Macking 128

Welcome to Bangalore, Mackers
It's a confirmed rumor -- Apple is moving all of their tech support, not just their iMac support, to India. An article in the Hindustan Times says the call center will be similar to the one Dell employs. This might be a good time to let Apple know of your disapproval of this move. Send them a snail-mail letter; it's way more effective than email.
The Mac is almost completely unknown in India. You know this if you have ever called tech support for any company that makes software for both Microsofts and Macs. They have no clue; most have never even seen one, and they do not have one there. All they have is a script, and if you have specific questions, good luck getting answers.
We should assume that Apple will at least spend a little money there, by providing actual Macs for them to work on, even though they are trying to save money by off-shoring. Will they hire only excited Indian workers who truly WANT to become Mackers? Will they give Macs to all the workers? I highly doubt it. This looks like bad news for all of us.

Opera for OS9
You do have an alternative to the obsolete browsers (Netscape 7.0.2 and the officially-abandoned IE) left to you: Opera, formerly a paid product is now a free download. Go and get this version 6.0.3 and make it your primary browser. It will probably work on those pages that are refusing to talk to what you have now.

Another Drive Space Eater
Found another overstuffed Mac today, this one a G4 tower with a 37-gig drive. The cause was not the QuickTime cache files mentioned last month; it was a single log file in the Logs folder - fifteen gigabytes in size! Normally 100K is large for a log. This particular beast was called console.log.6 and was located in here: Hard drive -> Library -> Logs -> Console. (The -> signifies an arrow, meaning the whole thing is a path, or which folder contains the next, which contains the next, etc.) You can throw out all but the most recent Console log, or even that one if it is the problem one.
I found this by first going to the hard drive window and setting it to View as List. Then open View Options from the View menu and choose Calculate All Sizes, This Window Only. Then wait. After a while, it will show how many megabytes and gigabytes are contained in each subfolder.
Be aware that it is dangerous to muck about in the Library folders. There is stuff in there that the system needs. Find a friend who is an expert or hire a consultant to clean these up. You can remove the stuff I mentioned here without fear, but the other folders can contain things that the Mac needs to work at all.
But the magic question is, what caused a 16-gig log to appear? I queried a few friends with knowledge of UNIX and the answer may be... your cat. Do you have a cat that likes to sleep or step on the keyboard? Lie down on the mouse? That would do it.
Accidentally drop a book on the keyboard or have some junk lying against it, pressing down a key all night? Each repeat of the wrong key at the right time can make a one-line log entry. Presto, a log file of 16 billion bytes. Then, the next morning, none the wiser you chase off the cat and go to work. You might not even notice that a good portion of your drive space has gone away.
Even more entertaining is what can happen after a few months. Those logs cycle and replace themselves. That was log 6. That means that there were 7 new small logs that followed it. Another cycle or two and it would have worked its way up to 9 and the next one would have auto-deleted it. Do you think you would have noticed that you went from having 2.2 gigs free space on your drive to suddenly having 18 gigs free the next day? What kind of questions would that have put in your mind? I'm glad it didn't happen because I would have had no idea either, until this case educated me.
Logs, by the way, are designed to update themselves, but you must let your Mac stay awake at night, with the Energy Saver set to Never Sleep the processor, and you never forcing it to sleep by choosing it from the Apple menu. Set your Energy Saver (part of System Preferences) to the checkmarks Never Sleep the processor or the hard drive, but Sleep Display after 30 minutes. The monitor/display is the energy eater anyway, and that backlight can cost a lot to replace so all you really care about is Display Sleep. Leave the rest of the Mac awake so it can perform its "cron" tasks, and keep your cat off of the keyboard.

Your Mac in 2012
28 years ago the Apple II was king and Xerox PARC was demonstrating a graphical user interface with a mouse for moving icons and windows around.
Want to get a look at your Mac in 2012? Check out this video. To read the story behind it, go to the Macworld blog article. This is so worth it, even if you are on dialup connection. It shows a 3D touch-screen interface that will blow your mind. I want this NOW.

Better PowerBook Battery Life
An article at MacOSX Hints described a battery-wasting problem. Briefly, "Like many 2005 PowerBook owners, I have been frustrated with the apparent bug in Apple's new USB trackpad driver on these machines which forces idle kernel_task utilization upwards of 7% at all times, dramatically reducing battery life, lowering system performance, and preventing the machine from cooling down while relatively idle... I decided to stop waiting and try to address the bug myself by simply removing Apple's trackpad driver from the equation. Installing the SideTrack 1.2 trackpad driver fixed the problem completely, driving idle kernel_task utilization down as low as 1%. It is Apple's new 2-finger scrolling trackpad drivers in 10.4 which are to blame."
Find that driver at Raging Menace and read more about the problem and how it's been fixed.

