Sol4 - A Macs Tale Part 2 - The first few months

A Macs Tale Part 2 - The first few months.

First the warning, I speak my mind, so can be brutal at times where justified, and no that’s not an excuse for bad language, just the odd rant.

OK its now been just over 6 months since I did the deed and rejoined the Mac world after many years in the wilderness. So what’s this done to me?

Well they have been interesting months, and no that does not mean I have dumped the Mac, actually it’s been what I would call different.

Remember I did not switch from that Windoze thing to the Mac, I just added it to my usual Linux environment, keeping the option to dump OSX for PPC Linux as my "Plan B", just in case OSX did end up driving me nuts.

Anyway yes I am still using the Mac, and no its not got Linux loaded (yet!)

Over these past months, I have learned the hard way that the beast is not the only software company to make questionable releases, while not really understanding the meaning of quality control or even in some cases testing. Expect lots more on this later, or for those who cannot wait, have a look at this for a prime example of what I mean.

My first encounter with this was with OSX 10.2.23, which came with my Powerbook. To me a long time Linux user, OSX looked buggy, less than stable, and just plain sucked when talking to non-apple networks. Not a good start...

One example of this pain was the SMB bug from hell. This nasty affected connections to Windoze machines, such that if you copied a file from the Mac to the PC, the copy would finish, but the copied file would vanish from the Windoze share, leaving no traces, no errors no nothing. With this one at first I assumed it was my inexperience with OSX, but no, after talking to others and finding they had the same problem, its not me, just another OSX bug.

Another painful experience was with finder, which in my case kept on doing odd things, such as causing the icons to vanish or appear corrupt, and for the display window just to jump to the left at totally random intervals.

Extensive talks with Apple got no where on this one, nor the SMB issue, although they did try to help, and even actually called me back, which was a very unusual surprise, as I am used to vendor support people just trying to make me/users go away (Dell take note!)

While talking about support, I found its quality to be on the whole good to excellent, being in a totally different league when compared to my current support desks from hell, Dell and Tel$tra. What’s not so good is the phone support that comes with the machine is only 90 days, after which you need to either buy extended support/warranty or pay by the call.

Now this pay for support after 90 days may sound fair enough, but its not even close to fair when I tried to report a number of bugs to them and was told its a chargeable call. I suppose they thought it was a ruse to get free support, rather than a truthful bug report.

Anyway enough support bashing, on with the tale.

OK so I found my first exposure to OSX a little painful, but no, it’s not enough pain to make me go for 'Plan B', although that could, and almost did happen at a latter date.

Running OSX for the first time, bugs aside, my first challenge was to find the command prompt, which being a UNIX user is something that I just could not live without.

You would think this would be a easy thing to find, but no it took quite a while to figure out that its in Applications/Utilities, and no the doco supplied with the machine was no help what so ever.

A suggestion to Apple on this one, would be to add a option during the initial software installation, to allow for the default apps in the dock to include the terminal app, as this would be attractive to technical users, and never know could attract more users to OSX

While on the subject of the installation. It was actually a pleasant surprise how simple the initial software load was for the Powerbook, not that this should really be a surprise given Apples reputation for making things as simple as possible.

Anyway this installation was literally insert disk, answer a few questions and walk away. Not a single error, problem or even a question that would confuse even the least experienced user.

To keep a very long story short, my new Powerbook was up and running, I had found the command prompt (also known as the Terminal), had hooked up to my local network via the inbuilt Airport wireless, and all was well with the world.

Getting OSX to talk to my local wireless LAN was a very simple procedure, and yes it just worked, or so I thought until it kept on losing its connection at totally random intervals. Time to call Apple support on this one.

They told me to update my OSX via the software update built into OSX preferences, as my bundled version was too old. So this I did, and downloaded what seemed like a endless number of patches, updates etc

All these updates did zip for my wireless problem, so its back to Apple support, which escalated things to the next level of support, who after going through some suggestions, went away to think about it.

In the mean time, I had plugged the Powerbook into my wired LAN, and was hitting google hard; to see if anyone had seen the same issue. Well yes, some had, but with no sign of any fixes from anyone.

I was thinking the my new Powerbook would end up wired until the end of time, but then I noticed that most of those with the same problem where all using the same Wireless Access Point as mine, a Linksys WAP11.

Interesting, so time to look at that for the source of the problem, and after resetting it to factory defaults and updating its firmware, up came my wireless link from the PB and stayed working. Time to abandon wired networking, and finally get rid of the cable running across my living room floor.

As to the exact cause of this one, to be fair its not looking like it was something I could really blame Apple for, more likely its yet another case of wifi not being as cross vendor compatible as it could be.

One other notable experience from those early days of my journey into OSX, was what I call the "Great Developer Tools Hunt"

I have still not managed to figure this one out, but by default when you install OSX 10.2 it did not seem to install the gcc compiler, plus all the other goodies that developers need, even though I thought I installed everything.

After talking to several Mac user friends, all who told me that I should have got a separate developer tools CD as part of the PowerBooks software bundle, so time to call Apple to see about getting one.

But no they told me its not something they could send me, and that I should already have it on one of the other disks. Anyway after they went away to think about it, I was put onto one of the next level support techs, who talked me though "installing it" which involved doing a software restore and only selecting the missing bits. Well it was a nice try, just did not give me the tools.

