gtuhl: startup IT and software development

We recently pulled the trigger on monitor upgrades for all developers at the office and I was faced with a tough decision to make.

Until this point, I was using just my 17″ (1920 x 1200) laptop and nothing else. I really like the Macbook Pro keyboard and additionally, though I realize I am in a minority on this, I love the condensed format of laptop keyboards. I also love trackpads.

My reason for this is I do not have to move my hands for anything. Once you get used to the layout of a laptop keyboard I actually think you can move faster and you don’t have to move your hands at all to hit any key or any shortcut. Now if you are an accountant or similar or working with numbers all of the time then sure, a number pad probably makes sense, but otherwise it is wasted space. I can bang out numbers at almost full typing speed (~110 wpm) using the bar along the top and I don’t have to move my right hand over to a number pad.

Similarly, I love the trackpad because I don’t have to move at all to reach for a mouse. I’ve gotten to where I can use my thumbs for almost everything trackpad-wise.

So I had this new monitor and I didn’t want to dual screen (I use spaces which doesn’t play very nice with multiple screens). This meant either don’t use the monitor (which wasn’t an option after I gave it is test run) or buy a mouse and keyboard.

I ended up forking over some cash for the following:

Wireless Keyboard

Wireless Mighty Mouse

Yeah they are expensive but even though I rag on Apple stability sometimes I still love their stuff and these have turned out to be an excellent keyboard and mouse. Now my impressions of both.

The Keyboard

This took me a bit to get used to because the keys, unlike the MBP, don’t run flush into one another. There is a strip of aluminum between them and at first I was striking that aluminum a lot when typing at full speed. I like it now that I have adjusted to switching between those keyboards though. I bought this one not for the bluetooth but because the layout is identical in almost every way to the MBP keyboard layout. The keys feel very good and though I wasn’t looking for bluetooth it does work very well. This keyboard just looks cool too - no wires, super tiny, and it feels well made.

The Mighty Mouse

This is probably the best mouse I have ever used. It again looks very cool, all flush and smooth but that isn’t the important part. It gives you right, middle, and left clicking though you wouldn’t know that by just looking at it. You can also program the side buttons to do something when squeezed. The trackball lets you scroll vertically and horizontally with ease (this was a big reason why I got this mouse - I love the trackpad scrolling in all directions on the MBP and would have missed that functionality big time). It again has no wires, the bluetooth works perfectly and at surprisingly long range. I have used it to control while watching movies on the laptop (Netflix’s video player is actually pretty nice). Finally, this mouse is very precise and it also feels very well made. This thing is awesome. The 2 devices are very small so I can keep the mouse really close to the keyboard and don’t have to reach too much for it.

So the new mouse and keyboard work pretty well but I still believe my ideal setup would be essentially a MBP with no screen and the base of it wired up to send keyboard/mouse signals to another machine. Or if I could detach the screen temporarily when using the larger monitor. If anyone knows if either of these is possible please let me know

OSX Leopard has a lot of stability problems, but I suspect many people are like me in that they aren’t enough to drive me to another platform for development. Apple has got me as a user for the foreseeable future despite the aggravations. So I wanted to share two tricks that have helped me keep my machine going without reboots. I like to tote my mbp back and forth just sleeping it. It works most of the time. Sometimes it does not and these are the three problems I have seen. Having the laptop hooked up to a monitor/mouse/keyboard and disconnecting them at the end of the day seems to make these issues much more frequent.

Machine does not come out of sleep.

This has only happened to me a couple times but I know it happens more often for others. The only solution that I know of is to press and hold the power button and shut it down. Anyone found a solution for this? It seems to be a pretty common problem on Leopard from reading the Apple forums.

Desktop icons become invisible or stop working.

This happens all the time to me. The Desktop seems dead and won’t let you click it or see any icons but if you open up Finder and browse to the Desktop everything shows up normally. To “fix” this shut down finder by doing sudo killall Finder from the command line. It will restart itself after a few seconds and things will be back to normal. Might as well be restarting explorer with the Windows Task Manager

Spaces/Dock/Expose/Active Corners malfunctions

These things can get pretty messed up. Active corners will stop working, or hotkeys will stop working, or animations/transitions will go away (making the usability pretty awkward), or a combination of these things. To fix this do sudo killall Dock from the command line. Once again a lot like restarting core stuff in Windows. This also seems to fix a problem I have where clicking links within other applications like Apple Mail stops automatically opening them in Firefox.

