GlitchNYC

I got an attachment from Kelly tonight only to notice that I could finally pop it right open in Google Docs! Maybe I won’t have to pony up for a copy of office 2008 for OS X afterall!

A few months back, I gave up linux after a 3.5 year love hate relationship, and went back to windows for a while.

It wasn’t horrible, but there were lots of things I missed. I missed the fact that I had a solid unix system underneath. I missed having SSH, SFTP, and VNC built in for remote access. I missed the ease of installing things with yum and all my beautiful, free applications.

I also had to relearn to think in terms of “this machine is vulnerable” and was careful with every file I downloaded and opened.

I have to admit, I loved the fact that dual-screen just worked. I loved that our printer at home finally functioned as it should. I loved sharing files easily with the click of a mouse.

After seeing Noel and some of the Ruby Guys at BarCampNYC2 work their magic on their macs, I started to realized that Mac combined the power of unix with a slick interface that generally just works. I could run apache, php, ruby, and mysql all locally and have a beautiful interface and my periphrasis work without endless .conf file hacking. And, watching these Mac experts fly around on their machine really piqued my interest. I’ve got the windows side of things pretty well mastered, but even still, it can be clunky to find your away around once you’ve got more than a few windows open.

So, last week, Kelly graciously accompanied me to the Mac store so I could take advantage of her student discount, and I came home with a shiny new MacBook Pro.

I haven’t been a fan of every little piece along the way (where’s the delete - not backspace - key? Where are home and end?) but I have found that most of my complaints can be tweaked and configured away, or are combination keystrokes to keep the keyboard big and simple. The more I play on this machine, the more I’m starting to love it. I’m starting to get the hang of the key commands and hot keys. I’m especially loving quicksilver, and the fact that I can almost instantly start a new application or trigger an event.

My one biggest complaint so far was the lack of an included OS X manual. If I hadn’t already known to drop an application into the applications folder to install it, where would I have learned that?

Tonight, Sara pointed me to the great documentation at apple.com/support , and I’ve been reading along and just soaking up the info. I’ve already got a few new tricks up my sleeve, and I’m especially looking forward to mastering iMovieHD and GarageBand.

I’m going to do my best to keep some notes of the things that I’ve learned and how windows and linux/unix users can make the most of their new mac, but for now, I’m just enjoying the experience.

One final question for any mac guru’s out there. I’m desperately missing my multimedia keyboard’s “play/pause” button when listening to music at work. Is there a way to set a global hotkey for itunes that works even when iTunes is hidden or behind the active window?

UPDATE: Quicksilver comes through again. I set a trigger key for “play/pause” and I can start and stop the track from any application. Just hitting the quicksilver hotkey and typing itunes->TAB->next jumps to the next song, and tons of other commands can be triggered that way. Brilliant.

I’m installing IE7 now so that I can test this final release version against the sites I run and see what gets broken (and what finally, hopefully, works).

The download was speedy, but it’s been 10 minutes and I still don’t have IE7 running on this machine. Let’s take a quick tour of where IE7, which has the potential to be one of the most frequently downloaded upgrades in computer history, sucks during the install.

First, they stop you before you even get started to make sure that your machine has a Microsoft sanctioned version of XP on it. No mention if they support 2000 or 98 here, or if the installer will turn you in if they decide you’re not legit, which according to reports of Windows Genuine Advantage false positives, happens quite a bit.

Next, even though we’ve just downloaded new software from Microsoft, we’re prompted to update it. Let’s say yes to ensure that we’re up to date.

The first thing I notice during the update is the “ripped from a mac” reflection under the arrow.

It’s been a few minutes, and that bar is still running…

Okay, that’s done.. But wait!

Now we have to get the required updates. I didn’t have a choice on these, apparently.

Once the install finally completes, you’re prompted to reboot. If you decline to reboot now, you get a stern warning. After delaying the restart you get a popup telling you to restart as soon as possible.

As if that wasn’t redundant enough, the automatic update service knows a reboot is needed, and popped up 3 times while I was writing this article.

I can understand that IE is a large install with its tentacles deep into the OS, but seriously, compare this install experience to that of Firefox, and the open source offering just blows MS away here.

They may stop a bit of the bleeding, but I seriously doubt this release will win any converts back from mozilla-ville.

