Wired Sage

Santa Clause brought a new 13″ macbook for my eldest daughter this year.  He was kind enough to set up most of the laptop for her, but left a few tasks for me to tackle after the holiday.  One of which was email.

Apple Mail has some wonderful Parental Controls allowing the parental units to define a white list of who the child can exchange email with.  Fantastic Stuff!  But my problem was my daughter has an email address from one of my google apps domains.  I needed to figure out a way for her to ONLY use Apple Mail and not login to Google via the web to circumvent those Apple parental protections.

I decided just on a monster password that she doesn’t know.  One that she will not be able to remember or type in.  We’re talking 35 characters long, upper case, lower case, numbers, and special characters.  It’s not a perfect solution.  The password is saved in the Keychain, and she can get it out of there, when she figures it out, but it seemed like a good compromise for now.

I could blacklist the URL for gmail so she can’t access her email via the web on her computer.  But, that won’t stop her from accessing her email  from another computer if she can figure out how to get the password off her macbook.

I’ll do some more investigation around this later.  It would be nice if Google allowed an account to ONLY be accessed via IMAP.  I’ll look into if that’s an option today, and if not, I’ll ask Google for the feature.  I think it would be a nice option to have.

Yesterday we also set up iChat, so now we have a video intercom in our house.  It’s funny to video chat when your kids just down the hall.  She is completely enamored with the Alpha Channel options in Snow Leopard’s iChat.  We need to get a green screen now.

The chair, desk and apple macbook are all new for Christmas.

My eldest Daughter got a MacBook from Santa this year.  A little 13″ solid plastic uni-body MacBook with a clear protective cover.  Yes, she’s only 9 years old.  Yes, she really does need it for school.  She attends a magnet school and is currently making straight A’s in one of the toughest/best public schools in the state. Santa did right by her this year.

In comparison, I was 12 years old when I purchased my very first computer, a Commodore Vic 20, back in 1981.  I got it from K-Mart for $125.  Money I had earned working paper routes with the Atom Tabloid and Star Ledger — my mother lied for me so I could get the Atom Tabloid job a year early.  In NJ the child labor laws mandated a kid be 12 before they could earn an official taxable wage.  Meh!

So, I got a computer at 12 years old and taught myself to program.  By 13 I was an old hack.  By 14 I was soldering external sensors to my Vic 20’s RS232 serial port.  I think having that computer experience got me where I am today — from the Vic 20 to Facebook.  I had to poke fun at Facebook, I just had to. 

I didn’t grow up with a computer, like both of my kids did.  I didn’t figure out how a mouse worked at the age of two just from sitting on my father’s lap and watching him work like my kids both did.  It’s intuitive to them.  It’s second nature.  Plus they’ve been hogging my wife’s PC and my Mac far too much for far too long.  I think Santa did my wife and me right.

So, it’s now the day after Christmas 2009 and I’m looking through my employee benefits sites at work trying to find the “$10 Office 2008 for Mac” deal that a co-worker told me about this past summer.  All of my daughter’s school work is done in Word, Excel or Power Point.  She knows Power Point so well, she’s been tutoring her fourth grade teacher on how to use it.  I got her hooked on the Mac with iLife.  I knew I wasn’t going to win any awards forcing her to learn iWork.  So I just got her the Microsoft Programs for the Mac.  She even agreed to split the $10 licensing fee I had to pay.  What a good kid.

But it took me ALL DAY!  The house was a mess.  Leslie and I are both sleep deprived.  I’m fighting a cold.  Holidays are getting rougher in our old age.  The kids were acting bratty.  There were 100+ interruptions — to a computer geek interruptions are like ice picks in the eyes; nothing is more annoying than an interruption when you are trying to get something complex done right.  Ugh!

Finally though, I finished installing all of the work on her computer.  I’m pretty proud of myself too.  Aside from the programs for school she also has the iLife suite, Voice Candy, and two Luxor games to play with.  It’s under complete Parental Control.  I’m using the Mac Parental Controls in conjunction with Open DNS which will also filters out nasty domains (phishing and maleware as well as sites that are not child friendly).  With a little Remote Desktop magic I can also view her screen in a window on my iMac’s 2nd monitor to make sure she’s doing her homework when she should be doing her homework.  Time limits keep her from spending more than 4 hours a day on the machine and will force her to logout at bed time, and she can’t login again till morning.  So there will be no late night net parties in her room any time soon.

