paul schreiber

I’ve been playing with the prerelease version of Chrome for Mac OS X and found a rather amusing bug:

Recently, my friend Rob posed a question to twitter:

Is Mac OS X 10.5.7 the single biggest patch Apple has ever released, or just one of the biggest?

I thought that was an easy question to anwser.

I was wrong.

I looked all over the web for this information, and no one seemed to have it in one place.

So, I present to you: the comprehensive Mac OS X software update chart, current as of May 28, 2009. When the downloads are still available, I’ve linked to them on Apple’s site.

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Your Xcode project has one or more targets. Each target builds something—a command-line tool, a framework or an application.

The Target popup menu lets you determine the active target. The active target gets built when you click “Build” or “Build & Go.”

But what about the default target? What is it, and why do you care? Well, if you build from the command line—using xcodebuild—the default target (and only the default target) gets built.

So how do you set it? I looked around in the help, and it wasn’t obvious. Turns out the answer is in the xcodebuild man page:

By default, xcodebuild builds the first target listed in your project, with the default build configuration. The order of the targets is a property of the project and is the same for all users of the project. The active target and active build configuration properties are set for each user of the project and can vary from user to user.

The default target is the first target listed. In this example, the default target and active target are the same — The “Palm Pre UI” Cocoa application:

Suppose we wanted to make the “Shell tool” command-line tool the default target. Simply drag it so it becomes the first item on the list:

Now we’re done. The active target is still the “Palm Pre UI” Cocoa application, but the default target is the “Shell tool” command-line tool:

Recently, I came across some streaming video that was only available to Canadians. Being a Canadian in the US, I felt somewhat entitled. Yes: I wanted to watch a hockey game.

I knew I could do this with an SSH tunnel. I just wasn’t sure how. There are lots of pages explaining how to set up SSH tunnels and proxies, but none were very clear or complete, and they didn’t explain what you had to do on the web browser end.

Step 1: Set up the SSH tunnel

ssh -D 8080 -f -C -q -N user@hostname.ca

Step 2: Set up System Preferences

This is for Safari and other WebKit-based browsers. Note: this will also affect Mail and other CFNetwork-based applications.

1. Select Apple > System Preferences
2. Click Network
3. Select the network interface you wish to use (i.e. AirPort)
4. Click Advance
5. Click Proxies
6. Select Configure Proxies > Manually
7. Check the box beside SOCKS Proxy
8. fill in “localhost” and “8080″
9. Click OK
10. Click Apply

Step 3: Set up Firefox

1. Select Firefox > Preferences
2. Click Advanced
3. Click Network
4. Click Settings
5. Click “Manual proxy configuration”
6. Besides SOCKS Host, fill in “localhost” and “8080″
   Do not fill in any other fields, including “HTTP Proxy”
7. Click SOCKS v5
8. Click OK

FotoMagico is program that lets you create amazing slideshows. In FotoMagico, slides advance in one of two ways:

1. automatically, after a set time period
2. after a mouse click

If you’ve picked option (2), you see a “fast forward” overlay when you click the mouse:

I dislike this. Fortunately, there’s a preference to turn this off.

FotoMagico lets you export your slide shows as standalone player applications, and distribute them to anyone with a Mac.

I found one problem, however. Even when you turn off “Visualize Interactive Control,” the standalone player does not respect this preference. That means you always get the “fast forward” overlay. Yuck.

Fortunately, there is a workaround. If you peek inside the bundle for FotoMagico, you’ll notice it has a CFBundleIdentifier of com.boinx.fotomagico.

If you run defaults read com.boinx.fotomagico before and after setting the preference, you’ll see one line appear:
"PrefsKey_DisplayOverlays" = 0;

Now, look at the Info.plist inside the player. Its CFBundleIdentifier is com.boinx.fotomagico.player.

