I’m thinking about getting a US keyboard as this will be closer to the OSX keyboard thus making it less annoying for me to having to think where double-quotes and tilde are, as for now at least I’m probably going to continue using OSX at work until I can get to a good point to make it into the world’s most expensive ubuntu laptop.

Software

Here’s a few of the highlights of the software I’m using which has made the switch easier for me.

Gnome-do

Quicksilver was something I knew I’d miss but Gnome-do seems to fill the hole quite nicely. It supports enough of the same featureset for me to be not feeling like I’m missing anything. To install it use the PPA (Personal Package Archive) so you can get the most up to date version.

Drop-down terminal

Yakuake has filled the slot performed by Visor on OSX. Although it’s based on Konsole it took the edge over Guake as it’s slightly more configurable.

Virtualization

Virtualbox OSE – is carrying out Virtualization duties – though I wish that it was easier to communicate with headless VMs I’m used to being able to SSH into VMs straight away having used VMware Fusion on OSX. Hopefully this is something that will be addressed in future versions or something I can resolve as I get more familiar with it’s networking configurations. The version of VirtualBox OSE in the upcoming Ubuntu release (Jaunty) is newer so I looking forward to trying that out. Update: I’ve fixed the issues with networking using a virtual interface to access VirtualBox guests.

Fonts

I’m using font matrix to manage my font collection which seems just as much of a font management app as I need.

Aside from managing fonts I found that installing the ttf-liberation package (free alternatives to well known Microsoft fonts) made everything look like the proverbial “kick in the nuts” so I’ve manually played with /etc/fonts/conf.d/30-metric-aliases.conf and added “Freesans” above “Liberation Sans” for use in place of Arial. This has made all web apps like gmail etc much nicer to use as FreeSans is just gorgeous to look at.

<!-- Microsoft -->
<alias binding="same">
    <family>Arial</family>
    <accept>
    <family>Freesans</family>
    <family>Liberation Sans</family>
    <family>Albany</family>
    <!-- <family>Albany AMT</family> -->
    </accept>
</alias>

In a similar fashion Georgia is horrific on Linux for some reason, whereas FreeSerif actually looks really good. At some point I’d love to do an up to date review of what fonts are best equivalents on various linux distros. One thing that’s clear with all the substitutions going on in the font configs it’s hard to really know what actual font you are really seeing rendered in a web page. I’d like to find a way to introspect that and really know what’s happening for linux.

Code-editing

I’m trying to get better at using vim as I work on other machines quite a lot via ssh; so improving my working knowledge of vim is definitely a good move for me. I’m also playing with gedit and it’s numerous plugins. Sure it’s not textmate but I’ve been able to emulate enough aspects of textmate that I like to make it useful. I’ve switched indentation to use alt+[ and unindent alt+] but doing that meant I had to patch the gemini plugin so that it didn’t try and match a square bracket when I was using the alt modifier (I’ll post the source to that if it’s of any use to anyone). That was easy enough though thanks plugins being python and I could work out what I needed to do purely using introspection and some educated guesses. That’s one thing I really like about gedit. All that’s needed is some improvements to make snippets and commands scoped to specific languages together in one interface. Other things like code folding are about to land in the gtksourceview component too so over time it will be interesting to see where it goes.

Lastly I miss the bookmarking ability that textmate has. In textmate clicking the gutter containing the line-number is all you need to create a bookmark. It’s nicely done and a preferable approach the way the gedit bookmark plugin works. This would presumbably something that would be implemented in the gtksourceview rather than as a plugin if the interface was to be identical.

Backup

For backup I’m currently trying Bubakup which can create backups of a live system which are bootable. Something of a simplistic SuperDuper for Linux. It’s very easy to use – and I’ve not checked yet but I’m hoping that it’s something I’ll be able to set-up on cron.

Graphics Apps

I’m adjusting to learning GIMP as a long time photoshop user. I’m pretty sure in time I’ll be able to find out how to do everything I could do on Photoshop with it, it seems very powerful. For vector I’ll be using Inkscape which again is pretty competent and I’ve already been using it on the mac to edit some of the Project Fondue mountain headers.

So what’s missing?

Application-wise – I’d like to find an equivalent to two apps. One is Omnifocus a Gtd application on OSX. The other is Together which is a general file/note-taking app which had the great feature of allowing you to add web addresses to it from which it created webarchives for viewing offline. These two apps are the only two things I’ve not got covered yet. I’m almost considering getting into Python GUI programming if I thought it wouldn’t suck up too much of my time. If you’ve got any suggestions for apps that would fill this role then please do let me know. With the note-taking thing I’d love to have something along the lines of a personal wiki which can handle ReStructuredText and can create archives of web-pages – though that may just be something I’ll build as a web app. Key thing here would be either you run it locally or it must have offline access.

