrow down to select the app or file you want to open. A tad annoying.
  • Dashboard is very pretty, but some of the widgets duplicate stuff that’s already in OSX, and it would be much more convenient if the widgets could be placed on your actual desktop, rather than an Exposé-like overlay. It also takes up a space on the dock… haven’t checked to see if it still runs if you remove it, yet.
  • Still no virtual desktop support– Desktop Manager to the rescue.
  • Photoshop CS refuses to run any more, even after a complete re-install. (Update: I tried again, and now it does.)
  • Had to upgrade Desktop Manager and my Wacom tablet driver to get them to work, but now they’re fine.

I haven’t yet looked at Automator, the 3D video chatrooms in iChat (nobody to talk to!), the improved mail client (as I only use that for my work email, which I can’t access until Cisco come out with a Tiger-compatible VPN client), or much else, really.

Update: samba also looks to be somewhat broken… I can connect to my office share using smbclient, but I can’t mount it with mount_smbfs (or Connect to Server, in Finder).

Update II: Mac On Linux can’t run Tiger yet.

Update III: There is a way to have dashboard widgets on your desktop

Update IV: Samba does work after all; in 10.4 it just sends passwords encrypted by default, which our office servers can’t handle yet. Adding this to /etc/nsmb.conf fixes it:

[default]
minauth=none

Tiger Time

My copy of OS X Tiger has arrived, a day ahead of schedule (and 10% off, thanks to Sun’s employee purchase plan)… all I can say so far is that it comes in this nice (if slightly hard-to-open) box, because I haven’t decided yet whether to install it and break my ability to work at home until Cisco get their act together and release a compatible vpn client. But I think I probably will 🙂

Mad world

Continuing our recent theme of going to see reformed 80’s groups, Tears for Fears were on our schedule at the weekend. Not a band whose albums I would have rushed out and bought first time around, but it’s always good to hear a few songs from your youth belted out by the original artistes, even if Roland does look more like Lawrence Llewlyn-Bowen these days. And the original Mad World is still a lot better than that effort that was No.1 at Christmas (which, spookily enough, was playing in the taxi on the way home).

The support was Irish Eurovision reject Fran King, who was kind of a less-polished cross between David Gray and the Finn Brothers… pleasant enough, but you get the feeling he might get a bit samey after a while. Will probably check out his new album (“Beautifcation”) at some point anyway, though… you can listen to his new single here.

The Network is the Computer (but not everyone’s)

Working at home a day or so a week has been a great convenience, but it looks like my days are numbered… at least if I want to keep using my Mac.

The current Cisco VPN client apparently doesn’t work with OSX 10.4, so I won’t be able to connect to the office from home that way if I decide to install my shiny new upgrade when it arrives next week– and let’s face it, it’s going to be hard to resist 🙂 Rumours abound too that the OSX version is about to be EOL’d anyway, so who knows how well it’ll ever work post-Panther.

Normally I’m running Linux on my Mac when I’m working anyway, so no problem you’d think– except there’s no PowerPC version of the Cisco VPN client, and today we’ve been told that we’re no longer allowed to use the open source vpnc client either, as a security audit has determined the current version to be too insecure.

Even if there was a way around those issues, Sun is taking SOX compliance rather seriously, and in the not too distant future, full remote access will be restricted to employees with centrally-managed workstations running Java Desktop System, with a Java card reader for authentication. If you think this sounds a lot like SunRay@Home, you’d probably be right 🙂 The rest of us will be restricted to accessing so-called ‘edge services’ like mail and calendar from our evil non-JDS boxes.

While SunRay is one of the coolest technologies going, and being able to control who does what with your infrastructure is a must, I’m not convinced that everyone who currently works at home is going to be well-served by this one-size-fits-all approach, or that the world is going to be a safer place as a result. It’s a perfect solution for VPs, managers and salesfolk, who have a SunRay on their desk whose session they can then tap into wherever they go. But I fear that engineers (and Sun does have the odd one or two, so I’m told) with their three or four standalone workstations per desk, and designers with the need for something a little more powerful than GIMP and StarOffice Draw, are going to find it a lot harder to get their job done in the comfort of their own home.

But there’s a way to go before all that happens, and I live in hope… Sun prides itself on the number of its employees who have the opportunity to work remotely. If anyone can find a way to securely connect together a bunch of differently-flavoured *nix machines1 across the internet without limiting their functionality to that of an internet café, you would think it might be us 🙂

1Ignoring the fact that some folk will probably want to connect Windows machines as well, but since they represent the largest part of the problem, I’d have no issue with them being banned from connecting remotely at all…

Challenge Everything, especially your patience

Having not been able to play Burnout 3 online for weeks (“Unable to open communications to other players”), and never having managed a full game of FIFA 2004 (disconnected after the first few minutes, on the rare occasions I got a connection to another player in the first place), I spent the last couple of evenings looking into why my connection to EA’s flaky-at-best-anyway servers was so poor. I disabled firewalls, opened every port going, put the PS2 in the DMZ, all to no avail. The only thing that ever worked for EA games (while other games were working just fine) was running a wire from the PS2 straight into my modem, bypassing the router altogether– and having splashed out for a wireless bridge, I didn’t want to do that.

I think I’ve hit on the solution eventually, though. I chanced upon a couple of posts like this one yesterday that said some people were having to turn off UPnP support in their router to have Xbox Live games work. Since it was about the only thing I hadn’t tried, I investigated… and it turns out my router had UPnP turned on, but my DSL modem had it turned off. So I turned them both off.

Result 1: A happy evening of online car crashing. (Most of the time; there are still some players I just can’t ping, resulting in a disconnect.)

Result 2: France 2 Brazil 0. Arse. Maybe I should stick with PES after all.

Ubuntu to you too

Have spent a few hours over the past couple of days installing and playing with Ubuntu Linux on my Powerbook G4. I thought I was quite happy with Mandrake^H^H^Hiva 10.2 (one of the few other mainstream distros that runs on a Powerbook), but I think I was wrong… with Ubuntu, the GNOME battery monitor works, my plug-in wireless card works, and my Wacom tablet works (mostly– no pressure sensitivity). And most of all, everything feels a lot snappier, especially the indispensable MOL (which is one of the few things that’s been more of a hassle to set up with Ubuntu than it was with MDK, thanks to the lack of a pre-compiled kernel module).

As with any flavour of Linux of course, there’s still no hardware acceleration for the G4’s ATI Radeon 9700 graphics chip (I do miss being able to play TuxRacer in its native environment, although the OSX port isn’t bad), and no driver for its built-in Airport Extreme wireless card. And there probably never will be, given both manufacturers’ reluctance to release any information about them whatsoever to Linux hackers. But what the heck.

You’ve got mail… but only for 400 days

So, Sun are going to start making us archive any emails over 400 days old that we want to keep, and everything else will be automatically deleted. According to an Evolution vfolder I just set up for the job, I currently have 23,206 emails older than that, each of which I’ll need to decide whether to archive or not. Think I’m going to have a fun few weekends 🙂

Galway coast

A few mini-photos from our Easter weekend in Galway (most of which are actually of places in Co. Clare):

We stayed at the Ardilaun House Hotel, which was very pleasant indeed… not the cheapest, but their Easter weekend deal included dinner on one of the two nights and full use of the leisure facilities, so I took the opportunity to have my first-ever jacuzzi 🙂