seanwillson.com

i received my powerbook back from apple the beginning of this past week. i wanted to wait a few days before i wrote about the results. the first few days i had the machine it seemed like it froze up a bit more than it should have. it wasn’t coming out of sleep properly and it had to be rebooted a few times. i wasn’t really sure what was going on. after reading an article over at mac dev center about macintosh maintenance under panther i decided to follow a few of their tips. i’m not sure if they really had any effect but i can say my machine hasn’t froze up once since following their directions. it’s also now returning from sleep mode without having to sacrifice my first born.


as you’ll likely remember i had my machine sent in for a new display. the above problems had nothing to do with the new display, this i know, but regardless it was the state of my machine when i got it back from apple. i can honestly say that the display is perfect. i have zero complaints about it, nada one … well maybe one complaint, it took 9 days for me to get it back, but that’s being nit picky honestly. the display is bright, vibrant, has zero dead pixels, and more importantly it has zero white blotches. i was a bit concerned since some folks on the apple support forums had received their machines back only to have more white blotches. i waited until those posts had subsided on the forum and then sent my machine after reading come success postings.


after receiving my machine back with a perfect display i can honestly recommend that the rest of the 15” powerbook owners with blotch problems send theirs in for repair immediately.

i was surfing without my powerbook tonight, yes i still haven’t gotten it back from apple. anyhow, i came across a posting on the apple forums detailing how to properly calibrate your battery. i’ve run into problems similar to what was posted in this thread. for example a few times my laptop battery would get to 30% life and then the machine would instantly go to sleep. i also found myself losing battery life fairly quickly. this writeup makes perfect sense and judging by the number of responses it appears that others are seeing success following this new method. i’ll indeed give it a try when i get my machine back, any day now me thinks.

i’m now powerbook less. yep, you read that right … i’m not in possession of my powerbook any longer. don’t think it’s gone forever, no sir. i had to send it in for repairs last friday. there was a manufacturing flaw that is causing white spots to appears on the lcd displays of most, if not all new 15” powerbook owners. it usually starts out as a small white blotch but then you get a few more and the screen just starts looking horrible. anyhow, i called applecare and they send me a box that i returned the machine in. i hope to get the machine back some time this week. i have a ton of things i want to do on it and i’m really feeling the windows pain now. i’ll let ya know when i get it back and if the problem is fixed. from what others said they either give you a new machine or swap out the whole display assembly.

i was working on printing the latest astronomy club newsletter from word to pdf so our club members could download it from the web (virus free). the file came out at around 1.1 mb in size. that’s a fairly hefty 4-5 page download, i’d almost be better off converting it to html if it wasn’t a painful mind numbing process. so i started poking around a few download sites to see if there were any third party freeware applications that could compress pdf files, nada one, just the standard, overpriced, we never give anything cool away for free adobe products.


so i started playing around with the panther print panel to see if i could tweak the output any. after poking a few times i saw a colorsync menu option on the print dialog that looked harmless. it seems to provide the ability to perform some “quartz filters” before outputting to a print device. it had some options like “blue tone, gray tone, light decrease, sepia tone, etc”. one of the filter choices that caught my eye was “reduce file size” … hummmm, that looks interesting. so i select that and then choose “save as pdf …” (let me see windows do that ellis). upon comparison the pdf went from 1.1 mb without the filter to 320 k with the filter applied. this was to good to be true right, wrong. i opened the pdf in the reader application and it was perfect. i could’t tell the difference between the two. obviously they’d done some optimizations somewhere but they weren’t visible to me in this small document. cudos to apple for this great feature.

while surfing the mac hint sites yesterday i saw a posting about how-to set up mail.app to use a thawte certificate to send signed and encrypted email messages. i was pretty geeked, but then i wasn’t sure if i wanted to give thawte my information, just to get a cert (big brother and all). why couldn’t i create my own certificate authority and sign my own certs. there really was no technical reason, trust reason yes, technical no … so i did just that …


first i went to google and did a search on “open ssl cert generation” and turned up this very useful page. i followed the directions in the “setting up your openssl ca” section. in short i created my ca keypair ( openssl genrsa -des3 -out CA.key <key_size> ) with a key size of 1024. i then created my ca certificate ( openssl req -new -key CA.key -x509 -days 1095 -out CA.crt ) with the 1095 days as my validity time. this is straight out of that webpage, nothing different yet. once your there be sure to do as the author said and secure your files with the proper permission, i used ( chmod 400 <filename> ) to protect each of the generated files.


