AppleTechnician.com

Jan 28

The iPad and the Future

Posted in: Apple, Hardware, iPad by Damien Barrett 5 Comments »

ipad I have a message for all the early-adopters and influencers who are denouncing the Apple iPad. As an early-adopter and technology gadget-hound myself, this has been a hard realization to make, but it doesn’t make it any less true. The message: What we want and ask for in an Apple Tablet simply doesn’t matter.

Apple didn’t design the iPad to be for us. It’s not a “Netbook without a keyboard.” It’s not meant to be a multitasking, primary-use computer. You’re not meant to write novels on it, or use InDesign to design a newspaper, or edit a movie in iMovie. The iPad isn’t for us; it’s for everyone else.

Apple has clearly spent a lot of time on the iPhone OS user interface to allow it to lower the barrier of entry to computing to practically nothing. I can hand my 2-year-old son my iPhone and he figures out how to navigate the controls immediately. My mother, who can barely manage to turn on her iMac to compose an email is able to use my iPhone with little guidance. The iPhone was the first step in moving away from the desktop paradigm of computer use; the iPad is a second step. It’s ironic that Steve Jobs and Apple, who did so much to create and popularize and spread the desktop metaphor of computer use, are the same people working to overturn that metaphor and move the public to a new way of interacting with computers.

In ten years, we won’t even recognize the computers that we’ll be using. My son will be 12 years old, and he won’t be using a laptop or a desktop computer, except in some specialized uses. Mac OS X and Windows as we know them will be distant and obsolete technologies to him. His computing environment, ten years from now, will be some distant generation of the iPad. Speech recognition and multi-touch variants will be the primary ways of interacting with his digital devices. Technology evolves and improves rapidly. What we’re seeing with the iPhone and now the iPad is nothing more than the next generation of computing devices. It’s going to be exciting to see it evolve.

The iPad also lends itself to a global audience. Apple has already figured out a better way for Chinese language characters to be entered, using the multi-touch trackpad on their newest laptops. This kind of data entry, using your fingers to draw characters rather than a keyboard, will of course be ported to the iPad. Just because the most efficient way of data entry for an Arabic character-based language is via a physical keyboard doesn’t mean that that is true for a large chunk of the rest of the world.

So you can titter and joke all you want about the name and how it conjures up images of feminine hygiene products. Apple doesn’t care. People laughed at the iPod name also and look how big of a failure that was. Eventually the iPad will gain some multitasking functionality in a future iPad OS version and it’ll be more palatable to the geeks. But until then, Apple will be selling millions of these things to average users who simply don’t know and don’t care about the “missing” features about which you are whinging.

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Jun 09

Apple’s Myopia

Posted in: Apple by Damien Barrett 4 Comments »

apple_blur Apple is completely screwing over a significant portion of its most valued customers by making laptops with non-removable batteries.

At the school where I work, we’re planning to lease 1000+ Mac laptops for a 1:1 laptop program to start in August of 2010. Until yesterday’s keynote, we were thinking that Apple’s 13″ Unibody MacBook would fit our needs well. In case you hadn’t noticed, Apple changed their laptop lineup yesterday, converting their Unibody MacBook into an entry-level MacBook Pro and making the only MacBook in the lineup the white polycarbonate one.

The problem here is that the only laptop in their lineup now that has a removable battery is the older style white plastic one. The desirable durability improvements of the newer Unibody models make it a better choice for our students (4th – 12th grades) and faculty, but the non-removable battery invalidates this model from our decision-making process. With limited power in our rooms and on our campuses, we were planning to rely on banks of battery-charging stations to allow our students and faculty to get through the day by simply swapping out a drained battery for a charged one. This solution has successfully been deployed in many 1:1 schools. A non-removable battery renders this solution unworkable for the vast majority of 1:1 laptop programs around the country.

And let’s not forget about the legions of MacBook Pro-toting photographers and film industry professionals who rely on MacBook Pros and swappable batteries to get their work done while in the field

When Apple released the 17″ Unibody MacBook Pro with a non-removable battery, I wrote it off as an experiment by Apple in their product line. I should have seen the writing on the wall and foreseen that they’d move this “innovation” into the rest of the new product line. Apple claims that these non-removable batteries get a 7-hour charge, which may be true for a brand-new battery. But what would we do when we are two years into our three-year 1:1 lease and the batteries start to fail (as all rechargeable batteries do). Apple certainly wouldn’t replace the failing batteries, even under AppleCare. Nor would they pay for the extra labor involved in replacing 1000 non-removable batteries. A significant reason my school is considering the Apple platform is because our small technical staff can adequately administer 1000 Mac laptops. For our school to consider a Windows-based 1:1 laptop program, we’d have to double or even triple our technical staff, a showstopper. The laptop program simply wouldn’t happen.

