Apparently, the solution, of course, is to navigate in the Finder to /System/Library/CoreServices and click on Java WebStart.app – an entirely intuitive and obvious solution. This triggers some hidden magic to somehow restore access to JWS. Who knows. It works after doing this.

Hey! You got Firefox in my Safari! You got Safari in my Firefox! 2 great tastes…

I’ve been experiencing an annoying glitch on my MacBook Pro since upgrading to MacOSX 10.5 – nothing serious, but occasionally it’d bug me. What happened was, if I opened a Finder window to /Users – it would show every user’s home directory except mine. I mean, I know it’s there, because all of my files are there. And if I used Terminal or remote SSH login, the directory was certainly there, as were all of my files. If I used Finder’s Go to Folder command (Command + Shift + G) I could enter “/Users/dnorman” and all was well.

But it was annoying.

Every once in awhile, I’d try to debug. I’d use Terminal and navigate to /Users. I’d run ls -l and I’d see this:

$ ls -l
total 0
drwxrwxrwt   7 root     wheel     238 23 Mar 15:17 Shared
drwxr-xr-x  13 demo     demo      442 14 May  2006 demo
drwxr-xr-x@ 47 dnorman  dnorman  1598 31 Mar 18:12 dnorman

The other user directories had either a + or no symbol after the file mode section. My directory had a @. WTF. I’ve tried looking through man. man ls. man chmod. Couldn’t find any mention of @. Try googling for @. Not helpful. This is where the gaping holes in my *NIX geekery are exposed. I was completely stumped.

Finally, I decide to try checking with the LazyWeb. I posted a tweet to roughly describe the problem – as best I could in the 140 character limit – and…

Waited 3 minutes before @thepatrick responded with a hint, and another one.

So, a few seconds later, I was running a new (to me) command via the command shell, finding out about xattr to list extended attributes about files.

$ xattr -l /Users/dnorman
com.apple.FinderInfo:
0000   00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ........@.......
0010   00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ................

Bingo. There’s some funky bit set. So, how to nuke it. I ran man xattr and found it has a -d flag, which is used to delete attributes by name. So I ran this:

$ xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo /Users/dnorman

Done.

My home directory now properly shows up in Finder. Everything’s hunky dory.

The power of my Network, harnessed with a simple LazyWeb plea, solved in 3 minutes what I’d struggled for 5 months to solve on my own.

I love my Network. It’s the people.

Thanks, Patrick. I owe you a $beverage.

I've got my desktop picture set to cycle through some of my photographs. Most of the time, it’s not a big deal, but occasionally, one comes up that causes my menu bar to look like this:

Seriously.

Yes, transparency is cool. It's great to show off the power of the UI renderer, etc… But not at the sake of readability.

Having this kind of info just an F12 away isn’t going to help. Especially as we head toward SAD season around here… Le sigh.

I’ve played with seeds of 10.5 for what seems like years (but is really only a year?) through our Apple Developer Connection subscription. But all of my previous experience was in carefully isolated cleanroom installations, to prevent any bugs from nuking my production system. I’d never tried an upgrade install. I’d never run it for more than a day or two tops because bugs and instability sent me running back to 10.4. So, this is my first real time in Leopard, without an alternate or backup system running a previous version Just In Case™.

My initial thought after install, which I’m sure is hardly unique, was along the lines of “holy frack. it worked perfectly. it just fracking worked.” Seriously. Every app I use still works. All preferences are retained (even my custom dock-pinned-at-start setting). Trivial upgrade to the new OS. Gotta love that.

After that, I played with some of the new toys. Spaces is absolute brill. I’ve used other virtual desktop apps. I paid for CodeTek Virtual Desktop. I used the Open Source Desktop Manager.  I used the other Open Source Space app. I’ve played with virtual desktops in Ubuntu. But Spaces just feels right. Dragging apps between desktops? Very cool. It’s got the best features of the others, without any bloat. Just right.

Time Machine. I plugged in a LaCie 500GB Big Disk Extreme, and 10.5 asked me if I wanted to use it for a Time Machine backup drive. Sure. Why not? I’ll give that a shot. Time Machine sounds pretty cool. So I let it chew (for a couple of hours) to do the initial backup set.

No kidding. 1.4 MILLION files. 124.5 GIGABYTES of data. And I don’t have to think about backing any of it up. Ever again. It’s fully automatic. IIRC, Time Machine keeps the last 24 hours of HOURLY backups, the last week of DAILY backups, and as many WEEKLY backups as your drive allows. That’s so freaking awesome I can’t even put it into words. Knowing that EVERY FILE I USE is backed up already? Priceless.

There is a catch, though.

