…To MacBook

I saw that Snow Leopard was only going to be $29 and I was so ready to jump on that bandwagon until the day they released it. Rumors went around that Parallels 3.0 does not work on Snow Leopard. This doesn’t work for me because I have a windows XP drive set up with parallels 3.0 which I use when some clients require me to use Windows or to test web pages on IE. Some people recommended I use a different VM but I spent a long time just setting up the windows on parallels that I don’t want to do that all over again.

Just when I quit on the idea of upgrading to snow leaopard, I found this site that has a large list of application compatibility with Snow Leopard:

http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/o-t

That’s where I found out that Parallels 4.0 works with Snow Leopard, so I decided to upgrade. I just spent $56.98 to upgrade to 4.0.

Installation is pretty straight forward. I downloaded a .dmg file from Parallels, double click on the file and you get a window that has the installation package. Just double click the installation package and follow the instructions. I just went with all the defaults without changing anything.

Before starting parallels 4.0 up, remember to first back up your windows installation just in case something goes horribly wrong. I’m using time machine and will be forcing it to do a backup right before I start it up. If you don’t have time machine set up then you could just as easily go to where you installed your windows VM and you should find two files. The first is a .pvs file, should be a small file that just has the VM configuration (mine is called “Microsoft Windows XP PRO.pvs”). The second file is the actual virtual hard drive (yeah I said actual virtual!) with a .hdd extension (mine is called winxp.hdd). You can also save the .fdd file (the floppy drive) but I don’t think that’s necessary but why not just back that up as well.

After installation, I ran the windows vm configuration by double clicking on it. I got a prompt that asked me to upgrade the VM to the new version with a warning to back up before doing so. Because we’ve already backed everything up, I just went ahead with the upgrade process. After a few minutes, parallels 4 started normally. The only problem I’ve been having is an issue with the floppy drive not being recognized which I don’t really care about because I don’t use it, everything else is working.

I was looking for a good way to stream my MP3s and Videos from my itunes to my xbox 360. The xbox talks about connecting to a media pc on your local system and there was no obvious way of connecting the xbox to my mac, until I found Nullriver’s Connect 360. I first downloaded their trial version from here. Installation was a breeze, just unzip the file and then double click on the “Connect360.prefPane” file and connect 360 gets installed in your System Preferences pane under the “Other” section:

Preferences Pane with Connect 360 installed

Once you open the Connect 360 preference, all you have to do is click the “Start” button and it will index your iTunes content and make it available for xbox 360. You will then see your computer’s name come up on the 360 when you go to the music or video library.

I didn’t even have to think about going to the site and paying the $20 fee to nullriver. It was so easy to install, so easy to get started and when I played some of the MP3s on the 360 and saw how well it worked I immediately bought a key to activate the full version. I would highly recommend this to anyone who has a mac and an xbox 360.

I was writing a blog post about an application and wanted to display the application’s icon. I didn’t want to take a screen capture because I might grab things I don’t need or the caprtured image may be too small. I found an article that mentioned a paragraph on how to do this properly (I unfortunately lost the link to that article).

The process is pretty simple. Go to your Applications folder and select the application you want. Let’s use ITunes as an example:

Application Window ITunes Highlighted

While ITunes is highlighted, press Command+C to copy or right click on itunes and choose Copy from the menu.

Next open up the “Preview” application and press Command+N or from the menu pick File->New From Clipboard. This will open up the Itunes icon in all the different sizes

Preview App With Icons Of Different Sizes

Next just pick the size you want from the sidebar and then save the image as a JPEG or PNG and you now have a clean version of the icon:

ITunes Icon

When an application in OS X is stalling on you and you have given up on regaining control of it, the best thing to do is kill it before it takes down your whole machine. Usually you would right click on the application icon in the Dock and choose the menu item “Quit” or “Force Quit” if available and that should do the trick.

Dock Menu When Right Clicking Application

Or you could click on the top left corner “apple” icon which will bring up a menu where you will see something called “Force Quit”. Choosing that option will open a small window with a list of the running applications which you can forcibly kill.

