I experienced a rather annoying problem tonight. When coming back from sleep, my MacBook Pro “forgot” about its keyboard. No matter of power-cycling or removing batteries could fix it, and because it wasn’t “there” it didn’t want to reset PRAM either. External keyboard and mouse worked fine.

After much angry grrr’ing, I found that resetting the SMC worked.

Blogged in case other people have the same issue.

Update: it’s happened a few more times since then. Each time it disappears from the list of USB devices – external keyboard works fine. Lots of other people having the same issue, me and N have decided to downgrade to 10.4 this weekend and stick with that for a while.

While developing a site which did some image resizing, I noticed this morning that Apple’s version of php5 which is shipped with Leopard didn’t have this library available! It does seem a rather odd omission, given that it’s probably one of the most commonly-used libraries behind mysql/mysqli.

A quick Google revealed that I’m not alone in this, and indeed Apple Discussions has threads on this particular subject albeit for Leopard Server (I’m running the bog-standard desktop edition). After trying a few solutions, I found that the Hill’s Dorm tutorial on installing GD gave the best pointers.

There are a couple of gotchas:

• Don’t use the Darwinports version of libjpeg – it’s a 32-bit version. This wasted half an hour while I tried to work out what was wrong only to find that I had the 32-bit libjpeg installed when everything else (including php5 and apache2) were 64-bit; the instructions given on the tutorial above does tell you how to build 64-bit versions of things which any recent Intel MacBook will require. A telltale sign of this is seeing in your logs: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/gd.so’ – (null) in Unknown on line 0 if you’ve got the wrong architecture (you might also see architecture errors in config.log if you’re really mismatching stuff).
• Don’t assume it’s not working because the command-line edition doesn’t work. This had me foxed and indeed seems to be that the CLI version of pph5 which Apple supply hasn’t got the capability to load dynamic libraries. The error is along the lines of dyld: Symbol not found: _php_sig_gif and puts the CLI version of php out of action pretty much.

I’m sure a more elegant solution will be along sometime, but for the moment this does seem to work.

Yesterday I took the plunge and flattened my MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo, 2.33GHz, 2G RAM) to reinstall Leopard. This was not an upgrade, this was a completely fresh install. It all went pretty OK really – nothing to write home about and certainly no disasters.

I can now quite happily report that out of all the applications installed the following seem to work without a hitch: Zend, Firefox, Adium, Azureus, Vienna, MS Word 2004, MS Excel 2004, Logic Express 7.2, MySQL 5.1, Mulberry Mail, Nokia iSync profile (for our new E65s).

The two apps which have little niggly problems that I’ve found are:

• VLC (media player), which occasionally has problems resizing the aperture and hiding the transport bar as a result.
• Parallels 3, which seems to ‘forget’ the bridging interface if you shut off the wireless interface.

I should note if you are a LAMP developer that the system comes preinstalled with php5.2 – I haven’t had to grab anything from Macports yet.

The annoyances of the transparent menu bar don’t really show in the backdrop I have, and the menu bar has been fixed with the hack I posted earlier this week. Additionally macosxhints.com had a nice hint on removing the stripes from Finder’s list mode, which were getting on my nerves.

Oh, while we’re on the subject of transparency, most of the presets in Terminal.app have a semi-transparent background. This can be changed in the ‘background color’ config section, the opacity option is hidden away in there. Took me 20 minutes to find that one.

Altogether so far an almost seamless upgrade. Tomorrow I try it in anger, and curse the missing wireless profiles I forgot to copy over 😛

Matt arrived at our house on Friday evening with a copy of the latest incarnation of Mac OS X ‘Leopard’ for me. Since the MacBook Pro is my principal machine, I thought I’d install it on the Mac Mini (which after all doesn’t get used by me much, more by the kids when they want to play on the CBeebies website). Anyway, I’ve taken the plunge on the Mini and upgraded the operating system.

First impressions…

• I like Spaces, the virtual desktop thingy. I used to use this sort of thing under Gnome and it’s really good to have it back – being able to have a workspace for worky stuff and a workspace for non-work so I can ignore it when I’m really busy is a very very good thing indeed.
• The menu bar transparency pisses me off. Matt noticed this first, but it’s got more irritating as time’s gone on – if you have a blue backdrop for instance the transparency in the menu bar makes the bar go light blue. The busier the backdrop, the less readable the menu bar is; it would be good if the transparency could be switched off altogether (someone suggested putting a 60px-or-whatever-it-is white extension to the top of your backdrop to ‘fix’ the transparency to 0%). Matt also noticed the rounded corners are gone on the menu bar!
• The reflection on the dock is a bit distracting too – I liked the old dock!
• Actually, a bit more control over the graphical elements of the UI in general would be nice.
• The new Finder is quite nifty, but it reminds me a lot of iTunes.
• The file drawers thing on the dock is very very useful. I’d quite like to be able to squish the font down though so I can fit more documents in the curve.

