Be Excellent To Each Other

That's interesting, is SMB actually Apple's recommended Mac-to-Mac wire protocol now? I thought it had the potential to fuck up resource forks.

Mind you, AppleTalk always was a royal pain in the arse from a network admin point of view. Stupid chatty protocol.

I've switched off Samba on both of my Leopard machines and AFP is still working fine. I've got it on my iPhone, too.

I'm running 10.5.3 as well, on a iG5, a MBP and an iBoko with no problems really. I get the occasional documented problem with it refusing to wake from sleep on the MBP, but I find a hard stare usually works fine to resolve that. I think it's a little less stable than Tiger (I like the fact that all the OS iterations are also the same as WWII German tanks!) but not deal breakingly so, by any interpretation - the only noticeable problems I seem to get nowdays are unresponsive apps, none of which are Apple. Firefox regularly buggers up if I have multiple tabs open - it starts with failing to load jpegs or flash or content into pages and ends with telling me it's "done" downloading content and there's nothing but a blank page. I also occasionally get lock ups with Lightroom as well, but FQ'ing usually resolves that. It's being widely reported that 10.6 (It's No Leopard) will be much cleaner as they're dropping PPC support.

I've just noticed //pedant mode// that your sig says AKA as Dr Glyndwr, so that's Also Known As As DrGlyndwr

LOLs out loud at DBSnappa.

Bollocks, you are technically correct. The best kind of correct.

It does. That's what's causing about 90% of our network issues with the Macs in the office.


Interesting, we can't get the Macs to communicate over AFP at all - is there a specific setting you have to switch on in Leopard? And on the iPhone don't you need to install an app to use AFP?

Macs still have resource forks? Really? I probably wouldn't have bought one if I'd known that

Yes, you need an app to connect to the iphone over AFP. I use ftp though 'cos it's a bit handier.

Finder is shit.

Only old school apps. I used my Mac for Java development and I don't think I had a single resource fork on the drive anywhere outside the OS. They are not widely used for data files any more, as I understand it. See also: alternate data streams on NTFS, which are pretty much the same thing, and is (I think I remember reading) why Excel will not accept a / or : in a worksheet name: each worksheet is saved as a different data stream and they all need valid paths.

It never really bothered me, any more so than Explorer or, for that matter, the Gnome and KDE file managers. Why do you say this?

Nice to look at, nice to hold, but if you use it consider yourself, er, fucked off.

Hateful device that makes Sir Clive Sinclair look like some kind of keyboard design genius. As discussed earlier, in my whole collection of computers the only keyboard I hate more than the Mac keyboard is my BBC Master. That includes all of Sir Clives efforts and the C64.

The best kind of response!

Oh, I hated it at first, but I love it now. I must point out that I came from a wireless crumb store beforehand that just stopped working. That was VILE to use, truly cheap, nasty, unresponsive and the worst kind of pita to clean.

I did waver about IMing you but I thought I'd humiliate you in public instead, seeing as it's rare that I get a technical one over on you!

We use QuarkXPress 4 and 5 in our office, although we are slowly moving to 6 which does run on OS X natively.

The other thing that fucks me right off about OS X is the way it drops hidden files everywhere it fucking touches. Leopard is even worse for this than Tiger and previous - those generally only put .DS_Store files everywhere, but now Leopard creates a hidden file for EVERY SINGLE FILE in any given folder. I'm assuming that this is Leopard's way of "emulating" resource forks, but it's goddamn annoying.

There isn't a way of turning this off. There should be a way of turning it off for network drives. Just like there should be a way of showing hidden files that DOESN'T involve typing in a command into the terminal.

Have you actually tried using it for, say, a whole day? They really feel shit at first but the more you get used to them the better they get.

2 full days.

I'm sure it's fine for web browsing, but for any kind of proper work it's shit. Same way I hate typing anything of length on a laptop.

