FireHaus Network

My co-worker sent a link to me in iChat this morning which discussed an article written by a legal consultant. In the article the author discusses the intelligence of a consultant who can’t figure out the basics of the Mac OS, which I might point, out most schoolchildren manage without the assistance of their teachers.
Can you trust a lawyer who is too dumb to run a Mac?

http://www.mac360.com/index.php/mac360/comments/would_you_trust_a_lawyer_who_cant_run_a_mac

And in the lawyers own words:

http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1160730321685

And don’t forget to check out the lawyers own web site, where he promotes his consulting skills:

http://www.larrybodine.com/

Judge for yourself, is the Mac as difficult as Larry Bodine says? Also why would an “intelligent” man like Mr. Bodine buy a $4000 top of the line Mac instead of a more economical $1800 iMac?

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060727082151123

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060725103733602

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060727082151123

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060725103733602

My wife and were invited to see the NIN show at the Clark County Fairgrounds in Clark County, Washington which is only an hour drive from our house. One of the crew for the show knows my wife and invited to see the show and possibly hang out with the crew after the show.

We made it out to the show a little early, but after the last sound check and we did get a tour backstage. I knew something was different about this act when I saw two PowerMac G5s in special enclosures with their own UPS and a thousand wires trailing about the back heading toward the video and lighting rigs. Next I thought things were back to normal when I saw a Toshiba notebook on top of another case of equipment but then I saw PowerBook (or MBP?) with a small “NIN” sticker on it (Note: All the photos were taken under extremely poor lighting conditions with the camera in my mobile phone).

I was told this PowerBook (or MBP?) had the “Set Control” list which is a list of cues of what each crew member is to be doing at any point during the show. Its used by the stage manager. In fact almost every crew member had access to or had their own laptop, either a Mac or a PC, mostly dependent on the primary software they had to use. After the tour of the stage setup we left to go hang out in the crew’s tour bus. I don’t know if I’ve ever been in this kind of bus before but somewhere in a fading memory I feel like I have. Anyway, my first impression was that they have flat panel displays much larger than what I have at home (keep in mind this is for the crew and not the band). Young women came and went delivering food, drinks, and taking clothes away to be washed and dryed. We watched motorcycle videos on our friend’s PowerBook and discussed “The Corkscrew” at the Laguna Seca raceway.

Time for the show.

I had only seen NIN once before more than ten years ago so it was very very cool to see them again. We made it back to our seats about halfway through one of the opening bands, Bauhaus. Bauhaus in best known for their song “Bella Lugosi is Dead”. The look and vibe of Bauhaus is credited with influencing Trent Reznor and NIN years later. After Bauhaus it was time for NIN. The show was great and all their complicated lighting seemed to go very well. The audio quality was also very high which is something I’ve noticed more and more with bigger acts. Now fade to end of show and the really big LED panel decends:

It was a lot of work meeting up with our friend after the show as gates were closed and we were kicked out of the venue before he had finished breaking down his equipment. Eventually, we were able to get let back in to go hang out with the crew in their tour bus. From then on it was Mac this and Mac that. I have never met such a bunch of Mac geeks even at a MacWorld show.

Here it is midnight after a succesful show and all they are doing is trying to get the best liquid screensaver or widget. One of the crew had a brand new MacBook with the glossy display. The display was very bright and extremely sharp. The other crew had various G4 PowerBook models.

One of the crew is the self-appointed Mac Guru and helps everyone else out. He also set up an ingeneous wi-fi network. When bands arrive at a venue the venue charges them for internet access. The charge is per-feed so each ethernet cable costs $200/night (yes, that is a ridiculous price). The Mac Guru sets it up so they only need a single feed and he links each tour bus with its own AirPort Express network (for NIN there were four large tour buses).

One of the PowerBooks seems to have an issue with its AirPort not working so he has to actually jack in. I tried several tricks, even the PMU reset, but nothing would make that card work. In fact I’m not certain anything is wrong with the card or its driver, I strongly suspect the antenna cable may be loose somewhere underneath the aluminum and plastic.

Its now 1:30 AM and they are still talking about liquid screensavers, Trent has the best I’m told, and new widgets they can link with the tour buses GPS unit. I give them a few more links to cool widgets and show them how to tweak the RSS feeds in Safari. I also show one of them how to subscribe to a podcast he had heard about. They all have my email now. My work is done. Time to go home and rest.

Read this article on ZUG Electronic Road Signs and Me and then you will understand the utter beauty of the comment below.

The only road signs that are more annoying than signs warning of construction that is long finished, are those ones that tell you how fast you are going, before you go around a sharp turn. I used to think they were kind of neat, until I noticed that my car actually comes equipped with a tool that tells me how fast I’m going, at any given time, so now I just use that one instead. – LlunchLladyLloyd

My boss was very insistent that she get a MacBook Pro even though I tried to explain to her that some of her applications might not run at all. She didn’t seem to care. She needs something new anyway as her iBook is nearly 3-years old and has had some rough treatment. So a new MacBook Pro was ordered and today it arrived.

