MacOS X 10.6.0 Snow Leopard was released over a month ago on August 28, 2009. While everyone jumped at the opportunity to be Apple’s outsourced QA, I followed my rule of “never use a dot-zero (.0) release.” Now, a month and a half later — and after the 10.6.1 update has been released — I’ve decided to install the upgrade.

Many people have suggested the upgrade was smooth and painless for them, and I totally believe this to be the case for probably 98% of Mac users, but I’m a developer and have installed lots of third-party (non-Apple) applications. I was completely expecting a bit of work to get my system running normally again, but my first symptom that something was wrong totally puzzled me: the system would stop performing I/O to disk, causing every process to spin the shiny hypnodisk at me. Basically, I could boot the system, and after about 3 minutes, everything would hang. So, keep this in mind as I describe all the things I fixed, because getting through each step involved several reboots just to make the necessary changes.

Here’s the list of problems I encountered and fixed:

Checkpoint SecureClient VPN

This complained at boot-up that the SecureClient service wasn’t started. A known work-around is to binary edit two files, StartupItemsMgr and SecureClientStarter and replace the string “kextload -s” with “kextload -r“. This worked for me.

MacPorts

The old MacPorts compiled against dependencies that are no longer available on Snow Leopard, including MacPorts.dylib itself. Luckily, I just grabbed the latest MacPorts installer .dmg for Snow Leopard which enabled me to selfupdate and upgrade outdated and get things working again.

Soundflower

Periodically, a dialog box complaining about Soundflower.kext popped up:

I had Soundflower 1.4.3 installed, which was the most recent release before Snow Leopard was released. Now, Soundflower 1.5.1 is available, so I upgraded to it. This appears to be sufficient to get it working again, too.

Oh, the agony …

At this point, my system appeared to be stable enough to use — no spurious errors being logged to /var/log/system.log and no more annoying hangs. I’m sure I’ll discover a few more annoyances next week when I start dealing with work stuff again, but for now I can at least use the machine again.

Was the upgrade worth it? I guess I’ll find out.

Tags: Apple, MacOS X, Snow Leopard

Back in 2003, when I started working for AOL, there was a race to launch a digital music store for the Windows platform. The company to beat was Apple, who launched their Windows port of iTunes in October 2003. At that time, AOL was still claiming to have over 24 million subscribers. Clearly, if AOL could push out a digital music store offering as part of their service to that many customers before Apple, it might have made a difference.

But, wait … AOL launched its MusicNet offering as early as February 2003, you say? Beating Apple didn’t make much of a difference, after all, right?

I wasn’t directly involved in any of that work at AOL so I’m just speculating here, but I know a lot of effort went into rights management systems and DRM. I’m willing to bet a lot more effort went into getting all that stuff working than actual work on making the product–the music store–kick ass. I kept complaining that AOL should take advantage of its then-800-pound gorilla nature and spend its budget and manpower to invent and pioneer a business model that was DRM-less, rather than spend all that time trying to satisfy everyone’s wacky demands trying to implement DRM.

At the time, I kept hearing responses that all boiled down to: it’s not going to happen. I’ve learned that nothing happens unless someone makes it happen and AOL certainly could have been one to make it happen. This reminds me of a quote I love: “People aren’t resistant to change. Matter of fact, people will change just about anything in order to maintain the status quo.”

Fast-forward five years to 2008: Amazon, Walmart and even Apple (through iTunes Plus) are offering completely DRM-free music downloads. Somehow, things are changing from “not going to happen” to “it’s happening” to “it’s happened.” What makes me sad is that instead of rendering itself irrelevant, AOL could have pioneered this.

Regardless, I’m happy that we can finally start saying goodbye to DRM for real. Now, companies can start focusing on really innovating where it counts–identifying, funding, producing and distributing quality digital content–instead of on meaningless technology like DRM.

Tags: digital content, DRM, AOL, Apple, music

This is my BlackBerry Curve 8310 tethered to my MacBook Pro over Bluetooth:

Not the “high speed 3G EDGE” I was expecting. Is this really the height of technological achievement for 2008? Where’s my flying car? Jeez.

Tags: mobile, BlackBerry, Mac, Bluetooth, tethering

One of the things I’m trying to do is mount remote filesystems on my Mac using MacFUSE and sshfs. In short, the idea is you use ssh/sftp to connect to a remote system and “mount” its filesystem (using the SSH connection) so that it appears as a mounted volume on your local machine. In general, this works great; you only need SSH access to the remote host–not SMB, CIFS, or any other standard, but perhaps firewalled, network file sharing protocol.

But, what if the remote filesystem you want to mount is actually a mounted SMB share? You would think it should “just work,” right? It kind of does, sorta. But, only sorta.

I start out by using sshfs to mount the remote filesystem:

dossy@shiny:~$ sshfs foobar:/share x -o volname=x

Nothing surprising: this just works as you’d expect. I’m mounting the subdirectory /share on foobar to my local mountpoint named “x” as a Mac volume named “x”. Lets make sure we can write to it:

dossy@shiny:~$ cd x
dossy@shiny:~/x$ ls -la
total 8
drwxrwxrwx  1 root  wheel  4096 Sep 13 20:40 .
drwxrwxrwx  1 root  wheel     0 Sep 13 18:23 ..
dossy@shiny:~/x$ echo "This is a test." > test.txt
dossy@shiny:~/x$ cat test.txt
This is a test.

There, we can write to this remote filesystem just fine–this is great! But, this was all from the shell, what about from the Finder? Ahh, this is where things start to suck hard. I create a small test file called “suckage.txt” and try to copy it to the sshfs mount:

Attempting this copy operation results in this error dialog:

Say what? I don’t have sufficient privileges? Finder, you’re crazy. Watch this:

dossy@shiny:~/x$ cp ~/Desktop/suckage.txt .
dossy@shiny:~/x$ ls -la
total 16
drwxrwxrwx   1 root   wheel     0 Sep 13 21:49 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 35 dossy  staff  1190 Sep 13 20:57 ..
-rw-rw-rw-   1 root   wheel    20 Sep 13 21:51 suckage.txt
-rw-rw-rw-   1 root   wheel    16 Sep 13 20:45 test.txt

Looks like I had privileges just fine–why couldn’t Finder copy the file? I suspect it has a lot to do with the crazy AppleDouble nonsense that Finder messes with, none of which happens when I just copy the files in a shell.

I’ve spent at least an hour playing Configuration Option Bingo (you know, when you try turning on and off all the various configuration options until you get the permutation that solves your problem, at which point you want to jump up and shout out “BINGO!”) … with no luck. I’ve tried “-o noappledouble” and the other obvious things. I’m now giving up and blogging this, hoping that someone out there has figured this out and might share their secret; I sure couldn’t turn up anything useful by Googling, that’s for sure.

Tags: Apple, MacOS X, MacFUSE, sshfs, Samba, smb, fail

So, I finally broke down and ordered myself a 15″ MacBook Pro from MacMall.com on Tuesday last week, and it arrived the next day (!) … and I’ve been installing apps and migrating my data over to it since. I guess you can officially call me “a switcher” as I’ve moved all my data off my old laptop onto this new one, and the old one is going to get reformatted and will become my wife’s.

Part of switching to a Mac means looking for new blogging software. I previously used BlogJet 2.0 on Win32, but now I’m trying out ecto 3 beta for MacOS X. I definitely think it’s going to take some getting used to but I can already tell it’s much better than BlogJet was. However, I can definitely see needing to customize ecto to my liking before I can feel really comfortable using it.

Have you switched recently? Got any good tips that I might want to know about? Things to avoid? Tell me about it in the comments …