About three years ago, I noticed that the fink binary distribution no longer had all the packages I wanted to use. The website would indicate the package was available but actually it would be only available in source code form and my aging laptop did not have the CPU or disk space available to compile not just the package but all its dependencies. When I upgraded that old laptop, and compiling everything from source seemed feasible, I decided that the MacPorts project had more community activity and jumped ship.

MacPorts worked very well. The initial install took time, and worked the fan of my MacBook quite hard, but once the base packages were compiled, subsequent software installs and updates were mostly painless. MacPorts also made it vary easy to tweak installs using its variants mechanism. However MacPorts’ downfall, in my opinion, is that it is not content to be just a way of augmenting the existing UNIX tools on my Mac but that it wants to be a self-contained operating system itself. For example, in order to install the git-svn tool MacPorts was going to download, compile and install not only an older version of Perl than is shipped with 10.6 but also a second version of the subversion tool that Apple have already provided. I am sure this is a good way to deliver a powerful and stable system, but it felt like MacPorts was taking over.

I am not the first to think this since someone has developed homebrew. It has the explicit goals of playing nicely with the OS defaults and programming language specific distribution systems such as RubyGems, CPAN and PyPi. I am pleased to be report that homebrew was very quick to setup and install the few remaining UNIX packages to which I remain addicted. The installer makes the assertion that every user on your system should be in the staff group,¹ but the script was very simple to modify and I have submitted my version back to the maintainer.

The one package where I do not find homebrew satisfactory is LaTeX. homebrew uses the TeX Live distribution rather than the tetex package I have used in the past. However TeX Live is a humungous 1GB download and some quick research showed that it was very much a kitchen sink package with many sub-packages that were completely unnecessary for me. Instead I highly recommend the 85MB download (234MB installed) BasicTeX package which has proved to be entirely adequate for my needs, even if it does have softie GUI installer!

1. I noticed that on a fresh install of 10.6 no one is a member of the staff group. It appears that all Administrator users are members of the admin group though, and since it seems to only allow admins to change the machine’s homebrew install, I forked this gist and replaced all the instances of staff with admin. [back]

The solution that eventually worked for me was to configure voicemail in the “old-fashioned” (“non-visual”?) manner by dialling 901 and then following the tedious voice prompts. Once this had completed, I retried the iPhone visual voicemail setup using the same PIN as I configured at the voice prompts, and it worked first time.

But is it any good as a phone? The answer is undoubtedly yes, but it’s not “great”… yet, a few more software updates ought to fix that. Missing features that, upon reflection, I never used on my old phone include voice dialling (I’m sure voice recognition systems are not tested on west country accents!) and video calling. The one feature that is sorely missing is a character counter in the SMS application, a horrendous omission now there are call plans without unlimited text messaging. The other feature that people talk about is the keyboard which is a joy to use—last week’s Heathrow Express post was written and edited entirely on the iPhone.

According to the web, it seems the most common cause of this is connecting the iPhone via a USB hub instead of directly to the computer, but I had no USB hub. Also, most people were experiencing this as a transient fault after regularly and successfully synchronising their iPhone for some months, while mine was a new connection—all very perplexing.

Fortunately, OS X is really UNIX in disguise, and so while the user interface tries to only display friendly messages, the technical details are being logged in the same way as any other UNIX system, hence I checked /var/log/system.log:

Jul 16 12:45:05 yvaine [0x0-0x10010].com.apple.iTunesHelper[136]: MobileDevice:
AMDevicePair: Could not mkdir /Users/ned21/Library/Lockdown: Permission denied
Jul 16 12:45:05 yvaine [0x0-0x10010].com.apple.iTunesHelper[136]: MobileDevice:
store_dict_osx: Could not create /Users/ned21/Library/Lockdown/
6b90d8c839e8ec9e74d2dffce9a2e111daf84f7b.plist: No such file or directory
Jul 16 12:45:05 yvaine [0x0-0x10010].com.apple.iTunesHelper[136]: MobileDevice:
AMDevicePair: Could not store pairing record at
/Users/ned21/Library/Lockdown/6b90d8c839e8ec9e74d2dffce9a2e111daf84f7b.plist

Aha!—a simple case of “permission denied”. (Which, lets be honest, to a non-techie person would be no less cryptic than the message that the GUI actually displays.) This did present another mystery though since permissions on ~/Library look normal:

yvaine:~ ned21$ ls -ld Library/
drwx------+ 42 ned21  ned21  1428 22 Jun 10:34 Library/

except for that little + sign at the end of the permissions string. A quick check on another mac indicates that this is in fact not normal, and means that the directory has an extended ACL (this is the same convention as in Linux) but unlike Linux, OS X does not have getfacl(1) and setfacl(1) commands for viewing and manipulating ACLs—use “ls -le” instead.

yvaine:~ ned21$ ls -lde Library/
drwx------+ 42 ned21  ned21  1428 22 Jun 10:34 Library/
 0: group:everyone deny add_file,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,writeattr,writeextattr,chown
 1: group:everyone deny delete

I have no idea how these ACLs were added to my directory, but let’s wipe them out:

yvaine:~ ned21$ chmod -a# 1 Library/
yvaine:~ ned21$ chmod -a# 0 Library/
yvaine:~ ned21$ ls -lde Library/
drwx------  42 ned21  ned21  1428 22 Jun 10:34 Library/

And my iPhone worked like a charm.