I’ve been trying to figure out why Apple would make such a myopic decision with their popular line of laptops and keep coming up bewildered. Their official explanation offered at MWSF (ostensibly it provides a larger battery with a longer lifespan) just doesn’t hold any water with me. Everyone I know who needs a longer charge would rather buy another battery and swap it out whether on the plane, or in the field, or in a 1:1 classroom. It’s a stupid decision by Apple and it’s alienating some of their most important and valued customers.

Everyone makes their decisions based on their own circumstances and environment(s). For some, a non-removable battery isn’t a problem. For many more, it’s the problem. A $500 netbook running a Linux distro is starting to look much more attractive than I ever thought it would be. It’s half the cost of the decidedly non-durable white MacBook and yet can still do 90% of our planned technology integration. Apple, are you listening?

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Jun 02

Why I’m Blocking Bing.com on my School’s Network

Posted in: Software by Damien Barrett 10 Comments »

bingcom1 Like the rest of the IT industry, I noticed when Microsoft–the proverbial 800lb gorilla in the room–waded into the search engine market with what appeared to be a fairly sophisticated new product, Bing. Billed as a “Google killer”, it does actually show some promise: clean interface, fairly accurate results, decent customization options, and it’s fast–all things that a good engine should be. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s cluelessness has once again bitten them in the ass and rendered their shiny new search engine completely unusable by the vast majority of school systems in this country. Here’s why.

Like most schools, we have a content filter. Ours happens to be [redacted], but these filters all work the same way, by blocking content from known-bad lists of domains. Some use fuzzy logic as well, but most are fairly straight-foward category-based content filters. Before we go further, try this as a experiment:

1) Go to Bing.com

2) Search for “Jenna Jameson” or any porn star name

3) Click on Videos at the top.

4) Turn off “safe search” if you haven’t done so already.

5) Now scrub your mouse over each of the videos in the search fields.

6) Voila! Instant porn, available to anyone, regardless of a content filter.

Right, okay, so what to do? As an IT administrator in a K-12 school, I can’t very well allow this content on my network. I’ve contacted my content filter provider and they said this:

After doing some research, it looks like Microsoft has developed Bing is such a way that will make it very, very difficult to block the inappropriate and/or dangerous content on the video links.

Most sites like this will have a page for turning on adult content, will allow a parameter to be passed that enforces safe searches, or other things. Microsoft appears to have done everything in the most difficult possible way. Everything is parameter based and mostly driven by javascript and random id numbers with zero clue as to content. Whereas Google and others embed the URL of the site where the content came from, which allows a partner to filter individual pieces out of results, bing does none of this. As there is no current way to block individual portions of a page and/or tools to enable something similar to “safe search”, at this time our recommendation is to simply block bing.com in your policies if you are concerned about users accessing inappropriate content.

So that’s my solution. Microsoft has left me with no option except to block their entire search engine. Good job, Microsoft. You’ll never win the search engine game with solutions as clueless as this.

6-17-2009: A day or so ago, Microsoft changed how their search results are delivered. Virtually all porn content is now pulled from “explicit.bing.com” instead of from the main domain itself. Very simply, they’ve listed to the complaints (including mine) and have made it much easier for me to use my existing content filter to block explicit content without having to resort to blocking the entire domain. Today I’ve unblocked “bing.com” and blocked “explicit.bing.com”. In all my testing so far, our content filter is working exactly as it’s supposed to and Bing.com can now be a resource our students can utilize.

More: TechCrunch. FoxNews. Loic Le Meur

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May 04

Apple is About to Save the Printed Media Industry

Posted in: Apple by Damien Barrett 5 Comments »

From a 1910 school book predicting technology in the Year 2000.

I put on my prognostication beanie and this is what it told me:

Apple is about to release a “media tablet”. It will run the about-to-be-released third version of the iPhone OS. It will have a 9″ or 10″ color screen and have the same type of onscreen keyboard that the iPhone has. You will also be able to connect Apple’s new, smaller, Bluetooth keyboard and use that. It will also have a single USB port so you may use a USB keyboard.

