Category: Apple

random patching

I spent a bunch of time on Friday night bringing my various home machines up-to-date with patches and software updates. The impetus for that was largely this security hole in Windows, which seems to be the biggest vulnerability that’s cropped up with Windows in quite a while.

I was also interested in updating my VMWare Fusion install to 2.0. Ars Technica has a good review of Fusion 2 up on their site. I did the upgrade, and it was pretty smooth, but I haven’t had time to play around with it enough to tell if it will work any better on my old MacBook than the previous version.

I realized that I hadn’t turned my Dell Vista laptop on in about a month, so there were plenty of patches and updates to run on that. And I hadn’t started the virtual machine I have set up under Fusion in a while either, so there were a bunch of patches to install on that too.

On Saturday, I remotely applied a whole bunch of patches to our servers at work. The main goal was to get that Windows patch on all the servers, but I also had a bunch of other patching to do. I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never updated our main SQL 2005 server to SP2. That had been on my to-do list for about a year. And I had to apply a cumulative post-SP2 patch file to our HR/payroll SQL server, since our HR/payroll software vendor requires that I bring the server up to that level before I can apply their year-end update. It took about three hours to get all that done. Happily, nothing locked up at any point, so I didn’t have to drive into the office just to power cycle a server. (And, yes, I know there are devices that would allow me to power cycle a machine remotely. But we can’t buy any new equipment right now.)

I have one Windows 2000 server that’s hanging up on one of the updates. I’ll probably have to bring that one up to date in safe mode or something. I really don’t know what’s wrong with it, and I’d like to just get everything off it and moved to a WIndows 2003 machine, but I don’t have the time right now.

I got some interesting errors on the two machines to which I applied SQL updates. There’s a long thread on this problem here, at the Microsoft forum site. I haven’t figured out if this error is actually going to be a problem or not. There’s certainly a lot of confusing (and sometimes conflicting) advice out there on it.

I’ve been watching the Jets game today, and enjoying the newest Mac vs PC ads that Apple’s been airing. The theme is basically how Microsoft is spending a bunch of money on advertising instead of fixing Vista. I have to say that I agree with that. This new security hole apparently exists in every version of Windows from Win 2000 to Vista and Win 2008 Server. There’s an interesting blog entry about MS08-067 and the SDL, covering the failure of the SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) to catch this bug. To quote from the article: “I’ll be blunt; our fuzz tests did not catch this and they should have.” I can’t help but think that a little bit of that Seinfeld cash might have caught this one earlier. I’m probably over-simplifying. These things are really complex, and a lot of stuff can go wrong that no pile of cash can fix.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to the Giants game this afternoon. It should be a good one. Well, this was a really long (and probably boring) blog entry, but I haven’t written anything in a few weeks, so I was due for a long one. I’ve got a bunch more random thoughts in my head, but I’m going to resist the temptation to make this entry any longer!

DD-WRT

I went ahead and installed DD-WRT on my router today. I want to give it a few days before I say this for certain, but I think it’s solved all the problems I had with the Apple TV. I tried streaming stuff wirelessly from my MacBook to the Apple TV, and that worked. I watched a podcast and a couple of YouTube videos over the Internet, no problem. And I synced a few TV shows from my desktop PC down to the Apple TV without the sync getting interrupted and restarting every few minutes.

The install was fairly straightforward. For a v8 WRT54G like mine, it’s detailed here. It turns out that the v8 WRT54G isn’t the best router to user for DD-WRT (that would probably be a WRT54GL, as explained here), but it works with with the “micro” distribution of DD-WRT, which is all I really need.

The installation write-up doesn’t bother to mention the default user name and password for DD-WRT. You can find them in the FAQ, but if you haven’t looked that up and written it down before installing, you might have to do what I did, which was to call a friend and have him look it up for me.

Aside from the usual setup, I didn’t have to mess with any of the parameters in DD-WRT to get things working well, except to turn off “filter multicast”, which I had to do under the original firmware also. (That setting is under security / firewall in the DD-WRT config.)

Overall, DD-WRT is pretty cool. You can see a lot of stuff in the status screens that you can’t see under the default firmware. And there’s lot of stuff you can tweak, though I doubt I’ll mess with it much, assuming it keeps working OK.

more Apple TV fun

I’m still struggling with my Apple TV. I got an initial sync (with my desktop PC) done only by hooking up the Apple TV to my network with an Ethernet cable. I couldn’t get it to work over wireless, no matter what I tried. I came across a good article on the way Apple TV tends to behave more like a computer (with all the usual problems) rather than a consumer electronics device. Good quote: “Whereas most CE A/V products just sit there and work, Apple TV is high-maintenance, demanding too much attention, updating, troubleshooting and overall spoon-feeding.”

After the initial sync, I switched back to wireless, and I have been able to sync a few things down to it, though it hasn’t been trouble-free. I’ve also been experimenting with streaming stuff from my MacBook to the Apple TV. I managed to watch an hour-long video podcast with no problems, but then I started experiencing problems with much smaller files. Weird. I played around today some more, and I’ve discovered that I can stream stuff from the MacBook fine, if it’s connected to my network via Ethernet cable. (The Apple TV doesn’t need to be wired, just the MacBook.) Again, kind of weird.

On the Apple discussion boards, I’ve seen three solutions to the Apple TV wireless problems that would probably work:
(1) Leave it hooked up via an Ethernet cable, and forget about using it wirelessly.
(2) Throw your WRT54G router away and get a new one.
(3) Load an alternate firmware on your router, such as DD-WRT.

