Deadly Bloody Serious

I’m seeing a lot of this disturbing little error message: “The wireless network appears to have been compromised and will be disabled for about a minute.”

A poke around the Internet doesn’t show much other than other people complaining about the same problem. Some find the only way to solve the problem is to disable WPA. I’m not so sure that’s a smart idea. I hope there’s a fix for this in 10.5.2.

[If you're getting this on what you think is a Django-only feed, it's because the community feed administrators haven't yet updated their subscription to point to my Django posts only. Sorry about that.]

If only I'd been following The Register: my shiny new Apple TV lacks any outputs compatible with older televisions. It outputs HDMI or component video; my Grundig takes RGB or composite over SCART.

If Apple TV had an S-Video port, I'd be fine. It doesn't. I'm not.  

For only an extra AUD$150-250 depending on model, I can buy a converter and have it shipped from the UK. Or, I can spend AUD$2,200 on an A/V receiver that can do the trick. Or, I can spend thousands replacing my fantastic looking cathode-ray tube TV with an expensive flat panel that still won't look as good for standard definition television.

Or, I could just return the bastard.

* * *

Keene Electronics have an Australian stockist. Hope hope. 

I’ve experimented with moving masters to solve my dumb albums problem, and have both good and bad news.

The good news is: you can move masters from one project to another. The cursor won’t change to let you know what’s about to happen (unlike, say, adding photos to an album), but a black border will appear around the project name. When you let go of the mouse button, you’ll be given the opportunity to cancel. There’s no way to tell Aperture to not warn you next time. Thankfully, you shouldn’t be moving masters to other projects too often.

Any albums in the old project will survive: as the Move alert tells you, their references will be updated. It might seem weird to have an album in one project pointing to masters in another, but it makes sense when you consider an album named “Portfolio”, in which you’d really like your best photos from any and all projects.

The bad news is: “smart” albums will break. My “Mug Shots” smart folder, for example, no longer found photos with the tag — even after I moved it to the new project. I had to re-create it from scratch. I thank the gods I’m not moving a year’s worth of pictures to another project, losing all twelve of my by-the-month smart folders and any other date-constrained special event folders.

Can anyone recommend a good resource for using Automator with Aperture?

Aperture has made it to version 1.5 without the ability to exclude pictures based on keyword. I want to have my screen saver display this year’s pictures rated *** or better, but without those I took for work. I suspect I’ll have to export the masters and import them back to a new project.

Speaking of the screen saver: it’s wonderful that Apple have Mac OS X automatically treat Aperture albums as screen savers in their own right, but I find the behaviour of the Crop slides to fit on screen feature somewhat bizarre when it encounters a photo in portrait orientation.

When I shoot in portrait, the most interesting part of the photo is usually in the top third or so. I’d like to see that third, but for whatever reason OS X feels compelled to show me my subject’s feet or crotch instead. Oops.

Update: I’ve found more smart folder breakage. Lucky me!

Scott Bourne recently published Aperture Trick #59 on building a dream MacPro for use with Aperture. To summarise:

• Spend big on the graphics card;
• Scrimp on the CPU if you need to;
• Buy at least 2GB RAM;
• Buy third party memory if you’re buying a lot; and
• Spend big on the graphics card.

As I’ve found with my 2GHz/2GB/X1900 Mac Pro, this advice will also result in a kick-arse gaming machine. Oops!

I’d like to contribute some additional advice for people who, like me, have spent most of their computing lives on PCs and who don’t yet know the ins and outs of buying and caring for Macs. It’s not so much what to buy, as how:

• Buy from a good reseller;
• Talk to them often;
• Bring them repeat business; and
• Buy AppleCare.

In more detail:

Buy from a Good Reseller. I bought my Mac Pro from Total Recall Solutions in North Sydney. Lara helped me fine-tune the configuration and quote, saving me a few bucks. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a great start way to start a relationship. That’ll help more than you think, as you’ll need to…

Talk to your Reseller Often. You’re switching. All your friends have PCs. Those of them that you’ve persuaded to switch are also brand new. So, who’s going to help you out?

So far, Lara at TRS has:

• Helped me fix some initial problems with application crashes;
• Ordered me a rare Avocent KVM capable of switching DVI at 1920×1200;
• Sold me Parallels and helped me nut out its problems;
• Put me in touch with another of her customers that had managed to get Boot Camp working despite his X1900;
• Helped me find a retractable iPod charge and sync cable that actually works; and
• Sold me Aperture and swapped tips.

You might have time to browse web sites all night. I don’t. I’m delighted that I can lob a quick phone call or email at Lara and her co-workers and get a tip on how to solve some minor problem that Google can’t.

My more astute readers will have spotted that some of the items above involve add-on purchases, and might be wondering why I didn’t buy everything online. Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve discovered that it’s a great idea to…

Bring your reseller your repeat business. I always give my reseller a chance to match online prices on new Mac-related kit before I buy it. Most of the time, they either beat the price or come within cooee of it, even if it wasn’t on their price list the day before. Overall, I think I’m ahead on price and way ahead on support. (They’re not doing too badly out of me, either.)