Snow Leopard is supposed to bring loads of stability and footprint improvements so perhaps this will fix some of the problem. I’ll show Apple how much I get aggravated by Leopard stability by, I guess, spending money on the next version of their operating system…

I first started using OSX right as Leopard was coming out so I’ve only known Spotlight as a great utility. It was very fast and did a great job of launching documents and applications. With a little more digging (like using command-enter on a selection to open its location in Finder) it became even more useful.

Unfortunately over the last several months Spotlight has blown away its index for absolutely no reason when I had to reboot my computer. Twice it was a reboot related to an update and once it was just a plain vanilla restart. In either case, there is absolutely no excuse for the index needing to be blown away. I depended on Spotlight pretty heavily and the 2 hours or so that it took to rebuild the index was excruciating. After the third time this happened I gave up on Spotlight and installed this Quicksilver thing people talk about. I’ve heard that the Leopard Spotlight largely lessens Quicksilver’s advantages but I have still found it to be pretty powerful and it hasn’t blown away its index yet. I’ve additionally started leaning heavily on some of its many capabilities that Spotlight does not possess.

Why Care About Quicksilver?

• You would like a Spotlightish application that does more.
• You hate having to use the mouse if you can help it.
• Spotlight appears to be forgetting to persist its index to disk or losing its index for some other weird reason.

Installation

First download the latest version. At the time of this post it is available here. Then I recommend following the quick tutorial here. There are some minor differences in the tutorial from the linked version of Quicksilver but it is largely still relevant. During the installation I had to select plugins one at a time else the installer froze. I also had to refresh the plugin screen several times for the bulk of the many plugins available to show up.

Next you will want to neuter Spotlight so it isn’t churning on your machine in addition to Quicksilver. Go into System Preferences -> Spotlight, then uncheck everything under Search Results and also uncheck both shortcuts.

I recommend setting Quicksilver’s shortcut to command-space now that Spotlight is effectively disabled and doesn’t need that combo.

In the Quicksilver settings under Catalog I couldn’t figure out how to increase the depth of the User catalogs that were already setup and Quicksilver was only indexing the first directory of my Documents folder. To get around this I unchecked the Documents folder that was already setup under User and added a new one to Custom with infinite depth. I did the same for my home directory Applications folder and was all set after that.

The way Quicksilver works is you launch it and start typing something. Pressing down or right will trigger a context menu of possible matches or files that you can navigate through. Once you are happy with the thing you have selected you can either hit enter to execute the default action listed or press tab and down to navigate through a list of actions. When searching through the list of items or actions you can type to jump to another option that you know is in the list. In most cases Quicksilver just seems to do the right thing so often the action doesn’t need to be selected. If you get lost in your selections just press escape and start typing again.

Usage

Though I have no concrete numbers to back it up, Quicksilver is every bit as fast during usage and seems to build and maintain its index more quickly as well. It also can do a whole ton more than application and document launching. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do as my usage is still solely within the available plugins and I am finding it more and more irreplaceable as I go.

I’ve only been using it for about a week and find all of the following extremely useful (most of this was recommended by the tutorial linked above):

• The standard launch behavior. Command-space and start typing the application or document, press enter to launch/open.
• The clipboard plugin. Command-space, command-L, press 0 - 9 to paste any of the last 10 things I have copied into my current cursor position. My preferences for this plugin are 10 items (so I can always paste with 1 keystroke) and hide after pasting. This function is incredibly helpful.
• Emailing. Command-space, start typing the name of a contact in my Address Book, right-arrow, enter on an email. Opens an Apple Mail compose window with that person in the TO line.
• Definitions. Command-space, period (this enters a free-form text mode), type a word, tab, type define, enter.
• Calculations. Command-space, period, type math to crank, tab, type calc, enter.
• File navigation. This is a HUGE feature and in many cases for me has eliminated the need to use the finder. Just do Command-space and then press and hold for a second either ~ (for your home directory) or / (for root) then press down and use the arrow keys to navigate through your computer very quickly. At any time while navigating you can type the first few characters of a folder or file you know is in your current directory and it will jump there.
• Opening links in FireFox. Command-space, period, type URL, enter.
• iTunes. Command-space, type Browse Artists, Browse Albums, etc then press right and start navigating through your music with only the keyboard like the file navigation. Press enter on an album, artist, genre, or song to fire it up in iTunes.

Those are just the things I have found myself using multiple times each day. Though some actions require what seems like a lot of keystrokes for me if it saves reaching for and using the mouse it is far faster. Quicksilver can do an enormous amount more than that and I am looking forward to using it more and more to make myself more efficient.

I posted a short while back about excitement surrounding a migration from Exchange 2003 to Zimbra for our company. The migration has had its ups and downs and now that it has happened and I have had a couple weeks to dig in as both a user and administrator I would like to share our experience.