I’m not real keen on any of those, though I wouldn’t mind having an excuse to try out DD-WRT. I’m a little worried that I might brick my router if I do that, but it’s only a $50 router, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if it happened. Maybe I’ll be doing that later this week.

Apple TV

I got an Apple TV today. I got it largely so I can watch Battlestar Galactica, season 4, in HD. And so I can watch Torchwood, season 2, which I downloaded back in July but haven’t gotten around to watching yet.

It was relatively easy to set up, but I’ve hit a few snags. The biggest one involves syncing my videos from my PC to the Apple TV. I fully expected that an initial sync between the PC and the Apple TV would take a long time. However, I didn’t expect that the sync would hit some kind of snag and abort after 5 minutes, every time I try to run it. Looking at the forums at Apple’s web site, it seems like this is a fairly common problem. Reading through a few threads, it seems like the only foolproof way to do an initial sync is to use an Ethernet cable. Unfortunately, I don’t have an Ethernet cable long enough to reach from my router to my TV here in the apartment. I’ll have to borrow one from work tomorrow. I think that this is a pretty big problem — syncing with a PC is pretty fundamental to the operation of this thing, and it should really be able to do it wirelessly. I don’t need it to happen fast, but it should *happen*. I can download pretty big files to my PS3 and my Tivo over the wireless network, no problem, so I know it’s not a problem with my network.

iTunes 8, continued

Well, my desktop Vista machine finally finished chugging through its “Genius” stuff. Just for yuks, I hit the Genius button on “Why Henry Drinks”, by Drive-By Truckers, and iTunes gave me a pretty awesome playlist, which I’d like to paste here, but I’m having trouble exporting the playlist to a format that I can easily paste into Blogger’s editor. The best I can do right now is a screenshot:

iTunes 8

I’ve upgraded all of my home computers to iTunes 8 today. My desktop Vista machine is still running through the “Genius” setup, which apparently takes a long time when you run it on a large library. My one pet peeve with iTunes 8 is that there is no longer a preference pane setting to turn off the Genre column in the browser. It can still be turned off though, using this hint. That worked fine on the Mac, but I’m not sure how to translate that to the PC. It’s probably a registry setting or something. I’ll have to play around with it later.

Meanwhile, I can’t seem to download app updates for my iPod Touch from iTunes right now. I’m hoping that’s a temporary glitch related to the iTunes 8 rollout. I’ve got two apps that need to be updated. I’ll have to take a look at that again tomorrow.

One more Apple-related note: I ordered a refurbished Apple TV unit today. I was motivated by the availability of Battlestar Galactica in HD on the iTunes store. I never got around to watching any of BSG season 4 off my Tivo, and now the first few episodes have disappeared. (Apparently, I ran out of room at some point, and they were dropped.) The quality on my Tivo Series 2 isn’t great anyway. I don’t mind paying $30 or so to get the whole season in HD, and without commercials or those annoying crawls for Ghost Hunters or whatever else SciFi is plugging. Oh, and with the Apple TV, I’ll finally be able to watch Torchwood season 2 on my TV. I downloaded that from iTunes while I was in San Diego, and I watched the first episode on my laptop, but I haven’t gotten around to watching any more of them.

iPhone note-taking apps

There are a couple of new note-taking apps for the iPhone that came out just recently. MagicPad’s key feature is cut and paste, which, sadly isn’t built into the iPhone system software. iNote is fairly straightforward and simple. One interesting feature is the ability to switch to landscape mode, which isn’t present in the built-in notepad app. Sadly, neither of these apps has the capability to sync to the desktop or to the web in any way.

iPod Touch annoyances

The MobileMe syncing stuff has been working fine for my calendar and contacts. I mentioned previously that there was one annoyance with this — there’s no way to get the birthday calendar down to the iPod Touch. I’ve now gotten around this by turning off the normal birthday calendar in iCal, and instead using the ability of MenuCalendarClock to copy birthdays from Address Book into a “normal” iCal calendar. So, long story short, I’ve got all my birthdays on the iPod Touch. MenuCalendarClock costs $20 to register, which is pretty reasonable, given that it does a few other useful things.

I still haven’t found a good note-taking app that syncs between the Touch and either my Mac, PC, or the web. I’m going to keep an eye on the app store and see if anything new and interesting appears.

more iPod Touch and MobileMe stuff

I see that Apple is extending all MobileMe subscriptions by 30 days to make up for the hiccups in the first few days of the service. That’s nice of them. MobileMe is working OK for me now. I’ve input stuff on the web, on my Mac, and on my iPod, and the sync is working fine no matter where I enter stuff. I’d still like to get the birthday issue straightened out though.

When I set up the 2.0 software on my iPod, I initially turned on “push”. That works well, but really drains the battery. I’ve got “pull” turned on now instead, and I’ve got the thing configured to check once an hour. I hope that’ll clear up the battery issues. I wonder if they could make the pull functionality work a bit more intelligently, so it doesn’t kill battery life.

I’ve looked around at a number of productivity apps for the iPhone / iPod Touch. I haven’t found one that looks like it’s all the way there yet, for what I need. There are a few interesting apps that don’t actually sync with their desktop counterparts yet. Things is a good example. Ditto for Dejumble.

I think my preference right now would be to have an iPhone version of DevonThink, Backpack, or maybe Yojimbo. With full sync, of course. I’m not sure any of these apps are going to get iPhone versions soon, though.