mazedlx.net

When Apple announced MobileMe as

The Exchange for the rest of us

they made a big mistake.

I signed up for a 60 day trial account (79 bucks per year is a lot of money and I don’t want to buy a pig in a poke) which got extended to 90 days due to Apple’s “we’re sorry for MobileMe being such a pain in the ass” apologies.

MobileMe’s speed is beneath contempt. When selecting all mails in my inbox and hitting the delete button it usually takes 5 seconds until the recent 25 mails moved to the trash. Same problem with the calendar. And with the iDisk. And I thought after the .mac debacle in Europe (availability below 75%, speed below 56k) Apple learned their lesson. For a 50kbyte Pages document it took me about 15 seconds to upload it to my iDisk (and my internet connection is far away from being slow) - when uploading from my Mac, when uploading directly via webinterface the speed is a bit better but still. Apple gets paid 100.000.000 bucks a year and seem to operate their servers with a modem.

It is not possible to send invitations from MobileMe to an iPhone or iPod touch - so why do they call it the Exchange for the rest of us. It is more like the Exchange that the rest of us never wanted.

Anyhow, I give Apple time until the end of my trial account to fix those problems, bugs and to add all those missing features (like push from my Mac to MobileMe, sophisticated appointment management, notes and tasks, sharing with iDisk etc). If all that fails my advice would be to stick with Google, Yahoo or Zimbra.

I want must have won’t buy one don’t know what do to. Apple strictened the contracts so now you can’t buy and activate the iPhone yourself, but have to buy and activate it in the shop of an official reseller near you. But I want one, I hate my Windows Mobile piece of crap and I must sync with the office’s Exchange server - so there’s not really an alternative. Or I’ll keep my iPod touch, pay that ten bucks for the software update to 2.0 and sync my contacts and calendars that way. Did I mention that I hate my Windows Mobile piece of shit crap?

Apple, I know you don’t consider advices of some Austrian kid, but wouldn’t you make a whole lot more money if you’d sell the iPhone to anyone? Forget those exclusive contracts, they’re so 1990 and give us what we want. iPhone, 16GB, for 200 bucks a piece without the hassle. Maniac said something utterly true about the iPhone:

By the way, iPhones will be sold with exclusive contracts only, it’s dead to me now.

Besides: the apps rock!

And paired your device with that very remote? Then you need to

a) look more closely to find that remote, or

b) take another Apple remote, aim it at your MacBook, Apple TV or whatever and press Menu + Rewind, until you see the icon with the broken chain, this will unpair the lost remote.

To pair that other remote press Menu + Forward, until you see the icon with the intact chain. This information saved me a lot of time and trouble with Sandra, who wasn’t able to watch “The Closer” with the Apple TV

I managed to install CounterStrike: Source the other day, and to be honest, it could be a bit smoother, but it’s still playable. Also installed Office 2007, and I have to admit that Microsoft did a good job in redesigning the user interface, but it is still a bit overloaded. Only a bit. Boot time is okay, but could be faster. Shutdown time still sucks. And after a PRAM reset Vista recognized all 4GB, not just 3 of 4GB of RAM. As I said in the first post about Vista, I installed it only and only for gaming purpose, nothing else. Well, okay, to get used to it so that I don’t have to when my company migrates from Windows XP and Office 2003 - won’t need any training at all.

So here is my conclusion:

Vista is Windows like we wanted it to be 5 years ago. The user interface got redesigned in an eye cancer avoiding way and it feels right. But you need a whole lot of new hardware to get things up and running.

First things first: The only reason I install Windows on Apple hardware is to play CounterStrike and Battlefield 2. No more, no less.

All started a few days ago when I first showed my MacBook at work. A colleague of mine who is a Microsoft fanboy - in a positive way - asked me if I’m planning to install Windows. First I said, that XP is not exactly what I’m looking for in an OS, and that I would like to install Vista for testing, making hands-on experience as our company will migrate to Vista in the near future) and to play CS:Source and BF2 again. Yesterday he offered me a Vista DVD and asked me

Does the MacBook have a FireWire port?

Yes it does.

Then you’ll need to install Vista Ultimate.

WTF? I would love to know what the boys at Redmond were thinking when they decided not to support a FireWire port with the other versions. WTF.

So later that day I fired up the Boot Camp Assistant, created a 32GB partition, inserted the Vista DVD and clicked the install button. A few hours minutes later, after formatting the new partition with NTFS, waiting for all files to be copied, several reboots, filling out some information (e.g. computer name, username, password, user avatar) Vista was up and running. The first thing I managed to do was to setup the wireless internet connection, and to install the Steam client. I tried to install all Vista updates and CS:Source but the clock told me that it’s already way after bedtime, I’ll finish that today.

The positive things in Vista so far:

It looks nice

I may sound like a douche bag, but when you’re working with computers and sit in front of them all day you need to look at something sexy, a Jessica Alba wallpaper, even in Full HD won’t do the job.

Aero

3D flipping, transparency, floating windows, all that soothes even the savage beast.

Security

A root password is the right thing to have.

Performance

Booting is much faster than it could possibly ever be with XP.

The negative things in Vista so far:

It looks not that good

Why do windows change their border color when maximized?

Aero

How can it be possible that you can flip windows around with a 64MB shared memory graphics card on Mac OS X, but in Vista you’ll need at least 256MB?

Security

It is annoying, to get asked for permissions four (!) times when installing the Flash plugin for IE7.0.

Performance

Why does it take so long just to shutdown? Normally an OS would tell all running processes to go fuck themselves,and then power off. Vista seems to prefer negotiation. Reminds me of XP when pressing the power button, and some application refuses to close itself, then it would me inform about not being able to shutdown. You’re the OS not me, you can kill processes and I need to catch my train.

I’ll post more information the following days.

Patchstick didn’t work for me, so I had to figure out something else. Everything is back to normal (software version 2.0), thanks to this forum post, which is a bit sketchy, so here is the correct version:

Open a terminal

diskutil list

You should see something like this
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *232.9 Gi disk1
1: Apple_HFS Media 231.4 Gi disk1s4
2: Apple_Recovery 400.0 Mi disk1s1
3: Apple_HFS OSBoot 900.0 Mi disk1s2
4: EFI 200.0 Mi disk1s3

The partition important to us is Apple_Recovery, which, in my case, is located at disk1s1

You may have to change disk1s1 to something else, depending on your system!

cd /Volumes
mkdir recovery

sudo mount -t hfs /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/recovery
cd recovery

sudo cp -p OS.dmg /Users/<yourusernamehere>/OS.dmg.backup
We copy the original recovery image to our user folder, just in case something goes wrong.

Download the Take 2 Recovery Image at
http://mesu.apple.com/data/OS/061-3561.20080212.ScoH6/2Z694-5274-109.dmg
sudo cp -p /Users/<yourusernamehere>/Downloads/2Z694-5274-109.dmg /Volumes/recovery/OS.dmg

Eject the drive with
diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk1
Put the Apple TV back together, do a factory restore and everything should work fine!

Use this How-To at your own risk! I can not held be responsible if something goes wrong!

I tried to update my Apple TV to software version 2.0.1 the other day, but installing the update failed every time. So I decided to go for a factory restore, which turns out to be the greater of two evils. Now I’m stuck with software version 1.0, and I’m still not able to update. I created a patchstick which I will test later, to install some extra tools like ssh.

Some forum users reported that it has to be a Leopard only issue, resulting when you upgrade your harddrive and use Leopard to clone the original drive to a new one, but I can’t affirm that, I used Leopard and I updated to software version 2.0 hassle-free.