Macking 89

MacCamp 35 Come and Gone
(This section written at MacCamp in Silver Falls State Park) One of the attractions of MacCamp is simply that it is a full weekend away from the Net and telephones. I had planned to take just one particular class and spend the rest of the time organizing and updating my hard drive and updating my web site.
Imagine my surprise when I could not boot into OSX 10.2 Friday night! I had been noticing that it was becoming a bit slow lately, but I was living in 9.2 for the last couple of weeks so I didn't notice that something had died.
The biggest complaint against OSX is the fact that one can't simply reinstall over the old version to fix things. It is recommended, when fsck disk (more on this later) fails and Norton can't fix things, to erase the HD and start over with a fresh copy. Well, that's easier said than done when you have accumulated a host of customizing utilities, applications and other stuff not part of the Apple OSX installation.
Fortunately I had already installed a new 40 gig drive inside my G4, which was being used as a backup for my MP3 collection and nothing else.
So I simply started from the Jaguar CD and made a fresh installation on the 40, leaving my OS9 applications and system folder on the 10-gig. Once that was working, I carefully copied my OSX Applications folders and appropriate library files to the 40, then made a copy of my System Folder and Applications (Mac OS 9) folder on the 40 and erased the 10-gig drive.
After copying the OS9 stuff back, I simply made an alias of my Documents folder on this volume that pointed to the 40 and set about re-establishing connection to it with Mozilla, IE, Eudora, Quicken, Now Contact and the rest of the applications that had permanent active links to Documents. I left the Documents folder inside the Users folder as is, simply putting in an alias to the Eudora Folder so the application could find the mail files.
Now, all I need to do is make a backup of the OSX folders should I ever have to nuke the 40 gig drive, and a separate backup of the OS9 volume. Most advanced X users recommend two volumes, or two separate hard drives, even though Apple never ships new Macs partitioned in such a manner. The performance of X has greatly improved.
If I had tried to do this at home this weekend, with all the attendant distractions, it would have been harder and I would have been less able to focus.
Oh, the reason I was not able to run fsck at startup is due to the fact that my obsolete but still beautiful SGI display is not compatible with the UNIX startup mode and displays only a blank screen until the OSX splash screen loads. Time to retire it.
It took about seven hours to do all of this, but as of now, Sunday morning, everything works. I even had time to get my last two columns onto my web site.

The Unix Startup
If you want to see what is really going on when your Mac starts up under OSX, then hold down the Command-V keys after the startup tone. It is quite interesting, especially when you see the line "Welcome to Macintosh" scroll by, mixed in with all the other Unix stuff.
If you want it to do this automatically, open the Terminal window and type [sudo nvram boot-args="-v"] without the brackets but with the spaces and quotes. Enter your password and hit return, then reboot. It will continue to work every restart until you boot into OS9. Then you will have to do this again. Since I switch back and forth so often, I just do the Command-V trick.
There is also a hard drive checkup that you can perform at startup, using a built-in diagnostic and repair program. To run it, do this:
Start up in "single user" mode. At boot, hold down Command-"S" until you see the text-based Unix display scrolling up the screen. After the text stops scrolling and you are at the "Localhost" prompt, type the following:
fsck -y (including the space)
then hit enter. FSCK is Unix's File System Consistency checK, the built-in diagnostic and repair program. The modifier "-y" means you want FSCK to automatically repair any problems.
If FSCK finds problems and corrects them, run FSCK -Y until it says that the "disk appears to be ok." Type "exit" and it will continue booting into Aqua's shiny goodness.
Thanks to Tech Tails from Small Dog Electronics for this tip.

The Apple 17" Display
Finally sick of the limitations of my once-state-of-the-art SGI display, I bought a refurbished Apple 17" TFT (Thin-Film Transistor, also known as active-matrix LCD). Imagine my consternation when I got it home and discovered that it didn't plug into my G4's video card! I had been using the SGI's card so I never noticed that when Apple released the Quicksilver G4s they changed the card. My G4 is the earlier "Sawtooth" model, released just after the "Yikes" model which was a tweaked motherboard from the Blue & White G3.
The fix was to hie myself over to The Computer Store and buy Dr. Bott's DVIator for ADC, a combination adapter and power supply for my new monitor, an extra $150 I had not planned on. TCS was the only place in town - I didn't check Fry's - that had the item in stock. I promptly pulled out the SGI card, plugged the adapter and the monitor together, booted while holding down Command-V and there it was, for the first time visible on my G4, the Unix startup sequence.
Even though it's something of a downgrade, being 1280 pixels wide instead of 1600 (like the Apple Cinema Display) the pixels are bigger, the screen is brighter and it looks great overall.
My old beige G3 is now plugged into my stereo system serving as an MP3 jukebox, and into it is plugged the SGI, now the world's largest and most expensive MP3 player monitor. I don't want to just sell it because the value has dropped from about $950 last year to $400 now on ebay. At that price I'd rather keep it. When it was new it sold for $3750 compared to the Apple Cinema Display at $3999. When I got it as a factory second in 2000 it was $1470. Shortly after SGI dropped the price for all remaining stock to $1400 and sold out the lot, never to be made again. Apparently they lost a bundle on the proposition, even though the design was hailed as the best looking display of the time and featured in advertisements that needed a cool display in the picture.
The manufacturer of the display's video card, Number Nine (since referred to as Plan Nine) went out of business shortly afterwards so no upgrades are possible.