At this point I gave up on Apple support and decided to look at every one of the disks I had, but this time from the command line, not the nice pretty GUI. Doing my first ls on the first disk I noticed that it contained more directories than finder was showing me, some of those looked interesting, especially one called .packages. Bingo, berried under this directory where a number of packages that looked promising, and yes dead right, one of them was exactly what I needed.

Another suggestion to Apple would be to actually document this, as again it would appeal to UNIX/Linux users who are looking at switching to OSX. But to be fair they have fixed this mess in later OSX releases. More on those later.

OK so I had problems with OSX, but it was not all doom and gloom, there where high points, or to be exact more good than bad

The very first thing I did after the initial software load was rid OSX 10.2 of one of its most annoying problems, "Internet Explorer" which as far as I can tell was the only trace of the beast in OSX. Anyway now that OSX was beast free, I needed a replacement browser, which as it happens was not a problem, as Apple, at the time had a public Beta of its new Safari browser, which is actually based on konqueor which I used under Linux for a while.

Even though Safari was in beta, its still in a different league to IE, its much faster, smaller, stable, fairly standards compliant and just worked. That’s not to say its problem free, but to be fair these problems are common to the vast majority of non IE browsers, in that there are far too many sites are designed for IE only, and flatly refuse to talk to anything else, yes sloppy coders strike again. To me these sites are not worth visiting, so this is not really a problem. Anyway as it happens in more recent releases Apple has made dramatic improvements, which has more or less removed this annoyance from my life.

Safari is so good, that if Apple ported it to Windoze, IE would be history, not that the beast would allow that, but we can but dream...

Now I had a browser, but still needed a number of other internet apps, with the most important being email.

Under Linux I used the console mode pine app, which after many years of faithful service had never let me down. Yes I could have just recompiled it under OSX and carried on as normal, but no, OSX has its own email mail.app, which everyone I spoke to about it, told me to at least give it a try.

More good advise, it’s a stunning app, rock solid, and without the mountain of useless junk that others think you want. It actually conforms to the "do one thing, and do it well" design philosophy, which is a pleasant change over some products.

In typical Apple style, I had all of my email accounts setup in under 5 minutes. Impressive, it just worked, with zero pain. And yes it gets better, not only does it do email well, but adds junk mail filtering, that’s both trainable and also supports powerful user defined rule sets. I just enabled this in training mode, and forgot about it.

I was not expecting much from this filtering, as from much personal pain, these things tend to be a real mine field, some being better than others, some being total crap giving more false positives that anything else. Now in this case from day one, the filter picked about 70% of my junk, and more importantly did not give even a single false positive. Impressive, and its only got better with training and each new release, so today its getting about 98% correct, and still has not made any errors.

While I do like mail.app and am still using it all these months later, and don't plan to change that. It’s not perfect, for example, no native mail encryption or UNIX mbox support, plus the junk mail filters do not support the use of any block lists. Yes I know its nit picking, but for me these are important, whereas for normal users these will not really be a problem.

All this talk about software, brings me to another pleasant surprise, the discovery of omnigraffle which is a Visio type of app, just in a totally different league, put simply its a thing of beauty, and is my preferred tool for network diagrams, flow charts etc. The best bit is, its part of the software bundle that came with my Powerbook, even if it was not, I would buy it without hesitation.

I was not aware of exactly what Apple bundled with my new machine and as far as I can tell its not documented anywhere. Anyway, in addition to "omnigraffle", there are all sorts of other goodies, with another notable one being graphic converter which just as its name suggests, is a tool to convert all sorts of graphic formats into alternate ones.

A big thank you to Apple for this bundle of apps, only suggestion would be to tell people, especially new Mac owners such as myself what’s where.

Enough waffle on the software for the time being anyway, now onto the hardware.

My first thoughts after unpacking the Powerbook, where, wow its so thin and light, closely followed by concern that its not going to stand up to the abuse its going to get at my hands, plus being so thin, hows it going to deal with the heat from the G4, let alone the Sydney summer time.

Yes I know it’s made of titanium that was one of the things that attracted me to these machines in the first place. Anyway another pleasant surprise, its turned out to be as solid as a rock, and even the screen which to me looked far too thin to be abuse proof, has survived without any problems, beyond the odd scratch, dent etc.

Before I went Mac, several people had warned me that the Titanium PowerBooks had a habit of losing their paint through day to day wear. Now while this is not an issue to me, as I really don't care what the machines casing looks like, just as long as its reliable, while others seem to get stressed about it. Anyway so far I have not seen any paint loss or even any sign that this is going to happen.

Now for the heat, my Powerbook arrived right in the middle of the Sydney winter, so while it did get a little warm, it was not excessive, and actually most of the time the fans where not running, or if they where, I could not hear them.

Now its the middle of the Sydney Summer, 30c+ with high humidity etc, and yes its running a fair bit hotter, indeed its too hot to touch the bottom of the machine, the fans are running more or less all the time, but so far I have seen no sign of any heat induced problems of any kind, the Apple engineers have done a excellent job with the cooling system.

A prime example of the sort of abuse this machine has survived is when I set it encoding video for 19 days with constantly high CPU loadings, and yes it survived even this torture test, just ignoring the pain and performed flawlessly.

A Macs Tale Part 2 - The first few months.

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