One of the things I used to hate about Linux was the way NFS mounts would hang for 10 minutes on one machine if the other computer crashed or lost its network connection. This, along with countless other niggles, was what made me switch to an “It Just Works” Mac.

Well, when it comes to network hangs and freezes, my Mac isn’t as bad as Linux. It’s worse.

I frequently need to connect to my wife’s iMac from my own (or vice-versa). To do this I go to Finder and choose Go > Connect to Server, then connect as myself and mount the remote iMac’s “Macintosh HD” on my iMac. So far so good.

Beachball blues

The problems start anywhere from 5 minutes later to a few hours later. The first sign is usually a dreaded spinning beachball in Firefox. Then I try to switch to Mail. Unresponsive. The Dock doesn’t work. Can’t switch to the Finder. Photoshop has frozen. Can’t do anything – it’s a beachball bonanza.

At least with Linux an NFS hang would only bring down one or two apps. With Mac OS X, the entire system is toast.

If I’m lucky, then after around 10-15 minutes, a dialog will pop up announcing “Server connection interrupted”, offering me a choice of just one button: Disconnect. At this point, the entire Mac springs back to life. If I’m unlucky, I need to power off one or both of the iMacs to get things moving again.

Is it so hard for Apple developers to write an operating system in a way that doesn’t bring the entire computer to a screeching halt, just because a network connection is interrupted? There’s nothing quite so frustrating as being in the middle of some work, only to have your entire computer freeze just because the stupid thing can’t talk to another computer at the other end of the house.

Rant over – I feel better now. 🙂

Is there a solution?

Does anyone know a way to stop these kinds of hangs? I’ve heard rumours that it’s “better” in Leopard (I currently use Tiger); if true then it might be the motivation I need to upgrade!

I really want to like Spotlight in 10.4. In theory it should be great: instant access to any file or app by typing a few words. In practice it’s sluggish as hell, making it almost unusable for me. Here’s how I tend to use Spotlight:

1. Click the Spotlight icon.
2. Start typing the name of the file I’m looking for.
3. After typing about 5 letters, Spotlight locks up with a spinning beach ball for 30 seconds, then slowly starts to produce results.
4. Meanwhile, I switch to the Finder and end up manually finding the file I was after before Spotlight has even finished telling me where it is.

To make matters worse, I recently bought a backup hard drive. Spotlight has decided this would be great fun to index, even though I don’t want it to. Here’s what I see practically every day:

Not only is this indexing unwanted, but it slows down my Mac for those 19 hours, and slows down Spotlight itself even further (if such a thing is possible). (more…)

A few days ago, my wife’s iMac started running out of disk space. As in, ‘Zero bytes available’ in the Finder, with a warning dialog. This was quite odd, as it had a good 20GB free last week. I cleared out a few old video podcasts from iTunes to free up a couple of GB and thought nothing more of it.

The next day, I noticed that the free space had suddenly jumped up to 20GB again.

Then, yesterday morning, it ran out of space again. I cleared a few more big files from the drive, then did a ‘df -h’. 780MB free. I did another ‘df -h’. 779MB free. Then 778MB free. It was dropping at a rate of 1-2MB/second.

I knew that iTunes was subscribed to quite a few podcasts and, indeed, it had been downloading a couple of episodes recently. So I shut down iTunes and did another ‘df -h’. 772MB free… 771MB…

Must be the backup, I thought. I do a nightly rsync backup from my iMac to hers, and sometimes it’s still going during the day. But a ‘ps -aux | grep rsync’ on both machines brought up nothing. The backup wasn’t running.

Very strange. Maybe it was some sort of virus, worm, or rootkit that was downloading from the net? I shut down the AirPort network on the iMac to stop all network activity.

745MB free… 744MB… 743MB…

(more…)

I’ve been on holiday the past seven weeks (I know, lucky me!), so the Leopard launch has somewhat passed me by. The reviews seem generally positive, but is it worth forking out the AUD $158 for the upgrade?

