Here is the single most important shell command for OSX Lion:

defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool false

Last Monday my Mac refused to boot up again – even in single user mode he remained in a reboot-loop. Trying to get to the data was not that easy as the hard drive was encrypted using PGP Whole Disk Encryption.

Not a problem I thought – I have a TSM backup from the Friday before and most data is in code repositories or anyway. All I really need is a presentation for Tuesday morning. So I boot up my Thinkpad, install all the Windows updates (I do not use it that often ) and start TSM.

Empty backup set.

What?

Verify all the connection settings.

Empty backup set. No data showing up in TSM.

Starting to sweat.

Now here the story about why I love my Mac starts. I love the Mac platform because:

• I was able to create a 1:1 copy of my personal Mac on an external USB drive.
• I was able to boot from this cloned disk via USB by just holding the Option key. Just boots, all data and settings there. Try doing that with Windows
• After booting I installed PGP and mounted the internal disk. I was able to copy away all my data from the broken disk to the external drive (this includes the whole /home/mike directory and some /Applications).
• Time to reformat the whole disk and install a clean copy of Snow Leopard (finally a good reason to upgrade!).
• After booting into the clean OS all I had to do was copying (!!!) the /Applications to the appropriate folder and copying (!!!) the home directory to the right location. After logging into the newly created user account all my data was there.
• By copying the home directory everything just worked – even the WLAN connections, settings, MobileMe syncing, all just working. All I lost have been the printer settings. No need to re-install tons of applications, all just copied back – and working fine!
• Try the above on Windows!
• Now I tried something – I started TSM on the Mac and logged in – and magically all my data showed up in TSM! What? Verified on Windows – empty set. Can someone working on TSM please explain that behavior to me? Why is the TSM data only showing within the same platform?

Overall the whole work took half a day – including a clean OS update and to “migrate” all applications. Only TSM scared me a bit – so I now started to create weekly backups using Carbon Copy Cloner – which is a good thing anyway, as it is super-easy to boot the backup on another machine. And I love the Mac because it does not use a magic registry and installing applications is really simple!

Heute habe ich versucht AON.at ADSL von der Telekom auf meinem Mac OSX Leopard Rechner einzurichten. Effektiv habe ich ziemlich lange “versucht” und auch Google hat nicht wirklich weitergeholfen, daher hier die Anleitung um via AON.at ins Internet zu kommen:

1. Ich gehe davon aus, dass alles richtig verkabelt ist und man durch Eingabe von http://10.0.0.138/ im Browser auf die Modem-Konfiguration gelangt. Falls nicht, hier hilft Google noch weiter
2. In den Systemeinstellungen von Mac OSX ist ein neues Interface hinzuzufügen (kleines + links unter der Liste).
3. Achtung! AON verwendet kein PPPoE sondern PPTP. Beim Hinzufügen also “VPN” aus der Liste auswählen und dann PPTP.
4. Die Einstellungen wie nebenstehend vornehmen und unter “Authentication Settings” das Kennwort eingeben. Wichtig ist die Auswahl von “None” für die Verschlüsselung.
5. Noch viel wichtiger ist die richtige Auswahl unter “Advanced” – hier muss “Send all traffic over VPN connection” ausgewählt sein. Sonst verbindet sich das VPN zwar aber alle Anfragen gehen ins Nirvana, nicht mal DNS Auflösung funktioniert.

Das war’s auch schon.

Spannend wird dann noch die Verbindung der Airport Extreme mit dem ADSL… mal schauen ob das klappt.

In the Mac world so called “Application Bundles” exist – this means that about a dozen commercial software packages are sold together for a pretty cheap price (usually $50 instead of more than $500!) for a limited time. Experience has shown that there are one or two packages that are pretty “strong” and try to convince the users to buy the package, the other applications are rather unknown, but might also be useful. But it pays off.
For example I recently bought my “upgrade” to Parallels Desktop 4.0 – the whole bundle including other software cost me about the same as just the upgrade directly from Parallels. So even if I don’t use any of the other applicatins included in the bundle it does not really matter, as it did not cost me anything.