My next plan is to show her the address book on the machine.  I’ll have her convert our old paper address book to the Mac format, then I’ll be able to port it into my machine with ease.  It’s a win-win.  She’ll love typing in all the information and using the Address Book program.  She’ll love having all that contact information at her fingertips.  And I’ll get to benefit from her labors.

Tomorrow we have to work on integrating Google email with Snow Leopard’s Mail and resolving the Parental Permission issues around that.  Tomorrow should be both fun and interesting.

Technerd Master of Disaster

Bryan, pictured here, has been having issues with his new Santa Rosa MacBook. He recently took it into an Apple store to have it repaired. Apple then sent him an on-line survey where he could only leave 2k of comments. He asked me to post this on-line so he could send Apple a link to his comments and tell the world that they are selling rotten produce. Bryan’s comments are below in blue.

To Whom it may concern:

Apple needs to get an actual engineer in the store, not just someone with a “Genius” title that can reload software or recommend replacing the motherboard — they did not know what the issue was and asked me what I wanted them to do.

I am fairly new to Mac’s (six months now); but, I have two minis and I’m on my second generation of MacBook. I am getting very used to what works and what does not work on them. I wasted three hours in the car, only to be told there was nothing wrong.

There is definitely something wrong. My new Macbook is a “B” series with an x3100 video chipset, 2.2GHz CPU, 4GB of memory, and 160GB hard drive. I was shocked to find out that it runs slower than my “A” series 2.0GHz MacBook with only 1GB of memory. There are obviously some issues here than no one in the store wanted to address. As I mentioned earlier, the “Genius” asked me what we need to do to fix it, last time I checked, he was the “Genius” and he should have told me what is wrong with it. There are issues here that may remain unresolved for a long time.

The issues I see are:

Excessive rainbow pin-wheeling when streaming video
Horrible boot time
Tiger is unsupported

Yes, you read that correctly. I am stuck with Leopard because Apple will not write a driver for Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) to run upon the “B” series MacBook hardware. How completely messed up is that?

I ran quite a few benchmarks using Xbench, and found that there are some obvious issues with the video chip or video driver in the new Santa Rosa series MacBook. I ran Xbench 1.3 which is the same software that other reviewers of Apple products run. This is the best way to stress all system components to their limits.

Sadly my Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz Macmini benches higher than my new Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz MacBook. As you can see below, the Mini trounced each new “B” version MacBook except the MacBook Pro. The following tests were run with newly loaded images of both Tiger and Leopard.

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Macmini 2.0G memory, 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo, 80GB HD

Results 103.57
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.2 (9C31)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model Macmini2,1
Drive Type ST980825AS
CPU Test 115.33
Thread Test 174.65
Memory Test 126.59
Quartz Graphics Test 161.02
OpenGL Graphics Test 271.48
User Interface Test 233.71
Disk Test 32.13

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MacBook 4.0GB memory, 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 160GB HD

Results 67.31
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.2 (9C31)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBook3,1
Drive Type ST9160823AS
CPU Test 119.32
Thread Test 206.37
Memory Test 147.08
Quartz Graphics Test 164.04
OpenGL Graphics Test 22.60
User Interface Test 250.51
Disk Test 33.74

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In Store Floor Model 2.4GHz MacBook “B”

Results 77.25
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.2 (9C31)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model MacBook4,1
Drive Type FUJITSU MHY2160BH
CPU Test 162.39
Thread Test 329.42
Memory Test 169.93
Quartz Graphics Test 187.39
OpenGL Graphics Test 25.10
User Interface Test 260.84
Disk Test 37.69

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In Store Floor Model 2.4GHz MacBook Pro

Results 124.05
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.2 (9C31)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model MacBookPro4,1
Drive Type Hitachi HTS542525K9SA00
CPU Test 167.60
Thread Test 306.51
Memory Test 166.67
Quartz Graphics Test 184.99
OpenGL Graphics Test 167.95
User Interface Test 324.84
Disk Test 37.37

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The MacBook Pro scored best overall. What’s telling is how poorly the new “B” series did on the Open GL Video scores. Surprisingly the Mini clearly ran away with the best Open GL Video score, beating out even the MacBook Pro on this task!

