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Now that I’ve been running Leopard for few weeks, I’m ready to spend some time diving into dotmac sync.  Overall, it seems to be less-error prone, but then new sync conduits seem to work sporadically. 

For instance, the only time I notice that widget sync has successfully run is when I see two of the same widget in my widgetland space- hardly my intended result. 

And while I’m at it, what exactly what “preference sync” do?  What kind of “smarts” should I expect?  Surely it can’t just sync my entire ~/Library/Preferences folder to dotmac.  I ran it and the only thing I noticed was that it changed the name of each of my iTunes shared libraries to the same name. 

It probably is still a bit early to give a harsh review since Apple is still reporting problems with sync.  That said, what commercial service provider allows a production, premium internet service to be in maintenance for nearly 3 weeks?  The only email I’ve seen from Apple on this stated that the changes necessary for Leopard would occur starting October 19, 2007.

Many of my suspect apps do indeed work in Leopard:

• Parallels 3.0 build 5160
• SnapzPro 2.1.1
• Little Snitch 3.0 b10
• Timbuktu 8.6- ancient, I know but I haven’t yet given it up for LogMeIn
• SoonR 1.1.8
• iStat menus 1.1- slight visual defects
• Locator 0.7.2- great front end to the unix locate service
• FileMaker 6.0v4- yes, I still have one database in the old, 2002-released, crusty, carbon application (please don’t tell anyone)

Anyone dare try installing Fink?

Update: It seems to work fine after a recompile with XCode 3.0 installed.

The following apps are currently incompatible with Leopard 10.5:

Dupin: Updated: 1.1.1 works great! crashes on launch

MacFUSE: generates errors in the console every 10 secs.  I remedied by removing the entry for com.google.filesystems.fusefs from the /Library/LaunchAgents/ folder.  Update: yes, this was the 10.5 version.

MyStrands: Updated 0.83 works great and looks good!  crashes on launch

fseventer: recognizes Leopard and disables itself

LMILaunchAgent is the hook for starting the LogMeIn internet screen sharing service.

Initial install notes:

- Quite a few scary moments upon each bootup

- Guess I should have installed fresh batteries

- The startup movie did not play on any of the three macs I’ve installed Leopard on.  if this happens to you, you can view manually by launching these two files:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Setup Assistant.app/Contents/Resources/TransitionSection.bundle/Contents/Resources/intro.mov

/System/Library/CoreServices/Setup Assistant.app/Contents/Resources/TransitionSection.bundle/Contents/Resources/intro-sound.mp3

- Something’s up with iDisk sync:

• Machine 1 presented me with a “Previous iDisk.dmg” on my desktop and rebuilt an entirely new local copy. 
• Machine 2 showed no iDisk and eventually brought it back about an hour after install. 
• Machine 3 seemed to just bring the iDisk over perfectly.

- .Mac sync is also acting screwy.  I keep seeing the conflict resolver no matter how I many times I say merge or replace.

- Overall compatibility seems excellent.

- The translucent menu bar isn’t as bad as I thought, but after changing it the included “Grass Blades” desktop picture, I immediately knew why Apple chose a dark color for the default.

- I like the upgrade overall, but everything seems a bit slower.  This is contrary to every review I’ve read.

iPhone really needs a search mechanism.  I’ve used mine since launch day and one thing I really do miss from my BlackBerry is simple contact search. 

My iPhone has over 3000 contacts and scrolling by letter takes too long.  A simple solution was to create some new groups in the Mac “Address Book.”  That was great, but why not use “Smart Groups?” 

I setup several Smart Groups and got ready to sync.  That’s when I found out that the iPhone cannot sync Smart Groups.  What a pain!

My solution was to write an AppleScript to copy from the Smart Group “Smart Restaurants” to a “Dumb Group” called “Restaurants” which can be synched to iPhone.

Here’s my script:  (saved to /Library/Scripts/)

—
—“Copy from Smart to Dumb.scpt”
— Description: Dumps Address Book Smart Groups to Dumb Groups
— by: David F. Bills 09.29.07
—

tell application “Address Book”
if not (group “Restaurants” exists) then
  make new group with properties {name:"Restaurants"}—Create our ‘hard’ Group if missing
end if
save addressbook
set smart_Rest to id of every person in group “Smart Restaurants”—This is the name of the Smart Group
set hard_Rest to id of every person in group “Restaurants”—This is the name of the ‘hard’ Group
repeat with sr in smart_Rest
  if hard_Rest does not contain (contents of sr) then add (every person whose id = sr) to group “Restaurants”
end repeat
save addressbook
end tell

Seems to be faster to run this from the shell script than in Script Editor and it makes sense to use osascript since I’m calling via Cron at 3am nightly.

0     3     *    *    *    osascript /Library/Scripts/Copy from Smart to Dumb.scpt

Now, I just need to do my daily sync first thing in the morning and I’m up to date.  Thanks to Craig Smith and Niel for their assistance.

One of the sites I work on, Songwriter101, has been experiencing problems in the forums- Chinese drive-by spammers.  The forum moderators had been deleting posts for weeks by users called shoesnew, Hu, ch, shoeman and the like.  They were all posting about the same topic- deals on sneakers, athletic wear, etc.

My team was pulling out their hair.  “Of all things… why shoes?? Do these spammers think that songwriters have a thing for purchasing new shoes? I could understand if they were spamming guitar strings or something, but shoes???”

I asked if there were any good deals.. and then knew I had to deliver a solution.  After playing the cat and mouse game for some time with suspending the userids and banning the IPs, it was time for something more drastic.

A quick Google search pulled up a great site with complete IP blocks in several formats.  A bit of htaccess tweakery with the CIDR files and now, we’re Chinese spam-free! 

(I’m quite proud of the “error message.”)

From the moderators: “And… today is the first day all week of spam-free moderating. Thank you!!  ...enjoy the absence of sneaker ads.”

I’ve been using the excellent CrashPlan software from Code42 pretty ever since I saw it demoed at MacWorld.  CrashPlan allows you to do nearly effortless secure, offsite backup. 

Each release of the software brings more control to the operation of the backup engine, but I wanted more control.  I wanted to completely turn it off while I was at home so that it wouldn’t be using any of my precious bandwidth.

After a bit of investigation, I found that the java engine was controlled with SystemStarter.  By issuing certain the following commands, I was able to start and stop the engine at will.


sudo SystemStarter start “CrashPlanService”

sudo SystemStarter stop “CrashPlanService”


Using this knowledge, I put together my final system crontab:

30 7 * * * root SystemStarter stop “CrashPlanService”
30 9 * * 1,2,3,4,5 root SystemStarter start “CrashPlanService”
0 18 * * 1,2,3,4,5 root SystemStarter stop “CrashPlanService”
30 23 * * * root SystemStarter start “CrashPlanService”

It seems that there are no current NES emulators on MacOSX that can play the NES verison of Super Mario Brothers.  I just spent nearly 3 hours trying to get it to work.  I finally resorted to some very old versions of RockNES in order to play.  ugh..