You don’t necessarily WANT all of your files backed up. That scratch video file of a few gigs of data. That temporary working directory of hundreds or thousands of HTML files, etc… Automatic backups have the potential to archive a helluvalotta crap that you don’t really want to keep (and no, I’m not meaning dwarf-hentai-tentacle-snuff-pr0n, but I guess that would fit as well). So, for the files that I want to work on without squeezing them into my Time Machine backup system, they go into a folder on my desktop called “NO BACKUP”. I’ve added that to my Time Machine prefs as an exclusion. So, if I want to use HTTrack to scape a site to a working directory, it just goes in there. No worries about polluting my backups.

What’s next… Oh, right. Safari Dashboard clippings. Absolutely brilliant. I’d been using a hacked-together widget on 10.4 that was inspired by the 10.5 preview Stevenote. It worked, but it lacked the slick UI for selecting the portion of a web page to display as a Widget. It’s got a visual DOM inspector. You just move the mouse, and it highlights the relevant HTML element and any children. Click it, and tweak the bounding box. Click “Add” and it’s done. A visual DOM inspector with manual override. Fracking brilliant. I’ve added a few web page widgets, including the stats/comments sidebar from my blog’s admin page, and the video feed from Maui.

I’m actually using Safari again as my default browser. The TinyMCE editor that comes with WordPress 2.3.1 works just fine in it. Thank the fracking gods. Now, if only those fixes get pushed into the main TinyMCE product so I don’t have to use Firefox to manage all of my Drupal sites (don’t get me wrong – I love Firefox – but Safari’s text rendering simply blows the crap out of every other browser, except other WebKit-powered flavours).

Update: doh. Safari+TinyMCE aren’t all hot and sweaty after all. seems like there’s some work to do before it works reliably. Safari stripped out all linespacing when I clicked “Save and Continue Editing”

I set up Janice in her account to use GMail via IMAP in Mail.app. Mail.app autodiscovered the settings. I only had to provide her address and password. Mail.app DID THE REST. Fracking brilliant, again.

The last comment I have after running Leopard for less than a day is about the menu bar. Love it or hate it, apparently. I hate it. It’s shiny, and demos relatively well, but the bling is at the expense of the readability of menu items.

Sure, the primary menu items lose translucency when you click on them. But that’s just annoying. A text-based Whack-a-Mole™ navigation system. Please, Apple, either lose the translucency outright, or have it pop to full opacity when the mouse moves within the menu bar. No clicking and scrubbing required.

Almost forgot! Tabs in Terminal.app! Sweet. Much cleaner than having to command-` between a dozen terminal windows. And, I’ve even caught myself playing with CoverFlow in the Finder. Not sure how much I’d actually USE that, but it sure is purty… 

Brian’s been working on making the switch from MacOSX to Ubuntu (or UbuntuStudio), so I’ve been thinking about it again.

Most of the apps I live in are there (Firefox is a good enough browser – even if it isn’t Safari, Thunderbird is a good enough mail app – even if it isn’t Mail.app). It’s got all of the server stuff I use either pre-installed or a simple apt-get away.

The one really killer app that is keeping me on MacOSX is Aperture. Nothing comes close on the Linux side of things. Nothing.

There are also tons of niceties in general use in MacOSX. Too many to list. And I’d miss them if I switched to Ubuntu.

Of course, with Parallels, it doesn’t have to be an either-or kind of thing. I can run Ubuntu inside MacOSX on my MacBook Pro. But, if I’m already running MacOSX, Linux is a bit redundant…

But, there’s a better way. Crossover for Mac – it’s a polished commercial version of the open source Wine tool/library which provides a way to run Windows applications in MacOSX without having to install Windows. Basically, it provides a self-contained environment where applications are tricked into thinking they’re running on Windows, but they’re actually running on a bridge between the Windows API and MacOSX (and X-11 for display). You set up a “container” or a “bottle” to hold an application or two, and Crossover takes care of system-level stuff. You get an application icon that’s right at home in your dock, too.

Here’s what a cross-platform browser test might look like. Safari, Firefox and IE6/Win all on one screen:

Text rendering goes from great to craptastic, from left to right. Also, apparently there are a few *cough*issues*ahem* rendering my blog in IE6/Win. Sorry. Shows how often I’ve used IE over the last year…

For something simple like browser testing, Crossover can’t be beat. It also runs with a bunch of other apps (including HalfLife). I tried to install NASA WorldWind, but didn’t get past the .Net install. I’ll try again after doing a bit of research first.

Sketch Fighter 4000 is a strange hybrid game. It’s basically an old-school game, a combination of Asteroids, Space Castle, Defender, etc… But, it’s rendered as if it’s being sketched in ink on paper. When you shoot things, they blow up, leaving scorch marks on the paper. Or are they eraser smudge marks?

Sketch Fighter 4000 Screenshot

In another nod to old school games, it comes complete with a level editor and sample custom levels. It has multiplayer game types, either sharing a single computer or over the LAN (I haven’t tried multiplayer yet). As an added bonus, the game plays great on my Powerbook. I’ve bought my license already. It’s totally addictive. Damn you, Ambrosia Software!