1. Upgrade it to the latest firmware (V4.01.30).
2. Toggle UPnP off and on (twice according to some forums).
3. Disable port scan and DOS protection (Advanced WAN Setup).
4. Disable SIP ALG (Advanced WAN Setup).

Although my Macbook was now very happy, the Ubuntu box would not connect to the wireless network using WPA encryption: SoftMAC authentication would complete, but the wireless NIC could not see any packets. The web suggests that PS3 owners have also experienced problems after upgrading to 4.01.30 and the only answer is to downgrade, 4.01.20 being the last known “good” version. Sadly Netgear have removed all but the new broken and a very old versions of the firmware from their support page, but the source code is still available and the tar.bz2 contains a pre-built image so you don’t even need to compile it.

At this point I am back to square one since iChat will no longer receive incoming video requests from people behind NAT devices unless I use manual port forwarding.

Firmware 4.01.37 has been released. I have not tested this but it claims to fix the incompatibility with the Playstation3 so hopefully it should also work with Linux machines.

• The visual appearance has been subtly modernised, keeping OS X at the forefront of sexy computing.
• The Front Row app, combined with the remote control supplied with new Macs, provides a simple and easy interface to view movies or show off photos. You can do the same with iPhoto and iTunes separately, but Front Row just seems less fiddly… (especially if you install the awesome Perian package so that FR can play additional codecs such as Windows .avi files).
• Mail now has this awesome feature called data detectors which makes turning emails into calendar events or phone numbers to address book cards a one-click process: click on the phrase “let’s meet Thursday 12th at 1pm” and the little drop down menu can either create a new iCal event pre-filled with the contents of the email, or just show you your calendar for that time.
• In a similar vein, QuickLook (the ability to rapidly preview files just by hitting the space bar) is the sort of time saving feature that you really miss when using lesser operating systems.
• There is an ssh-agent included—no more third-party apps required to manage my ssh keys!
• From reading Mac websites there is this perception that “.0″ releases are not for the faint hearted and non-techies should always wait for “.1″ before upgrading. I had always regarded this attitude as a little paranoid, but it has to be said that in the three weeks I was running 10.5.0, the Mail application crashed on me twice and once the window manager became completely wedged. Happily 10.5.1 has been a return to form and I have had no problems since.

Of the headline features, Time Machine and screen sharing within iChat are probably the most impressive and a key driver for those of us who are called upon to do Mac tech support. When it works, the implementation of the screen sharing is impressive, but iChat struggles when both computers are behind NAT devices. Similarly, Time Machine mostly “just works” but the default configuration has the caveat of trying to backup everything not included in OS, thus requiring a hard disk at least as big as the one you are backing up. If I trim the configuration to only backup my home directory then I seem to be able to get a couple of months of snapshots onto a partition that is just double the size of my data. Disappointingly, backing up over a network is requires an unsupported hack so hopefully a future update will enable this; it’s probably also worth noting that while backup and restore over the air worked, it was incredibly slow so doing the initial transfer via wired ethernet is a good idea.

Sleep
Fixed a bug that prevented automatic sleep for some people.

Which is interesting because for some time now my macbook has not been putting itself to sleep after the correct period of idleness (although a manual command to “sleep” worked fine). After shutting down NetNewsWire and leaving my machine idle for 5 minutes, it promptly went to sleep of it own accord. It would be interesting to know the technical details of this one.

To allow a Windows computer to print over the network to a USB printer connected to an Apple Mac (step 5 is the important bit):

1. Configure your printer as normal on the Mac.
2. Turn on printer sharing: System Preferences->Sharing
3. On the Windows PC, install the Bonjour printer wizard from Apple.
4. Run the wizard and select your printer.
5. When prompted to choose a printer driver, choose the default of generic/postscript. If you attempt to use the Windows printer driver which came with your printer, the PC will think that the job has successfully been sent to the printer, but the job will in fact disappear into the ether!

And you are done — Macs are that easy.

mtsend.py: Definitely the ultimate geeky cross-platform solution: use your favourite editor, and then run a Python-script from the terminal to upload your post. It’s also free (unlike the others featured here) but it does have a number of disadvantages, principally the need to remember a particular format for posts, and the lack of preview functionality.

MarsEdit: I used this on my previous train trip to the North and found it to be excellent. It features a simple and uncluttered interface, and it was very easy to configure its Preview mode to use the Too Busy To template.

Ecto: My free trial of MarsEdit having expired, I thought I would try out Ecto before parting with any cash for MarsEdit. I have yet to reconnect to the Internet to actually post anything with it, but after using it to write just a single post I find it to be the complete opposite of MarsEdit: the interface is overflowing with buttons, controls and options I have no use for, and the rendering of the Too Busy To template in the preview window is not brilliant.

Current listening: Undone (The Sweater Song) from the album “Weezer (Blue Album)” by Weezer.