mind the explanatory gap

I have been waiting for this for a very long time…

One of the major problems with working in Mac IT has been the lack of a space to discuss pre-release seeds of major OS X versions, ie the current state of Snow Leopard 10.6.

Things change a lot between major releases. Seemingly small changes by Apple can have an enormous impact upon workflow, and when you couple this with the fact that new hardware will often only work correctly on the latest OS X release, you often end up being forced to support 10.x.0 releases that simply don’t work correctly.

To get around this you stagger bulk purchases to avoid the periods when new OS versions are released, and you pay for ADC accounts that give you access to the pre-release seeds.

The problem is that testing is time consuming, and good bug reporting is even more so.  There’s nothing more dispiriting than spending several hours putting together a good bug report for Apple, only to submit it and get it marked as a duplicate.

Sure, there were the AppleSeed forums, but they’ve never really taken off, which I can only assume means that there really aren’t that many Mac IT people on the AppleSeed program.

Ta-da! https://devforums.apple.com/community/mac

Now we have a space we can talk in that is sanctioned by Apple. If it turns out that something fundamental is broken or works completely differently in a pre-release seed, we can share this information with each other, leading to more discrete bug reports to Apple, and leading to an OS that upon release hopefully works better in all sorts of deployments.

Well done Apple.

April 24th, 2009 | Category: macosx | Comments (3)

So even though we have reasonable packages out there for Puppet and Facter, some people prefer to install this sort of thing through MacPorts, the closest thing we have to a third-party packaging repository on OS X.

Anyway, Puppet and Facter are both out now.

nigelk@sillymidon [/Users/nigelk]
$ port search puppet
puppet @0.24.8 (sysutils)
Puppet is a configuration management solution.
nigelk@sillymidon [/Users/nigelk]
$ port search facter
facter @1.5.4 (sysutils)
A cross-platform library for describing OS attributes.


March 30th, 2009 | Category: macosxserver | Comments (2)

http://blogs.adobe.com/OOBE/

I’m really glad to see they’ve done this, but am still reserving judgment until we actually see some results from it…

February 12th, 2009 | Category: macosxserver | Comments (1)

I poked around a bit looking for something that did this, and couldn’t find anything, apart from some sample code using a private API to send the display to sleep, so I whacked that into a screeensaver.

https://sites.google.com/a/explanatorygap.net/misc-sw/files/SleepSaver.saver.zip

This does use a private API and thus could do anything. No warranties, may destroy your machine, etc etc etc, but works for me.

code:

//
//  SleepSaverView.m
//  SleepSaver
//
//  Created by Nigel Kersten on 1/29/09.
//  Copyright (c) 2009, Google Inc. All rights reserved.
//

#import "SleepSaverView.h"

@implementation SleepSaverView

- (id)initWithFrame:(NSRect)frame isPreview:(BOOL)isPreview
{
self = [super initWithFrame:frame isPreview:isPreview];
if (self) {
if (! isPreview) {
[self dimDisplayNow];
}
}
return self;
}

- (BOOL)hasConfigureSheet
{
return NO;
}

- (NSWindow*)configureSheet
{
return nil;
}

- (void) dimDisplayNow {
io_registry_entry_t r = IORegistryEntryFromPath(kIOMasterPortDefault, "IOService:/IOResources/IODisplayWrangler");
if (r) {
IORegistryEntrySetCFProperty(r, CFSTR("IORequestIdle"), kCFBooleanTrue);
IOObjectRelease(r);
}
}

@end

January 31st, 2009 | Category: macosxserver | Comments (3)

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2005/tn2083.html

This is really just going here so I can find it again as I can never remember what keywords to search with to find it and I often need to refer to it.

AAAAA+++ Excellent TechNote Would Read Again kthxbye

January 24th, 2009 | Category: macosxserver | Leave a comment

January 9th, 2009 | Category: macosxserver | Comments (2)

Presentation here:

January 9th, 2009 | Category: macosxserver | Comments (4)

Not completely working, but…

October 4th, 2008 | Category: *nix | Comments (6)

So dre has done a great overview of the LKDC in Leopard, including a more detailed wiki page. There really isn’t enough info out there about the LKDC, and it’s quite awesome technology.

May 14th, 2008 | Category: macosx | Leave a comment