Status-Q

Here's how you can install Apple's Front Row software on any Mac running Tiger 10.4.4.

Works for me...

Apologies to those of you not interested in Mac-related posts. I expect the current flurry to die down soon!

I noticed a subtle but interesting change in the graphics specs for the new Intel-based iMac:

For the first time ever, iMac lets you use a second display in extended desktop mode, in addition to simply mirroring the first.

In the past, the iMac and the iBook have supported external displays but only as a clone of the main one, unlike the PowerMac and PowerBook. This was never a hardware limitation, only a marketing decision and there's a good reliable hack to get over that foolishness. But it's nice to see it won't be necessary.

Well, I've been very patient. Patient, first, while my insurance company took two months to pay up after my old Powerbook came to a tragic end, and then patient while I waited for Steve Jobs' keynote address. But it was worth it, because he announced the Powerbook replacement, the MacBook Pro, and I have one on the way... Hee hee.

But my patience is not yet exhausted, and it's just as well, because though they're taking orders now, delivery is sometime in February. And the Apple retail stores will no doubt get them sooner than the local dealer with whom I placed my order. I'm hoping that good things come to those who wait...

One thing my new MacBook won't have is a PCMCIA (PC Card) slot. I've been rather fond of this on my old Powerbook - a CF card adaptor lives there permanently, and it means that I can always get photos off my camera without the need for cables.

The new machines have an ExpressCard slot. This is the replacement for the old PC Card standard; it has been around for a while and has lots of advantages, but I haven't seen any cards for it yet, and the slot is too small for a Compact Flash adaptor, so it'll be back to cables, I guess, for transferring my photos.

Not only did Apple come out with some great new stuff yesterday, but Google Earth is now available for the Mac. Wonderful!

I'm a bit late with this one, but the new official DivX codec for the Mac came out a couple of weeks ago, and integrates nicely with QuickTime. After the trial period there's a charge if you want to create DivX-encoded movies, but the package also includes the free codec which will let you watch them indefinitely.

If you don't know why you'd need this, you probably don't! If, on the other hand, you regularly download movies created on PCs and find that they don't play, this will help with quite a lot of them. The other solution is to install the excellent VLC player, which seems to play pretty much everything, though it isn't as pretty or as easy to use as QuickTime Player.

I wrote about TextMate a couple of days ago. Giles Turnbull is also a new convert.

I'm not normally a listener to the Catholic Insider podcast, but I think, at Christmas, if you know anything about Apple's products, and especially if you've ever watched one of Steve Jobs' keynotes, you will enjoy God's Keynote Speech.

First heard on the MacCast.

There are some very good text editors for the Mac.

SubEthaEdit is nothing short of wonderful for its collaboration features - if you haven't tried this, you should find a friend with a Mac and do so - and it's not at all bad as a general-purpose editor. TextWrangler has a somewhat nostalgic Mac-classic feel to it, but has a wonderfully useful feature of being able to browse, open and save files on a remote machine via SFTP/FTP. You simply pres shift-cmd-O and shift-cmd-S instead of cmd-O and cmd-S. If, like me, you spend a lot of time editing config files and web pages on remote servers, this is very nice.

But the one I've recently converted to is TextMate. I'd seen people starting to rave about this app, but hadn't quite worked out why. The more time I spent with it, though, the more I liked it, to the extent that I forked out the 39 EU to buy a license within a few days, not something I'd often do for a program that didn't even have documentation. The Bundle system, which groups together the functionality associated with particular types of file, is very nice, and I find I'm starting to miss the various shortcuts, completion mechanisms and auto-expansions when I'm entering text into anything else.

It doesn't have TextWrangler's convenient access to remote files, but I've long been a fan of the Transmit FTP utility, and if you specify TextMate as the editor then everything's pretty seamless.

And then this week, not only did documentation arrive, but people are starting to produce screencasts, showing how to get the most out of it. More info here.

I've been experimenting with the Open Source backup system 'Bacula', which is gaining popularity as an alternative to the venerable Amanda.

I wanted to use my Linux machine to backup our two Macs, so I needed a version of the Bacula agent bacula-fd which was built for Mac OS X. That turned out to be pretty easy to do, but since I've had an amazing number of visitors to the post where I made a copy of 'wget' available, I thought I'd put this up here too in case anyone else is looking for it.

So here is a gzipped tar file containing the basics. Note that this doesn't contain any of the other bits of Bacula, only the file daemon that you'll need if you want to back your Mac up over the network from elsewhere. I haven't done extensive testing, but it seems to be working OK. This is from Bacula 1.38.2, and was built on Mac OS X 10.4.3.

Some quick notes on how to use it:

The path names here can be changed if you edit the appropriate config files - these are just the ones I used.

1. Copy bacula-fd to /usr/local/sbin (creating the directory if necessary)
2. Edit bacula-fd.conf to your requirements. See the Bacula website for docs if you don't know how to do this.
3. Copy bacula-fd.conf to /usr/local/etc (again, creating the directory if necessary).
4. Set the permissions so that bacula-fd.conf is not generally readable.
5. Create the directory /var/bacula/working as a working directory.
6. You probably want hfsplussupport = yes in the Options bit of the FileSet declaration on the server.
7. You can now test it from the command line with
   sudo /usr/local/sbin/bacula-fd -c /usr/local/etc/bacula-fd.conf
   Add -f and -d100 if you want it to stay in the foreground and print debugging info.
8. On Tiger, the right way to start things on boot-up is to use launchd. Copy bacula-fd.plist to /Library/LaunchDaemons (editing it if you've used any different paths).
9. You can use sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/bacula-fd.plist to load it into your currently-running launchd. You should then be able to see it with sudo launchctl list.
10. Assuming that worked OK, you can start the daemon running with sudo launchctl start org.bacula.bacula-fd.