The new micro-payment features of iPhone OS 3.0 is perfectly suited for this new Apple “media tablet” to be a competitor for Amazon’s Kindle. Apple will begin selling digital version of e-books, magazines, newspapers, and even textbooks through the iTunes store. Want just one issue of something, just buy one. Want a monthly or yearly subscription? Not a problem.

Apple is poised to do for the printed media market what is has done for the music industry and (to a lesser extent) the film/tv industry. What’s been lacking is the existence of a well-designed tool and distribution system for the purchasing and consumption of electronic versions of printed media. Technically, it will be very easy for Apple to extend the iTunes Store to include electronic versions of printed media. The hurdle, as it was with both the music and film/tv industries, will be whether the content providers will embrace the inevitible shift to electronic consumption of their goods. It’s clear to me that those companies that do not are doomed to failure and extinction. The smartest and most forward-looking content providers are already figuring out ways to get their content on the iPhone and the Kindle. Apple’s new device will be the tipping point. Five years from now (perhaps even sooner!), students will think nothing of carrying around their textbooks, homework assignments, magazine subscriptions, and newspapers in something like Apple’s coming “media tablet.”

Develop and release game-changing, paradigm-shifting technology. It has become a simple but successful formula for Apple and I don’t see any reason why they would change their S.O.P. now. Everyone knows that the old media industry is dying. Newspapers are closing. Magazine subscriptions are in freefall. Its salvation lies with the difficult but necessary transition to electronic publishing. Many will not be able to adapt and will fail. Those that remain will emerge stronger.

Apple is about to save the printed media industry…at least those companies that are smart enough to get aboard the salvation train as it comes barrelling through the station. It’s coming. Are you ready?

I even have a pretty good idea for what they’ll call the device. It’s so simple and obvious, most people have overlooked the possibility. Let’s not forget that Apple already owns the name and trademark for “iBook.”

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Tagged with: Apple • iBook • iPad • iTablet • MacBook Micro • media tablet

Apr 27

Building a Mac Tech Utilities Drive

Posted in: Mac OS X, Software by Damien Barrett 7 Comments »

screwdriver So you’re a Mac tech and you regularly encounter hundreds, if not thousands, of Macs. And while these Macs share an operating system, they are often more different than they are alike. Users install the strangest stuff and do mind-bogglingly weird things to their systems, often while attempting to solve a problem themselves. Your job is to fix these neglected, abused, and mucked-up Macs. So, which tools do you use, and what tips or tricks are there to help you overcome the unforeseen problems that are lurking behind the innocent login window? Here’s my setup. You are welcome to copy or modify to fit your particular Mac troubleshooting environment:

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Tagged with: APM • GUID • Leopard Install • Mac OS X • mac tech • tools • Troubleshooting • utilities

Apr 22

Overcoming the Awfulness of Adobe Updater (CS3)

Posted in: Software by Damien Barrett 2 Comments »

adobe_icon So I’ve just spent three weeks manually updating an Adobe CS3 installation on about 200 MacBooks. And while many problems arose during this maintenance period, nothing was as un-user-friendly or as awful as trying to get Adobe Updater to properly update a CS3 installation. If you find yourself in a similarly unpleasant situation, I hope that this document can help you overcome the multitude of problems that can arise while trying to update CS3.

Note: I’m using a VLA copy of Adobe CS3 at my campus. For those you using single-installs, most of these tips may apply, but you may be having issues with product activation, which I don’t talk about at all in this post.