One would expect that a machine with a 400MHz faster CPU, a better video chip set with double the shared ram, and twice the system memory would kick the crap out of a Macmini. Am I right? I personally think there is an issue here that Apple is refusing to acknowledge or wants to cover up.

If someone at Apple would care to contact me and address these issues, I am all ears. In the meantime, I am very unhappy with the run around I got at the Apple store. I expected a resolution; I would have settled for an acknowledgment, documentation, and escalation of the issue. There is a serious issue here and it needs to be addressed before EVERYONE that buys one of these machines gets stuck with the same issue.

The new MacBook should not have been shipped in their current production state, unless Apple is now subscribing to the Microsoft theory: “Ship it now, and we’ll fix it later!”

Sincerely,
“Soon to be previous Macbook Owner if it Does not Get Better” Bryan F.
itpmguru@yahoo.com

So, it seems from Bryan’s testing above that Apple and Santa Rosa aren’t playing nicely together. I would highly advise anyone reading this to delay purchasing Apple’s newest hardware until these major flaws are resolved.

HP Photosmart D5160

Talking with a friend of mine a while back I mentioned I was converting my old Digital8 tapes and burning them to DVD. He told me he had old Digital8 tapes but no longer had a Digital8 camcorder. So I offered to convert his tapes too.

I’ve been capturing them with a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 950 and Eye-TV. It’s really nice, you press play on the camcorder, record in the Eye-TV program to start. Two hours later (or whenever the tape ends) you stop recording, wait a few minutes for Eye-TV to compress the stream, add chapter markers, and send the newly captured program to Toast with a simple right click. Out pops a DVD with your old movie on it.

So, I’ve been going through my stack of non-printable DVDs hand writing the tape titles directly onto the DVD with a felt tip sharpie until I ran out of non-printable DVDs. Not a big deal, I started using printable ones. But, when the first printable DVD was burned and ready I couldn’t bring myself to write on it with the sharpie, it just seemed… well, wrong. If you’re going to do it, do it right. I fired up my HP D5160 ink jet photo/DVD printer, clicked on the HP Create application and the “%$#@*&” program didn’t work properly.

I decided that reinstalling would be the fastest road to recovery. So that’s just what I did, I reinstalled the print driver and software after uninstalling the same to no avail. I then did my research, searching the web for some occurrence of this happening before with no luck. I scoured HP’s support site, nothing. So, I figured I’d have to resort to emailing HP’s technical support. But, before I did that, I wanted to provide as much information as possible. Mostly because I didn’t believe it was happening — it’s a freaky error. So I made a movie. Yes, that’s right, I made a movie of the odd behavior as proof I wasn’t a stark raving lunatic that just likes to email random, anonymous, tech-support, people to have email chats. I created a screen capture with Screenium, which is a fantastic program, and then compressed the quicktime movie file with MPEG StreamClip, another program no one should be without.

The movie is dull, boring and embarrassing. I start off with “Hi my name is Andrew, and I have an iMac.” Like I’m speaking at some AA meeting. Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, a two minute video should be worth ten thousand. Here’s the movie if you’re so inclined to watch it.

Dull, boring, embarrassing and completely bizarre isn’t it?

So I filled out the HP website with the details bellow:

problem area : installation and setup
operating system : Macintosh OS X 10.4
How is your product connected to your PC? : USB Cable
error message : No message
problem description :

When I open the Create Program to print/label a printable DVD, on the left the templates and layouts do not load. The screen is just gray. I have an old boot drive archived and tested it by mounting the image and it works when I run the program from the mounted image. But when I run it from my current boot drive, nothing, not even when the archived image is mounted.

troubleshooting :

I have a screen capture video (2.3MB DivX AVI) which illustrates this. I think once you see the problem I’m having and the comparison of the two programs on different partitions, you’ll be able to either tell me what files need to be fixed or copied over.

setting changes :

This has never worked since I reinstalled my OS from scratch last month. I reformatted by hard drive and installed OS X 10.4 from original media. I did not IMPORT the previous settings from the old OS. I then reinstalled the HP driver suite,downloaded fresh from your website, and Create has not functioned since.

I then got an automated ‘we got your email’ email and waited. To my delighted surprise I had a reply with fantastic, detailed instructions in email when I got home the same day.