Force Quit Applications

Sometimes though a key component of OS X fails on you which you don’t have an option to force quit like the above mentioned methods. I came to such a situation when the Dock froze on me the other day. It just would not come up at all. Today I had a similar situation when I had cover flow switched on in the finder while I was browsing an external hard drive that has 20 gigs of hundreds of subfolders inside hundreds of subfolders that contain thousands of photos. Cover flow could not handle this and it wouldn’t allow me to do antyhing else either. I had an application crunching data for the past 5 hours so restarting the machine was definitely not an option. I needed a way to cleanly kill Finder without destroying any other work going on. In situations like this you need to go beyond the GUI and directly to the terminal. Yes, I know, now that I am writing this article, I noticed that the “Force Quit” application actually has Finder as an option but being someone from a linux background I immediately go to Terminal for anything I need rather than look for GUI solutions.

What you need to do is find the PID (Process ID) of the application you need to kill. To do this, type the following in Terminal:

ps aux | grep Finder

The result of that command will be something like:

sergemadenian   131 97.1 25.9  1213744 542124   ??  R    Fri12PM  54:49.70 /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder -psn_0_40970
sergemadenian  3932   0.1  0.0   590472    192 s000  R+   10:07PM   0:00.00 grep Finder

“ps aux” is the command that prints out all the currently running processes from all users. ” | grep Finder” will restrict the results of the “ps” command to show only the lines that contain the word “Finder”.

From the above result you can tell that the Finder application is question is the first line and I have set the PID in Bold and red “131″. You can also tell that this process is struggling because immediately after the pid we see the CPU and memory usage which in this case is “97.1 25.9″ (those are percentages).

Now that we know the PID (131) all you need to do is run the command:

kill -9 131

“-9″ tells the OS to kill immediately. That took care of the offending Finder window and I noticed that a new Finder process had been kicked off by the OS. If a new process had not automatically been kicked off, I would have had to start it manually by running the command that was running before which I’ve marked in blue and bold ”

Same process applies to any application including the Dock. All you need to do is find the specific PID by changing what you filter with grep. For the Dock as an example, you will need to run:

ps aux | grep Dock

Remember that the PID is not a universal number (that is your Finder application will not have 131, even my computer will have a different PID for Finder when I restart it) so you need to always find the unique PID running at the time.

Here’s another post that will be a short one for mac OS X. The best way to control what will run on startup is to go to System Preferences -> Accounts Pick the user you want to modify the startup list for and choose the “Login Items” tab. You should see something like this:

Account Login Items

At this point just pick the application you want to stop running on startup and click on the “-” sign to remove it from the list.

I recently heard about, and installed Understudy; an open source plugin for Front Row that allows access to streamin media. It currently supports Netflix streaming and Hulu. I don’t really care about Hulu but I do have a netflix account and I already use netflix to watch movies on my xbox. Installing front row was straight forward but once in the front row interface, it was a little tricky to get used to the operation of the plugin.

First you need to go into the understudy category and add new feed. From the netflix menu you can add different categories like the most popular list of all time, the newest movies avaqilable to watch instantly, most popular last week and so on. You need to open safari before loading front row and you need to be logged into your netflix account. In true front row fashion the list shows up on the right and a thumbnail with a description of the movie on the left.

What I like about the plugin is the clean interface of front row to browse the movies. I also like the fact that I can browse list of movies especially the latest additions to the instant system. The code seems to work fine without any problems.

My gripe though is that I need to open safari, go to netflix.com, log in and then open front row. If I need to do all that then why not just continue using safari? I wish this plugin had an area where I could put my username and password and it would log into netflix wihtout the need to start safari. The other issue is that my own movie queue does not show up which is available on the xbox version. Both the xbox and understudy have no way of searching the netflix library and you are pretty much stuck just using the lists that are available. It’s a little ahead of the xbox because of the ability to browse some lists at least whereas the xbox only has your queue. To watch anything on the xbox you need to first log into your account on a computer, find the movie and add it to your queue.

Even though it’s missing some of the features that I’d like to see, understudy is in it’s infancy and is a great step forward in streaming movies on front row. I encourage mac users to download the plugin.