I’ll probably take out next weekend to flatten the MacBook and install Leopard on there, once I’ve listed all the applications I’ll need to install. I’ve not zilched the machine since I got it, and in the first couple of months I installed all sorts of crap so I good broom is required to get rid of my learning curve 😛

Update: Barely 10 minutes after I’d written this blog entry, there was an Apple Update for ‘login and keychain access’. I wonder if it’s got anything to do with this…

Update #2: macosxhints.com has a nifty way of getting rid of the 3d dock at the bottom.

OK, it seems I was a little hasty in my Apple keyboard whinging. I’ve cut my fingernails and it seems fine now. The posture change has helped a bit too.

Sadly, the function key melarky is still annoying. You can’t have everything, eh?

On my way home from my current contract in Sheffield I stopped off at Meadowhell to pick up a spare keyboard from the Apple Store. I’d heard about the new aluminium keyboards being quite thin, and since I tend to carry a full keyboard around with me when I’m contracting this seemed like a good acquisition.

I’ve been using it for about half an hour now to get used to it, and a number of things annoy me – not least the ergonomics. The problem lies in the profile – it’s almost flat to the table, and consequently use of a wrist rest is prohibitive. It also means you have to hold your hands almost vertically over the keyboard itself which (after low use) has given me a bit of an achy wrist; the keys don’t seem to travel enough, sometimes leaving me hitting them probably a bit too hard. Maybe I’ll get used to that.

Second thing that’s naffed me off – merging the volume keys and the function keys. I realist that F16..F19 are probably very important, but it would have been really nice if Apple had kept the volume keys over that way rather than the function key / utility key merging. I have my MacBook Pro configured so that the utility keys are at the foreground, with FN key combinations being required for use of F1..F12 but prefer it the other way round on the keyboard itself. I can’t do that in MacOS, I can either have it all one way or all the other.

It will go in my bag and be used at contracts, but I doubt I’d want to use one of these ‘in anger’ at a workstation. I think I may acquire a couple of the older white Apple keyboards just as spares for when I get a new desktop (which will happen one day or the other when I’m back with a solid office base to work from).

For many years I was a Eudora fan, using it to organise my email from upwards of 20 POP3 boxes. When I moved to IMAP I ended up using Mulberry, and it followed me onto the MacBook. I still have problems with the way Mulberry does some things (such as not rendering HTML mail, inline attachments, or being able to set ‘priority’ on outgoing emails) so it was with interest that I heard the first version of Penelope (aka Eudora 8) had been released, and I installed it eagerly.

Firstly, they’re very eager to state that it’s a complete rewrite, or to be more accurate it’s a hack of Thunderbird. However, I think I’d expected more than this – it did have a nice Eudora-y installer and a lovely set of icons, but other than that it was… well, Thunderbird. It’s also interesting to note that most of the bug reports on the Penelope tracker appear to be to do with keystrokes not doing the right things.

One final note: if you’re going to try this, back up your Thunderbird config first. Penelope very helpfully trampled all over my Thunderbird settings and left my NNTP reader in an almost unusable state.

2/10 – could try harder.

Today’s the first day using the MacBook Pro, and leaving the IBM at home. This now means that I’m working 100% on the MacBook, the backups are working, and I’ve got access to the applications I need. Some interesting notes on issues/niceties I’ve discovered so far…

Parallels: I’ve found Parallels to be excellent so far: along the same lines as VMware, it’s a virtual machine thingy so you can run a copy of Windows under OS X alongside your other Mac applications. There’s still the little matter that I have to deal with IE6 bugs, and I’ve still not found an OS X replacement for EMS MySQL Manager, so this is proving indispensable: on top of that I can configure some good sandbox justice, enabling me to see what sites look like in IE6, IE7, and under Linux as well as on the Mac itself. I really like how it puts icons for each Windows start-bar process on your Apple task bar too.

LogicExpress: I had a bit of fun with Logic Express last night. I’ve acquired a MidiSport 4×4 and connected it to the Minidisc mixing desk, with the aim of starting to convert the MD-Data masters from the Cheese Factory. After I’d got my head a bit more around how Logic processes things, I switched on MTC and managed to get it talking – woo! Sadly that was the point it went pear-shaped: Logic failed to record anything, crashed, and lost my session. Repeatedly. I think I’ll probably wait until I’ve got some peace and a few clear hours until I try it again 🙁

Palm Desktop: Calendaring is pretty important to me, and I’m very much ingrained in use of my Palm T|X. A killer app for me on Windows was their Palm Desktop product which pretty seamlessly integrates with the PDA itself, but I was quite annoyed to find that the OS X version wasn’t as mature as its Windows counterpart. Additionally, the version for download on Palm’s own site is 4.2.1, whereas my year-old installation CD has 4.2.2 on it! It’s a bit odd and crashes occasionally, and doesn’t have as many features as the Windows one; however it’s passable and beats iCal, which (for instance) doesn’t seem to retain categories properly.

