Gary's Bloggage » snowleopard

Delicousness: iPhones, boarding passes, Cult of Mac, nerd subclasses, Snow Leopard and weird ads

Gary — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:16:46 +0000

The end of the week, semi regular, hand selected, carefully edited snapshot of what made it into my Delicious bookmarks this week.

Last week I blogged about my experiences with an electronic boarding pass, hosted on my iPhone, while travelling home from Amsterdam’s Schipol airport. Cult of Mac came across it, liked it, and used it as a basis for an article. Which was nice.
Remember those Venn Diagrams you did in maths class? Now you can use one to work out which of the subclasses of nerddom you belong to. Naturally I place myself in the geek with a life subclass, which is strangely absent from the diagram.
At the weekend I upgraded my work MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest version of the OS X operating system. And then 4 days later I downgraded it back to Leopard.
Want to buy used toilet paper, a used tombstone or a rottweiler called Mr Giggles? Some people think you do.

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Why Snow Leopard Thawed Back To Leopard

Gary — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:42:53 +0000

Last weekend I upgraded my MacBook Pro from Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5.8, to Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6. This kind of classes as early adopter behaviour as there’s no bug fix release for Snow Leopard out in the wild yet to iron out any kinks or rough edges but I wasn’t particularly bothered by this.

I’ve used OS X since version Cheetah, version 10.0 and have gone through the intervening releases, Puma, Jaguar and Panther. With Tiger I stopped using a desktop machine and took a decision to make my Yahoo! supplied MacBook Pro my sole day-to-day machine, an experiment I didn’t regret and which has become the norm for me.

When Leopard arrived I took the early adopter plunge and upgraded and, apart from a few teething troubles, which I can’t even recall now, all was well. Then Snow Leopard arrived and I waited a week, not quite early adoption but early enough. I heard no shouts and screams and even my one blocker, the lack of suitable Cisco VPN support for the version required to connect to Yahoo!, was resolved so I made sure my backup was up-to-date and upgraded. The backup gives me more foresight than I really deserve.

At first all was good. The Exchange server my corporate mail is hosted on is Exchange 2007 and at the right service pack level to work with Snow Leopard’s rather stringent requirements. Mail took my authentication credentials and set up my Exchange account, iCal did the same and so did Address Book. Granted they took a while to sync up but that was over a VPN connection, over a wifi link, over my home broadband connection so some slack was cut.

And on Monday I went to work and lived with Snow Leopard on a day-to-day basis. Then the minor niggles, gripes and whinges began …

A meeting invite would arrive, be responded to and deleted out of my Inbox but Mail still thinks I have one unread message. The only solution I found would be to rebuild the mailbox, of 10366 messages at the last count, every time a meeting invite or update arrived.
Talking of meeting invite updates, each one created a new appointment in iCal. Got a meeting invite and 5 subsequent updates? Hey presto, you’ve now got 6, count them, meeting invites.
Safari Input Handlers were finally disabled. Now I know that they were undocumented and never actually supported by there’s some plugins I use a lot that now just don’t work, including DeliciousSafari and Inquisitor. If you’re going to remove some functionality at least open up a plugin API for Safari developers. But no. Yes I know I could run Safari in 32-bit mode but that’s not really the point.
Mail lost all my previous settings for Junk Mail. I could understand it for my Exchange account as that was, too all intents a new account, but for every other mail account I have as well?
Safari lost all my settings which said don’t remember user name and password for this site.
The Mobile Me and RSS screen saver vanished with no replacement on offer; no Flickr photo RSS feeds for me.
Exchange calendars can’t be synchronised with an iPhone over Mobile Me, you have to use ActiveSync, and if your company doesn’t support it, well no syncing for you then.
The entire printer driver architecture seems to have changed and all my printers needed new drivers. Which would be fine but alas the updated bundle of Ricoh drivers doesn’t include the printer that is on every single floor of the Yahoo! office, so no printing for me.

I could go on but I won’t; the lack of printing was the final straw and so I spent 50 minutes last night restoring my Leopard install from that backup I mentioned earlier … thank you Shirt Pocket for writing SuperDuper!

So I’m now back to a machine running Leopard, without native Exchange support, but with all of my working environment back and … working. When the next release of Snow Leopard comes out I’ll try again, but I’ll make sure I take a full backup beforehand. Just in case Snow Leopard needs to be thawed again.

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Deliciousness: Mac OS X 15.6, gallons of chilli sauce, globes and Virgin Media

Gary — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:13:27 +0000

This week’s trawl through my Delicous bookmarks. Actually this is last week’s trawl but real life got in the way of posting and I beg your indulgence.

Last week, Snow Leopard, AKA Mac OS X 10.6 was released though some places seem to now be selling an even more advanced version, Mac OS X 15.6.
I like chilli sauce, I have a fine and wide range of the stuff in the larder at home; but some people must really really like the stuff to buy it a gallon at a time.
In my day job I do geo stuff but I wasn’t aware that a globe, an inflatable one come to that, has sharp corners and isn’t suitable for children.
While we’re on the subject of geo, Virgin Media found out the hard way that place names aren’t unique and sometimes there’s more than one place sharing a name; Whitchurch in this particular case.

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I Haz Snow Leopard

Gary — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:40:27 +0000

It was inevitable, but once I’d found out that a new version of the Cisco VPN client was available, the one thing that was stopping me from installing Snow Leopard, then a Snow Leopard upgrade was on the cards. So off to the Apple Store on Regent Street in London I went.

Once home, it was time to see what’s in the package, to which the answer was not a lot, as it was even more minimalistic that the Leopard box.

And then on through the best part of an hour’s worth of installation with a single reboot roughly half way through.

… and yes, I do have more disk space now that there’s no PowerPC support and so there’s no Universal binaries and yes, though it’s totally subjective it does feel a darn sight faster. Now to test Exchange 2007 support …

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Deliciousness: yet more bacon, Snow Leopard, Hitchhiker’s, WhereCamp Europe, under your feet and shell scripts for your baby.

Gary — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:19:33 +0000

This week’s trawl through what appeared on the interwebs and made it into my Delicious bookmarks.

The march towards all things bacon flavoured continues unabated; now you can get bacon (and mint) flavoured, err, mints and that get-you-going-in-the-morning first cup of coffee can now be bacon flavoured as well. Where’s this going to end?
Mac OS X 10.6, AKA Snow Leopard, got officially released today. Some people rushed out, bought it and installed it. But as ever, there’s some compatibility problems, not the least of which (for me at least) is that the Cisco VPN client may (or may not) work properly. It’s also for Intel based Macs only so a lot of PowerPC based Mac owners are going to be sad.
First reviews of the new Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy book, not written by Douglas Adams on account of him being dead, find it “not really funny” and “less a case of So Long And Thanks For All The Fish and more a case of So Long And Thanks For All The Money“.
#wherecamp, the geogeeks (un)conference of choice, is coming to Europe in the form of the aptly named #WhereCampEU. Naturally, I’ll be there.
While walking into Soho, I found one of London’s lost streets right under my feet. Literally.
And finally, real men don’t rock their child to sleep, they write a shell script to do it for them.

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Sad iBook G4

Gary — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:12:32 +0000

No Snow Leopard for you with your PowerPC chip.

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