Now that I already bought 4 bundles (from MacHeist and MuPromo) I have a lot of commercial software to test and rant about… and trust me, there are great differences when it comes down to support, updates and quality. Therefore I want to write about some of the top notch applications included in the bundles:

1Password
1Password is still the most used application on my Mac and I’m very happy that it was included in the first MacHeist bundle. The password manager includes support for all major browsers on OSX, syncs its data flawlessly across an iDisk and “just works”. It allows me to “remember” very complicated passwords in a secure way and it also synchronizes to the iPhone, so I have my passwords with me all the time.
They release new versions of their software very regularly (usually every 3-4 weeks) including bug fixes and new features. Recently they came up with the best WiFi iPhone sync process I every saw – 1Password automatically detects the iPhone using Bonjour and synchronizes automatically. That’s how every software should sync with the iPhone – flawlessly and automatic!
1Password is highly recommended to every Mac user to manage passwords! And all other application developers should have a look at how easy it is to sync across Macs and to the iPhone.

Parallels Desktop
This was the reason to buy the first package from MuPromo – it included a cheap license of Parallels Desktop 3 and the recent bundle included the new 4.0 release. A great deal to get a license for an amazing piece of software that allows me to run Windows on the Mac. It just works and got even better after I upgraded my Mac to include 4GB of RAM. Highly recommended to test Websites in IE or execute Windows-only applications.

The Hit List
The recent MacHeist bundle included The Hit List, a GTD app I already wrote about, as their main application. While still beta the developers are very active and release a new version every few weeks. They also listen to the forums and communicate with their users – and because the MacHeist sold more than 88.000 bundles I’m sure they receive a lot of support requests these days
Nevertheless the very promising application is still unfinished – to be a real, serious GTD application it misses two featuers – a rock-solid way to sync tasks between different machines and an iPhone counterpart. But until now, long time after the Heist, there is no iPhone application available, rendering The Hit List pretty useless (at least for me). So I’m still waiting (together with a lot of other folks) for the release of an Hit List iPhone application…. hopefully they look into 1Password to learn about synchronization!

Espresso
The article is named “the good and the bad”, now let’s talk about the bad one… MacRabbit released Espresso 1.0 just before the last MacHeist took place, but to be honest this application is still in “heavy beta mode”. It tries to be an source code editor which matches up with Coda, TextMate or BBEdit and it was one of the reasons for buying the bundle.
Unfortunately the application is not anywhere being ready for production. While the overall approach looks great it lacks required features, that you would expect from a source code editor. For example Espresso only supports syntax highlighting for a few languages, the application crashes too often, and I can’t even enter the ^ character, which is used quite often within regular expressions. Even worse, the support does not reply to bug reports at all – see the forums (i.e. here) for details. Just on a side note – they don’t seem to participate in their own forums at all.
So how about updates? Well, there have been some, but neither did they fix a lot of bugs nor did they bring Espresso anywhere near a serious text editor.
Unfortunately Espresso has been a waste of money and I’ll stick with the free TextWrangler instead.

Voila! and MoneyWell
Now that I complained about the Espresso support being not responsive at all I want to highlight two great software companies where the support is just amazing!
Voila v2.0 enhances the OSX built in screenshot feature and allows editing, rotating, modifying screenshots without any need to fire up Pixelmator. There are still some bugs and missing features (copy to clipboard!), but the support wrote back within minutes on all my requests!

The same applies to MoneyWell, a simple but powerful personal finance application – the support wrote back within minutes (from the iPhone) and they participate actively in their own forums. That’s how it should be!

The summary

• Bundles are great! They are even so successful that there will be a bundle every month!
• Developers should listen and respond to their customers – in the forums and via mail. Pre and Post sales!
• Developers have to release often and react fast on bugs – otherwise the majority of the users will move away and a great opportunity is lost.
• Mac bundles can bring a lot of users to unknown applications, which helps the developers to build up a user base and users to get cheap software directly from the developers.