That’s it so far. Probably more soon, but head’s a bit fuzzy right now thanks to the man-flu epidemic.

I’d been intending to do it all along: the arrival of the MacBook Pro had simply speeded the process up, but for about 6 months I’ve been gradually leaning towards having a Mac as my principal desktop.

This isn’t a thing to be taken lightly. I’m a contractor and as I’ve said a lot, I need to hit the ground running. Sometimes I’ll have less than 4 weeks to do a task that should be scheduled for 6 months, and so I need to be exceedingly confident using the tools of the trade – namely, my computer. So it was with a little bit of anxiety that I finally decided to try and use the MacBook in work, properly, and without needing to use the T42p.

How did it go? Well, day #1 was pretty good. I’d installed most of what I thought I might need – stuff like Zend Studio and Photoshop as well as staples such as Firefox. I only really need ssh on top of that lot and I’m fine.

Thanks to Macports I’ve got the MacBook set up to be a full sandbox – php5, mysql5 and of course apache are all installed. I’m working within subversion and it’s a real pleasure not to have to reboot all the time to get to applications such as Office and Photoshop! Then I’ve managed to get Parallels working, so I have a Windows 2000 desktop just in case I need to test IE. Very fine.

Irritations so far: mostly keyboard-related, which could be solved with a proper Apple keyboard rather than using my mobile USB one; the trackpad is a bit annoying but I’ve been taking my Mighty Mouse with me so that’s circumventable; I’m still getting used to OS X in terms of setting things to start up on boot but that’s easy since it’s BSD at the core; Printers crashed today when the Bonjour service was being a bit nosey.

Other than that, fine. No, you can’t have it, I’m happy with it.

I’m typing this on my new MBP. It’s lovely, although it’ll take me a bit to get used to the keyboard, and I want a wireless Mighty Mouse for it. Mmmmmmm yeah.

One of the pieces of kit which goes everywhere with me is my 3rd-generation iPod. Bought by my wife and friends for my 30th birthday (you do the math on how old it is) it’s constantly charged, discharged, bumped and clonked. It’s got almost all of its 40G of disk full of tunes which help me work, sleep and play. Sadly, of late it has managed to last less than 20 minutes before requiring a charge, meaning I either have to play it through the computer or I have to lug the charger around with me too.

So, aware that I was working in Leeds this week, I thought I’d nip to the KRCS Apple dealership up near the Merrion Centre which (last I looked) sold iPod batteries suitable for my particular model. Sadly this time round they didn’t, and weren’t sure if they might get some in by the end of the week or not.

Lucky for me an acquaintance had been through this themselves and pointed me at iPodDoctor.co.uk, who for the princely sum of £18.50 could furnish me with not only a battery, but the tools and instructions to carry out the operation, and throw Special Delivery postage in as well. Bonus! From a Monday afternoon order it arrived on Tuesday morning and so, post-client-meeting, I carried out the operation in a spare moment.

It went smoothly, took less than 10 minutes, and I’m very pleased with the results. Although I wouldn’t recommend it for the faint-hearted, anyone with a bit of technical nouse and who can stomach delicately pulling their beloved iPod apart can do this. They even provide the tools, just follow the instructions carefully.

Definitely recommended.

Today has been my first proper day trying to use the MacMini as a development environment in my day-to-day work, and I’m extremely pleased to say it’s going well – php5+mysql5 (courtesy of macports.org) seems to be quite happy, and port forwarding is helping me use it remotely. In fact, I’m so impressed that I think I may have to change my laptop to a MacBook Pro if this continues (I don’t think Nicky quite banked on that when she bought me the Mini!).

The one sole sticking point is that the default filesystem installed on the Mac (HFS+) is case-insensitive. One client’s code repository had two files in it named fooBar.jpg and the other foobar.jpg, so that the case insensitivity screwed it up when I was checking out the code; therefore, if I end up changing the laptop I think I’ll have to change the filesystem type and sort that out before I start working seriously with it.

Of course, before I do that I’d better backport almost 10 years of email onto an IMAP server and find a decent Mac mail client – pity Mulberry went titsup and has an uncertain future (although there are downloads still), I quite liked the look of that.

On the subject of laptops, Lenovo have done all the paperwork to get me a complete brand new replacement T43p which is the closest specification to my T42p that they can lay their hands on; however I’ve had my T42p shipped back so I can transfer files when it arrives. Fingers crossed it won’t be too long – lack of a decent reliable laptop is starting to grow wearing.