This means, the fix is simply:
defaults write com.bound.fotomagico.player PrefsKey_DisplayOverlays 0

Here are the tools I mentioned in my Mac Productivity 101 session at the San Fran MusicTech Summit:

Know your instrument

• Inquisitor: Google inside Safari
• Quicksilver and LaunchBar: application launchers

Collaboration

• SubEthaEdit: collaborative text editor
• Screen Sharing: built in to Mac OS X Leopard
• Address Book: built in to Mac OS X
• Teleport: share one keyboard and mouse between multiple Macs
• Adium: multi-protocol instant messaging

Audiovisual

• Audio Hijack Pro and WireTap Studio: record any audio on your Mac
• VLC and Perian: play pretty much any video

Eliminate Distractions

• Spirited Away: hides unused applications
• Writeroom: full screen text editing

Save Your Ass

• DiskWarrior: recover damaged drives

The slides

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Here’s a neat Leopard trick I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Hold down the option key while choosing  > About This Mac, and the menu item will change to “System Profiler.”

That’s much quicker than the old method of (i) select About This Mac, (ii) click “More Info” (iii) close the about window.

It’s not Bungie Spins Off From Microsoft, but rather “Microsoft cuts cord.”

At this year’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, I’m giving version 2.0 of my Bug Reporting Best Practices talk.

The official blurb:

Bug reports that are complete and reproducible help to isolate known issues in system and application software, making a solution much more likely. Learn the bug reporting best practices that Apple has developed in partnership with our third-party developer community. Observe the key components of a great bug report, and how they could expedite your bugs through our processes. You’ll also learn to apply these practices to your own bug processes.

The sound bite version is “I’m teaching developers how to write bugs.”

It’s Wednesday, June 13 at 9 am in The Marina.

Here are some comments from people who’ve attended my previous talks:

• “Paul’s presentation style kicks ass.”
• “Great lively presentation and very interesting content!”
• “Flows well, Paul is a great presenter!”
• “Great information.”

Say you have a SanDisk ImageMate (SDDR-95) USB 2.0 card reader with a Fuji xD card inside it.

And you have a Mac running Mac OS X 10.4.9. And you attach the card reader, insert the card, and … nothing. The drive doesn’t show up on the desktop. It doesn’t show up in the sidebar.

Weird.

You check System Profiler. Good news: the Mac can see the device after all:

ImageMate xD-SM:

Capacity: 250 MB
Removable Media: Yes
Detachable Drive: Yes
BSD Name: disk1
Version: 91.39
Bus Power (mA): 500
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: SanDisk
OS9 Drivers: No
Product ID: 0×9595
Serial Number: 0100536881
S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported
Vendor ID: 0×0781
Volumes:
NO NAME:
Capacity: 249.98 MB
Available: 65.66 MB
Writable: Yes
File System: MS-DOS FAT16
BSD Name: disk1s1
Mount Point: /Volumes/NO NAME

Not only can the Mac see the drive, but it’s mounted. Sure enough, if you go to the Finder, choose Go > Go to Folder, type “/Volumes” and click Go, there it is.

So what gives? If you look around SanDisk’s mess of a web site[1] and register, and search the “Self-Help”[2][3][4] section, you find the article “My USB reader/USB Flash Drive won’t mount on Mac OS 10.3.3?“[5]. However, SanDisk’s article just point’s to Apple’s article “Mac OS X 10.3.3: USB device, FireWire device, RAID card or SCSI card doesn’t work after updating to 10.3.3,” which tells you to upgrade to 10.3.4 or better.

But we’re already using 10.4.9. That doesn’t help.

Here was the workaround I came up with:

• Launch Disk Utility
• Erase the xD card

Poof! Eject the card, stick it back in the camera, take a photo, stick it back in the reader and it shows up. Weird.

1. The link I used won’t even take you directly to the product page.
2. Or “Self Help,” depending on which team wrote the copy.
3. a.k.a. knowledge base
4. This site has been outsourced to CustomerNation.
5. I can’t even paste the full 776-character URL here, because WordPress is having trouble with it.