Bluetooth
Since Apple is not willing to supply the officially-endorsed d-link bluetooth transceivers to the independent dealers, meaning anyone in Portland, I finally got a competing product, for $15 more, at Fry's.
I lost another two months of hair getting it set up and speaking to my Ericsson phone, but finally it transmitted all the data in my Phone Book application from my iBook. Then I discovered that none of the phone numbers work for dialing, just reference only. Why? Simple. To save space on the Palm screen I have been continuing to leave off the 503 for all Portland phone numbers. Since our little region of Qworst is the only area gifted with local ten-digit dialing in the USA so far, I would have to tediously open each listing and add the 503 manually. Don't get me started on the idiotic decisions behind THAT mess.
There is no find/replace command, even under AppleScript, that could tell it to locate any instance of a seven-digit number that is not part of a ten-digit number and add 503 to the beginning of it. Not on the Palm, not in Now Contact, and not in the Phone Book application.
Since the Phone Book cannot import directly from Now Contact, I must first load the Palm with my Now Contact list, then move it to the iBook and synchronize with Palm Desktop 4.0 which does save it in the vcard format that Phone Book understands.
Then I export the data from Palm and import it into Phone Book. Finally, using a convoluted series of passwords I "pair" the phone with the iBook using Bluetooth and tell it to synchronize.
Did I mention that you need to be running 10.2.1 and also need to install iCal before you can install the beta version of iSync? Oh, and even if you have the Apple Extended Warranty on the iBook, Apple considers iSync an unsupported beta and will not help with it. iSync will not work without the presence of iCal, even if you have no intention of using it. Disk space required? 10 megs.
In any event, there is hair on the floor and 7-digit phone numbers in the phone. At least I can use them for a reference and then dial manually with the 503 added. Just before finishing this column I corrected and updated all of the listings in Now Contact, and then moved over to Phone Book permanently.

MS Lies Like a Gateway
Last month the world was laughing at Microsoft for taking a page from the Gateway book of misleading advertising. Their web site contained a take-off on Apple's "switcher" campaign with a story about a woman they said was a freelance writer who made the switch from Mac to a Windoze PC. The copy sounded like it was written by the Microsoft PR department and oops, it WAS. Readers discovered that the woman pictured on the Microsoft website was a stock photograph of a model that is available on the net for anyone to use. Worse yet, the story was not by a freelance writer but rather was written by an employee of Microsoft's PR firm! Caught red-handed, Microsoft quickly pulled the ad.
Really, why would anyone even think about doing a reverse switch? They can't even find a legitimate switcher who wasn't forced to switch by their employer or need for an application not available for Macs. The latter isn't even an excuse any more. The current line of Macs are so fast and powerful that they can run Windows under Virtual PC at a respectably peppy rate (except for games, of course, which are too demanding for emulation) and use any MS-only application available. Even better, Virtual PC will support Linux for x86 so you could have a Mac running four different OSes: OSX, OS9, Windows and Linux, all together. Geek heaven.

The Newest Macs
A post-deadline flash from C-Net stated that Apple has made a $200 price cut on all iBooks, bringing the entry-level model down to $990. The next one up, with a CD/DVD drive is $1295 and the 14" model is $1599. Speed rate has been boosted too; the slowest model is 700 MHz. They cut prices on the Titanium as well, and included a SuperDrive in the high-end model for the first time. Buyers beware: If you don't need the ability to burn DVDs, be aware that that drive burns CD-ROMs at half the speed of the regular CD-R drive. DVDs burn so slowly that you should assume that it will take all night to fill up a 4.3-gig DVD disk. Apple has already announced that all new models released after January will no longer boot into OS9.
Although these Macs will still run Classic mode, the reason is that it has become too difficult and expensive to support two vastly different operating systems. OS9's startup requirements prevent Apple from making modifications to the motherboard that would allow such things as 64-bit processing, quad processors on a single daughtercard, doubled system bus and all the other advances coming down the pike.
By sticking to X, which is the future anyway, we will finally get processor-speed parity with Intel when Apple moves into IBM's new line of PPC chips. From this point on, it appears that Motorola is history as a provider of processors for Macs. IBM's chips are still built on the PPC architecture, so don't expect OSX for Intel any time soon. Apple is still convinced that doing so would introduce all the incompatibility issues that Intel users have to deal with now: setting dip switches, writing things to BIOS, etc. As complex as Unix is, Apple wants to still be able to sell a Mac to your grandmother and have her able to start it up and go to work.
And speaking of that, Xmas is coming. Buy everyone a new Mac and help the economy!

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.)