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Domain: alsoft.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to alsoft.com.
Comments · 10
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Re:My Mac Sucks
"because they do slow down(not sure why? spotlight db getting bloated? fs getting fragmented?"
If you are in the habit of turning your Mac off when it isn't in use, there is a great possibility that many of the maintenance scripts the OS runs on a schedule are not getting run. Also, caches for things like apps, spotlight, fonts, and so on can get fragmented or even corrupted over time and use. There's an app for all this:
Onyx. It's free. I recommend running it every few months just to keep everything running well. Also, it doesn't hurt to check the filesystem once in a while: Diskwarrior is your best friend. Between Onyx and Diskwarrior, there is very little else you will need in the way of system utilities to keep your Mac in top working condition.
You're welcome.
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Mac OS X options (also: the freezer trick)For an Mac OS X volume (HFS, HFS+), I've had lots of luck with Data Rescue II ($99) for recovering from serious drive failures. For drives that are still operational but have become borked at the filesystem level, Disk Warrior does a great job of rebuilding a healthy new directory structure. I make it a point to always have a copy of Disk Warrior within 100 yards of my PowerBook.
Also, a couple of times I've had dying drives that work OK for a few minutes after a cold boot, and then they (heat up and) die. I've had good luck throwing the drive in the freezer (in a ziplock bag) for a day, then powering up it, recovering as much as I can until the drive chokes again, lather, rinse, repeat, until all recoverable data has been copies off to a good drive.
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Interesting list...
...but, as always, subjective at best. I still have a G5 iMac, and many of the apps on the list are useless to me, as they're specifically for the Intel processor. However, these lists are informative in that they help to become aware of potentially useful apps to any mac users out there.
That said, here are a few apps the guy neglected to mention:
- Claris Filemaker http://www.filemaker.com/. Hands down, the best database software out there, for the Mac or any other OS.
- iWeb http://www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/. Ridiculously easy to use, yet web pages still come out clean and looking pretty good too.
- DVD Studio Pro http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/dvdstudiopro/. Isn't this still the industry standard for assembling DVD structure and navigation?
- Visual Hub http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/. For its' ability to convert video files in any format out there into any other.
- Disk Warrior http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/. In the extremely isolated cases of ever having to need it, this is the single most important life-saving app out there.
Oh, and an honorable mention: Mac The Ripper. Site is down, but you can check out their forum http://www.ripdifferent.com/. -
Re:Wrong implicationTerminal is certainly better than cmd.exe or straight xterm. However, it doesn't do tabs or any of the really whizzy stuff that you expect on your Linux/BSD box's kterm/gnome-terminal. Incidentally, what do other slashdotters reccomend as a replacement?
Not a true replacement, but I swear by Terminal + screen (included with OS X). The major advantage is that you can attach to the same screen session from anywhere in the world, resuming exactly where you left off. You can even be attached from multiple places at once (work, home, etc). This is also handy for viewing multiple screen windows at once by simply opening multiple Terminal windows and attaching them to the same session.
The keyboard shortcuts for managing "windows" are also quite handy, easier than clicking a mouse. I can't imagine why anyone would use anything else, but I guess that's just me.
Anybody have any other good Mac OS X "gotchas" for the average technically competant switcher that I've forgotten?
A couple off the top of my head:
If you're doing serious administration, learn niutil and its gui sibling, NetInfo Manager. User account settings, groups, NFS mounts, etc, are all stored in the NetInfo database. Learn it and love it.
OS X's built in fsck is crap. If you're ever unfortunate enough to get a corrupted HFS+ filesystem, invest in a copy of DiskWarrior. It's fixed everything I've thrown at it that wasn't a hardware failure, where most of the time fsck (also wrapped in the Disk Utility gui) gave up. I still don't understand why Apple doesn't just buy it and bundle it with the OS.
External disks are mounted by default with permissions such that the currently logged in user owns everything on them. This is not always desirable (when backing up files that should retain owner/permissions). To disable this behavior for a volume, either use vsdbutil -a
Short list of helpful command-line utilities to look up:- ditto (copy files with metadata, etc -- though in Tiger, the standard file utilities finally handle resource forks)
- open (open a document or application in the gui)
- osascript (execute an AppleScript -- ie, osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to pause')
- /Developer/Tools/SetFile (set obscure HFS+ file attributes -- only available if Xcode is installed)
- softwareupdate (commandline version of -- you guessed it -- Software Update)
- hdiutil (mount, unmount, and manage automounted disks and disk images)
- diskutil (commandline version of Disk Utility)
Finally: macosxhints.com. -
Re:Steve, you want my business?
As someone who recently had his HD replaced on AppleCare (a four-day turnaround), I think Apple puts some very lame hard disks in its computers. My super-duper top-of-the-line G5 shipped with with a Western Digital crapfactory, and of course the applecare replacement was another WD. At lest they stopped putting DeathStars in them. OTOH, my old Performa 6200 had a Quatum in it from the factory, it was in use for about four years with nary a problem.
Stupid question: You're using DiskWarrior, right?
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Re:Networks, sure.
Back in Mac OS 8 days, I use to use DiskExpress Pro. I had configured it to put the most used files at the outer cylinder (i.e. fasted part) of the drive, and the less used files on the inner cylinders.
The software would analyze file usage, and move them around every day. The anecdotal evidence I have that it worked on such small scale was that my girlfriend later asked me how I got the computer to start responding faster.
