The Syncing Apple

I’ve had my MacBook (white) for a few weeks now. And I strongly suggest you get the glossy screen if you don’t work with over head fluorescent lights. The screen is so bright and nice I can’t go back to my older LCD panels any more- they look horrible. Also my G5 now seems so sluggish. The first thing I did is put 2G ram in, and its just an incredible deal from Apple. This much power for such a cheap price. Parallels runs so nicely that I don’t even use my XP laptop anymore.

The recent 10.4.7 update switched the JDK to java 5.0. If you still need to use 1.4.2 for some reason, its still in there. Here is how you change it. It’s just a symlink in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions

chac:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions dillera$ ls -l
total 40
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 Jun 10 22:20 1.3 -> 1.3.1
drwxr-xr-x 8 root wheel 272 Apr 18 09:31 1.3.1
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 Apr 18 09:31 1.4 -> 1.4.2
drwxr-xr-x 8 root wheel 272 Apr 18 09:31 1.4.2
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 Jun 10 22:20 1.5 -> 1.5.0
drwxr-xr-x 8 root wheel 272 Apr 18 09:31 1.5.0
drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 170 Jun 27 19:23 A
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1 Jun 10 22:20 Current -> A
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 Jun 10 22:20 CurrentJDK -> 1.5.0
chac:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions dillera$ sudo rm CurrentJDK
chac:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions dillera$ sudo ln -s 1.4.2 CurrentJDK

chac:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions dillera$ ls -l
total 40
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 Jun 10 22:20 1.3 -> 1.3.1
drwxr-xr-x 8 root wheel 272 Apr 18 09:31 1.3.1
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 Apr 18 09:31 1.4 -> 1.4.2
drwxr-xr-x 8 root wheel 272 Apr 18 09:31 1.4.2
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 Jun 10 22:20 1.5 -> 1.5.0
drwxr-xr-x 8 root wheel 272 Apr 18 09:31 1.5.0
drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 170 Jun 27 19:23 A
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1 Jun 10 22:20 Current -> A
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 Jun 28 10:55 CurrentJDK -> 1.4.2
Now it’s all better.

Of course I wasted all that time yesterday snapping photos of the new ITOS’06 Beta when the classic Load Applet and Screenshot taker was ported and sitting over in the Maemo Garage. It works fine In 2006. After I took a few shots I realized there was no easy way to get them to my Mac, without having SSH or Xterm handy on the 770. So I ended up loading Opera, got on Gmail, and then attached them to an email to my self. That worked fine.

Screen Shot of the amazing FBreader, which is also already ported and ready to go.

Screen shot of me attaching my screenshots in a Gmail to myself.

Here is my Gmail, attachment laden and ready to send.

It’s all in there this time. Control Panel, Memory, Virtual Tab.

Sweet. Extend away.

Have you used the thumb-board (T-Board) yet? It’s tricky. The idea is that you use the pressure of your thumb or finger, say, in the chat screen and the T-board will pop up. You put in your line of text, then return to the chat screen.

Here is the T-board:

You control the pressure to activate it in the Text Input Settings Control Panel:

You have to mash the screen pretty hard, with the default settings, but it works. Now it makes more sense…

So the new IM client on ITOS’06 is really nice. Of course it does Google, and through that Google Talk- but it also seems to be a full featured Jabber client.

At my company, we’ve installed our own Jabber server for internal IM. I was able to easily add a new “account” and connect to that Jabber server- and the Nokia IM client pulled in all those contacts as well and aggregates them together with the Gmail contacts. Nice work. Some screen shots below show the story.

The Account Control Panel (this is after I added in my work Jabber account)

Adding a new account, specify your own Jabber server (or account at jabber.com)

Now status shows both accounts (Google is the talk icon, Jabber is the lightbulb)

And my contacts for both accounts are all in there.

This looks to be a great release. I was worried that we wouldn’t see this till later summer. Its amazing that Nokia has this much in the beta already.

Lots of talk on the net about this- and they are all correct- this beta is amazing. It’s very fast and the the UI enhancements are nice. I’ve taken some screen shots (12) the old fashion way, and I’ll let them do the talking.

