Global Reset

It’s usually pretty tough living on the bleeding edge, but Apple has made things a lot easier with their switch to Intel. Thanks to Rosetta, you can still run just about all of your PowerPC applications under emulation. Since the emulation is obviously going to be slower, I’m trying to stay clear of any PowerPC apps if I can, especially if they are meant to run all the time (daemons). Apple created a handy logo to identify apps which are Universal (containing binary code for both Intel and PowerPC architectures), but I’ve found that there are some apps that still aren’t using logo. This means I typically have to visit the changelog of my favorite apps and search for the keyword “universal”. Optionally, you can download the app, select it in the finder, and hit Command-I to get its information screen. From there, you can see if it’s a PowerPC app under the “Kind” heading. It’ll read either “Kind: Application (Universal)” or “Kind: Application (PowerPC)”. If I find that it’s a PowerPC app, the url for it gets dragged into my “Waiting For Universal” folder in my Bookmarks Bar.

I did get bit by an app recently and I didn’t see it coming. I noticed a frustrating amount of slowdown on my MacBook Pro, especially when switching tasks. I searched for a long time to figure out which app I had loaded that was slowing me down by so much. My memory usage was extremely low, so disk swapping wasn’t the problem. CPU usage was next to nothing, so I was stumped as to what it could be. I had a 5-10 second delay when switching apps or when bringing up the dashboard, so something was definitely misbehaving. I checked my Console (Applications/Utiilities/Console.App) and I found that I had several plugins for Quicksilver and Mail.app which were throwing linker errors. The errors came from the fact that they are PowerPC plugins that got moved over via the Migration assistant. Even after removing those, I still had the noticable slowdown.

Finally I tried the Activity Monitor (Applications/Utiilities/ActivityMonitor.App). If you right-click on the column headers, you’ll see a drop-down to select which fields are available. Select the “Kind” field. Now sort on that field and you’ll see all of the PowerPC applications (those running under Rosetta) on your machine. These are the most likely to be causing slowdown, especially the daemon apps who are constantly performing work in the background. I found my culprit easily: The Delicious Library Dashboard Widget. Delicious Library was a Universal app, so I wouldn’t have suspected it. But the handy widget included with it has a separate binary component and that’s built as a PowerPC application (either that or the installer for the latest version failed to overwrite my old widget). After removing it from the Dashboard, I was again cruising at full speed. I sent Delicious Monster some feedback about the widget; seems to be an easy enough fix that I’ll bet it’s corrected before my RSS feed is updated.

If your MacBook Pro (or other Intel Mac) is experiencing slowdown (so early in its life!), I’d suggest you perform the same investigation. As an aside, here are some of the apps in my current waiting list now: * SideTrack – makes your trackpad more useful. * NetNewsWire – RSS reader. Universal Beta available * FlickrExport – handy iPhoto plugin. Went Universal on 3/8/06. * kisMAC – WiFi stumbler. Version 0.21a is now Universal * PSPWare – Sync/Encoder app for PSP. This one has gone universal. * Windows Media Player and Remote Desktop Connection – at the mercy of Microsoft on these two. * Eclipse – the world’s greatest IDE.

Damnit! I waited too long to flip my Mac Mini PPC on eBay… Now that Steve’s announced the Intel Mac Minis, it’s going to be a hard sell. If you were holding out on switching, the new Mac Mini’s look a lot more attractive than they were before. From the Engadget live-blog of the event:

10:09am PT - Introduced the iMac, doing really well out there, MacBook Pro reviews are off the charts, two of the things helping this transition are universal applications. Rosetta turned out to be much stronger than we thought it would be, running most PowerPC apps. Today we’re introducing our third machine, the mac mini based on Intel’s Core Solo processor.

10:11am PT - It’s two and a half to three times faster in the same box. Also, putting a core duo processor in the Mini, it’s 4.8x to 5.5x faster. We have a product that’s over five times faster in the same form factor. We’ve added gigabit ethernet and doubled the number of USB 2 ports to four. Analog and SPDIF input and output. And its really quiet, it’s a pretty great product.