So far I’m not really missing that much – clearly OSX has a certain feel of slickness to it but in the last couple of years Ubuntu has become much more refined and easier to use. More an more works without intervention – I’d long held an opinion that using linux was like owning a vintage beetle — It’s great but you have to spend all weekend tinkering with it to keep it on the road. For me using windows was like that, as I found more and more time was sucked into keeping my PC running. When I switched to OSX I found my productivity went up. So far with Linux it’s too early to tell whether I’m as productive though I’m fairly confident that I’m finding enough software that performs well and is intuitive to use that I should be every bit as “at home” on Linux as I was on the mac. Plus with the added bonus that I’ve got a much better set of linux tools (rather than bsd) under the hood and not to mention that running an open source operating system is a much better prospect long term.

By all means any thoughts and recommendations towards must-have software etc – please drop a comment.

To start with today I was using Vector Designer, which is another simple vector app which I had lying around as it had come as part of a software bundle. However I was finding it to be a touch limiting and when I was looking to align nodes in a path I couldn’t find a way to do that. Hitting that block made me think of Lineform and so I instantly downloaded the demo to give it a spin.

Overall, Lineform has a lot finer grained controls for vector objects and I found it’s also very intuitive – the gradient tools in particular are wonderful. It also follows mac interface conventions well which always makes one feel at home. Whilst I also like Inkscape (which is an open source vector application) I do find it’s interface quite clunky in comparison. Additionally it only currently runs under x11 which makes it less that ideal on a mac. Whilst Inkscape is clearly extremely powerful in the right hands (definitely not mine!) there’s a lot to be said for stripped down interfaces that help you get what you need to do done. It’s in this department that Lineform excels. That being said Inkscape is well worth a look as an alternative – and it’s free so you can’t say fairer than that!

The one downside I found with Line form is that the control over type seems slightly limited in some specific areas (I particularly found there doesn’t seem to be an interface which provides control over horizontal letter spacing). Despite this I would say it’s a very compentent app for getting vector work done efficiently, especially considering how much it costs. The current price is a reasonable $79 and if like me the low value of the pound is biting hard then there’s currently a $30 discount if you enter “lineform30″ at the checkout.

For more details of the app or to try it out go to freeverse.com

The Symptoms

The problems experienced showed up in many different ways. For me the worst was a text-tearing issue where the display of text would get scrambled. For example if I was using texmate, lines would overlap when scrolling and the only way to temporarily clear it was to use cmd+a (which presumably caused a re-draw). To stop it completely required a logout. There was also a relationship with sleep modes as it often appeared after waking the machine from sleep.

There were also occasions where the display was continually covered with white blocks that appeared as you scrolled. These appear in the terminal and places like embedded YouTube players in the browser making it difficult to get RickRolled.

The FAIL

Apple’s failing was to not publicly admit to there being a problem. This combined with the amount of time between the issue occuring and the fix being released made it incredibly frustrating. This main thread on discussions.apple.com was raised on a back in February and looking at the thread plenty of people had mainboards replaced and yet still the issue persisted like a bad smell emanating from a pair of birkenstocks worn all summer.

From the reports on the thread it also appears that only a very limited number of Apple’s technical staff had been advised of the issue. I pretty sure the frustration of many people waiting for a fix would have been significantly reduced if there had been a statement issued saying that work was being done to put it right.

The net result of not making a statement amounted to a lot of wasted time spent by MacBook Pro owners and Apple’s own uninformed staff trying to fix a problem with solutions that would never work.

I’m pleased it’s now fixed but seriously, a bit of transparency next time wouldn’t go amiss! It’s times like this when the openess and transparency of open source operating systems is much appreciated.

From this post http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071102105927735 I found the cause of the issue is that a second instance of the screensaver will kick in at the interval set-up in sys prefs despite the screensaver having already been manually activated when I lock the screen.

The solution for this is to activate the screensaver via an automator script as the link above describes. What I’ve done is to set the activation of the screensaver to never happen so that I always activate it manually.

Now I’m pretty sure everyone remembers the ball mice of yesteryear that were great until the ball mechanism got filled with crap and the mouse started being as responsive as Sly Stallone in an ESP test.

Still someone realised this and optical mice were invented (according to Wikipedia) as far back as 1980. Failure has been averted ever since optical mice became widely available and the world has been much happier with mice sans ball.

However with the mighty mouse what Apple have succeeded in doing is bringing back the ball only on the top of the mouse. Absolute genius! So what happens now is ever so often the ball on the top of your mighty mouse gets full of cruft and the scroll ball stops working. Who’d have thunk it!?

