Stuff I Do

If you don’t change the setting on your Windows 2003 server to not encrypt all SMB traffic your Mac won’t connect. This problem is fixed in Samba but not in the version running under the hood on a Mac.

I installed my virtual Windows inside my OSX machine and needed to get the 80+ updates XP needs since SP2 but did not feel like waiting to pull them down over the company’s slow T1 connection. We have a WSUS server setup for our domain that would feed it all the updates except I did not want to join the virtual machine to the domain. Found this page that has the registry entries needed to have workstations, not in the domain, use the domain WSUS server for updates.

This post has some software needed for noob Mac users like me.

And more.

Yesterday I updated iTunes to 7.4 and had to reset my Windows defaults because I don’t want iTunes as my default media player. Today they release 7.4.1, probably have to do the same thing again. Thanks

Another BB outage yesterday as I received 3 messages all day and those ones were on average 3.5 hours behind when they were actually sent. Don’t realize how much you rely on one until it is not working.

In Apple stores they have this thing called “Genius Bars”. Yes it is smug like most things Mac. Anyway, these geniuses help people with all things Apple related. Tonight I watched one kid teach an man in his 50’s how to import his video into his iMac and then walked through all the video editing of the film. The guy beside me needed help with his iPod. I was really impressed with the knowledge these geniuses had and how good they were with customers, no smugness at all, really good instructors and the patience of Job when working with people.

My problem was that my MacBook Pro would not mount movie DVDs. This means no icon on the desktop and no way to watch a film. The genius that helped me out use a tool called Disk Utility and ran Repair Disk Permissions. Once that completed the MacBook mounted and played all DVDs. Quick and easy and I learned something tonight.

So I am working on my smugness now that I carry a Mac and before too long I too might contribute to my own smug cloud.

My boss decided I needed a new laptop and got me a stunning new MacBook Pro. My boss is a Mac guy and figured it was about time I had one of my own. I have never used OSX before so this is all new and after a week of working with it here is my assessment.

First off, it is the 15 inch MacBook Pro with the 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 160GB hard drive and 4GB of memory. The machine is an inch thick and 5 pounds is very small to the HP laptop I had been using at home and very compared to the Dell D800 laptop I had from work.

The things I have notice that I like are the following. Putting the laptop to sleep and then coming back out works every time. With my Windows laptops, the longer or the more time I put it to sleep the less likely it is to wake up. With the Mac, open the lid and up it comes. The Windows laptops, hit the enter key sometimes, other times hit the power button, or hold the power button, but not too long because you will shut it down, then again you might have to do that eventually because it won’t come out of sleep.

Once the laptop is back up the wireless comes up nearly immediately. Windows machines seem to take longer to attach to an access point after sleep.

The lighted keyboard is awesome. I do computing at night in bed after the wife has gone to sleep and it is nice to be able to see the keys I need.

Since it is built on Unix, all my favorite command line tools are here and it is easy to shell into my linux servers.

Auto darkening screen when I am not actively using the machine, saving battery life. It also auto senses the light and brightens or darkens the screen depending on ambient light.

Power cable lights green when fully charged and amber when charging, Magnetic power cable so that if it gets pulled it simply disconnects instead of lurching the machine, saved me 3 times already. Battery blinks how much charge is in the battery when charging. Don’t have to start the machine to know how much battery life I have in it, how long until the charge is done.

Run Windows on the same machine. The be all end all machine.

Install applications by dragging them into the Applications folder. Uninstall them by dragging them to the trash can.

Things I don’t like.
Some of the streaming radio stations I listen to will not work with anything on the Mac. This go along with some of the webpages that will not display on the Mac.
Triple clicking the url bar to select the whole thing.
Citrix is a bear to operate on a Mac, I think it comes from missing a right mouse click.
Thing is bloody hot on a lap.
Safari has no way for me to sync my bookmarks on other machines.

The biggest problem I have at this point is easily fixable. The problem is me. It is a new system with new software I have never used, It is going to take some time to learn what software I like, hate and how to use it effectively. An example would be the amount of time it took me to figure out iPhoto to get images imported from a folder and edited. Then cleaned out of iPhoto. Learning pains abound and I feel like such an end user. If I need a piece of software to do something, instead of just knowing what I want to use I have to Google for it, for me that is frustrating. Finding things in the system are difficult right now such as when I needed to add a printer and it took me longer to find the tool to add it than it did to add the printer.

This should get better with time and use, and in a few months I will laugh at myself for the things I struggled with. In the meantime I will stumble along as learn a new OS.