1. Disassemble both MacBook and SuperDrive (oh, you wouldn’t want to do that) and clean it with q-tips. And then hope you’ll assemble it back.
2. Use compressed air can to blow the dust off the laser.

I didn’t have time to use the first approach (and yes – I didn’t want to take my chances), but I did not have a can of compressed air either..

I did have a straw, however.. So here’s the third option you should consider:

I N S T R U C T I O N S

0. Eject CD/DVD if there is one inside – device can’t read it anyway, right?
1. Put a straw into your mouth
2. Blow couple of times at your or your friends hand to make sure it’s not saliva you are blowing
3. See pictures in this article to figure out where the laser lens is located (it is marked red in the 7th picture)
4. Put a straw into SuperDrive (that is the hole where you put the optical media) and blow couple of times moving straw around the laser (no spitting!)

Done. For the first minute drive won’t ready any disks even if it did (it is a little dewy now), but then it should work like new.

DISCLAIMER: try this at your own risk. I’m not responsible for any damage you may make to your equipment. It worked fine for me but I haven’t tried this on my wife’s or my friend’s mac.

A side note: Actually cleaning the SuperDrive like described in the first “solution” I guess is the best way to go (taking it to a techie of course if you ain’t one yet), but if you need to read/write few disks just urgently (like I did) – this is pretty decent too.

Tabs can’t be renamed. I could not believe it at first, but there really is no [documented] way to rename tabs – they only show your last locally executed command. So if you’re using lots of tabs all connected to different servers – finding the right one may be really challenging as you will have tab menu full of “ssh”. Here’s a solution for those who need to see servers they’re connected to in tab menu:

Create a folder ~/bin/ssh, add it to your PATH, and add following lines to your ~/.profile:

tabssh () {
  if ! [ -f ~/bin/ssh/$1 ]; then
    ln /usr/bin/ssh ~/bin/ssh/$1
    ~/bin/ssh/$1 $1 $2 $3 $4
  else
    ~/bin/ssh/$1 $1 $2 $3 $4
  fi
}

alias ssh=tabssh

For every new connection, this will create a hard link to /usr/bin/ssh in your ~/bin/ssh folder and then it will call the hardlink as a command, so tabs will have the connection name. Good commands to run are: ssh username@server, or ssh server but using something like ssh -l username server you would end up having “-l” as a tab name. Do not forget to run source ~/.profile or restart Terminal.app after editing ~/.profile.

Selecting paths and other connected strings with double-click. It’s simple – you have to use Command+Shift+Click instead of Option+Click as you used to in Tiger. I would still expect to have this configurable (something like “Symbols considered part of the word” that we have in iTerm), but we don’t have much choice here.

Home, End, Pg Up, Pg Down. If you use only OS X terminal or only FreeBSD terminals, this should not bother you. But if you are connecting to Linux servers usually, in order to have your Home/End and Page Up/Down keys working correctly, just go to: Terminal -> Preferences -> Settings, pick your theme (I use slightly modified Novel) -> Keyboard. Now, change actions for these keys:

Key: end, Action: send string to shell: \033[4~
Key: home, Action: send string to shell: \033[1~
Key: page-down, Action: send string to shell: \033[6~
Key: page-up, Action: send string to shell: \033[5~
Key: shift-end, Action: scroll to end of buffer
Key: shift-home, Action: scroll to start of buffer
Key: shift-page-down, Action: scroll to next page in buffer
Key: shift-page-up, Action: scroll to previous page in buffer

One more thing – if you want to have correctly functioning home/end keys in your local OS X Terminal – create ~/.inputrc and fill it with:

"\e[1~": beginning-of-line
"\e[4~": end-of-line


and restart your Terminal to get the full functionality

Tomorrow. Available Today.

The Leopard – Mac OS X 10.5 major release we all have been waiting for is finally released and I was happy to receive the Leopard + iLife’08 family pack from UPS 4 hours before the official 6pm launch.

So how is it? Generally – I really like it. I like the new features, the new look, the overall improved performance – especially Mail.app updates as most probably I won’t have to use MailTags. But most probably I will start really liking Leopard only once these functions will become stable and some will actually start working.

And this is exactly what this post is about – things we were (and still are) expecting from Leopard, that don’t work or just don’t work right.