Next you can already imagine that Apple are working on replacing the ball with a Frickin’ laser on the top of the mouse so that anyone who hasn’t already smashed their mighty mouse to a million tiny pieces can get the new improved version which won’t suffer from the same EPIC failings of the original.

I’m on my second – I’ve never bought one of these myself they’ve been supplied by work, however I’m getting really tired of rubbing the scroll ball with mouse up-side down in the vain hope that I’ll be able to scroll through an application again some day.

So with the above in mind. Please tell me, what’s a good mouse that works with a Mac that doesn’t suck Balls!

On the weekend I was lucky enough to be sent a copy of the awesome mobile Python book by my brother for my birthday. After hitting an issue with updating my PyS60 install I thought it would be a plan to re configure my phone so that I could start working with a freshly upgraded Python install.

Before I did this I wanted to backup my contacts to the mac addressbook – always a good idea just incase something goes wrong. When I opened iSync I was greeted with a blank iSync window – despite having previously configuring the phone to work with iSync.

Confused I thought “ok maybe it’s to do the with phone?”, so I backed up through the Nokia PC Suite software running under VMware Fusion and then carried out the Phone software re-installation.

After nuking the E61 I was able to restore my contacts from the backup and I could successfully install the latest PyS60.

Next I re-tried the iSync software but it was still playing up. I spent a while trying to delete and re-associate pairing but it all got me no closer to a working iSync.

Next I looked at the logs via console.app and noticed some interesting entries:

Jun 23 19:04:32 x104878 iSync[399]: SyncServices assertion failure (nil != _constructedIdMapper) in [ISDSqliteRecordIdMapper constructedIdMapper], /SourceCache/SyncServices2/SyncServices2-389.6/SyncServices/ISDRecordIdMapper.m:392 Could not initialize constructedids.synciddb at /Users/scol/Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Local/clientdata/1fd848069e3e1f39b824ff18b43821bb5ee6a48a
Jun 23 19:04:32 x104878 iSync[399]: Failed to create client state. Error was [ISDSqliteRecordIdMapper constructedIdMapper]: Could not initialize constructedids.synciddb at /Users/scol/Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Local/clientdata/1fd848069e3e1f39b824ff18b43821bb5ee6a48a

I decided to try renaming /Users/scol/Library/Application Support/SyncServices/ to /Users/scol/Library/Application Support/SyncServices.old and rebooted hoping for the best. Lo and behold as soon as I fired up iSync the problem was resolved and there was the E61 icon I was expecting. WIN!

What happens is the lines of history appear to start halfway through a previous line of history like so:

For a while I’ve been blaming the terminal when in fact it was totally my fault. The problem occurs when you have incorrectly escaped your prompt.

The details of the correct color escape sequence can be found at tdlp.org

Once I’d corrected my escaping the problem was fixed and now history works as expected. What’s interesting is that I’ve been using the same prompt for ages on Tiger and had never had that problem although for the best part of a year I have been using iTerm, and I’m not sure if there’s something about tiger’s terminal or iTerm that makes it more forgiving of dodgy escape sequences.

The only caveat is that Importer only works for Windows based VM’s at present. Currently supported are Windows 2000 SP4, XP SP2, Server 2003 and Vista.

To convert an image all you have to do is:

1. Drag the Parallels image onto the importer app
2. See the details of the image are read by the utility
3. Change the “disk options” so that it’s not breaking the image into pieces or assigning all of the space at once (unless you that’s what you want.)
4. Start the conversion, say where you want to save it and go and make a cup of tea.
5. Come back and use the resulting fusion image.

VMWare Importer is definitely much better than the previous solution using VMware Converter under the running parallels image it gets my vote. To try it for yourself you can download it from vmware.com

try
	do shell script "killall -s iTunes"
	tell application "iTunes"
		pause
	end tell
end try
do shell script "open '/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app'"

To get the keystroke configured I’m using quicksilver triggers (to do this you’ll need quicksilver installed), first put the script above into script editor, save as an application bundle the the location of your choice and then point a trigger to that app file and define your keystroke. I also set the scope to all applications. Done!

Update: Added a dirty little try catch to only run the pause when iTunes is open

In this example the output of ls -la is now available to be pasted from your clipboard:

muffin@shiva $ls -la | pbcopy

Rather awesomely the reverse is also available it’s called pbpaste. If you copy something to your clipboard you can then make use of it in the terminal with the pbpaste command. In other words pbpaste just sends the contents of your clipboard to stdout.

This example for the mac writes out the clipboard to the file, index.html:

muffin@shiva $pbpaste > index.html

A quick google search shows that there’s also a couple of Linux equivalents one called xclip and one called xsel, that replicate pbpaste and pbcopy. Additionally if you use Cygwin you can make use of getclip and putclip.