Mike Cohen: Macintosh

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 15:56:20 GMT

I will no longer update this site at radio.weblogs.com. I will now be publishing my weblog at http://www.mc-development.com/~mike.

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 18:50:52 GMT

I've converted my code to use Apple's OTMP library for multi-tasking. Although it works under X, I still can't get it working under 9.

Fri, 18 Oct 2002 03:38:22 GMT

Ballmer Sees Free Software as Enemy No. 1 [Slashdot] Poor Microsoft! ... they're getting hit from Linux and Mac OS X. Dance your way out of this one, monkeyboy.

Sun, 13 Oct 2002 23:45:17 GMT

The top-10 things I missed in 10 days without OS X. With my PowerBook away to be repaired for the first 10 days on this month, I found myself using Mac OS 9.x and even Windows in between shifts of using my wife's PowerBook. Here is what I missed most about having my own OS X-based machine to work with:

Speed - The move from a G3 PowerBook with 1GB of RAM to a PowerBook 3400c with 144MB of RAM or a Windows box with 64MB of RAM was a painful slowdown.
Stability - It is hard to beat the stability of Mac OS X, no matter how much I may point out shortcomings of the operating system.
Radio 8 - The additional speed of Radio under OS X cannot be appreciated enough until you run it under Mac OS 9.x on an underpowered machine. There is truly a reason computers keep getting faster.
NetNewsWire Lite - One of the first programs I fired up when I got my Pismo PowerBook back was Brent Simmons' excellent RSS news aggregator.
Chimera and OmniWeb - Neither of these Web browsers can be touched by anything under Mac OS 9.x.
OmniOutliner - How did I used to live without an outliner?
iTunes - Yes, I can run iTunes under Mac OS 9.x, but that older version of the program is not as flexible as the newest running under Jaguar.
Fire and Proteus - It is hard to touch the OS X goodness of these two multi-protocol chat clients that let me communicate with people using AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber and IRC all from within one application.
Unix under the hood - I don't dig into the command line a lot on a day-to-day basis, but there is no beating it if you need to fire up Terminal in order to see what process is eating up all of your processor time.
Complete flexibility - Mac OS X offers more ways to access your data and to customize the way you work with your data, through shareware, Unix and other means than any other OS in the world right now. And it is customizable in a completely user-friendly way.

[Mac Net Journal] I haven't booted 9 since I bought my fax machine - the only reason I used to run it was to fax my time sheets, since neither FaxSTF X or Cocoa eFax worked reliably. On the other hand, I'll have to be running 9 a lot more often when I start working on the 9 version of the CompuTrace client. Hopefully I'll be able to do most of it from classic, without actually having to boot 9.

Mon, 30 Sep 2002 02:12:54 GMT

I now have a dialup ISP to use when I travel next week. I just signed up for access-4-free, which was $5 to sign up with 10 free hours per month. Best of all, they don't require any special software and it works great with Mac OS X (in fact they even have Mac OS X setup instructions, although it refers to 10.0).

I've been looking for a free or cheap dialup ISP since I switched to AT&T Broadband last month. Unlike BellSouth DSL, they don't provide dialup to use when I travel or when the service is down (so far it hasn't been down). This looks like my best choice.

Sat, 28 Sep 2002 05:02:47 GMT

I just upgraded WorldBeatPlanet to PHP-Nuke 6.0. The upgrade went flawlessly.

I've got it down to a quick & simple routine. Upload all of the files to a temporary directory, since uploading can take a while. When everything's up, run the upgrade script, and then move the uploaded files into the live directory.

Since copying the files to another directory takes a lot less time than uploading, only a few seconds pass from the time I run the upgrade script until the upgrade is complete with all of the files in place, and there's little or no downtime. It did take me a few minutes to activate some new modules & rearrange blocks, but the site remains usable during that time.

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 21:59:52 GMT

iPlugs. I can't believe MacSurfer actually linked to this.