Yes, Netscape Is Really Dead
Netscape, killed with malice by Microsoft in the late '90s, became the property of AOL. The product you see now is no relation to the founding Web browser we all came to know. This letter appeared in a recent Macintouch regarding lack of any effort to develop a Mac version of Netscape 8:
"As a former employee of the "real" Netscape (releases 4.04 through 6.0), I'd wanted to take issue with [Ken's incorrect comments]: Netscape 8 is derived from Firefox, not Mozilla Seamonkey.
"That said, Netscape no longer exists. Almost everyone who once made the Netscape web browser now works for Google, Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, or other Silicon Valley companies.
"Netscape" today is a group of AOL employees in Ohio assigned to monetize whatever remaining brand equity remains. AOL's primary activities in this are a low-brow web portal (netscape.com), a mediocre ISP (netscape.net), and a web browser derived from Firefox, with engineering outsourced to a Canadian contracting company."
This means, forget about Netscape. If you liked the old combined email and web capabilities, your best bet is to download the current version of Mozilla and use that. As part of the open source community, it is being worked on by people who care, not people under contract to, or who can't get a better job than working for, AOL.
My usual recommendation stands: Use Eudora for email, and then keep Safari, Firefox, Opera, Shiira, Camino and even the rotting, festering corpse of Internet Explorer around for your web browsing. Thunderbird is also a choice for an email program, produced by the same organization as Mozilla, Firefox and Camino. Oh, and of course there is AppleMail, but I really don't like the way it works, especially in handling attachments.

Documents in Applications Folder
Quicken STILL makes this mistake by default: storing your Quicken Data file in the same folder as the program. Since it can remember which is your data file, it simply opens when you launch the program from the Dock. As a result, some users forget where the file is located and what it is called.
The program does a good job of protecting you against lost data by making repeated backups of your data file, but you must take the effort to put those files where they are safest.
If you can't remember the name of the file, launch Quicken and look at the splash screen at startup. You should see the phrase, "Opening 'Quicken Data' last opened (date)." Take note of that name. Yours might not be called that; it might be called "Copy of Quicken Data" or "Business Info" or whatever you named it originally.
When the file is open, scan it to make sure your latest entries are present, then quit the program. If you can't immediately locate where that file is, type Command-F and in the Find window type the exact filename you noted. When you locate it, see if you can also find the backup files as well. If not, don't worry. Open the Documents folder and in there create a folder called Quicken Documents and put your primary Quicken file into it. If it has an odd name, like "Copy of..." change the name to something simple and meaningful. Then double-click on it to reopen the program. This will tell Quicken that you have moved its primary file into a new location. Quit Quicken and then try launching the program from the Dock, or from its own icon in Applications. It should open and display your current data file.
This technique also applies to QuickBooks files as well, which are more complex and have assorted supporting files. Leave no doubt in your mind where the documents are actually located.
Now, when you back up your Documents folder, either by burning a CD containing it or copying it to an external hard drive, you will be assured of protecting your bookkeeping data. You are making backups, right? Ask yourself how you would feel if your hard drive chose tonight to die and you could not recover it. Would it be worth $200 to get it all back? That is the cost of an external hard drive big enough to hold your entire internal drive's contents. Prefer to spend $1500 instead? That is the least you can spend with Drive Savers to recover the data from a dead hard drive.
Make your decision now, rather than wait for it to be made for you. If that happens, I guarantee you will not like the choice you will have, which is NONE.

Okay To Update Now
I tell people to hold off on updating their systems just because Software Update tells them to. Give them time so the bugs can be hammered out, I say. It looks like that time is finally here.
If you are using 10.3.8 or older, there is now a good reason to move to 10.3.9: Google Earth. This is the coolest program in ages, although it really requires broadband (DSL or Cable) to do its job. Formerly Tiger only, it now runs under 10.3.9. It does require more Video RAM than came with the earliest G4 Towers, though, so you might have to buy a new monitor card as well.
I recommend, especially if you are running 10.3.8, that you go to Apple's web site and download the Combo Updater for 10.3.9, instead of the stripped-down version provided by Software Update. Once you have it, repair permissions first, then run the installer. When it is finished and you have restarted, repair permissions again. This is very important to prevent serious grief. If you don't know how to do that, read the Help file after launching Disk Utility from your Utilities folder.
Once you have done that, you can run Software Update and let it update everything else. Uncheck the boxes for anything you don't have or use, such as AirPort, iSight, iDVD or whatever. Also uncheck the box for iTunes Phone unless you are one of the 12 people who bought one.
After all the updates have run and you have restarted, Software Update will tell you about more updates. These are updates that could not be installed until previous ones had run. Same rules apply.
When finished, repair permissions again. If you get a trouble message from Disk Utility, it means that it is reacting to the iTunes bug and you must remove some files. Open the Receipts folder (this path: Hard drive -> Library -> Receipts) and look for anything that begins with iTunes. Trash all of them except the iTunesX.pkg file. Restart your Mac and you should be able to successfully repair permissions. This is the major bug I wrote about in Macking 126 and it appears to be fixed because the last few updates I have performed for people have worked despite the presence of the older iTunes receipt packages.
Tiger users, the same applies to you. Go ahead and update to 10.4.5 and the current QuickTime and iTunes. Then get yourself a copy of Google Earth and don't plan on getting any work done for a while. The bugs I wrote about in Macking 126 have been fixed in the 10.4.5 update and there are very few reports of people having trouble. Of course that is cold comfort if you get to be one of the few who do have problems, but there is always a risk in updating; it just seems that things are pretty good right now. To be absolutely safe, run a full backup of your drive before starting.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)