Here’s what I think of the major new features in Leopard – bearing in mind I’ve never actually used it 😉 :

New Finder: I actually like Finder in Tiger, though I know a lot of folks complain about it. The new Finder features do sound like they’d help me find things quicker. I love the idea of browsing files in Cover Flow mode, though I’d like to see how well it performs in practice. The new sidebar looks like a big improvement, as does the new Spotlight – finally, boolean searches, and, from what I’ve read, it’s a lot faster too. Tempting to upgrade just to get a decent Spotlight frankly.

Quick Look: Decent previews of files without having to open them sounds like a great time-saver, though again I’d like to see how “quick” it is in the reality of a cluttered hard drive like mine. Though Apple naturally shows off this feature with movies and photos for the wow factor, I reckon it’ll be most useful for previewing PDFs for me. Would upgrade for this feature if it turns out to be genuinely useful.

Time Machine: Great to see a decent backup feature finally built-in to a desktop OS, but it’s nothing you couldn’t already do with rdiff-backup if you’re technically minded (though TM is of course much prettier and works on a per-app basis too). I already use rsync to do my own backups and am perfectly happy with that, so I wouldn’t upgrade to get TM.

New Mail: Stationery – meh. I use plaintext email, thank you very much. 😛 Notes could be a useful feature, especially if they sync with my Palm notes through Missing Sync, but I feel they’d be better in iCal. I like the ability to access them via IMAP though. To-dos in Mail seem a bit frivolous too, but then again, iCal’s RSI-inducing interface sucks so badly that any other way of entering to-dos would be a blessing. Faster searches and RSS are nice improvements, but again, not sure they’re worth forking out for. (more…)

Front Row can be slow as molasses sometimes, particularly when browsing the Movies folder. Sometimes it locks up for over a minute before it moves from one item to the next – presumably while it attempts to render a preview of the movie.

After nearly dying of boredom while waiting to watch a movie one time, I decided to rummage around on the Apple forums, and found the solution: The Perian codec I had installed (0.5) needed updating. I grabbed the latest 1.0 version, upgraded, and restarted the Mac. Problem solved. (It still takes a few seconds to enter the Movies folder, but not the 1-minute-plus that it previously took.)

So if you’re gnashing your teeth wondering why Front Row is taking ages to browse the Movies folder – check your codecs!

I realise that I’m probably in the minority here, but anyway…

The one thing that piqued my interest when I heard Apple was making a phone was the possibility of syncing my iCal calendar events and To Dos with a nice, sexy, Apple-designed PDA-phone. I currently use Missing Sync to sync with my Tungsten T2 – and while both Missing Sync and the Tungsten work, they’re not the most reliable of beasts. And I’d like to have my PDA and phone in one handy gadget. I’m a big GTD fan, so being able to sync events and To Dos is pretty much essential.

Frankly, you can keep your music playback and Google Maps – all I want is a nice way to manage my events and To Dos on the move.

So I was somewhat taken aback to discover that, not only does the iPhone not sync iCal To Dos, but it doesn’t actually have a To Do feature at all! What the…?!

It gets worse. Although it will sync iCal events, it apparently dumps all events into a single calendar. Much like the bad old days with my Tungsten, before I switched from iSync to Missing Sync. Extremely lame.

Come on, Apple – you made iCal, you made the iPhone. Can you not at least get them talking properly to each other?!

All this is probably moot anyway – I live in Australia, so probably won’t get my hands on an iPhone until 2015… 😉

Screenshots are great when you need to illustrate an article, troubleshoot an app, or even just show off your cool  desktop. To take screenshots of your Mac screen, you can fire up the Grab utility (in Applications/Utilities), which does a pretty good job. Or you can use built-in keyboard shortcuts to take instant screenshots at any time:

• To take a screenshot of the whole screen, press Command-Shift-3.
• To capture a selected area of the screen, press Command-Shift-4. The mouse pointer changes to a crosshair. Now drag out a selection rectangle over the area you want to capture, and release the mouse button. (If you decide you don’t want to capture anything after all, hit Esc.)
• To grab a specific window, the menu bar, a menu, or the Dock, press Command-Shift-4 then hit the Space bar. The mouse pointer changes to a spiffy looking camera. Move the mouse over the item to highlight it, then click the mouse button to grab it. (Again, you can press Esc if you want to back out.) You can even capture a pop-up menu like this: right-click (or Control+click) to bring up a pop-up menu, then follow the above steps to highlight the menu and click.