There’s one more thing you can do that can substantially help your reseller help you:

Buy AppleCare. Your Mac is going to cost you a bundle. Should something go wrong, it’s going to be expensive and time consuming to fix. If you don’t buy AppleCare, you’ll basically have to send your box back to Apple to get it looked at and fixed, and your puny warranty will have you buying expensive bits only shortly into the machine’s useful lifetime.

If you buy AppleCare, on the other hand, there’s someone paid to take your calls and authorise your reseller to swap parts at Apple’s expense. Your reseller can get the parts and swap them while you wait, minimising your downtime and hassle.

* * *

I realise this advice isn’t as attractively geeky as tips on shaving GHz in exchange for GB, but how you buy your Mac can have as big an effect on your productivity as what you put in it.

Spending time on a professional relationship might feel weird to some geeks. It would have felt weird to my younger self. I’ve found, however, that buying from a good reseller and keeping in touch with them has contributed more to my satisfaction with my Mac than a mild CPU upgrade would have.

It’s time to come out of the closet.

I use a Macintosh at home.

At first, it was just a Mac Mini used for the occasional build and test of Juice. Then my PC started flaking out, and I had to pull half of the memory out. Its performance became awful. Unfortunately, at three years old it was too hard to swap out just a few bits: I was going to have to get a whole new machine.

I spent a few months locked up in analysis paralysis over the four digit upgrade whilst also wrangling a five digit kitchen upgrade, planning a six digit forced rebuild on the back of the house, and helping customers figure out seven digit upgrades to their IT environments.

I eventually decided that if I had to choose two items out of good, cheap, and shipping before 2020, I was going to compromise on the price.

That, in combination with accidentally subjecting myself to three contiguous hours in a reality distortion field chasing down a friend’s recommendation that I find out about Time Machine, made for a decision I hadn’t anticipated.

I ended up getting a Mac Pro.

To my surprise, I’ve taken to Mac OS X quickly. I thought I’d be switching back to XP under Parallels a lot, but so far it hasn’t been necessary: I spend all my time in Aperture and Firefox. I’m already trying to use Expose on my XP based work laptop and wishing it had the Dock.

A Mac Pro might seem overkill for browsing the ‘net, but photo management is already making good use of my investment. Video might even make the beast seem slow, which leads me to another reason I bought the Mac Pro: I don’t want to get painted into another architectural corner like last time.

One of the claimed benefits of the Mac Pro’s more expensive server chipsets is extended system life: server manufacturers would much rather upgrade parts in an existing production line than start from scratch with a new motherboard. It looks like I’ll be able to upgrade to eight cores pretty soon, I can quadruple my memory whenever that becomes affordable, and I sincerely doubt my gaming requirements will stress 16 lanes of PCI Express anytime soon. Bwa ha ha. Which reminds me:

My other important use case was being able to run PC games. Boot Camp has turned out better than I’d hoped. Half Life 2 is so smooth (with full detail!) I’m getting motion sickness if I play too long. I’m looking forward to Portal turning my guts inside out.

Overall, I’m happier with my Mac Pro than I expected to be. A lot of that is thanks to Aperture, about which I’ll definitely be ranting soon, and the rest is due to a solid and easy operating system on some kick-arse hardware I won’t have to fuss with for ages. Life is good.

I’ve got good and bad news for Juice users on Windows.

First, the bad news: iTunes 7 breaks Juice. Apple might have changed the COM interface on which Juice relies to do its work, but they haven’t updated the SDK so I can’t find out. Perhaps it’s something in our code. Regardless: If you upgrade to iTunes 7, Juice can’t add downloaded tracks to the library.

(Reinstalling iTunes might help; see the updates below.)

Now, the good news: I upgraded, too. My podcast listening life is going to be a hassle until I fix the bug. I listen to a lot of podcasts, so it’s safe to say I’ll get this one fixed as soon as I can given three factors:

1. My understanding of win32com not being wonderful;
2. Apple’s changes, if any, being un-documented until the SDK is revised; and
3. Me being an old geezer.

For the time being, there’s a relatively easy work-around (if re-installing iTunes doesn’t work):

• Have Juice download your podcasts as usual;
• Run iTunes;
• Select Add Folder to Library from the File menu;
• Select your My Received Podcasts folder again; and
• Watch iTunes add your new podcasts to the library.

I’m banging my head against the win32com documentation as I write. We tried using static dispatch with a past version of iTunes, but any iTunes upgrade would break us. We switched back to dynamic dispatch, and that’s worked us fine across plenty of upgrades until now.

If there are any Python experts out there who spend a lot of time with COM and can help me nut this out, please let me know.

Updates:

• Here’s an odd one: at least one Juice user has upgraded to iTunes 7 without trouble.
• David Nicolson reports, on the python-win32 mailing list, that he’s seen this occasionally out of iTunes and that uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes usually fixes the problem. I’ve tried it, and it works. I’ll get confirmation from a few others, and publish if it’s not just me succeeding at this.
• Further to that last one: it mostly works. Unfortunately, the gap is adding tracks. IITPlaylist doesn’t have AddFile any more? Gaaah. My “fixes” obviously aren’t. Time to destroy my makepy cache…(Sub-update: my binary install of 2.2.2a1 works fine, so this might be local to my development version.)
• There might be other reasons not to upgrade: engadget report other problems with iTunes, including “scratchy playback”. Personally, I haven’t noticed any of the declared symptoms, and I love the scrolling album view.