Thank you for contacting HP Total Care.

Please follow the steps below to do a full manual uninstall/reinstall of the printer software in order to resolve this issue.

1. Remove the HP Print Drivers installed.

NOTE: If you have any other HP printers they may have to be reinstalled.

a. Open the hard drive volume (by default labeled Macintosh HD).
b. Select Library.
c. Select Printers.
d. Single-click on the HP folder and drag it to the Trash.

2. Clearing Preferences:

a. Click on File at the top of your screen.
b. Select and click on Find.
c. In the search box at the top of the window type in com.apple.print.
d. Highlight all the contents and drag them to the Trash.
e. Close the windows.

NOTE: The items appear to remain in this window, but have actually been moved to the Trash.

3. Once the HP folder has been removed it is important to repair the disk permissions. Please complete the following steps:

a. Open the hard drive volume (by default labeled Macintosh HD).
b. Double-click Applications.
c. Double-click Utilities.
d. Double-click Disk Utility.
e. Single-click on the name of your hard drive located on the left (usually says Macintosh HD).
f. Click the FIRST AID tab at the top.
g. Select Repair Disk Permissions.
h. The process takes about 10 minutes depending on your system.
i. Restart the Macintosh by selecting Restart from the Apple menu.

4. Download and install the driver from the following website.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?softwareitem=mp-55651-3&lc=en&cc=us&lang=en&os=219&product=1155996&dlc=en

5. Adding the printer into the printer list:

a. Open the hard drive volume (by default labeled Macintosh HD).
b. Double-click Applications.
c. Double-click Utilities.
d. Double-click Printer Setup Utility:
1. If the printer is listed, highlight it and press the
Delete button at the top of the window.
2. Click the Add icon.
3. Click once on the name of the printer, then click Add.
e. Once the printer is on the printer list, close the Printer
Setup Utility.

This should resolve the issue. If you need further assistance, please reply to this message and we will be happy to assist you further.

You may receive an e-mail survey regarding your e-mail support experience. We would appreciate your feedback.

Sincerely,
HP Total Care

I originally used AppZapper; but, I’m sure it didn’t remove all the “com.apple.print” drivers as HP suggested. With high hopes, I followed the instructions above to the letter and still the same problem. Frustrated, I sent one more email and walked away from the computer.

Thank you for the detailed instructions.

I’m sorry to say that I’m still experiencing the error. The steps below did not solve my issue. Attached is a screen capture of what is happening.

I’m going to keep trying while I’m waiting on a reply. I know I’ve got to be missing something small and simple.

Thank you. I’m really looking forward to HP’s reply.

I did other busy-tasks and mindless-things, quieting my thoughts, reaching for that zen state where you’re not actively thinking yet all the while the whole of your brain works on the problem. In many way’s it’s like backgrounding a process, especially when it’s done; the answer just jumps right out at you. When my answer hit me, it hit me hard. I raced back to email.

Could how I have my drive formated be my issue? I’m a UNIX
administrator so when given the option I formated it “Mac OS Extended
(Case-sensitive, Journaled).” Could this be my issue? And, if so,
is there a workaround (file rename script, symbolic links) or will I
have to reinstall my OS because of this?

Thank You again!

I was hoping they had a lab and could test and reproduce the issue. Then it dawned on me, I had an external firewire drive that I could reformat and test with. I had the lab. I had the issue. I could test it. So I did without even waiting for the automated mail from HP to hit my mailbox.

This is what I did:

Open Disk Utility
Highlight the boot partition
File, New, Disk Image From disk0s2, (partition name)
Select a Name and a Location and Save
Wait for the image to write to disk
Highlight the Firewire partition
Select Erase, Volume Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled), give it a name, and press Erase
Select Restore
Press Image… select the image created above
Drag the Firewire partition into the Destination box
Press Restore
Wait for the image to write to the new firewire partition
Open System Preferences
Select Startup Disk
Chose the Firewire disk as the new boot disk
Reboot the machine to the new image

I now had a perfect bit for bit copy of my boot drive on my firewire drive — that in and of itself is impressive, let alone that it’s only 16 simple steps to do it! Once I was in the new “insensitive install”, I went right to the HP Create application. I opened it up and it worked fine. Just like my old “Mac Boot” image that I had mounted in the video above. Proof that the Case sensitivity caused my issues.