Vista Screenshot
Originally uploaded by Glitch010101.

It is done.

I just couldn’t take it anymore. 3.5 years of running desktop linux at home and I never stopped fixing it. There was always something that needed tweaking, something that was broken today.

I need an OS that vendors write working drivers for. I need it to do what I need in a hurry, without worry of having to go “i know you can do that under linux, I just have to figure out how.”

You know, simple things… like printing. And my display.

I can’t explain what a joy it was to install my OS and have 2 displays up and running at the right res within a few minutes, and know that they’re 3D enabled and accelerated.

Of course, this is going to make some of the other things that I took for granted (like NFS filesharing between my main machine and my MythTV box and SSH access) readily apparent, but i’m sure I can work around those losses.

I’m ready to do more work WITH my pc and less work ON it.

Everyone hates the fscking paperclip. You all know what I’m talking about, it’s that stupid little popup that gets in your way when you’re trying to do your work in a microsoft office program.

Microsoft finally retired their friendly bane-of-every-office-workers-life with Office 2003, only to replace with the “Task Pane”.

Yes, the “Microsoft Bob” inspired paperclip has grown up and gotten fat - it now takes up a whole sidebar of workspace and covers your document, forcing you to close it.

Every time.

It comes back every time you start the program. If Dante could rewrite the inferno, I’m sure this type of “we know best” functionality is part of the first level.

To turn it off for good, go to tools->options->view tab and uncheck “startup task pane.”

I’ve recorded a breif, funny tutorial on this, so you can see exactly what to click.

Your done, it’s gone for good! Well, until you start excel for the first time, that’s a whole ‘nother program. Have fun.

I’ve just stumbled upon a nasty little problem with Windows XP, laptops, and the NumLock key.

Windows attempts to remember whether or not the numlock key should be on, but there’s several different “states” that the machine has to remember for. It remembers for each user, and for the “no user” logon mode, meaning that if it defaults the the one you don’t want, it can be extremely hard to change.

Okay, this sounds like a simple annoyance, just hit the key when you need to use the keypad, right?

The problem comes in when you’re on a laptop and numlock is on during the logon screen by default. For most of us, the numlock key is that stupid button that makes the keypad over at the right of our keyboard do weird stuff if it’s off. For laptop users, the numlock key turns a portion of their lettered keyboard in to a numerical keypad.

When this happens on the logon screen, you can’t see that you’re typing numbers instead of letters, because your password is asterisked out.

You can log in by figuring out what’s going on and hitting the numlock key, but the next time you log out, you’re back with the same problem.

Here’s the voodoo you have to do to fix it.

• Log in
• Turn numlock off
• Hit ctrl-alt-del to log off (don’t hit start->shutdown->logoff)
• You’ll now be back at the logon screen, and you’ll notice that your numlock key is maddeningly back on
• Turn it off once more, but don’t log in
• Hit “shutdown” on the logon screen and reboot your computer
• Upon rebooting, it should remain off. You’ve now set the default setting for the numlock key during logon.
  • (this would, of course, work in the reverse if you wanted to change the default to on for a normal keyboard)

Click to see the fullscreen screenshot in it’s 1680 x 1050 glory

Just a quick screenshot to show how drop shadows look in Linux. The eyecandy, ahem, I mean, useful visual cues that Mac OSX and Windows Vista tout are now easy to enable in KDE. I just installed Kubuntu, added a line or two to my xorg.conf, and turned shadows on in the GUI. Very slick.

I’ve got a little 1ghz computer and a very old ATI card. The screen refresh rate when sliding a window around is a little slow, but tolerable. I’m debating keeping it turned on for good. I like being able to clearly see what’s on top of what, and you know what? Drop shadows are just sexy.

To turn the shadows on in Kubuntu after install:

For an ATI card (nvidia’s are slightly different)

• Add these lines to your device section:

Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
Option “backingstore” “true”

• Add this extension section:

Section "Extensions"
Option “Composite” “Enable”
EndSection

• Right click on any titlebar and choose “Change window behavior”
• Set your translucency and shadow options.
• Reboot
  • You could just restart X, but I didn’t see the change actually happen till a full reboot, since I’m using KDM and killing X just seemed to drop down to KDM.