The Box is very thin for the new MacBook Pro 15 inch model. Once the plain brown shipping box was removed a familar looking black box was inside. Once this was opened some very artful foam packaging surrounded the new MacBook Pro.

I believe that the extra-thin retail box packaging is being done to emphasize just how thin this new laptop is. It really is UNDER 1 inch thick while it still retains a full compliment of ports plus a DVD/CD drive. Many PCs achieve this slender form by resorting to external DVD/CD drives and such.

The magnetic aka “Mag Safe” power connector has received a lot of attention and some people I’ve heard comment “Why do I need that?”. Obviously these are people who don’t carry a laptop with them everywhere they go (like I do). I have never had my laptop go flying off a table because someone tripped over my power cord but that is only because I have very fast reflexes. I have had many people bring me their poor broken laptops to me for repair after a table dive. The magnetic power connector works exactly as advertised and its a brilliant piece of engineering all by itself.

My plan is to test all our applications on the system, none of which have been updated to “Universal” status yet, and then load Apple’s Boot Camp so we can then install Windows XP Pro.

More to follow…

I will have some screen shots and more details after testing but initially I can only quote the other IT guy who works with me: “wow, that’s insane”. 22 seconds from cold boot to the desktop.

NOTE: all pictures were taken with the iSight built-in to my now out-of-date G5 iMac.

In addition to the several Mac computers my wife and I use at home and the home Mac OS X Server I also have two PCs in the house. One of the PCs runs Windows XP Pro and is my custom built Media Center PC (aka DVR). I use it to record TV shows from our satellite feed, listen to iTunes music in the family room, and to import image files from visiting friends digital cameras. The other PC is a dual-boot machine and it serves as our Windows gaming machine AND a Linux test bed.

I have run several flavors of Linux on this system but for the last year I have only been running Suse Linux 9. Recently Suse Linux 10 became available and I simply wanted to download it and install it on the system. Last time I did something like this I made the download using Windows, and then completed the rather complex task of burning the iso image to a bootable CD (or you can buy Nero and save yourself a lot of trouble). This time I wanted to try using a Mac.

I downloaded the DVD image from a Suse FTP mirror using my iBook at work (T1), then brought by iBook home and transferred the 3.5 GB file to my PowerMac G5 with the DVD burner. I added the image file to Disk Utilities list of available images (drag and drop) then clicked burn. 15 minutes later the DVD was ready. I went upstairs with the freshly burned DVD, restarted the PC, inserted the DVD and within moments the Suse Linux 10 installer was loading.

I have never had such a pain free experience when trying to download a Linux installer and burn it to disk(s).

The Linux installation was very clean too. No hassle. No complicated questions to answer (yes, I could have answered the complicated questions but it was late and I was tired).

This extremely positive experience was made possible by Mac OS X 10.4 and the good folks at Apple who design and engineer some really cool–but practical–computers.

Thanks.

I’ve enabled my 10.4 server as my domain’s Software Update Server and configured my client systems and other servers to retrieve their updates from this system. However, when the server itself needs an update it downloads the update separately instead of pulling it from its own stored updates. That’s just dumb.

I have to force it to get the updates locally using the Terminal.

Here are a couple of links to interviews with well-known Mac users. If you know of any others please send the links my way.

MacWorld interview from 2001 with Alton Brown

MacWorld interview from 2000 with Thomas Dolby

Starting on Nov. 4 you may have had trouble launching IE for Mac. If the default home page is msn.com the browser will not be able to load the page. I don’t know if this is Microsoft’s way of saying “screw you” to all the Mac users who are still foolish enough to use their free browser or if its because the MSN team just isn’t aware that there are still Mac users out there.

If you have encountered this issue you probably found that there doesn’t appear to be anyway to undo the default home page chosen by IE and you have lost valuable hours of your life deleting preferences, cache files, and such. It turns out you simply need to disconnect your Mac from the internet (unplug the ethernet cable or turn off your AirPort) and then launch IE, change the default home page to ANYTHING that is non-Microsoft, and you should then be good to go. Reconnect to the internet, launch IE, and browse the internet as before.

If I really loved you I would advise you to NEVER use IE for Mac again, it hasn’t been updated in 2-years and all the OTHER browsers are updated frequently, both with bug fixes and new features. I strongly recommend you use the latest version of Safari or Firefox. Opera, Netscape, Mozilla and Camino are all Mozilla-based browsers like Firefox but they have focused on either loading pages with blazing speed (Opera and Camino) or by being a full suite of internet applications (Netscape and Mozilla). The full suite applications take care of your web browsing, email, newsgroups, and web page creation all in one integrated package. All of these are free.

Microsoft has indicated that IE for Mac is not likely to ever be updated to version 7 but who cares (a new version 7 for Windows is due out very soon)? There are so many good browsers out their for Macs that support security, RSS, fast page loading, java and javascript, that you simply don’t need IE any more.

I guess the genius clan at MSN and Microsoft don’t want Mac users to be able to use a Microsoft browser on a Microsoft owned web site. Seems like shooting yourself in the foot doesn’t to me?