Happy Foto ist ein qualitativ sehr guter Anbieter von Online-Ausarbeitungen welcher (als Ausnahme am Markt!) auch eine Mac-Version seiner Software anbietet. An sich wirklich sehr löblich nicht nur auf Windows-User zu schauen. Leider lässt sich diese Software auf meinem System aber nicht starten – in /var/log/system.log wird nur folgendes ausgegeben:

2008-10-21 10:28:01.810 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_USE_SETCURRENTCONTEXT_NIL=0
2008-10-21 10:28:01.811 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_WORKAROUND_CICONTEXT_MAPTABLE=1
2008-10-21 10:28:01.811 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_WORKAROUND_CICONTEXT_MAPTABLE_VIA_CG=0
2008-10-21 10:28:01.812 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_FORCE_SOFTWARE_RENDERER=0
2008-10-21 10:28:01.812 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_FORCE_SOFTWARE_RENDERER_VIA_ENV=0
2008-10-21 10:28:01.872 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] Unable to load nib file: MainMenu, exiting

Sehr lästig, das Programm-Icon verschwindet nach rund 2 Sekunden wieder. Das wars. Keine Fehlermeldung für unerfahrene Benutzer. Grund ist laut Hotline die “ungewöhnliche” Spracheinstellung meines Systems – Englisch. Nun ja, ich verstehe ja, dass Happy Foto nicht alle Sprachen dieser Erde unterstützt, aber das Programm sollte zumindest in der Standardsprache Deutsch starten, falls keine Lokalisierung verfügbar ist.

Der Helpdesk konnte nicht weiterhelfen – “Umstellen auf Deutsch” ist aber nicht wirklich eine Option für mich. Hier also die Lösung für alle die den Terminal starten und bedienen können:

cd HappyFoto-Designer 1.0.app/Contents/Resources
cp -R German.lproj/ English.lproj

Das legt eine Kopie der deutschen Sprachdateien an und fortan startet der Happy Foto Designer für den Mac auch auf einem englischem System. Endlich ist der Happy, der Foto Designer!

This morning I discovered that I have more than 1000 contacts in my “Personal Address book” within Thunderbird. What the he*k? Why are there so many duplicates, addresses from spammers, mailing lists etc. I definitely never added to my Personal Address Book? Seems to be mixed with the “Collected Addresses”, where Thunderbird collects all this crap for me. But why?

I’m using the Sync Kolab plugin to sync my addresses between various computers using IMAP – a smart way of using the protocol to keep contacts in sync. Unfortunately I made a mistake when I setup Sync Kolab on a new computer – I mixed up “Collected Addresses” and “Personal Address book” which caused the mess. Not a big deal to fix – just change the settings, remove unwanted addresses and sync again. But wait – Sync Kolab does not really sync! It just adds addresses, but it never removes them. It also does not seem to detect obvious duplicates (same name, same address, same fields!). As soon as I start the sync process the locally removed addresses are added back to my Address Book. Not very smart. Resetting all the IMAP data does not work as well – the other computers will again add all the addresses.

So what are the alternatives to Sync Kolab? One option is to wait until Thunderbird 3 is released (end of 2008), as it supports the usage of the Mac Address Book. Which syncs itself using me.com. Which does real syncing including deletions and works flawlessy so far. There are costs involved, but that’s fine as the syncronization between the Macs and the iPhone is really worth the money. Of course then switching to the Mac Mail application is an option as well, unfortunately it does not support everything Thunderbird does – Mac Mail seems to be more “basic” – but I’ll leave that open for a future blog post. In the meanwhile feel free to research on your own.

Migrating an existing, running and working Thinkpad (from Lenovo ) into a Parallels image is relatively easy – just download the Transporter for Windows, install it and reboot. Afterwards select the computer from the Mac Transporter and wait.
Wait.
Wait.
Finally reboot your newly created image. If you are lucky it just boots, if you used a Thinkpad as source computer you might end up with a Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) as shown in the image to the right. PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA. In this case follow these steps to get the issue resolved:

1. Boot the image in Safe mode
2. Open up the Device Manager
3. Enable viewing of hidden devices in the menu
4. Find a device tree called “SM DRIVER”
5. Uninstall all devices (SM BIOS) below that tree
6. Reboot and hope

At least for me this worked fine and I could boot the image. And begin uninstalling all the Thinkpad software.

(Original instructions)

PS: doing the migration over a Wireless connection is no good idea. Will take veeeery long. Instead use a direct, wired connection between the Thinkpad and the MacBook and enter the IP directly (169.x.x.x) in the Transporter Wizard. No need for a router. No need for a cross-over cable, the Mac is capable of auto-sensing.