Order of the Bath

The Apple aluminium keyboard (and, I am told, the built in keyboard on the MacBook Pro) has a feature that there is a short delay on the Caps Lock key so you have to hold it down a little bit longer before it takes effect. This is to guard accidentally writing emails and IM messages all in capitals. The guy who thought of that one should GET A BONUS, but I would like it adjustable—a little longer in my case.

Some people prefer to disable it completely and, I must admit, it is a pretty useless key.

To those who look carefully, photographs on web pages look dull compared to how they look in photo editors. I always thought it was due to the low resolution but apparently it is all about Colour Management Profiles. These are instructions placed in the image file which tell the receiver how to render the colours and are intended to allow matching on different devices—e.g. Screens on different computers, projectors and printers. However, Firefox has always ignored them; until Firefox 3. IE ignores them as well; Safari does read them but in a different way.

In Firefox, if you go to the about:config page and set gfx.color_management.enabled to True then, after a restart, it will be activated. All the photographs will look just a little bit richer, brighter and more sparkling. The photo purists are wondering why it has not been enabled by default?

Well if you have tried it in Windows you will see—everything else will have taken on a different tinge compared to what it was before, mine went pinkish, others have reported a cream bias. The greys are no longer neutral because in the process of doing it to photographs that come with built-in profiles, they have applied a default profile to everything else on the page and it all looks wrong. The official Mozilla page says that it relies on a properly calibrated monitor. Well mine is as close as I can get it without special hardware but that is not the answer. What you also need to do is set the default profile gfx.color_management.display_profile. You would expect this to be the actual values for your monitor, but that is what Firefox is already doing. What you need to do is set it to C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\color\sRGB Color Space Profile.icm to stop Firefox altering it and allow the Windows display driver to make the correction for the screen. Brad Carlile has a good test page—if the greys still look grey and his three test pictures all look the same then you have got it right. The Apple Mac doesn’t seem to have a problem, just set the enabled flag to True and it mostly works. Safari (at least on the Mac) does it like this by default.

Secondly, plugins, particularly Flash, do not compensate, so sites that blend from backgrounds to Flash will no longer be seamless—but my fix seems to solve that as well, unless they are trying to blend Flash with JPG which would be unusual. I haven’t got this working for the Mac yet. and, although Flash blending is ok, apparently Safari falls down for a similar reason; the CSS and GIF backgrounds don’t blend seamlessly with JPG and PNG images. This may also affect my fix but I haven’t had a chance to experiment with it yet. What I need is another comprehensive test page. Update: It is a heavy read, but this page by G. Ballard explains it all and has a lot of test pictures or this excelent article by Jeffrey Friedl.

Finally, it also takes 10–15% more processor power to render the pictures so those on older systems will see a noticeable slow down on picture heavy sites.

I first though that I would be switching it off again until they get this sorted out properly, but having found the profile hack I will leave it, I don’t care about Flash anyway.

This seems to be a bug in Mac OS X 10.5.* (Leopard). If you have the Energy Saver options set to “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible” (obviously not the same euphemism in the States as here ) then Time Machine can hang in the “preparing backup” state. Forum help here and here.

Oh, and another thing—backing up your VMware images using Time Machine is a good way to fill up your disk in no time. Use a separate guest O/S backup mechanism to do them,

I normally use these posts (the technical ones that is) to highlight problems with products and help people get around them. This one is different. Skype is brilliant and easy! For those that don’t know, it is an internet phone system.

The Mac Pro is one of the few Apple machines that doesn’t come with a microphone so I had to get one first. Unlike a PC it only has a Line-in socket (low sensitivity) and requires a powered microphone. It is a shame that it doesn’t provide 3v phantom power for electrets but I don’t suppose there is much call for it. Powered mics are remarkably hard to get and the easier solution is a USB microphone—it also leaves the line in socket free for other things. Some people recommend using a headset but we didn’t find it necessary.

Then install the software, create an account (most of the good names are already taken unfortunately) and you are away. The only criticism I have is that the Skype web site doesn’t give you much help around the hardware side but otherwise it is fine.

The quality is excellent and it is easy to use. I was particularly impressed by the easy and high quality conference call facility. Now if only the company system was as good as that!

We also installed on a windows laptop and that was just as straight forward. The software version is different and the windows version looks a lot more cluttered but it works just as well, even with the laptop pin-hole microphone and tinny speakers. We found that it scans your Outlook address book for know phone numbers, that may or may not be useful, but they do work quite well; apparently your first call to a “real phone” is free. Internet to Internet calls are free all the time so it is very popular for people with families dispersed around the world. It will also do video calls (I don’t think we will bother), IM chat and SMS.

Finally a recommendation. Unless you want to restrict your calls to a few designated people, fill in at least the basic information into your profile. Think of it as a phone book. I would suggest the minimum is your real name, country and city. Then at least callers can have a sporting chance of getting the right person.

I am not going to talk in this post about how to setup this device, because it works well with the instructions provided and in most normal situations will not give you any trouble. It is a good printer and an acceptable scanner. I will, however, start off with a very strong warning—Once it is configured, leave it alone. This applies to other Canon network devices as well such as the MP800R and IP5200R.