First, the flasher on OSX worked like a charm:

blinky:~ dillera$ sudo ./flasher.macosx -F BETA.SU-18_2006SE_0.2006.22-21_PR_F5_MR0_ARM.bin -f -R
Password:
Found image kernel (length 1266304)
Found image initfs (length 1880192)
Found image rootfs (length 67633152)
Found image secondary (length 86784)
Found image xloader (length 13824)
USB device found found at bus 003, device address 002-0421-0105-02-00
Found board Nokia 770 (F5)
NOLO version 0.9.0
Sending X-Loader image (13 kB)…
100% (13 of 13 kB, avg. 613 kB/s)
Sending secondary image (84 kB)…
100% (84 of 84 kB, avg. 718 kB/s)
Flashing X-Loader… done.
Sending kernel image (1236 kB)…
100% (1236 of 1236 kB, avg. 733 kB/s)
Flashing kernel… done.
Sending initfs image (1836 kB)…
100% (1836 of 1836 kB, avg. 728 kB/s)
Flashing initfs… done.
Sending and flashing rootfs image (66048 kB)…
100% (66048 of 66048 kB, avg. 625 kB/s)
Finishing flashing… done

When it was done, I had my 2006 770 ready to go!

Here is the new Desktop. That Google bar is a search bar- type something in and it will pop open the browser with the search results.

Continue reading on for my 12 other screen shots……

Continue Reading »

I love Firefox and I hate Firefox. On the Mac, it’s great and it’s even better on my new MacBook- it’s super fast. You are using the built-for-G4-G5-Intel builds over at Beatnikpad aren’t you?

With all the Firefox goodness however, there has always been one thing that has driven me nuts: the ToolTips. I like to keep my Bookmarks Toolbar viewable, and I have all the bookmarks that I ever use arranged there. I never use the old Bookmarks menu anymore. And when I find a nice link to add, I like to drag and drop it into the Bookmark Folder there on the Toolbar. This works fine in Windows. On the Mac however, there has always been these blasted ToolTips that pop up and block you from dropping the URL onto the Toolbar Folder. So I had finally had enough of them and figured out how to kill them. It’s easy enough.

Enter about:config in your URL area. That will open up all the configuration options for you. Use the filter to find toolbar_tips. Its value should be true (i.e. show the stupid tips) click anywhere on the preference and it will switch to false. Now save and close this and those useless tooltips are gone for good.

Also you should try using FoxMarks to keep all your Firefox bookmarks in sync, between computers.

So my Solaris sysadmin skillz are getting rusty, and I had to add a new virtual disk to a VMware Solaris9 X86 system (it’s a long story) and I was drawing a blank….

bash-2.05# dmesg | grep ata
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris pcplusmp: [ID 637496 kern.info] pcplusmp: ide (ata) instance 0 vector 0xe ioapic 0×1 intin 0xe is bound to cpu 0
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 640982 kern.info] IDE device at targ 0, lun 0 lastlun 0×0
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 521533 kern.info] model VMware Virtual IDE Hard Drive, stat 50, err 0
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 241969 kern.info] cfg 0×427a, cyl 16383, hd 15, sec/trk 63
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 674665 kern.info] mult1 0×8040, mult2 0×110, dwcap 0×0, cap 0×2f00
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 350272 kern.info] piomode 0×200, dmamode 0×0, advpiomode 0×3
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 245087 kern.info] minpio 160, minpioflow 120
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 435839 kern.info] valid 0×7, dwdma 0×7, majver 0×1e
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 640982 kern.info] ATAPI device at targ 1, lun 0 lastlun 0×0
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 521533 kern.info] model VMware Virtual IDE CDROM Drive, stat 50, err 1
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 241969 kern.info] cfg 0×85c4, cyl 0, hd 0, sec/trk 0
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 674665 kern.info] mult1 0×0, mult2 0×0, dwcap 0×0, cap 0xf00
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 350272 kern.info] piomode 0×200, dmamode 0×200, advpiomode 0×3
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 245087 kern.info] minpio 120, minpioflow 120
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 435839 kern.info] valid 0×6, dwdma 0×7, majver 0×1e
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris pci: [ID 370704 kern.info] PCI-device: ide@0, ata0
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] ata0 is /pci@0,0/pci-ide@7,1/ide@0

That all looked like crap… what the hell do you do again for X86 type disks in Solaris? Luckily Xwing at Kernal trap.org has a killer howto that answered all my questions. So if you need that, there it is.