The general takeaways are that Zimbra isn’t perfect. It does some things worse than Exchange and some things better but the balance, in my opinion, slants heavily in Zimbra’s favor. I’ll break it up into migration and then administration/usage.

The Migration

The migration was a bruiser. It involved a couple nights of failed attempts and then a brutal 6pm - 4am effort to get everything finished well enough to go to sleep. I had a sysadmin helping me that knew his stuff so the details of how to complete it aren’t here (he handled most of the work), just the headaches I saw. The issues included:

• The bulk migration tool was not able to migrate calendars.
• The individual .pst importing tool also was not able to migrate the calendars. It would just fail like crazy and then give up because the error count was too high. For users with 2k+ appointments the migration would fail after only a few dozen events. I eventually got these calendars over by doing .pst exports/imports with Outlook itself rather than trying to use server-side migration tools.
• We had to run the bulk migration over 2 nights because it took a long time. This isn’t a huge surprise because we had 100’s of 1000’s of emails, events, and contacts to migrate but the issue is that the second run re-imported everything imported in the first batch despite settings to the contrary. This essentially created duplicates of all emails and contacts.

To remove the duplicates of emails I used a perl script found at this page (this script actually worked fantastic). For contacts I used the Zimbra CLI to bulk clear the applicable address books and used client apps to re-import cleanly.

Administration/Usage

Zimbra started to shine after the migration ordeal. We immediately had all of our OSX users sync’ing their iCal, Apple Mail, and Address Book apps with the server, I had most of the Outlook users on the Zimbra Outlook connector without much effort, and most things worked well. There were a few issues I encountered.

• The Outlook connector worked flawlessly in XP Pro but was very difficult to install in Vista. You need to follow the tip here and then just keep trying until it works. If it doesn’t work remove the program and try again. I really hate Vista and the fact that it makes things so hard.
• The activesync with Windows Mobile is pretty flaky. It fails often for no apparent reason. I settled on using IMAP for email and just sync’ing my contacts and calendar and this seems to work consistently. It was as if it was stumbling over the greater volume of items to sync when the email was part of it.
• I’m not real happy with the calendar sharing. Without admin intervention a user must share their calendar with each individual user and each of those individuals must login to the web interface to accept the share and see it. These notifications cannot be accepted in Mail/Outlook/Entourage or whatever else. Once these calendars are accepted though you can use almost any app you want as your calendar and that is nice.
• There are connector apps for almost everything, but many of them are not updated to the latest versions of their target apps and none of them are completely polished and perfect. The Outlook and OSX ones seem to be the best but those also are not without issues.

In general though Zimbra works pretty well. I have calendar and contacts sync’d with my laptop using the OSX sync services and also sync’d to my Windows Mobile phone using activesync - a setup that never would have been possible with Exchange (without Entourage, but Entourage sucks in my opinion).

There are shortcomings but as I have worked through various user issues I have discovered what I believe is Zimbra’s biggest strength - its openness and open source underpinnings. It is a huge, powerful piece of code and between the CLI and the REST API you can do almost anything as an admin. Now that I am getting the hang of it I have created a set of quick scripts to interact with the CLI for doing things like auto-mounting calendars shared with distribution groups (getting around the email acceptance bummer mentioned above). The REST API is great and documented a bit here. It is completely trivial to export people’s contacts or calendars and to constrain what is exported using different parameters using the REST API.

Another big advantage in Zimbra’s favor is the community is quite strong and helpful. They have a wiki, forums, and bugzilla all very active and open.

So this is a bit of a ramble, but overall I am exceptionally happy that we made this switch. Zimbra is not perfect but it is powerful and utterly open making it possible to find workarounds for almost anything and it helps that it runs on Linux as well.

I finally grabbed the latest beta (beta 4) of Firefox3 and absolutely love it. The downsides are that many extensions are not yet setup to work and there are rendering differences. I fixed a half dozen visual problems today primarily related to button input widths and absolute positioning of iframes.

Overall though that doesn’t matter because the fixes were minor, the important extensions are ready to go, and the new browser is fantastic. My personal list of observations includes:

• It looks fantastic and like a true OSX application.
• The rendering speed is incredible, I no longer have any reason to run Safari given that it no longer has the advantage here.
• The memory issues appear to have been resolved. I generally never shut down my browser and would only kill Firefox in the past because of the rolling memory leak that would eventually consume my machine.
• I love the way that alerts (such as whether to remember credentials for a login form) are now a slick pop-in div that does not interrupt or delay your browsing. They used to fire up in abrasive popups.
• Bookmarks are beefed up in several nice ways, though I use delicious so not massively useful.