Ooohh.. Audio-input – something that was missing on the previous generations of Mac Minis. But this is nowhere near the point of giving me Buyer’s Remorse (not like those poor folks who bought the iMac G5 a couple of months before they announced the iMac Core Duo).

OS X has an annoying (at least, to me) idea about how the Home/End keys should work. For a while, I tolerated it because it was my duty as a switcher. But, going back and forth between my work PC and my home Mac is painful (especially now that my home Mac is sitting next to my work PC). I finally stumbled upon this reference to help over write the default key bindings to come up with something that’s a little more natural for me. Here’s what I used for my new key bindings

/* ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict */
{
    /* Home Key */
    "\UF729"   = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
    "^\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfDocument:";
    "$\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
    "$^\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfDocumentAndModifySelection:";

    /* End Key */
    "\UF72B"   = "moveToEndOfLine:";
    "^\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfDocument:";
    "$\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
    "$^\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfDocumentAndModifySelection:";

    /* Left Arrow Key */
    "^\UF702"  = "moveWordBackward:";
    "$^\UF702" = "moveWordBackwardAndModifySelection:";

    /* Right Arrow Key */
    "^\UF703"  = "moveWordForward:";
    "$^\UF703" = "moveWordForwardAndModifySelection:";
}

I played around with trying to get the Shift+Delete combo to do a forward-delete (like Windows Delete key, instead of like Backspace), but I couldn’t get that to work. My MacBook Pro keyboard only has the one Delete key, but if I use a Windows keyboard the Windows Delete key works as expected. I’d be interested if anyone else had a tip about a good way to get a convenient forward-delete on my MacBook keyboard.

Update 3/11/2006:
Apparently, on all Apple laptops, the mapping for a forward delete is fn + delete. However, it seems I can’t use fn + [cmd|opt|ctrl] + delete to do any fancier forward deleting (like “forward delete word), because once I press any of the modifier buttons it’s as if the fn button is ignored in the combo.

Damn, they are shipping my MacBook Pro direct from Shanghai! If I’d known that at the time of shipping, I would’ve upgraded to something faster. Those 2-day air prices are a pretty good deal if we’re talking about international shipping.

… Your keynote brings the entire internet to a grinding halt. All the tech news sites are at full stop as Mac geeks sit constantly refreshing the page, to see which rumors are true. Full disclosure: I’ve been refreshing TUAW’s live chatcast, so I’m contributing to the problem. So far, looks like iPhoto has added Photocasting.. But only for .Mac users. Nothing else has caught my eye yet, but I’m hoping for affordable Intel-based laptops to be announced.

I had my first frightening Mac crash last night. I was using CocoaMySQL to set up the latest Typo and Rails on a test server, when the app locked up by taking up 100% of the cpu. This is something CocoaMySQL does for me frequently, but I tolerate it because it is a nice interface and I can usually just restart it (and I haven’t found a better GUI alternative).

In my previous post (TiVo and Mac OSX: Remux Redux), I discussed a GUI and command-line option for re-muxing video from a TiVo on OSX. Well, the command-line option was based on a perl script called TivoTool. The developer of that perl script has gone on to create a very slick GUI around it.

I got an email from the developer a few weeks ago about the new GUI, and I’ve been meaning to write about it, but I had a few problems with earlier revisions. For example, I couldn’t get it to save my video on an external volume… The new file would simply disappear. That said, I’m very excited to see that the tool is being very actively developed, with a new release today that adds some slick features.

I have to say that with this tool, I no longer regret leaving behind the win32-only TyTool.

Technorati Tags: MacOSX, TiVo

I had a few people post in the comments about getting a copy of the OneWireViewer update I did… A few email me privately. I’ve been emailing it out to people as it’s requested, but now that I have a good web hosting service, I may as well put it out on the intarweb proper-like.