First, you need to make sure that you’re using the most recent version of Adobe Updater available. Sounds simple, right? One would think that if you navigate to /Applications/Utilities and launch Adobe Updater, that it would check against Adobe’s servers and see a newer version and tell you so. Outside from downloading the newerest Adobe Updater (5.1..1.1113) from Adobe’s site, the only way to get Adobe Updater to see the newer version is to first launch Acrobat Pro 8.x and run “Check for Updates” from the Help menu. Doing the same from any other application in the suite will not get the newest version. And without the newest version, Adobe Updater will lie to you, telling you that everything’s up to date when it’s not; specifically Acrobat, which would otherwise remain stuck at 8.0.0.
Adobe Updater will often fail when trying to update an installed copy of Adobe Reader 8.x. It will download an update, attempt to run it, and then just quit out, without providing any feedback to the user whatsoever. Since part of this updating process was updating Adobe Reader to v9.1 on my MacBooks, I simply deleted Adobe Reader 8.x to work around this problem. Adobe Reader 9.x uses the AdobeUpdater6 program, not the AdobeUpdater5 program.
If the updates to Adobe Acrobat Pro fail, you sometimes have to manually run the updates outside of the Adobe Updater program. If Adobe Updater has already downloaded the updates, you can find them in ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Updater5/Install/Acrobat. This is where Adobe Updater5 installs all of its updates, so if you wanted to capture the updates to the CS3 suite for the purpose of running them individually, or for repackaging into an installer (yay for Casper Composer!), this is where you’d look to get the various updates that Adobe Updater5 runs.
Sometimes you have to clear out stale or corrupted updaters. I’ve seen a few occasions where Adobe Updater just borks itself trying to apply an invalid or corrupted update. You can simply delete the entire “Updater5″ folder from the above location and then re-run it and it’ll regenerate all the necessary files and folders and, most importantly, redownload clean copies of the updater(s) that is failing.
On a few occasions I had to manually apply the Acrobat 8.1.0 update to Acrobat 8.0.0 in order to get the 8.1.3 update to take. I don’t know why.
If the Acrobat Pro Updater continues to say that there are other Adobe applications running and asks you to shut them down before continuing, you’ll have to quit out of the updater, run Acrobat Pro and agree to the nonsense self-healing crap that it throws up. If Acrobat Pro is in the state where it needs to repair itself, then the updates can’t happen. Long story short: make sure that Acrobat Pro can launch without throwing up any of the self-healing dialogue boxes for Word PDF plugins or the AdobePDF printer, and then the Updater will be able to run properly.
The Adobe Flash Light and Adobe Air updates take a very long time–as long as 45 minutes on a fast MacBook, and 90+ minutes on a slower PowerBook G4. If you’re running these updates from Adobe Updater instead of manually, know that Adobe Updater isn’t providing you any granular feedback about what stage in the install process it’s in. It gives you only a blue progress bar. And on these loooooong updates, it appears that the Updater has actually stalled. On several occasions, I found my technicians forcequitting or cancelling the Adobe Updater because they believed that it had hung on something. If you wait long enough, these updates will complete. If you run these long updates manually, you’ll recieve better feedback and see that they’re installing many many thousands of HTML and help files, accounting for the very long install.
If you install Adobe CS3 fresh on a machine and then run Adobe Updater to get updates (remember to run it from Acrobat Pro’s Help menu), you can expect there to be approximately 600MB of updates. Plan for about 90-120 minutes for all of these to install, per machine.
Run Adobe Updater until it says there are no more udpates. At the time of this writing Acrobat Pro was verison 8.1.4, and is only available to install once you’ve gotten Acrobat to 8.1.3.
Learn to curse Adobe Updater. It’s very therapeutic. Every day, my coworkers and I would create new ways to curse Adobe Updater. I’m not sure what a wanker or a knobend is, but Adobe Updater is surely one.

Lastly, I’m fondly looking forward to Adobe CS5. Word on the street is that the installer will finally be package-based and we can expect the Updater7 to be a well-behaved application instead of the misbehaving and almost unusable douche-nozzle that it currently is.

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Tagged with: Adobe Installer • Troubleshooting

Mar 29

Solving Unresponsive Mac OS X Server Tools

Posted in: Mac OS X Server by Damien Barrett No Comments »

The problem: Suddenly, your Server Admin and Workgroup Manager applications are unresponsive or extremely sluggish, taking many seconds to simply switch between tasks, or up to a minute to launch.

The solutions & explanation: While this issue existed sporadically in Tiger Server, it’s really come to the front with Leopard Server because the latter is now much more picky about having properly-configured DNS for your server. If this is happening to you, here’s a checklist to help you solve the problem:

1) Have you recently changed IP numbers on your server? If so, did you use the changeip command? (man changeip to read about this tool). Run this command to determine whether anything needs to be fixed on your server:

sudo changeip -checkhostname

If your DNS is configured properly, the result should read something like:

Primary address     = 209.250.250.98

Current HostName    = macshelf.com
DNS HostName        = macshelf.com

The names match. There is nothing to change.

If you get anything other than this match, you’ll need to run the changeip command to get the configuration on your server aligned.