By default, the Mac saves your screenshots as .png files on your desktop (as opposed to Grab’s TIFF files). If you’d rather save the screenshots straight to the Clipboard, ready for pasting into Photoshop or a similar app, hold down Control at the same time. This saves cluttering your desktop with temporary screenshot files.

Unfortunately, neither Grab nor the built-in keyboard shortcuts can capture your mouse pointer as well. (Well, Grab sorta can, but you have to choose from a limited range of pointers in its Preferences; you can’t grab the actual active pointer.) If you need to do this, check out third-party utilities like Snapz Pro, which offers mouse pointer grabbing, and all sorts of other goodies besides.

Finder’s Column View is a bit of a black sheep amongst many Mac users, who tend to eschew it in favour of the more traditional icon and list views. However, Column View has its uses. It lets you see exactly where you are in your folder hierarchy, and it’s great for quickly drilling down through a deep folder structure, as you only need to single-click a folder to open it. You can also use it to quickly preview items such as movies and images.

Here I’ll share a few tips for making Column View a more pleasant experience.

Smart column resizing

One annoying quirk of Column View is the way that long file and folder names get rudely cut off.

You probably know that you can drag a column’s resize handle – that little double bar at the bottom of the column’s vertical divider – to the right to expand a column and view your full file and folder names. But did you know you can double-click the handle to automatically “maximize” the column to fit the width of your longest file or folder name?

Changing default column widths

Talking of resizing columns, you can stretch or shrink all the columns in the Finder window at once by Option-dragging the resize handle of one of the columns.

Even better, Finder remembers this width when opening new Finder windows; Option-drag your columns nice and wide, and they’ll stay that way for evermore.

The same is true with the file selector dialog used when opening or saving files in applications; in this case, Mac OS remembers the column widths on an application-by-application basis. For example, open a file in Firefox with File > Open, and Option-drag a column handle in the file selector to change the width of the columns. The next time you open or save a file in Firefox, the file selector retains your chosen column width.

(more…)

You probably know that dragging a file to the Trash icon doesn’t actually delete the file; to do that, you need to empty the trash by:

• right-clicking the Trash icon and choosing Empty Trash
• choosing Finder > Empty Trash, or
• pressing Shift+Command+Delete while in the Finder.

However, you may not know that emptying your trash doesn’t delete the file either! Like most operating systems, Mac OS merely deletes the pointers to the file’s data on your hard drive; the data remains, and is recoverable if you know what you’re doing (for example, if you’re a hacker looking for credit card numbers!).

Really emptying the trash

Luckily, Mac OS provides a way to not only delete the pointers to the files in the trash, but also to overwrite the files themselves with garbage data. To do this, switch to the Finder and choose Secure Empty Trash from the Finder menu. It may take a while to overwrite all the data. Once done, your deleted files really are history.

Apple has a help page about deleting files and using Secure Empty Trash.

Wiping the whole disk

If you’re selling your Mac and you’re extra paranoid, you may want to wipe all the data on your disk beforehand. You can do this using Disk Utility’s secure erase options. More information in this Apple document. The truly hardcore will want to choose the 35-Pass Erase option, which takes forever, but makes the data nearly impossible to recover using current technologies.

Enjoy your privacy!

In my continuing quest to find a way to instantly, reliably turn off the iMac screen and keep it off, I just stumbled across this little gem: Sleep Display. It’s a little utility – in application or widget form – that lets you sleep your Mac screen instantly. None of that “make it sleep in 1 minute” hassle – just open the app, and your screen instantly sleeps. Wonderful – and about bleeding time. 🙂 (Having said that, I like to lock my display first, so I’ll still probably use the “1 minute” trick – but I’m sure this app will be incredibly useful to some folks.)

Now we just need a way to keep the damn display off. I’ve abandoned the idea of running my DVD backups overnight in the bedroom – spinning up the DVD “conveniently” wakes the display – so I now have to run these during the day. Ah well.

Haven’t moved the iMac into the bedroom yet – that’ll happen in the next month once little Isaac outgrows his bassinet – so I’m not sure what else might cause the display to spontaneously wake in the middle of the night. With a bit of luck it was just the DVD. Time will tell.