I usually try to post tutorials on this blog to help users figure out how to do things on their new macbook, it’s also mostly for my own benefit because I look back 6 months later and wonder “how did I do that?”. Today I will be posting a product review (angry rant) about the $70 Mighty Mouse from Apple which people shouldn’t even waste time on even if it was given to them for free.

First off, what is the Mighty Mouse? it’s a wireless mouse by Apple that looks cool and works great when you first start off. Here’s a description off of Apple’s own product page:

“How do you improve on the mouse that has everything? Remove its tail. Mighty Mouse — the mouse that changed the way you scroll — has gone wireless. Now you can take that seamless, touch-sensitive, 360-degree scrolling design with you wherever you go.“

I was given one at work left over from another colleague who switched jobs. Setting the mouse up was pretty easy and straightforward. The mouse worked great. The wireless feature is amazing because you don’t need to pull the wire as it gets stuck on something on the desk.

The pain started shortly after setting it up and using it for about a week. The mouse scroll just stopped working. First it wouldn’t scroll up, then it would’nt scroll at all. Since it’s a mouse ball as a scroll wheel, I knew this had to be issue with dirt. No problem, I remember the old days when there were no lasers for mice and the ball would collect dirt and get stuck. I’ll just open up the hood and clean the scroll ball… how do you open up the hood to this thing?  The bottom door just leads to the battery. Maybe I need to take the batteries out. Nope nothing there. I’ll look online. wow, there’s actually no easy way to open up and clean the scroll ball. 

This problem isn’t just something that happened to me. I went around the office and found out the same issue with a wired mouse that comes with the iMac. I also found other who had the same problem that comes and goes every now and then. A google search turned up many results for this issue, here’s one of them from http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com:

“The fix? Blow compressed air around the scroll ball, or just push on it really hard and roll it around (that worked for me). If you’re lucky (I was), it will start working again.”

“If you’re lucky”? is this what we’ve come down to? luck of the draw to fix a hardware issue? Apparently I’m not lucky this time. That solution has worked in the past but now it has been two days and nothing seems to work. I will have to just open up this mouse and hope it’ll be as good as new when I put it back together. If it doesn’t, I don’t really care anymore because I’m going to dump this $70 dollar mouse and get a cheap $5 one that will probably work without causing this many problems.

While using the macbook I’ve picked up a few keyboard shortcuts that I now use all the time. Here is a list of them:

1. Command+tab: to switch between different applications. This is similar to window’s alt+tab. You can hold down the command button and press/release tab and a prompt will come up to show you all the currently open programs. If you press and release the tab button it will then go to the next program and so on until you find the one you want and you let the command button go. This is extremely useful when you have multiple applications open and switching between them often. The biggest difference between windows and linux is that you switch between different application and not different windows of an application. For example if you have three different windows of firefox open comman+tab will not switch between those windows whereas alt+tab on other systems will. Mac OS X has a different keyboard shortcut to accomplish just that and it’s the next on the list.
2. Command+~: Switching between different windows of the same application. Just as the case specified above, when you have three windows of firefox open and you want to switch between then, you just use the command+~ shortcut.
3. Command+C: Copy.
4. Command+V: Paste.
5. Command+X: Cut.
6. Command+Q: Quit the current application. This is similar to pressing Alt+F4 on a windows machine but the greatest difference is that with Alt+F4 you only close the current window or instance of that application you are looking at, whereas with Command+Q you are quitting the whole application. If we continue our example of having three firefox windows open, on a windows machine Alt+F4 will close the current window and when you are at the last window it will quit the whole application. On a macbook Command+Q will wuit the application closing all three windows at once. Just like Command+Tab there is a window specific shortcut and that is next.
7. Command+W: Close only the current window of an application. This key is what is probably the closest to Alt+F4 on a windows machine because it will close the current window of the application you are on. Unlike windows’ shortcut though it will not quit the application if you close the last window. You will notice that the application is still showing as active in the Dock as well as the menu bar showing up at the top. If we follow the firefox example, closing the last window will still keep firefox open and you could open firefox again very fast because it’s still running in memory. You could use the next shortcut to open the new widnow.
8. Command+N: Open a new window of the application. This is application specific.
9. Command+Space: Open the spotlight prompt. You can use spotlight to find any files or even start up an application for you. Once you get used to this you will see that you rarely use finder or even the Dock to start your application. you want to open up firefox, just press Command+Space and then start typing the name “fire” you won’t even need to finish it and you’ll see firefox come up in the list. Use the arrow keys to go up and down the list to highlight the firefox Application and press enter.
10. Command+Shift+3 and Command+Shift+4: Take a screenshot. For more information look at our screen capture post.
11. Shift+Fn+Left Arrow: Home. This works in different ways on different application. I use terminal a lot and in terminal it will be like pressing “Home” on a keyboard and go to the beginning of the command. In other applications I’ve seen it go to the top of the text (like this input box in the browser jumps to the first character). In other applications you also don’t need to press the Shift key but you do in terminal.
    (Edit: Peter Morgan recently posted a comment pointing out that point 11, 12 and 13 do not need the Shift key to work if you are using Mac OS X 10.5.6. Thank you Peter for the info )
12. Shift+Fn+Right Arrow: End. Works the same way as the home button.
13. Shift+Fn+Up Arrow or Down Arrow: Page Up and Page Down respectively. Works the same way as the home button
14. Fn+Delete: Delete. The way the delete button alone works is more commonly known as backspace in other systems, it will delete the text found right behind (to the left of) the cursor. To delete the text found in front (to the right of) the cursor you need to press Fn+Delete.
15. Fn+FX where X is a number between 1 and 12: Issues that function key as pressed. You will notice that the Function keys (F1, F2, … F12) have other uses like dimming the screen, controlling the speaker, starting spaces or expose and so on. Sometimes though you just want to press the F1 button, in those cases you need to use it in conjunction with the Fn key.
16. Ctrl+Eject: Brings up the shutdown prompt to easily issue a shutdown or restart command.
17. Command+Home: Go to beginning of the line.
18. Command+End: Go to end of the line.
19. Command+Up Arrow (Page Up): Go to beginning of file.
20. Command+Down Arrow (Page Down): Go to end of file.