Well, good



It just isn't really good at anything. List files and directories in a sensible way so you can see them? No. Access an FTP site or expand a zip file? No. Even the preview of images and such is poor. Every listing is in its own window which has to be massive, so you end up shuffling through about half a dozen of the stupid things for the simplest operations. I'm sure there's more I could come up with if I was sitting at it.

I know you're going to say "well, you should use the shell then". And you're probably right, but I grew up using Directory Opus which did everything nicely, and even windows Explorer is tolerable on XP, so it's annoying to take a step backwards to the days when GUIs were pretty but largely useless for anything file-system-y.

AFAICS Gnome and KDE file managers have the same stone age metality but look awful as well.

We'll have to agree to disagree then. I do probably about 9 hours of coding a day on mine and I'm consistently faster with it than with any other keyboard.

The lack of a numeric keypad is a killer blow IMO. I've rather got used to it, Amstrad being the only major 8 bit manufacturer to include one on their machines.*



* OK so the CPC numeric keypad was "F" keys but nobody ever used them as such.

Aaaaah. You've been using the wireless one.

Yes, that blows goats compared to the wired one.

Funny how we're influenced by our early computer "choices" isn't it
I was lucky enough to get a C64, so to this day I exclusively use the numbers which are right there above the letter keys, which is dead handy. So I could quite happily ditch the right 3rd of the keyboard and not miss it..

I use the numeric keypad a hell of alot in my accounts package, but also in spreadsheets. Other times I use the numbers at the top.

What are the differences (apart from being wireless and having no numeric keypad)?

Mainly that it doesn't sneak off every 10 minutes to find a goat and pleasure it in certain ways, judging by the sound of it.

That would get annoying, to say the least.

I did find it doing this....

Disgusting.

*Applauds*

My wife has the aluminium wireless keyboard, and barring the lack of num-pad, I can't really see/feel any difference.

The KDE file manager/swiss army app, Konqueror, is actually stupendously lovely - it's the thing I liked most and miss most about Linux. Effortlessly switches between local browsing, FTP, HTTP (Webkit based), FISH, man page browsing, etc. Massively customisable to look like whatever you want, from a tabbed-finder style to a Windows Explorer heirarchical list style, or both at once. Fully spring-loaded and drag and drop, and with tabs, which are an even greater boon to file management than to web browsing.

The Finder just isn't very good. Typical situation - you want to move a file from a subdirectory into its parent directory. How do you do it? Choices appear to be to switch to Column View (which I loathe, scrollbar hell), open another finder and navigate to the required folder and drag and drop, or grab the icon and use spring-loaded folders to navigate through to the required folder, which is a pain.

How often have you double-clicked on a downloaded disk image, to presented with an icon which you need to drag to Applications to install? As the DMG is a special finder Window, there's no sidebar which rules out drag and drop, so you click on the Finder Icon in the Dock, which just re-selects the same bloody finder Window. So you hit Apple-N, drag and drop, curse, and repeat this the next time it happens.

Problems after Mac updates - I have never had one, ever, and my first one was 10.3.3. Most Mac users have their own combination of cargo-cult rituals which they follow for successful update, but the one point just about every experienced user agrees with is this: for a point release (e.g. 10.5.3), always download/install the Combo Update from Apple's website, rather than the Delta Update that Software Update pushes at you.

The Delta Update attempts to patch existing files to bring them up to date, while the Combo Update simply replaces them outright with known good copies. As well as being far more reliable, re-running the combo update can (apparently) often fix other problems. If you've got problems after installing the Delta, try installing the Combo over the top - might fix it.

Although for power issues, an SMC reset normally fixes everything.

Can anyone recommend any good games/software for a circa 2006 PowerPC G5 iMac running 10.5?

I think they made GTA San Andreas for the G5. Don't quote me on that though I've only played it on an Intel.

MAME

NATCH.

I've still got a 2003 PowerBook G4 at home which I used to play The Movies on a fair bit.

I remember that game coming out. Another Molyneux over-promise