Having just finished my PB+J (Jif and grape) sandwich, I had to share this comic Shane sent me months ago. It was on my MacBook Pro and I forgot all about it until I backed it up last week before dusting it and re-installing Leopard on it.

Anyway, this comic totally made me LOL (for real!). You’ll have to be using that thing called the CLI (command line interface) in either UNIX (you OSX users) or Linux to get this. I can’t tell you how many times a day I try to do something on my Mac in Terminal and I get the dreaded “you’re not important enough for me to listen to” error. It’s almost to the point I’m prefacing every command with sudo now. Ya, I know, dangerous, but it still prompts for the password at least.

Enjoy the joke and if you know if more geeky jokes like this, let me know in the comments.

Thanks, Shane!

One thing all Mac users have had to come to accept is that we live in a Windows world. Because of it, file sharing was a major sticky point for OS X when it first appeared and it tried to answer this problem with a UNIX technology called SMB. SMB helps emulate Window shares for UNIX operating systems. Since OS X is based on BSD, an UNIX variant, SMB was a no brainer to implement. Well, not quite a no brainer. There were problems early on and Apple has done a pretty good job of fixing the problems but many still linger.

The great folks at Objective Development have graciously shared a little program, called Sharity, it made for itself. Their problem was a bit different as Obdev’s team wished to integrate more seamlessly with Windows from UNIX clients such as Nextstp/Openstep and then later with later, “SGI/IRIX, Sun/Solaris, (and) HP-UX”. It just happens that this would be an easy port to the Mac.

Using a more robust CIFS (Common Internet File System) client than Apple, Obdev is able to handle many of OS Xs short-comings. My main beef with how Apple handles Windows shares is that I am always losing my connections to them. Reboots is the most frequent place I am forced to re-establish the share and waking up my Mac from sleeping is another place this occurs. But with Sharity, I don’t have this issue, they’re always there! In fact, browsing directories and shares is way easier than with Apple’s solution. It’s how things should have been from the get go.

In my conversations with Obdev for this piece, they really want to make one thing clear about Sharity. It’s not a Mac application as you know it. Christian told me, “With Sharity the deal is that you get a slightly different (we think better) behavior than Apple’s CIFS client, but the App comes from the Unix world (with all implications).” Meaning, you’re not going to get the pretty and easy OS X interface you’ve come to expect. This is pure UNIX. In fact, I told Christian how the interface totally reminded me of my SunOS days back when I worked at Hitachi. For me, a good fuzzy feeling since I loved SunOS. To many, this fuzzy may be too irritating of an itch. So be forewarned.

In playing with Sharity in the last month, I’ve come to be thankful for it. When I used my PowerBook or my wife’s Mac mini and I have to surf to our sole Windows machine, I do it so cringing. No fun. Obdev has spoiled me. With it’s use of symbolic
links to automatically mount a share after boot is awesome. I found this trick in Obdev’s Tricks and Tips section which I highly recommend any Sharity user to review.

Overall, I would say if you have a need for better file sharing between either UNIX or Windows clients, then this is a sure bet. I figure most desiring this advanced client will have a strong foundation enough to know how to use the UNIX looking UI. Again, with the documentation and the tips section on Obdev’s site, you’ll be sitting pretty in no time with this excellent program.

And oh ya, due note that lack of an announcement of improved file sharing at this years WWDC for Tiger.

UPDATE: Some aspects of this article have been modified for accuracy. Thanks to Christian at Obdev for the clarity.

Why oh why must I reboot my Mac for a stinking install of QuickTime? Why must I reboot for anything at all? This is UNIX people? You don’t have to reboot in UNIX. Ever hear of the command “kill -HUP”?

Ever since I started using OS X four years ago, I always scratched my head to certain applications being updated that informed me that it would require a reboot when done upgrading. Having worked on SunOS, Solaris, and IRIX for some time, I never had the same requests when I did updates on those machines. Wayne Fiori, manager of technical services at INACT Health Management Systems, got that when he told Jim Carr of the MicroTimes that he went UNIX instead of NT because he wouldn’t have always reboot. But anything that needs hardware access is a problem, one might say, like my QuickTime example. Well, not necessarily true, according to Nicholas Petreley.

Some versions of UNIX (Linux, for example) support loadable device modules. This means you can boot Linux and reconfigure its support for hardware and software on the fly. For example, you can boot Linux without support for the SCSI card you have installed. You simply load support for that SCSI card when you need to access one or more of the SCSI-connected devices, such as an optical disk for backup. You can unload the SCSI driver when you’re finished. You can also freely load and unload support for sound cards, network cards — even file systems such as HPFS, FAT, VFAT, and others (an NTFS driver is in the works).

This is not a new complaint and yet one that goes unanswered by Apple. You can find many blogs, forum posts, and magazine articles discussing this problem. As to why this annoying feature of OS X goes on unchanged, the coveted answer goes unknown like the mystery of why HP told Woz that it didn’t want to make PCs when he brought to them the Apple I idea. Maybe Leopard will have this fixed, but don’t hold your breath.

We at SvenOnTech would love to see the ability to just upgrade without a reboot but since that isn’t going to happen, at least we are thankful for quicker boot times than we get on our Windows XP Professional desktop. Wow, if we had to reboot for everything on that, we’d for sure throw that out the windows (bad pun intended.)