My Apple Story

To all of you in Cupertino and Austin and to the family of Steve, my heart and thoughts are with you.

The world is mourning the passing of Steve Jobs today, and so am I. Steve passed away yesterday after a long battle with cancer. For those of you who use apple products, the iPhone, iPad, iPod, Macs, this is a sad day. For those of us who spent time at Apple, it's almost a personal loss.

My first computer was a Commodore 64 with dual floppy (5.25) drives. It was soon and quickly replaced with the first Macintosh. I was in love. I bounced from the 128 to the 512k model in a year, then to the SE, SE/30, and ultimately to the LC I. My first personal computer at home was the LCII followed by a Performa 6116CD (my first PPC chip), 8150 WGS, beige G3/233, and finally Blue&white G3 with a G4 upgrade. Twenty years of history and memories defined by the Apple products I used at home and at work. I learned almost everything I know about computing (which is a lot, but not exhaustive) on the Macintosh Platform.

In 1995 I started a contract with Apple at a call center for the AAC (I still have my 1990s Apple Assistance coffee cup). I worked for Apple during the dark times. The times of licensing the OS, clones, Pippen, OS 7.5, and Gil Amelio. It was a hard time for Apple, there was a loss of focus on innovation, easy of use, and technology. Stock prices and market share were at an all time low and nay-sayers were constantly predicting the closure of Apple's doors. Yet there was always this spirit of hope. In the last few months of my tenure there, Apple bought NeXT, and it was announced that Steve would be returning as a consultant. I left that job to go work elsewhere. I received my hardware and software certifications during that time and was happy to see things beginning to change.

Then the most amazing thing happened, iMac. Ditch the beige boxes of yesterday and make the internet and home computing fun again for the everyday person. Apple stopped trying to compete with the PC market and made something fun and interesting again. iTunes and iPod were just around the corner bringing to the masses the wonders of mp3s. iPod was not the first mp3 player. I owned a Rio (which worked with iTunes at the time), but in my opinion, the iPod changed the world. Mobile devices were never so easy to use, so well integrated with the GUI and operating environment.

With the dissolving of the AIM alliance and the release of OSX, Macintosh computers exploded on the scene as well. Innovation and design was alive again at Apple.

I could go on about the innovation of the iPhone and iPad as well, but those are much less personal to me. I turned many people to the Mac platform. I've used it for 27 years now.

The world became a better place for the technology and innovation developed by the Steves (yes I hold Woz in the same regard). My only hope is that Apple continues to foster and nurture the abilities of other visionaries and innovators.

Thank you Steve, you will be missed. Rest now our friend.

Goodbye Lala, You were good to me

My Friend Tivo25 introduced me to lala.com a few months ago. I am always looking for new music and even spins on old music. Lala is great, it offers a queue for sampling music, social networking to find people with interests and get introduced to music and share it with other networks (facebook), and most of all a great way to easily and comfortably purchase music on a tier.

Chairman Steve at Apple thinks it's good too. Apple recently purchased Lala.com. Like myself, many users had hoped this site would become an extension of iTunes or simply just left alone.

Nope....it goes down May 31st. Thank you Apple, you cheeky B&^@6@!(&%#s. This is something I expected from the likes of Microsoft, not Apple. The iTunes store has many merits, and I am loyal fan, but social networking really leads to music discovery, something Apple has yet to grasp in it's push to appease the big labels, which I hope die in a fiery, brimstone laden, smelly, smoky ball of financial ruin. Sorry, lost it there for a second. Nothing stifles new music faster than shutting down avenues of discovery. Not everyone can go to SxSW every year and we rely on services like lala to produce new music for us.

Today, another avenue was roadblocked, and unfortunately it looks like music lovers on the web will ultimately suffer the consequences. Had it not been for lala and a local radio station (PBS funded 91.7 in Dallas-FortWorth), I would have never discovered St. Vincent, Passion Pit, Little Dragon, Aqualung, Fanfarlo, Efterklang, Shiney Toy Guns, or Ok Go. This leaves Pandora and perhaps last.fm. I will be showing my support for Pandora now with a paid subscription and will create an account on Last.fm probably this weekend.