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 14:42:02 GMT

BounceWeb is currently upgrading their servers, so MacMegasite & WorldBeatPlanet are both down right now. The upgrades should be finished this weekend. I'm also unable to receive email at both domains (and all of my email addresses except my domain mc-development.com are forwarded to my macmegasite IMAP account).

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 15:09:40 GMT

PHP-Nuke 6.0 Released [PHP-Nuke] I just downloaded it, but I'm pretty busy this week and next week, so it may be a while before I get a chance to upgrade MacMegasite & WorldbeatPlanet. As usual, I'll experiment with it on my G3 before I go live with it on the actual site. With every new release, I always have to update all of my themes, which adds a bit of extra work.

Sun, 22 Sep 2002 17:04:57 GMT

Mac incompatibility myths persist. In today's Sun-Sentinel, a reader asked the following question: I have been a PC user since 1984. Until recently it has been my understanding that Mac files & Windows files are incompatible. Is that still true? If I buy an iMac, could I still exchange files with people who use Windows? [MacMegasite]

Sat, 21 Sep 2002 05:12:50 GMT

I finally caught up with all of this week's new account requests at mymacmail.com, and I've temporarily disabled new account signup. I now have 142 mailboxes, and while BounceWeb allows "unlimited" mail accounts on a reseller account, I don't know at what point they'll decide I've gone over the line and created too many. I also won't have a chance to deal with account signups for the next two weeks since the other programmer I've worked with for almost a year and who I've never met in person until now, is coming to visit next week, and the following week I'll be out of town for a long weekend. Although it doesn't require any effort on my part to provide POP3 & IMAP accounts, since I already have those services running on my BounceWeb reseller account, plus they even provide IMP for webmail. The only programming I had to do for mymacmail.com was the signup form, which simply emails me the information that I have to enter into the Plesk control panel. I didn't bother trying to figure out how to automate account creation (which seems to require administrative access to the Plesk software), which is OK if I only get a few requests, but I didn't count on having to spend a lot of time manually creating accounts. Thankfully, once the account is created, it doesn't require any further maintenance. After I'm over this crush in a few weeks, I plan to re-enable account signup but only allow a limited number of POP/IMAP accounts. After that, I'll only allow forwarding accounts, which put less load on the server and don't use any storage.

Fri, 20 Sep 2002 20:42:04 GMT

I still can't get my client code working under Mac OS 9. I've looked at Apple's OTMP code, and it looks a lot like the way I'm using MP tasks. I'm considering whether I should rewrite my code to use OTMP or to use cooperative threads. For now I'm still trying to debug it, which isn't fun when it's able to crash my OS (plus I really hate having to run 9).

Wed, 18 Sep 2002 18:24:06 GMT

Remembering General Magic. General Magic has announced that they are ceasing operations. I used to own one of their PDAs, and here are some of my personal experiences with it. [MacMegasite]

Fri, 13 Sep 2002 01:36:51 GMT

Thanks to Josef Wankerl I was able to recover that file. It seems that if the flattened resource file also has a "real" resource fork, Constructor gets confused and tries to use resources from the resource fork. I still found lots of problems with flattened resource files in Constructor. Doing a save is like playing Russian roulette - after I save some of my layouts would end up corrupted or changes wouldn't be saved. I think I might be better off just working with real resource files and saving as a flattened file just to check into my CVS repository. This is why resource forks (as well as types & creators) have to go. Some applications use them and others don't, and some get completely screwed up by their presence or absence. As long as they're supported halfway, we're going to have these kinds of problems. Apple needs to bite the bullet and either support them all the way or get rid of them completely.

Thu, 12 Sep 2002 20:51:27 GMT

I just found that PowerPlant Constructor 2.5.5 won't properly read a flattened resource file, even though it's read properly when I buld my application and all of the PPOBs in it work properly. I now have no way to edit it.