Here is the new default look of the toolbar area. I really like it.

So the new browser is great, but it does have some rendering differences and it is still beta so at the moment having both the beta FF3 and the stable FF2 installed is a great idea. Here is what I did to set it up where both are installed and can run at the same time. I am assuming you currently have FF2 and are adding FF3 and also assuming you have never messed with your Firefox profiles before.

• Make sure Firefox isn’t running.
• Rename your existing Firefox application to Firefox2.
• Open a terminal and run /Applications/Firefox2.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox --profilemanager.
• Rename the default profile to Firefox3 (this is preference, feel free to skip or name it whatever you want).
• Create a new profile named Firefox2
• Download the Firefox3 .dmg from here.
• Mount the .dmg and copy it into your Applications folder.
• Rename the new Firefox application you just copied over to Firefox3. Renaming this is mostly so spotlight searches and dock mouseovers can be differentiated.
• Create a file named firefox2.sh in /Applications/Firefox2.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox2.sh with this content.
  

  #!/bin/bash
FFDIR=`dirname "$0"`
cd "${FFDIR}"
./firefox-bin -P Firefox2 -no-remote "$@"

  • I had to use FFDIR to make it work, needed the absolute path.
  • The -P argument tells firefox to run with the Firefox2 profile created in the previous steps.
• Modify /Applications/Firefox2.app/Contents/Info.plist. Look for the key CFBundleExecutable and change the string value from firefox-bin to firefox2.sh
• In my case, OSX had cached the contents of my Info.plist file somewhere and it ignored my modifications to it. To make it see my change I had to drag Firefox2 out to another location (I used the desktop) and then back into the Applications folder. I was going nuts trying to find out why my Info.plist file was being ignored and this fixed it.
• You should be able to run both version at the same time now. Firefox2 will use your custom script and pull the Firefox2 profile and Firefox3 will use the default profile (Firefox3).

As a final note, when you fire up Firefox3 it will appear that Firebug doesn’t run on the new browser. This is not the case, you can install the 1.1 version which will work with the Firefox3 betas at getfirebug.com.Home improvement loan missouri
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Now that i’ve had a macbook pro for several months and feel that I know my way around the OS quite well I thought I would share the things that I do not like about it to follow up on my initial impressions. There are loads of things to like and you can find those lists all over the internet so I am going to focus on the negatives for 1 post.

• Kernel panics. With Leopard i’ve had 8 - 10 kernel panics in total. They show you a fancy screen that tries to make it feel better than the windows blue and white but the effect is the same. This never happened a single time with my linux workstation (I never had to reboot it after a year+ of use) and it also almost never happened with any of the Windows machines i’ve had since Windows 98.
• Updates require restarts. OSX is no better than windows in this regard. The reminders are just as annoying as well.
• Proprietary file formats. The mac doesn’t place a line break (as recognized by Linux/Unix/Windows) in plain-text files so your data is completely useless (all collapsed into 1 line) until you run it through mac2unix on a Linux machine. This behavior is even worse than that of windows. Why does grab spit out .tiffs? Why do .picts exist?
• Proprietary file systems. HFS+ can’t be mounted in read/write on a Linux system. This was an unpleasant surprise when I grabbed my timemachine-formatted external drive to snag a file off a server. Why don’t they use ext3, xfs, zfs, or anything else that is already out there and works just as well?
• Case Sensitivity. I’ve already posted about this. Very frustrating to me that it was ever case insensitive and that the installer allowed me to select an option that prevented my macbook pro from running supported software.
• Spaces Bugs. I’ve had it happen a half dozen times where if you move away from your current “space” and then come back the applications in that space aren’t rendered. They are still running and their menus are visible, but there is no way to see the windows again. They have to be quit and restarted which really, really sucks for certain applications.
• Display Bugs. The brightness of the screen will not stay where I set it (max). It always slides to about 75% and I have found absolutely no way to prevent this from happening.
• Flimsy Screen. I wish the screen on the macbook pro stayed in place. It will move back/forward at the slightest touch. This doesn’t come into play too often but there have been multiple times where I had to sit up straighter than I would like because the screen kept closing.
• Key Shortcuts not on Keyboard. Loads of application list shortcuts involving shift, alt, command, etc and they all use weird symbols (sometimes different) that are not physically printed on the keyboard. An up arrow is shift, a inverted L-looking shape is alt. What is up with this? Windows and Linux do the far more intuitive thing of saying “shift” when they mean shift and “alt” when they mean alt.

I run this machine pretty hard and overall I still prefer the Mac over my previous machines but it is far from perfect. I’ve heard there is a mega-patch wrapping up testing for Leopard on the way and I hope that some of these issues will go away then.

