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(First, yes I do realize the ‘X’ in ‘OS X’ is pronounced “ten” not “ecks.” I simply like the portmanteau.)

With the release of Leopard, I discovered the need to migrate my existing Tiger system onto an external drive. I needed it to be bootable, and I wanted to have a little discontinuity as possible. Apple generally makes this pretty easy, but it’s still a bit involved. I write this article from my migrated system, currently booting Tiger off of a USB drive.

People like their applications to work. Even better, they like them to work, even when things change. For the WinTel world, this isn’t a big deal (Vista aside ;), because the underlying CPU architecture hasn’t really changed, from a program’s point of view, in the past two decades. Unless you have a weird program that’s designed for AMD’s 3DNow! instruction set and you switch to an Intel CPU, or perhaps an application designed for a more esoteric old SIMD architecture, your application should run just fine (as long as your Operating System is ok with it).

Mac OS X doesn’t have the luxury of working on the same underlying CPU though, so things need to be handled a little bit differently. The solution Apple came up with was

Good morning gentle readers. I opened up my craptop this morning to witness the struggles of what seemed to be a laptop battling cancer. No, this was not another case of opteron cancer. Instead I found that Windows, unable to cope with my Cisco Aironet 350 wireless card, was creating network connections one after another in the system tray.

Updated: now with response.

I thought to myself this morning – I want an Eggo Waffle. You see, I have never had one, but have always been interested. There were some in the freezer that Robert had bought, removed from their packaging because of his space-saving ways.

Naturally I found the need to prepare an Eggo Waffle to the correct specifications as I wanted to make sure that I was having the correct Eggo experience (microwave, toast, pan fry, what?). To my surprise the feast was ruined (credit for the title), and breakfast was not magically delicious.

For years, iPhoto users have been stuck using a limited number of email clients to send their photos easily. This was mostly remedied by the iPhoto Mailer Patcher, but it left out non-applescript aware applications because, after all, iPhoto uses applescript to interface with them. One of the more notable omissions is Thunderbird.

Finally, this void has also been filled, via the iPhoto Thunderbird Bridge. It’s still quite primitive, but all the basics are there for iPhoto-Thunderbird integration.

If you’re an iPhoto/Thunderbird user, give it a whirl.

Paper Is Bad Records, Inc. was formed with no fanfare whatsoever back in 2005 by some of the people behind Tuesday Afternoon at China Wong Buffet as a venue for production and distribution of the resulting DVD. The DVD was a huge success and we all became rock stars. In our decadent complacency, we never got around to making a website for our one-hit-wonder.

NSSpeechSynthesizer, the Cocoa class responsible for giving applications a voice under OS X, is leaky. Creating and destroying thousands of instances of this class slowly consumes all the available memory in a system, leading to degrading performance and eventual application instability.

The disappointing part is that this bug was first noticed almost two years ago.

The Kineme Quartz Composer patches now have a proper home at https://kineme.net/, including forums, bug reports, comments, and feature requests – complete with voting!

Along with the new site, a few new patches are available as well based on requests from users.

While writing the new Image Downloader (Blocking) QC patch for CoreMelt, I ran into what appears to be a bug in Mac OS X’s NSURLConnection framework – if you construct an NSURLRequest and specify a timeout of less than 30 seconds, it’s ignored when you perform a [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:returningResponse:error:]. The request takes at least 30 seconds to time out, contrary to what the documentation suggests..

Steps to Reproduce:

Faced with a need to recover images from Robert’s camera after a defective card-reader nuked the filesystem superblock, a quick utility came to mind. Nuked superblocks mean no file allocation table. It means no metadata. But it does not mean no data.

• Target medium: 1GB XD card from a digital camera.
• Data to recover: JPEGs. Lots of them.

Whipping out some jpeg-format-and-filesystem-jutsu, here’s the solution (for less than that $20 shareware recovery utility):

Making pop-up menus in custom Quartz Composer patches is actually surprisingly easy.

1. Set up a QCIndexPort input. QCIndexPorts provide values from 0 to whatever max you specify using - (void)setMaxIndexValue:(unsigned int)max;.

Here’s a new version of the Xcode Template for Custom Quartz Composer Patches.

Changes:

• Rebuilt from scratch – no longer depends on QCJP’s work – and, by extension, the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike” license. My Xcode Template, as of version 0.2, is released into the Public Domain. You are free to use it for whatever – commercial or non-commercial.
• QCJP’s headers were replaced with headers assembled directly from the QuartzComposer framework – now located in the QuartzComposer/ folder of the project. I’ve exported a few more headers than QCJP had constructed, so there’s some added functionality (namely, image input/output ports).
• The project now automatically assigns an icon to the patch bundle, and installs it in /Library/Graphics/Patches/ for you each time you build, for faster edit-build-test workflow.

Download the installer, version 0.2.

See the old version’s blogpost for some additional instructions and user comments.

Steve Mokris is a developer at Kosada, Inc.

For those that deal with complex networking, having a device’s MAC address can be very helpful in diagnostics, configuration, and firewalling. Often just using a device’s IP address is enough, but what about DHCP? Unless you can control the device’s IP range, this can cause many hours of troubleshooting. This is where having a MAC address helps.

Recently we had an interesting opportunity to deploy 7 identical customized machines for one of Kosada’s consulting clients. We’ve been working on disk images to make this quick and painless, and have more or less succeeded. However, getting an archived image onto the machines has a few different methods, depending on circumstance. We also get to pay a penalty every time the underlying hardware changes, since the image bundles in specific drivers. Usually we’re able to work around this with minimal pain.

Excitingly, these new machines broke the mold (they’re slightly older, considerably cheaper machines), so we had to tweak the image a bit.

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a P5 Glove listed on eBay for $20. It arrived a couple of days later, and I started playing with libp5glove by Jason McMullan, Tim Kreger, and Ross Bencina. I built a very simple Quartz Composer patch around it.