Thu, 12 Sep 2002 16:03:39 GMT

Woo-hoo!!!! We're past 100k hits at MacMegasite!!!!

Wed, 11 Sep 2002 15:42:57 GMT

MSNBC. Intel to include copy protection functionality in new chips. I personally won't ever buy a chip with type of stuff on it. Unless there is an alternative, my aggressive upgrade cycle has ended (I usually buy the high-end chips and pay a premium). I hope other people feel the same way. The same goes for Microsoft's Palladium.

The LaGrande technology will be first included in Prescott, Intel[base ']s code name for a member of its Pentium chip line that is due out in the second half of next year. It was one of a series of technical advances outlined by Mr. Otellini at a conference here for software and hardware developers.

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] This is why I don't trust Microsoft & Intel and why I try to avoid their products. When I had a PC, I made sure I bought one with an AMD chip, and I plan to do the same the next time I buy a PC.

Wed, 11 Sep 2002 03:27:45 GMT

Even free, iCal isn't worth the price [RandomMaccess] [Mac Net Journal] I've posted my review of iCal here. iCal is beautiful but very frustrating. It has some really great features, but lacks so much functionality and is so buggy that it's nearly unusable.

Tue, 03 Sep 2002 19:28:35 GMT

I just had to disable new account signup at mymacmail.com because I was getting too many requests to process. It will probably take me a few days to catch up. It must have been mentioned somewhere - I normally get 2-3 requests a day, but today I got 23. If this continues, I will have to stop taking new POP3 account requests, since I would like to limit it to less than 200 POP3 accounts, although I will continue to accept redirect accounts only.

Tue, 27 Aug 2002 01:54:35 GMT

BounceWeb is still having problems with MySQL & suffering DOS attacks. I've moved the database for MacMegasite to mc-development.com, which is also hosted at BounceWeb, but running on a different server. Right now BounceWeb's forum, which depends on MySQL, is down but MacMegasite is working. I may do the same with WorldBeatPlanet, but I don't think the server has enough bandwidth to host SQL databases for two different sites.

Sat, 24 Aug 2002 04:09:16 GMT

BounceWeb was having more MySQL problems today, which affected both MacMegasite & WorldBeatPlanet, as well as their own forums and all other sites hosted there. When I emailed them about it the last time, they assured me that the problem is fixed and won't happen again. I added error_reporting(0); to mainfile.php in both sites, so the next time it happens you'll only see a message saying there's a problem with the home page instead of a page full of PHP & MySQL errors. Hopefully BounceWeb will get their act together pretty soon. Unfortunately I'm paid a year ahead for both sites, so I'd lose money if I move someplace else.

Sept. 24, 1992 - Sept. 24, 2002

Fri, 23 Aug 2002 23:46:59 GMT

Of course Sept. 24 2002 is an important date - the official release of Jaguar. Here in south Florida, this date is in the news for another reason: the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew, one of the biggest disasters in Florida history. I didn't live here at that time, so I have no personal memories of it. Hopefully Jaguar won't be a major disaster :)

Fri, 23 Aug 2002 20:22:27 GMT

Turn off graphics in Eudora. Eudora provides a way to turn off automatic loading of graphics for greater speed and privacy. [MacMegasite]

Fri, 23 Aug 2002 02:13:37 GMT

Setting a trap for laptop thieves. A spate of publicity over misplaced government laptops has people hopping mad. A solution? PC makers are offering tracking software with new computers. [CNET News.com] The article has nice things to say about Absolute Software's CompuTrace Plus. I'm currently working on the Mac version.

Thu, 22 Aug 2002 19:07:35 GMT

Archiving Email with Eudora. Eudora may not be the prettiest or most user-friendly email client, but it has a few very significant advantages: it can handle a large amount of email, since it uses plain text to store email it can't suffer database corruption, and it can search much faster than anything else. Here's how you can take advantage of it for archiving your email. [MacMegasite]