As a quick follow-up to the parallels-related post I made the other day, wanted to mention Parallels Tools and also a workaround for a mouse issue I was having while using it.

Parallels Tools is an excellent helper application that can be installed into the OS of your virtual machine to enable extra features and make things easier. I’ve only tried it with Vista and XP and this was with build 5162 of Parallels 3.0. Among other things, it provides:

• Seamless copy-paste from host OS to VM OS.
• Makes sharing of disks pretty dang easy, just fire up your VM and by default the C drive shows up and is accessible from your OSX desktop.
• Makes OSX aware of what applications your VM has and is running. Running apps pop into your dock like OSX apps. I at least think this was new with the Parallels Tools.

It is also very easy to install. Fire up your virtual machine, login if not already, ctrl-alt out of the VM, then select “Actions -> Install Parallels Tools” from the OSX menu of Parallels. The installer will magically run inside your virtual machine and after a reboot you will be set.

Now I had one big problem after the installation of Parallels Tools - my mouse quit working in Windows XP. I could seem to move it vertically along the left side of the monitor (but the cursor was out of view) and I could hit the start button and some of the left-most icons on the desktop but otherwise it was useless.

The fix, believe it or not, was to use windows to update the mouse driver. Not sure if this messes anything up, but my virtual machine works great now and none of the features (copy and paste from OSX to VM) appear to be negatively affected.

Using the keyboard, I did the following:

• Using tab get to the Start button and press enter.
• Arrow over Control Panel and press enter.
• Press enter on Printers and Other hardware.
• Select Mouse.
• Get to the Hardware tab. To do this use the tab key to navigate to the current tab then use the arrow keys to change tabs left and right.
• Select Properties.
• Navigate to the Driver tab.
• Press enter on Update Driver.
• For the wizard steps select “No, not this time”, Next, “Install automatically”, Next.
• Once done, reboot the virtual machine.

I couldn’t find a solution to this issue on google so hopefully this will be helpful for people hitting the same problem after me.

I posted recently about tentatively moving to a macbook pro after using Windows and/or Linux for many years. At this point in time I don’t see myself ever switching back. I’ve rearranged my work environment to eliminate the Linux desktop, my old Dell laptop is collecting dust, and now I just have my macbook with a 2nd monitor attached.

In any case, I needed a way to test stuff I am working on in both IE6 and IE7. My macbook came with Parallels and Vista so IE7 was no problem but for whatever weird reason there is no way (that I have found) to run IE6 in Vista. I tried following the directions all over about running Virtual PC 2007 but my plans of running a virtual machine inside of a virtual machine didn’t pan out. It gave me some error about the CPU architecture being invalid or some such.

The solution is actually pretty straight forward, and if you don’t have the benefit of Vista and IE7 already accessible it can be used to get that as well. The only downside is it does require Parallels (which costs some small chunk of money) and the whole process of needing virtual machines to test does feel a bit heavy - though I suppose far less heavy than having another machine to test on.

The easiest way to go would be to buy Parallels, buy a copy of XP, and then create 2 virtual machines from it with one remaining at IE6 and the other being upgraded to IE7.

The potentially cheaper alternative follows:

• Go buy and install Parallels. It is a great piece of software that makes working with any virtual machines you have open far more pleasant than other virtualization tools I have used.
• Using a windows machine, go to this Microsoft page to get free Virtual PC hard disk images for XP with IE6 or XP with IE7. It is actually pretty reasonable of Microsoft to provide these but they are self-extracting EXE files thus the need to do this step on Windows. Sure would be nice if they had used a plain old zip file instead. It appears the images expire quarterly so you will have to redo this process a few times each year.
• Extract the VPC image by running the EXE file on a windows machine.
• Copy the VPC image to your mac on a CD or flash key or something.
• Run Parallels Transporter, it came with Parallels.
• Select ‘Express’
• Select ‘From Virtual Computer’
• Select ‘Single Virtual Disk’
• Browse to your VPC image, hit ‘Migrate,’ and let it crank.
• When it is done you will want to choose the option to make it bootable and here it will ask for the installation media. I realize this step sucks and probably makes this process invalid for most people but at a company this works fine. You just need the installation files, it doesn’t use the activations so any XP cd you have lying around should suffice.
• From here it should fire up the virtual machine and you are set.

I realize that second to last step makes this a bit of a bummer, but still in an environment where an XP cd is available it works just fine. For a company this can make a lot of sense because XP activations don’t get used up for these free images so you can provide IE6 and IE7 to any employees running on OSX without having to purchase windows licenses.