Bye Lala, I hope to see you on the other side. :(

Macworld 08

So like every other mac fan, I am eagerly waiting for the bloggers to post the keynote tomorrow as well as new products from the vendors. Macworld San Fran always brings back memories of my first Macworld 1997. Of course I had never been to San Francisco before and was in a six car wreck on 101 after being in the state only 40 min. California certainly has a way of welcoming people....(jk). When I was there, the most promising things were Umax making clones, the BeOS running on Apple hardware, and the announcement of the first Radeon chipset. Wow have things changed since then.

I will post here what I think of new products and services as they come out of the expo this week. I am hoping that some of the announcements will relate to the iTunes store and the recent changes at Amazon.com. I really want Apple to stay competitive and on top of the download market, they seem to drive innovation here and I'm looking forward to the Big Four learning a thing or two. I would also love to see a revamp of the AppleTV, I think that Apple has something there, but it has kinda been disregarded. This is really the era of video on demand, and I really really want to digitize my movie collection to a device.

I will update as I learn, but I will probably start with the Bento announcement from Filemaker and a few others.

DMG Converter for OS X

DMG Converter is rapidly becoming my archiving tool of choice for OS X. With the exception of creating encrypted images, this nifty and free utility does just about everything else. It currently has support for just about every compression type across most major formats.

I personally use it to archive those CDs/DVDs which manufacturers still seem to want to send out. I prefer the dmg format, but sometimes when you need some cross platform support an .iso is the only way to go. The real beauty of this application is that if you are like me and are running XP/Vista in parallel, you will need a quick and easy way to get the iso loaded, and without having to stop what you are doing, and go searching for a physical media like a CD or DVD. This makes it easy to load in parallels when you need to get something done quickly. I have included screen shot of the types of images the converter accepts and understands. This application is written for Tiger (10.4.x) but so far I have had no issues running it in Leopard (10.5.1).

Apple Airport Disk Utility

Why would Apple not give everyone a link to download the Apple Airport Utility software, but then include it in the stupid update to 5.1, hidden, nested in the directory of the mpkg?
The only answer I have is that it must have the plans to a top secret jet plane embedded somewhere in the files. Now all I have to do is find Dabney Coleman, my Atari, and go to the Alamo to get it all worked out.....

If you want the software, lost your disk, and don't have time to "play a game", then you can feel free to use my backup of the disk image located here.

Lessons Learned with Airport Extreme Base Station

So I made the decision to use the built in functionality of the Airport Extreme Base Station's print and file sharing services. I went to Best Buy yesterday, shelled out my $179.00 and walked out. I hooked up a 500GB USB drive and went about my merry way to finally having a flexible NAS.

Setup for the Base Station was easy. I did some homework first though and here are some suggestions if you want to set one up yourself. I have what I like to call Acquired Knowledge - This means through trial and error I can save you a few steps.

1.RTFM - Read the Fine Manual. This comes in PDF from Apple's Site and as a paper manual in the box.

2. Format the disk using something other than Windows. I had multiple problems when the disk was formatted using NTFS, FAT32, and UDF. There were nothing but errors when using NTFS, FAT32 does not (beyond theoretical) support disks larger than 32GB, and UDF simply wasn't seen. I finally used Apple Disk Utility in 10.3.9 and from that moment on the Airport Software could see, mount, and share the disk.

3. Copy files via USB prior to establishing connection. I timed the transfer of my iTunes Library (26GB). It took 3 hours over G, 2.5 over N, and roughly 30 min over USB2.0.

4. Make sure to do all the updates to the Airport Base Station prior to disk install, this includes the firmware.

5. Make sure your wireless cards support WPA2. This is critical if you want to move on to something better than WEP.

6. For Heaven's Sake - Secure your network. Don't leave your network open, especially with the optional disk and printers attached. Password protect your network as well as your disk. Personally I did not use the "workgroup" option when setting up the disk.

Enjoy

Using Automator to Show Hidden Files in BSD Filesystem

This has probably been posted before somewhere else, but I found it to be useful to move it beyond the standard shell script.

At times I want to see the hidden files in Mac OS X, at other times my OCD of being organized makes me crazy and I have to turn them off. This is a perfect example of using OS X's built in functionality to simplify my life by making these easy scripts finder plugins using Apple Automator.

The script itself is quite easy:
#!/bin/bash
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

to Hide Files

#!/bin/bash
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

to Show Files

Now use these in Automator:


Save them as a plugin for the Finder:


and you are good to go:


This can be a real time saver. This does however kill the Finder, (killall Finder), which will cause Finder to relaunch, but this has not been a problem since 10.2.

Enjoy!