First of, I would not expect to see that kind of view while editing Apple’s original mail rules in Mail.app:

Could you please save them for me with the [OK] button? Thanks!

OK, this is some really minor thing (my screenshots are no better), there were few more interesting ones. For example:

• iMovie HD that came with iLife’08, just did not work out of the box on Leopard – it just crashed before even loading
• iPhoto is still crashing while mangling photos or trying to create some more advanced album
• iPhoto effects and adjustments are way too slow comparing to the previous iLife
• iDVD, GarageBand and iWeb are so far the most stable ones, but most probably this is only because we did not attempt to load them.

Right, after iLife updates were installed, it became slightly more stable and iMove started working, but I was really expecting it to work really good out of the box on Leopard.

A2DP support. It sort of works, but really – “sort of”. I mean – on my first attempt to use iTunes playback directly to my stereo headphones, I started hearing something. Something really mono, but still – something. Unfortunately after few seconds playing with the headphones, computer became totally unresponsive and I had to restart it the hard way. I don’t know if Mic works – while testing it with skype, Mac also got into “bad situation”, so I did not want to “try” A2DP anymore.

Time machine over AirPort. Some time ago there were plans to make it work, but so far, it just does not. Hopefully, it will be fixed soon.

Command+Tab for X11.app and Firefox. This is a really bad one – switching between some applications, particularly Firefox And X11.app, that I use for my Konsole with Command+Tab just don’t work. OK, for Firefox it happens occasionally, but for X11.app – that’s permanent. This is not good.

Mail.app plugins. It was rather unexpected too, but none of the Mail.app plugins I have used, not even Mail Act-On that I like so much, work anymore. But I don’t blame Apple for that, although it should’ve warned me about that before installing Leopard (maybe it was somewhere in the license agreement? ).

SMS over Address Book. “Apple have removed all the Bluetooth SMS & Calls functions from Leopard’s Address Book v4.1..”. Too bad, I really liked the feature.

There’s a number of other minor bugs and missing features and I really hope them to be fixed soon. Actually, to keep track of all them, I’m submitting them right to apple via Apple Bug Reporter. Well, at least I was, before I got this:

What Leopard bugs or missing features are you suffering from?

At my work for security reasons we access some of internal services (eg. irc chat server) via ssh tunnel. Generally, setting up an ssh tunnel (a.k.a. secure port forward) on any UNIX type system having openssh client takes one simple command:

$ ssh -L 6667:localhost:6667 user@server

and entering a system password.

However, I like to close my MacBooks’ lid occasionally or reboot the Book and I really hate (and forget) to reconnect the tunnel every time connection breaks or Book is restarted so encouraged by a colleague, I decided to do something about it. The result is – few simple steps and the tunnel is available permanently. The steps are:

1. Key based ssh authentication. This was actually set long time ago but I’ll mention it here as it’s necessary to have key-based authentication – tunnel is created in the background. I won’t cover the details, simply on your Mac terminal, run ssh-keygen – this will generate your private/public rsa key pairs. Then copy your ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to remote server ~/.ssh directory and name it authorized_keys. Make sure file is only writable by owner. For starters, $ chmod 644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys should be enough.

2. Two simple shell scripts. One – to initialize the permanent ssh tunnel script on user login and, of course – the tunnel creation (and recreation on failure) script.

a) The first one will be invoked by Mac OS Login Hook. I placed it as ~/devel/login-hook.sh. Here’s scripts’ content (replace <user> with your short username):


#! /bin/bash
 
if [ "$(ps ax | grep tunnel-start.sh | grep -vc grep)" -lt 1 ]; then
 sudo -u <user> /Users/<user>/devel/tunnel-start.sh &
fi


The statement checks whether an instance of the script is not running yet (this could happen if you log out and then log back in again), and if not, starts tunnel script with your username rights (sudo is used because Login Hooks are run with root privileges)

b) The tunnel script which is placed in ~/devel/tunnel-start.sh in my case:


#! /bin/bash
 
while [ 1 ]; do
 ssh -N -L 6667:127.0.0.1:6667 user@server
 sleep 5
done


Generally – it’s a simple loop which tries to create a tunnel infinitely with short 5 second breaks. If tunnel is established, the script becomes idle.