So, I wanted to let HP know that I had identified the issue: sloppy code — some programmer who thinks that a=A, which every UNIX programmer knows is just wrong. I really wanted a code fix, or a script to rename the offended files, or a script to create aliases to the offended files with the case that HP was expecting. It was so frustrating not being able to find this issue online that, at the very least, I wanted them to put this into their documentation or on their website: “Do not use Case-sensitive file systems.” I sent another email.

I formated a fire-wire drive I had laying around without the Case-sensitivity option. Imaged my current boot partition, and restored it to the newly formated fire-wire drive. I then booted from it, and HP’s software is working fine now.

I now need two (2) things from you:

1) Is there a workaround? Possibly a script to rename the offending files to uppercase or create uppercase aliases to the lowercase files so it works? If not, I’m going to have to format my internal hard drive without case-sensitivity and restore the image I just made. Which I can do, but it will take several hours and I’d rather not do it.

2) At the very least, I would appreciate it if you could document the fact that this software REQUIRES this type of formated boot partition — although ideally, it would be really nice if you would submit this as a bug and have your developers fix it.

Thank you for your help. You provided the right information and empowered me with the knowledge to resolve my problem. I really appreciate it. I’m looking forward to your reply.

Take care

I thought about this a little and guessed that HP had no clue that their code was so bad — in my judgment of course. Their website had little or no on-line documentation at all. The time it would take for a code review and someone to create a script, if it were a top priority, would be a week or more and honestly I knew it wasn’t a top priority. I realized I wasn’t interested in waiting around that long.

With a twinge of fear and anticipation I reformatted my primary boot drive, installed the image I created just hours before, changed my boot drive back to my internal hard drive and resolved the issue.

But then I got these e-mail messages and I felt I needed to share this whole experience with the net because HP didn’t commit to changing anything or even documenting it for others to find.

Thank you for contacting HP Total Care.

I don’t think that it was the way that the hard drive was formatted, but it appears that you are going to need to reinstall the operating system at this point.

If you need further assistance, please reply to this message and we will be happy to assist you further.

You may receive an e-mail survey regarding your e-mail support experience. We would appreciate your feedback.

Sincerely,
HP Total Care

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Thank you for contacting HP Total Care.

We do not have a workaround for the issue that you are experiencing and this is not a common issue as most customers do not have the experience to do most of the things that you are obviously capable of. Unfortunately your only option would be to format and then reinstall.

If you need further assistance, please reply to this message and we will be happy to assist you further.

You may receive an e-mail survey regarding your e-mail support experience. We would appreciate your feedback.

Sincerely,
HP Total Care

So what is the moral to this story? For the Mac consumer reading this, is it “don’t buy HP”? For those with enterprise or corporate interests, is it “always code with case sensitivity in mind”? Or for those who like to tinker and make things the best they possibly can be, is it “don’t do things differently?”

You tell me.

I’ve been critical of Apple in past Journal entries. I feel I need to give credit where credit is due. All of Apple’s code works perfectly with a case-sensitive formated drive. And, in the spirit of full disclosure, this isn’t just an issue with HP. My Cannon LIDE 30 Scanner wouldn’t scan when installed on the boot partition formated with case-sensitivity.

All of this transpired because I wanted to print to a DVD. After everything above, I opened up the HP Create application that came with my printer and put the title of the Digital8 tape on the DVD perfectly centered with a drop shadow and it looks much better than my hand writing.

These are the lengths I’ll go through to do things my way!

If this article helps you, please comment below and let me know.

‘Great Uncle’ Dennis gave me some great inspiration for new video content. Speed Freak and Basketball Girls are inspired from our email correspondence. If he weren’t so manly I’d probably call him a muse; but, the flannel, bearded image of him in my mind’s eye won’t allow that. Sorry, G.U.D. you’re no Sharon Stone.

In this video clip, first Tweedle-A gets equal time to show off her other-worldly skills in her bid for the WNBA. Then while Tweedle-A works on her mad dribbling skills, Tweedle-L shows off her ability to make baskets on a regulation height goal.

Maybe they’ll be the “Williams Sisters” of Basketball? Or maybe it’ll just be a fun thing they like to do to stay in shape.