I mainly use Mac OS X at home, but keep a PC running XP for a couple of apps. One of these Windows apps, DVD Profiler, today highlighted the gaping difference in developers’ thinking between Windows and Mac applications.
In today’s constantly connected world, we have become accustomed to updating programs on a fairly regular basis. Both minor and major updates are available on-line without resorting to retail boxed discs.
Applications can even check for updates when you launch them and many Mac OS X applications on launch, having determined that an update is available, will offer a dialogue box saying “A newer version is available” and offer to “download, install and relaunch” or “skip” – all very efficient and streamlined.
Today, however, I fired up DVD Profiler on the PC. Before adding a new DVD to the collection, the program will download the latest database, which it did but then complained “This database cannot be read as it is for a later version of DVD Profiler”. So why then did it waste time downloading 18MB of data if it wasn’t going to work? Surely it makes sense to check compatibility first. It did however ask whether I wanted to download the latest version; I said yes, but instead of DVD Profiler updating itself, it fired up my browser and dropped me on their download page to download and manually run the installer myself, which rather than a one-click update was the usual long-winded multiple dialog windows application installation process asking all the same questions the initial installer asked. Surely an update should pick up on the existing installation and work with that. I’m surprised it didn’t make me uninstall the previous version, something demanded of several Windows application upgrades.
The new version, as it happens, runs like a dog, so I may well be switching to Delicious Library on the Mac.
If you have changed your SSH port in Leopard to something other than port 22, be aware that the Snow Leopard upgrade process resets this back to the default port 22 without asking or warning you.
Over on TidBits, Glenn Fleishmann is complaining about Quicken for Mac not working with the latest bank interfaces. At least the US has a version of Quicken for the Mac.
Intuit never managed to release a version of Quicken for Mac in the UK before Intuit pulled Quicken out of the UK completely.
After moving to Leopard, my Canon LIDE 60 scanner was not working, however when I tried to reinstall the driver it just hangs. I found the solution however on the Throwable Blog where you can get links to a download to uninstall the old driver and install a new copy of the LIDE driver.
I noticed this morning that something had been uploading data overnight. I saw that the Mozy Backup status icon showed it was still running, however, when I checked the status (see below), I was surprised to see that it had decided to try and back up 435GB of data! It is only supposed to back up around 9.3GB of data, so what the hell made it decide to to do that?
Unfortunately, I was unable to find out, because whenever I tried to run the Mozy config, it just sat there and locked up. I had to force-quit it, but something was still hammering the processor. A quick look using ipulse showed it was a process named ‘MozyBackup’. I killed it, but immediately it fired up again. Repeatedly killing it resulted in the same firing up. It was almost behaving like some kind of malware. I ended up rebooting, but it started hammering the processor again, so for the time being, I have had to uninstall Mozy.
Mozy for Mac is currently at 0.9.3.1 and Mozy recently asked its users whether Mozy for Mac was ready for being called version 1. I think this sort of episode shows that they have some way to go.
Update
Following Dan’s Comment below, I have now re-installed Mozy, and he is looking at the log files amongst others to diagnose the problem. I will post back here with the outcome.
My iMac lost its network connection this morning. The system.log was full of these:
May 11 10:54:11 iMac configd[48]: bootp_session_transmit: bpf_write(en2) failed: No buffer space available (55)
May 11 10:54:11 iMac configd[48]: DHCP en2: INIT transmit failed
which is odd, because the iMac only has two ethernet interfaces: en0 (wired) and en1 (wireless), so what is en2?
It seems that 10.4.9 introduced something called ‘Bluetooth PAN‘ and when I paired up my new Nokia 6300, OS X enabled this. Unfortunately, it is this which causes the DHCP issue shown in system.log.
The solution (thanks to Jonas Salling’s comment on Justin Williams’ Blog) is to disable Bluetooth PAN in system preferences.
Having changed from a Sony Ericsson k750i to a Nokia 6300, I was amazed that the Nokia did not support the wholesale copying of my phonebook by Bluetooth, so I had to find another way round. This was to set up a temporary account on my Mac and use iSync to synchronise the two bluetooth phones. (It also has the benefit of making a backup copy of my phonebook on the Mac).
Unfortunately, the Nokia 6300 is too new to be listed as supported by iSync, but Koos Kaspers has a post on how to modify the iSync files to include it in the list of supported phones. This worked a treat, and my phonebook was copied over in no time at all.
Don’t know which version of Microsoft Windows Vista to choose? Take a look at JoyOfTech’s recommendation.
A warning to all those who host a website using Apache built into Mac OS X.
Installing Tiger will overwrite your httpd.conf file.
Read more…
Well, I placed an order for Tiger yesterday.
I was initially upset to see that the UK price was UKP 89 compared to the US price of USD 129 which is about UKP 68 – 21 quid less!, but apparently, the US price does not include VAT (or sales tax), whereas the UK price does.
Forgive the pun, but they’re not comparing apples with apples.
