OS X

Coming soon

April 17, 2005

Apple announced Final Cut Studio this morning at an event at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas. The promo session by Apple is a lead-off event to this week's National Association of Broadcasters convention in Sin City.

Among the outstanding presentations was the real-time use of iChat AV by the folks over at Scrubs to show how they can review video remotely and collaboratively edit with remote locations. The whole world of live remotes for local TV and other real-time production work.

Included in Apple's announcement were lots of cool features but none that top Final Cut Pro 5's emergence as a multi-camera editing platform. Not only does the new revision of Final Cut do multi-camera but it does so in an incredibly slick way. Watch your feeds in a 4x4 to 16x16 viewer window and select from amongst as many high definition feeds as you would like.

Setting up and running Qmail/Vpopmail on OS X

April 1, 2005

A place to keep some notes....

Guide to qmail, vpopmail and qmailadmin setup on FreeBSD

So I found a great page on setting qmail up on OS X.... with one problem... it destroyed the NetInfo database that keeps user information. Fortunately I was logged in as root and could use this procedure to recover.

1. "ls -l /var/backups" – this prints a list of everything in the backups directory. It should respond with something like:
  total 40
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 19001 Aug 4 03:15 local.nidump
The date on the file (in this case "Aug 4 03:15") indicates when the backup was made. If it's not from a time when the computer was working right, or if the response doesn't list a file named "local.nidump" (e.g. if it simply gives you the localhost# prompt without printing anything first), you don't have an appropriate backup, and these instructions won't work for your situation. Sorry.

2. "cd /var/db/netinfo" – this gets us to the directory where the live NetInfo databases are kept.

KISS

March 29, 2005

I spent some time this evening searching for the way to repeat the mac to mac migration that is offered the first time you launch a new macintosh computer. Several web searches and delving into /System/Library/Core Services were not productive. However, sitting right there in the Utilities folder is Setup Assistant which is for just this purpose. Remember to Keep It Simple Stupid!

Forcing a change

January 22, 2005

I've been working with the new iPhoto 5 today. It is the first time in quite a while where I wasn't in the middle of a project that would prevent my doing the upgrade right away. Basically iPhoto 5 has been a complete bust. The upgrade process took about an hour for my 3000+ photos. Then the trouble started. All of my old photos are blank. Reading up at the Apple discussion groups there seem to be several others with the same problems. iPhoto 5 will come up and say for hours on end that it is "Loading Photos" but nothing ever happens.

For some time I've been slowly moving towards putting my whole collection in iView MultiMedia instead of iPhoto. Now with a completely worthless iPhoto install I'll be making the move sooner rather than later. Also it should be noted that the iPhoto 5 album setup breaks seeing albums in iWasCoding's Garage Sale. Not surprising particularly but frustrating.

While we're on that topic, Garage Sale is a pretty good program. Two things make it a pain. First, although I paid for a multi-user license to give them some more support, I still get postings on eBay with the annoying Garage Sale ad in them. It is not shareware. I paid for a commercial product and they don't even show it in their preview, but put it on the posting. Also when selling technology items it is necessary to go to eBay's site and add details to make the listings take advantage of the extra features on eBay. Those gripes aside, Garage Sale has been great for collecting listings and getting the info together for a listing.

.Mac downtime January 22 and 23

January 17, 2005

dot_mac.png Apple Computer sent a note this week that there will be an eight hour downtime for .Mac next weekend. The email (pictured) seems to leave a few things to wonder about. First of all, the message says New iChat sessions will be temporarily unavailable, what does this mean. Does it mean that if you use AIM and have iChat as your client you won't be able to start a new IM session, or just not log in?

OK so it seems the answer would be to go to the support page suggested. Of course it says nothing about the outage and does not answer the questions.

Does the outage have anything to do with the release of the new iLife next Friday? Are they preparing for an influx of sharing or something else? It seems pretty drastic to take a commercial service offline for eight hours, even if they are generally the least intrusive eight contiguous hours of a week. It also hints that they are "enhancing" their service. Does this mean we'll see new features next week?

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