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OS X 10.5.2 is here and it totally messes up my AirPort/WiFi! | February 12, 2008

First the good… 10.5.2 fixes almost all the initial interface issues, that most people had. The transparent menu bar never bugged me as much as others (I did select a background image with this a a consideration though), however now you can toggle that. Stacks seem to be mostly fixed (though you still can’t traverse aliased folders in “List” view). Finally the Time machine Menubar Item is nice and should have been there all along. All good things.

Now the very ugly… I can no longer find my WiFi network at work, not at all! In my last post I noted that there were issues connecting to the Fortinet FortiWiFi 50B at work. This was annoying, but there were workarounds, in fact switching from WEP to WPA (as things should have been to begin with) seemed to solve the problem entirely. However, after applying the 10.5.2 update, things are now worse then ever. My MacBook Pro doesn’t even see the WiFi network, making it impossible to connect no matter what security is used (even with none at all). Now there are many issues with this problem:

• There is clearly something unique going on with the FortiWifi unit, since I’ve never had these issues with numerous brands of WiFi routers all over the world. Attempting to contact Fortinet for an answer futile, as it seems there support, from my experience, represents the worst of the worst. (Why anyone would pay three to five times more for a WiFi router from a company that sucks this bad is beyond me. They have a reputation for excellent security, which is always welcome, of course making your network totally unreachable from with-in or with-out, while effective, isn’t what I think anybody wants. Plus… and this is real fun, after pay way to much for the hardware, you have to keep paying them for software updates, support, and everything else. Oy!… there is more, I could go on for awhile panning Fortinet, especially as a Mac user, but I’ll move on.)
• Apple has to share in the blame here though. First of all while there were issues with WEP connections to the FortiWiFi in 10.5.1, WPA worked fine, and there were workarounds for WEP as well. Plus, I’ve never had an issue connecting to the WiFi with *gasp* Windows, or even Linux. So clearly whatever suckiness Fortinet offers it seems that it’s still within Apples abilities to make this work (and nothing frustrates me more then updates taking hugh leaps backwards. Experimental interface whims I can live with (though I’ll be there to bitch about ‘em), but breaking essential computing functions is just plain unforgivable… especially when everyone else seems to get it right). I mean seriously how am I suppose to convince the powers that be that we should all switch to Macs, when they come back (rightfully I might add) and say “WTF, they can’t even connect to our WiFi network.”

My hope is that there are just enough of people with this issue so that Apple will take notice and release a patch very quickly to correct this.

ExifRenamer Updated! | December 8, 2007

A while ago I wrote this post explaining an effective yet convoluted way to rename images using EXIF data. In it I lamented the fact that this was only necessary since ExifRenamer hadn’t been updated in years. Well lo and behold, today it was updated! I consider this one of those holiday miracles. Go get it here!

A New Look for bm.c | December 8, 2007

As the day when my book ships grows ever closer (just over a week now) I thought I’d better clean up this site a bit by creating a new theme. Initially I was just going to replace WordPress with TextPattern (which seems much more flexible in both design and content organization), but I didn’t want to break any existing links or deal with that associated migration chaos. (This switch however is not be out of the question.) So anyway I’ve activated the new theme, however, at this moment it’s not quite polished so for the moment you may find some visual glitches as I work everything out (the new theme is quite a bit different from the old one). If you notice something a bit off or have suggestions feel free to send a message my way. My goal is to have everything looking and working well by the ship date (12/17).

Mac OS X 10.5.1 Leopard Update | November 15, 2007

Today Apple whisked out the first update for Leopard: 10.5.1. This seems to fix a host of bugs in the initial release, some minor, some a bit more serious. I used the System Update tool and installed it with no problems. A list of some of the things fixed can be found here.

PC Mag Leopard Review | October 31, 2007

What’s going on here? First PC World declares the a Mac Book Pro the fastest Vista laptop! Now PC Magazine claims that Leopard is “by far the best operating system ever written for the vast majority of consumers.”

What’s next? Will John “I have no plans to move to the Mac platform for my personal use” Dvorak start using a Mac for personal use? …maybe after the Apple-Sun merger.

Leopard reviews are rolling in… | October 29, 2007

With Leopard releasing on Friday, over the weekend many reviews have been popping up. By far the most complete that I’ve seen thus far (and one which I tend to agree wholeheartedly with) is the Ars Technica review. The Ars review is 17 pages (though pages are a sort of unprecise way of measuring things on the web) and really digs down to comment on the underlying system improvements and developer tools (the sort of thing We’ve come to expect from Ars really). Ars, seems to be the first to catch the new “no-glass” look of the dock when positioned on the sides (which wasn’t present (or obvious anyway) in any of the developers releases).

Of course there are other reviews out there as well. The Macworld review is decent if you are more less interested in the inner workings of Leopard (though it misses even some user centric stuff that Ars catches).

Glad to see both reviews rightfully think Stacks stink.