These are the most common keyboard shortcuts that I use and can think of right now. Let me know if you have a favorite one and I’ll add that to the list.

Recently we’ve started using some packages in java that require us to use Java 1.6 (sometimes refered to as Java 6. Which one is it java, 1.6 or 6? We’re at war, pick a side!). If you have Mac OSX leopard then you should have both 1.5 and 1.6 installed on the system but by default 1.5 is used.

To check which version is being used when you log in, open up terminal and type:

java -version
You should see something like:

java version “1.5.0_16″
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_16-b06-284)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_16-133, mixed mode, sharing)

To switch this to use 1.6 instead, you need to add the following to your .bashrc:

alias java=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Commands/java
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/

Remember to either exit your terminal and start a new session or just run the command:

source ~/.bashrc

for the changes to take effect.

I’m finally back. I had to close the site for a while because of a bad spam problem. While I was away I learned something new about the macbook. How to get some diagnostic data on your battery.

Issues with my battery started recently. What would happen is the battery would be chargning, reaches “finishing charge”, then the adapter light turns green and the battery indicator turns to “Charged”. A few seconds later though the adapter light turns orange again and the indicator goes back to “Charging” then “Finishing Charge”. It basically looks like it continuously charges and doesn’t stop once done. This definitely can’t be good for the battery.

Well I took it into the apple store and a genius looked at it and basically told me that my battery has passed the recommended number of cycles and it is pretty much downhill from here. The typical “Cycal count” is around 300 and I was at 318. You can tell this by going to the apple icon at the top left of your screen, click on “About this mac”, in the dialog that comes up click on the “More Info” button and then under hardware find the “Power” section. In that section you should be able to see more details about your battery including the cycle count.

A few tools I found useful for battery info:

1. Coconut Batter: http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/
   if you don’t want to go throught he “About this mac” dialog. You can download coconut battery. This will pretty much tell you the same info but also allows you to save the details at any point in time so you can view it again later. It also has the default charge for most mac laptops so you can tell how much charge your battery has lost.
2. iStat Pro by iSlayer: http://www.islayer.com/index.php?op=item&id=7
   iSlayer has a cool widget that tells you the overall health of your laptop. Things like CPU load, heat of the processor, the heatsink, the hard drive and battery info as well.