AppleCare/Service Hints
I just had to take my MacBook Pro in for service, and here are a couple of hints to help you if you ever have to do this.
- If you live near an Apple Store, don't bother calling the Apple Care "hot line," they have a string of things they'll ask you to go through to rule out 'human error' (i.e. you) as the problem, and after all that they'll more likely these days send you to the Apple Store anyway (or at least encourage it). They'll still send you a box to send in a portable if you are insistent, but it's not like the good ol' days of AppleCare.
- If the Apple Store close to you is a particularly busy one (and they all tend to be especially this time of year), go online and schedules you appointment with an Apple Genius ahead of time. This will save lot's of time.
- Create a dummy admin account if possible before you go, and lock your keychain. When they ask for the admin password , give them the info for the dummy account. It will allow them all the access they need, without easily allowing them to poke through your files. (Though if they really wanted to they could at this point, but this makes it inconvenient). They can use this info if they need to send you computer in as well.
- Make sure you back up everything before you take your computer in. I've never lost any info during a repair (…knock on wood…) but I know people it's happened to. Time Machine provides a valid backup for those using Leopard.
- Prepare to be without your computer for a week or so. This sucks I know, but it's a small price to pay for a healthy working computer. Often the repairs only take a few days, but occasionally they need to order parts or they could be particularly busy, and this will take some time.
ps clarification
I just received my author copies of the book and discovered the first issue. In chapter 18, page 302 where I write about the ps command I write:
"The most common options are -a, -u, and -x (so common, in fact, that you can issue them without the
-)."
This is actually no longer exactly true. The latest version of Leopard has changed the ps command and the -u option now is a switch to select the processes of a specific user ID (though the man page is a bit unclear about this, and the command doesn't seem to work as expected).
That said, the command used in the book ( "ps aux" ) still functions as expected (do to some compatibility magic), however if you use "ps -aux" you will get an error. The proper new way to get the expected results would be to use "ps -ajx" .
Also, it seems for the moment neither the -u or -U options (the -U option is covered on page 303) work as they should at all. I assume this will be fixed with an update, but who knows
It seems the -u and -U options do work however if you use them with the -a (or -A) options, then they (-a or -A) will take precedence. So, rather then "ps aux -U user" (as I used as an example in my book) you can use "ps -jxU user" instead.
ExifRenamer Updated!
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
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).
Add Recent/Favorite Items Stack to Dock
You can add a very useful stack to your dock that can display a variety of you recent or favorite items. Do do this simply enter the following commands in the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
killall Dock
You can then select what items you want this item to display from the stacks contextual menu.
Personally I like to leave it on "Favorite Items" which correspond to the user selectable locations under "PLACES" in the Finders side bar.
My Book is at the Printer!
Last week I was out in San Francisco for Oracle Open World (which was really quite interesting… Oracle seems IMO to be way ahead of everyone else in the whole enterprise software space). Anyway while I was out there I spent quite a bit of time at Apress in Berkeley and was there as they put the finishing touches on my book and shipped it off to the printer. All this means that it should be on bookshelves all over in about another month (Officially December 17th). Of course you can pre-order it now if you'd like <g>.