If you’re not hosting your own DNS, then you may need your ISP to create a PTR record for your server’s domain name so that both forward and reverse DNS lookups are valid. This is especially important if you’re hosting email on this server, as many email servers are configured to reject mail coming from a server without 100% correct DNS.

2) Ok, so you’ve verified your DNS settings are correct. If you had to execute the changeip command to make changes, make sure you’ve rebooted the server.

3) If you’re still having issues with Server Admin and WGM being slow, try removing their preference files (com.apple.ServerAdmin.plist and com.apple.WorkgroupManager.plist) that reside in ~/Library/Preferences. When you relaunch Server Admin and/or WGM, you can re-enter your server’s address (either its domain name, its IP number, its local Bonjour name, or its loopback address (127.0.0.1); they all will work)).

4) If you’re still having problems with unresponsive Server tools, try unloading and then reloading the servermgrd process.

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.servermgrd.plist

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.servermgrd.plist

These are the steps I followed in resolving this issue on several of the Mac OS X Servers that I manage. Your mileage, of course, may vary. I culled most of this information from the Apple Discussion Boards and the Mac OS X Server and MacEnterprise mailing lists. Good luck!

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Tagged with: Mac OS X Server • Server Admin • Troubleshooting • Workgroup Manager

Mar 28

Adobe CS5 Installer to use PKG Installer

Posted in: Software by Damien Barrett 2 Comments »

adobe_updater I almost can’t even believe it. Adobe has indicated that the next version of Creative Suite (CS5) will have installers that are in pkg format. This will, of course, make it much easier for those of who administer and deploy Macs to manage Adobe’s software. And if that weren’t enough, they’ve also said that the next verison of Adobe Acrobat (version 10) will not have the obnoxious “self-healing” functionality anymore:

[William Smith writes]: I’d like to hear something from Adobe about plans for Acrobat and their installer. On the Mac side, Acrobat seems to be a stepchild of Adobe’s installer technology and I don’t understand why.

[Adobe staffer answers]: The Acrobat installers are actually completely separate from the suite installers. Its more of an organizational issue than anything else. The Acrobat installer and the Reader installer are completely different technology and a completely different team.

That said, the Acrobat installer for the next major Acrobat release plans to be completely PKG for the Mac. In addition, the self-healing functionality should be gone (that is the technology that tries to do further setup after first launch.) They planned to get rid of self-healing in Acrobat 9 but couldn’t quite get to it. For the next version it is already removed so really should ship without self-healing.

Adobe finally seems to be listening to the screaming coming from their customers. I have spent so many hours struggling with Adobe’s installers and their ridiculously bad updater software, and I know I’m not alone. Someone even created DearAdobe.com, where people have been griping and voting for months about the poor quality of Adobe’s installers, updaters, and softwares.

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Tagged with: Adobe • CS5

Mar 28

Robert’s Day with the Mac OS (1995)

Posted in: Apple by Damien Barrett 1 Comment »

roberts_day_with_macos Rummaging around in my old computer boxes sometimes yields some interesting stuff. I found a promo CD from Apple from 1995 called “Stepping Into the Future: Robert’s Day with the Mac OS”. Of course I had to watch it!

It’s cheese-ball city, but if you can remember what computers were like in 1994 and 1995, you’ll realize exactly how far ahead Apple was. At this point in time, Microsoft’s best offering was Microsoft Bob. Shudder. What’s surprising is that a Google search for this Apple promo resulted in little info about it. Lest this gem pass into extinction, I used Snapz Pro to record it to a .mov file and put it up on YouTube for everyone to watch. Enjoy this piece of Apple History.

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Tagged with: 1995 • Apple • History • Nostalgia

Mar 26

Router-based Worms

Posted in: Hardware by Damien Barrett No Comments »

netcomm It doesn’t matter what operating system you’re running if the attack vector targets and/or infects your router or other infrastructure device. This interesting report from threatpost.com, a new malware-tracking and news site run by Kapersky Labs.

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Tagged with: Security • Viruses • Worms

The iPad and the Future

Apple’s Myopia

Why I’m Blocking Bing.com on my School’s Network

Apple is About to Save the Printed Media Industry

Building a Mac Tech Utilities Drive

Overcoming the Awfulness of Adobe Updater (CS3)

Solving Unresponsive Mac OS X Server Tools

Adobe CS5 Installer to use PKG Installer

Robert’s Day with the Mac OS (1995)

Router-based Worms

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