now is where the directions vary from the origional thawte directions because we have to get our cert as a trusted authority before we can import it into our keychain. to do this open up the finder application and goto the directory where you stored your certs. double click the .crt file that was generated in the above steps, this should launch keychain access application and ask you where you want to import this cert into. choose the x509 anchors from the list and click ok. this will add your cert to the trusted x509 authorities. you should be prompted at that step for your administrator password.


now that we have the cert trusted we have to generated a p12 certificate like the thawte directions did. to do this you need to run another openssl command to generate it (openssl pkcs12 -export -inkey CA.key -certfile CA.crt -in CA.crt -out mycert.p12). once this was generated double click on the mycert.p12 file in finder and imported it into your login keychain. once it’s imported into keychain access you need to give mail.app permission to access this certificate.


after that your done, just quit mail.app and restart it. you should have all of the features defined in the thawte posting and can send signed and encrypted email messages.


as a note, if you want to print out your x509 fingerprint for your cert you can use this command ( openssl x509 -fingerprint -noout -in CA.crt ). also, if you want to view your x509 anchors you can import this keychain into the keychain access application by going to file -> add keychain and selecting it from the /system/library/keychains directory. you should see your generated cert in that trusted list now. enjoy and let me know if you have any questions.

i’ve successfully converted my collection (2500+ songs) of 256 kbps mp3’s to 192 kbps aac. it’s essentially mp4 if you look at the standard, except that it’s more advanced thus it has more benefits. it has improved compression which means that i get the same or better quality as my mp3 and it takes up less space. typically, a cd of mp3’s imported at 256 kbps was taking up about 120 mb. with aac i get the same high quality sound in only 80 mb. that means i can fit more songs on my ipod. aac also supports mulitchannel audio, higher resolution audio (rates above 96 khz), and improved decoding efficiency (i.e. your machine isn’t pegged when you importing). i was able to take my collection from 18 gb of space to 16 gb. of course while i was reimporting all of my audio i found a bunch of cd’s that i wanted to add in so now instead of having 2500 tracks i have 3000 tracks in the same space. not to shabby if i do say so myself.

i’ve spent most of the weekend getting my recently purchased and configured powerbook reconfigured to use panther. i did a complete backup of my home directory and then performed a clean installation of the os. I read a few posting from various forums about people that had trouble doing an upgrade so i figured i’d rather do one install instead of two in the event that it failed the upgrade.


my first impression thus far has been in a word, comfortable. i’ve always thought that osx was a intuiative operating system but it has always been missing a flow. they never seemed to get things working as smoothly as you would expect, yet it was still better than windows. well with panther it’s all changed. the new exposé and fast user switching are really pushing the apple operating system into new areas where others can do nothing but copy. you can’t really imagine how useful or smooth exposé is until the first time you use it. to instantly see every window you have open on the computer or within an application makes navigation a lot easier. i always have tons of applications open and it takes forever to find my way around sometimes. this makes a time consuming task a simple task for anyone to do.


i was also pleased to see apple steal a feature from windows, the alt tab view that shows your currently open applications. they of course added a bunch of features that windows doesn’t have and likely will end up copying from the mac. you can use your mouse to navigate through the view and you can hit “h” to hide the application or “q” to quit that application.


an another great application enhancement is their threaded discussions in their mail application. i know, something simple that every other application has had forever right? yes, and no … they added a nice threading view but took it one step further and allowed you to thread between mailboxes and folders. imagine having your inbox with a bunch of messages and no context to what you said in the thread. that’s easily solved by command clicking the sent mail folder and you instantly have all of the messages from that mailbox threaded with the other messages so you can see flow. pretty cool ahe?


in short i love the changes they made, i love the new brushed metal interface on more applications, the subtle color changes, and improved usability, and more. i could go on for hours but you get the point. if you own a macintosh i highly recommend you upgrade to panther.