3. We have to enable the login hook. As a simple user issue in terminal:

$ sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow \
    LoginHook /Users/<user>/devel/login-hook.sh

That’s it! Log out, Log in or reboot to test. Any questions?

While reading Adam’s article about duplicates in iTunes library, I decided to mess around a little with in my own library. Those who are following my blog most probably know that I’ve switched to Mac recently (personal friends also know I’ve changed my MacBook to MBP just few months ago) so had some hassles moving files back and forth. Skimming through iTunes library duff did not discover big mysteries, I really had only few (19 out of 2691 to be precise) duplicates.

But, then I decided to check my whole home folder (duff -r ~). Here are my stats:

• 3651 files having at least one duplicate
• 2903 files having 1 duplicate
• 335 files with 2 duplicates
• 154 files w/ 3 duplicates
• 23 files w/ 4 duplicates
• others are more system-wide duplicates for internal needs and can be ignored

What a mess!!! Time for clean-up.

However, once my fiancee moved to Mac, she decided to exchange The Bat! for Mail.app. Although it took a while, export/import from The Bat! to Mail.app went pretty smoothly. Furthermore, on the way of the transfer I had to search for some extensions (e.g. to remove duplicate messages etc) so at this point I found that extensibility of Mail.app is indeed available. And it is available so widely that I have switched to Mail.app myself. And I am a happy Mail.app user now.

For those considering the move, here’s the incomplete list of available Mail.app extensions:

http://www.hawkwings.net/plugins.htm

As for me, I’m pretty happy with these plugins:

• GrowlMail
• GPGMail
• MailTags
• Mail Scripts

I’m processing a decent email pipeline so sqlite backend really plays it’s role and performance is much better.

Note for Thunderbird users moving to Mail.app, export/import between those applications was not that smooth. I had to run a script against Thunderbird profile folder before ALL messages were imported successfully. It’s available here.

Have a good Mail.app!

If you’ve been following my posts, you should know that when I first switched to Mac – I was a little disappointed with my first MacBook experience. One month – two issues. But I did not tell you how (if) did it end up. I guess it’s about time.

As it became clear latter – the charging issue wasn’t actually about the battery. Worse – it was about the motherboard. But the interesting thing is not what it was – it’s how it was solved.

So, the next Friday after the battery stopped charging, I decided to give Apple Genius Bar a chance to prove they can be better. And, to my great surprise:

1. The Genius actually spoke English (Don’t forget – it’s France we’re talking about)
2. The Genius did not take my Mac promising it will be fixed ASAP (yeah, 2 weeks is usually the “fastest possible” for most)
3. We even managed to agree on a call from the Genius when he receives the spare motherboard and when someone is available to address the issue in a working day.

I should note he wasn’t 100% sure it was the motherboard yet. He just said: “Well, when you bring it here, we’ll check if it’s the motherbord and if not – we’ll check what is it, return you your sick MacBook, order spare parts and call you again when they’re here.

It didn’t take long to get the call (I think it was three days) and, as agreed – I instantly took the MacBook to the Genius. Well OK, it took them more than a day to fix it – it was three working days and I was getting mad already (I never took my primary notebook to the service before), but in reality, I’d say that three days is good. Very good.

Almost five months passed since then and the MacBook is doing just fine.

Firefox-2.0.0.3.en-US
Thunderbird-2.0.0.0.en-US

Please read this post before downloading to make sure you know what you will get.

P.S. For fancy forms, don’t forget to apply Firefoxy patch

Firefox-2.0.0.2.en-US
Thunderbird-1.5.0.10.en-US

Quick F.A.Q.:
Q. What is all this about?
A. Intel binary builds are optimized for running on Intel cpus so they’re a few percent faster than the regular ones (and almost twice smaller )

Q. Why my “Firefox” became “BonEcho” and “Thunderbird” – “Mail/News”?
A. I cannot distribute binaries with Official mozilla.org Branding so these are so called development releases.

Q. Can I build these on my own?
A. Yes, build instructions are here (they are for both- universal and individual builds):
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mac_OS_X_Universal_Binaries

Q. Is it hard to build them?
A. It’s really easy. It’s just that for the first time it takes quite a lot to download and install.

Q. Do you have your own builds with –enable-official-branding?
A. Yes

Q. Can you share them?
A. No