For now, this is a binary-only distribution. I want to do some more testing with it and make a similar binary distribution for Linux before I make this official. Once I’m convinced that it’s as robust as the PC solution, we’ll move it over to the official Dallas Semiconductor ftp site. Although most of the source is available online (1-Wire API for Java and 1-Wire Public Domain Kit on maxim-ic.com, libusb on libusb.sourceforget.net, rxtx on rxtx.org), some of the glue I used to make this work isn’t. I’ll try to make that available soon to people who want to dig around in that part of it.

Don’t blame me if this application sets your pretty Macintosh computer on fire.

OWV-Beta-2.dmg (2.4mb)

If you have any success with this at all, please leave a comment and let me know.

Technorati Tags: 1-Wire, iButton, MacOSX

Take a look at this screen capture to see how I spent my 4th of July vacation weekend.

I ended up taking the libusb build of the 1-Wire Public Domain Kit and creating a JNI-wrapper around it. Now I’ve got a nice USB Adapter driver for the Java API (and hence for OneWireViewer). I’m going to look into modifying the WebStart download so that it will deliver the new USB adapter and the binary (JNI) portion of it. Possibly, I can sneak the libusb drivers along with that as well, without causing too much confusion. Maybe make 2 builds, one that includes libusb for people who aren’t cmd-line savvy enough to build their own and one that doesn’t.

The good news is that this should work on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. Windows users will have to install a .inf file first, but it will be a single-click application for Linux and Mac.

Update (7/10/2005): I used JarBundler to create a nice .App bundle of this for Mac OS X users. It’s pretty nice to have a installable .App of OneWireViewer that supports both the USB Adapter (DS9490) and the Serial Adapter (DS9097U) on Mac OS X. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good place to host it.. I’m not sure in it’s current form if it’s suitable for an official release to go up on the dalsemi ftp servers. So, if you’d like to try it, just leave a comment and include your email address (not in the comment, but in the regular email address field, where I will be able to see it but noone else will) and I can email you a copy of the app. It’s 2.3mb compressed.

A couple of weeks ago, I made a comment in Chris’ blog post about how he tried to ruin his laptop with a bottle of water. For your convenience, here’s my relevant addition to his story where I tried to ruin my delicate Apple hardware…

Last weekend, Nicole was using my brand new Mac Mini. Of course, that also means she was using my almost brand new Dell 2005fpw 20” lcd… Not to mention my mostly new wireless keyboard. And, she was drinking coffee while doing this. So, I’m playing fetch with the dog downstairs. The way our apt is laid out, we have a second floor with a sort of balcony over the living room which is where my mac mini lives. I decide to give the dog a good challenge by tossing his toy over the balcony edge to where Nicole is sitting. Nothing but net… The toy went straight into the coffeee, splashing coffee everywhere. Keyboard was the worst hit, but I did actually get a big splash on the Mac Mini. It looks like it’s going to survive, but I have a nice brown stain on the felt in the slot loader to remind me of what an idiot I am. I think I got the keyboard back to a good state, though if the N sticks on me again, I’ll have to buy a new one. Can’t tolerate sticky keys, you know…

Today, thanks to a remnant of that mess, I learned a couple of things about my Mac Mini…

1. Dried coffee is like hardened cement when placed between my computer desk and the rubber bottom of the Mac Mini and will, in most circumstances, require an actual chisel to separate the two.
2. That little power cord in the back slips out of the Mac Mini like a frightened, greased pig at the county fair.
3. Mac OSX does not berate you for improper shutdown of your system, unlike Windows XP.

That third point is an interesting one to me. I’m very familiar with recovery on Windows, given that prior to WinXP crashes were quite frequent… I’m sure Mac OSX must have some sort of method for recovering orphaned files and, perhaps, booting into a safe mode if I installed something which hosed the boot process… I need to add that to my “to research” list…

Technorati Tags: MacMini, MacOSX