I don't know how well this technology would help on newer systems. I suspect at least a little. Perhaps it would really show gains for people who are video editing. Alas, Alsoft never updated their software to work on OS X.
Essentially, these guys are doing what DiskExpress did, but on a larger scale. I have to wonder if they are stepping on any of Alsoft's patents.
Call me a power user, but I do think that people should be at least mirroring their drives. I have heard too many people complain about losing something important because of hard drive failure. -
Re:Ordered the Family PackI'm interested to see how badly it trashes Norton Systemworks on the iMac. biggest mistake of my life to buy that.
You should definitely give up on Norton Utilities/Systemworks for Macintosh - it's had problems since they introduced CrashGuard (aka "CrashHard") and HFS+ support. I still have a soft spot in my heart for Norton Utilities 3.1, which saved my ass many years ago when I was using my dad's powerbook 180c while he was out of town (without his knowledge) and somehow screwed up his hard drive. A quick trip to CompUSA, and a couple of hours later, everything was fine. Of course, that's before a disk utility program had to do everything under the sun instead of just focusing on what it's meant to do.
Instead, I highly recommend Alsoft DiskWarrior, which has saved my Macs several times (running 8.x up through OS X 10.2.x). It does what it's supposed to, and it does it well. No idea if it's 10.3-compatible, though; it says on their site that the current version of the CD won't boot G5s. Since the latest version supports the journalized filesystem, it should be fine.
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Re:See also:
Microsoft drops Mac IE development as Safari reaches 1.0
Of course, anyone who wants to develop Office-like business software or any kind of web browser for Windows faces the same uphill battle. When the OS manufacturer makes non-OS software, they enjoy unparalleled integration with the rest of the system and anyone else comes in four to six months behind the development curve.
This is not quite the same situation. First of all, Apple not only made its own web browser - Safari, it also released the entire rendering library for the browser - WebCore. There are no hidden API or system hooks, it's all out in the open for anyone to use. In fact the latest version of OmniWeb uses WebCore and makes a great browser which builds on Apple's efforts rather than trying to compete with them.
Yes, Final Cut is competition to Premiere and yes, Final Cut is programmed by Apple. However, the fact that Final Cut is made by Apple really doesn't matter. To my knowledge Apple does not hide any of the MacOS API from other companies in order to outdo other companies in providing software to the Mac platform. If you watch what libraries are getting called from an Apple-made program you will find that they are calling the same libraries that are publicly available. Not only that but the people who program the Mac operating system are different than the people who program the additional applications like Final Cut, so they don't have any additional experience in programming the MacOS than any other programming group that makes it a business to regularly program for MacOS. You can see this when you look at the products made for the MacOS by companies other than Apple. I already gave the example of The Omni Group but there is also Alsoft who make DiskWarrior, and even Microsoft who still make many good products for MacOS despite Apple's so-called programming advantage.
What it comes down to is that Final Cut is a better product than Premiere and Adobe does not want to spend the time and money necessary to compete with it. This would be true regardless of who programmed Final Cut. It's truly a shame since Final Cut has only gotten so good by competing with programs such as Premiere. I would like to have Premiere still directly in competition with Final Cut so that the two can continue to compete and innovate, keeping both products fresh. -
Linux without reformatting?
In my opinion one of the biggest blocks to the installation of linux on any machine is that no one wants to do the reformatting that is usually necessary to create a linux partition.
On the PC platform this is made someone less of an issue becuase of PartitionMagic, and because some linux distributions (mandrake i know-- any others?) have begun distributing a stripped-down version of Partitionmagic with their distros for creating and destroying linux partitions without affecting anything else.
My question is this: What are mac users to do about thi? Are there any macintosh equivilents of PartitionMagic? If not, could anything (perhaps a petition) convince Alsoft to create one?
More importantly, though, is there any reason there couldn't be a fork or something of linux capable of just booting off of an hfs+ drive, so that rather than needing its own partition linux could just coexist with a mac os install on the same hard drive partition? I know someone is going to suggest that since hfs+ can't have coexisting files named 'copying' and 'COPYING' in the same directory, that linux will immediately burst into flames if altered to boot from hfs+, but mac os x is a UNIX and it seems to get by with booting off of hfs+ perfectly fine, which leads me to indicate hfs+ isn't too bad of a FS for unices.
I'm not even sure yet if hfs+ partitions can even be *mounted* from linux-- i see something on sourceforge about an hfs+ project for linux, but haven't tested this since i'm too much of a wuss to manually install a 2.4 kernel onto my debian/ppc install-- but does anyone see any real technical obstacles to making linux capable of booting from hfs+? I can see a set-up-to-be-used-by-an-idiot, simple-install distribution of linux with MOL nicely integrated being marketed to everyone with old, non-os-x-compatible macs (which is a lot of people) as a way to get a system where your apps crash but GAIM and Evolution keep running being very, very financially successful (at least if enough detail was paid to making sure the setup of the distribution vaguely followed the principle of least astonishment, and if you made sure to have the default of the system NOT boot into something with a windows-puke-green background and the KDE start bar, and if you marketed it right-- "just like os x, only without the ugly bubbly interface!" or something).
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HFS+ Issues
I'm not sure if there is an utility to convert HFS+ disks back to HFS (I know PlusMaker lets you go the other way, but the site doesn't mention HFS+ -> HFS). However, when you erase a disk you have the choice of the format. If you don't have a program that lets you partition non-destructively, then you just have to back up, and then repartition.