My problem arose when I moved my wireless access point to a location that was out of range of the device. As there was a switch nearby, I decided that the best solution was to change from wireless to wired. This was not easy and to explain why and give a solution is going to get very technical and complex.

Problem description

The heart of the problem is that this multifunction device does so many things and seems to achieve them (or at least initiate them) by broadcast and recognition of the ethernet MAC address using a proprietary protocol. Here we can spot two consequences immediately: first it will only work on the same subnet (but that is generally not a problem for home) and secondly, the wireless and wired interfaces have different MAC addresses (ending in a4 and a5 respectively in my case).

The functions that the device performs are

• Printing—this is pretty much understood and well supported in both Windows XP and MacOS X. The drivers behave in a standard way and using the tools available it is fairly easy to create a new port and printer device—but don’t bother because of what follows.
• Scanning initiated from the device—This depends on a custom daemon “Canon IJ Network Scan Utility” which is waiting for messages. It is configured to watch for particular MAC addresses so doesn’t work if you switch. There is no re-configure tool available but a reinstall does add the new address to the list. Again, don’t do it yet because of what follows.
• Scanning initiated from the computer. This uses the “Canon MP Navigator 3.0.” I am not exactly sure how this works but it must need to know about the scanner address because it didn’t work anymore, and no amount of reinstalling would convince it to work.
• Mounting a memory stick. This seems to work ok because the mechanism knows about both MAC addresses anyway, but I haven’t tested it.

A Solution

While playing with this and trying to get things to work, I got into a situation where one (Windows) machine couldn’t see the device at all, even during installation and another could see it with the “Canon IJ Network Tool” but could not print or scan. I came to the conclusion that the only way forward was to start again from scratch. To clear the deck I un-installed absolutely everything. It helped that I had no other Canon software at all on the system so after using the official uninstallers I deleted the Canon folder in Program Files and, using regedit, deleted all software\canon keys in the registry. I believe that this last stage is important because that is where the addresses are stored. Now do a reboot to clear the air.

Having done this, I re-installed everything needed including configuring the printer using the USB connection, just as if it was brand new. And it works.

I haven’t done this on MacOS X because I have no idea how to uninstall things this thoroughly. Using standard tools and re-installing over the top I have got printing and remote initiated scanning working but computer initiated scanning doesn’t even start. It doesn’t help that the Canon installer keeps insisting that the machine be rebooted, an anathema to Unix based machines.

Would updated drivers have improved things? I don’t believe so but didn’t get the chance to find out as it wasn’t at all clear which versions I already had or what was available for download.

Lessons learned

• Get it right first time. Plan ahead and think before you start to install.
• This device is not designed for larger networks. e.g. it won’t work with multiple subnets and I don’t think two of these devices configured on the same computer would work too well either. Although there is a device configuration tool (”IJ Network Tool”) there is nothing to reconfigure the computer end. Even replacing the printer with a new one would be difficult.
• Don’t rely on Canon tech. support. The web site is hopeless and no one got back to me at all from a support ticket [see below].
• If possible, get one device to do one job, they are much easier to understand. I was shopping for a wired network inkjet printer. All that was available was this wireless combination printer/scanner/copier. At least it doesn’t do fax!

All this is a great shame because Canon make good printers which are economical to run and I have been very happy with them. I hope I will continue to be happy with this one.

Update: later the same day I had an email reply from Canon support. They said

In Mac, you need to select the device and move it to the rubbish bin and the same with software. Just move everything to rubbish bin, device and software. Restart before installing again.

I understand dropping applications into the Trash, but devices? Eventually I took the same drastic action as on the PC. I dropped everything that said Canon into the Trash including stuff under /Applications, /Library/Application Support, /Library/Printers and /Users/Shared. Then rebooted and installed everything from scratch again even using an (extended) USB cable. I thought initially that I was still in the same position as MP Navigator still said “Scan Failed” but on the second click it worked. Trying again, it seems it always fails on the first click. I am not convinced that I managed to delete everything as it still seems to know my scanning settings (600dpi rather than the default 300) but it seemed to be enough to do the trick.

For reference, “Canon IJ Network Scan Utility” (the daemon), “Canon IJ Network Tool” (for configuration) and “Canon IJ Printer Utility” (for printer maintenance and default settings) are all under /Library/Printers/Canon/BJPrinter/Utilities. “Canon IJ Network Scanner Selector” (to pick which scanner to use I suppose) is under /Library/Application Support/Canon/ScanGearMP/Utility. “MP Navigator 3.0″ is under /Applications/Canon Utilities. This is stuff that should be in the manual.

I am having a few problems using this. I am getting used to it in Mac mode but in VMware Fusion running Windows (or Ubuntu) it is a bit of a pain. There is only mapping for genuine PC layouts. This is what I get:—

This means I either have to touch type and think PC when using Windows ignoring the key caps (if I use the UK layout) or lose the £ and ¬ signs (if using the US layout). Neither is very satisfactory. In UK format I can get € (Ctrl-Alt 4) and ¦ (Ctrl-Alt §) but neither in the US layout.

Update: The best answer I can come up with at the moment is to set the guest to use the US international keyboard. This has the basic keys in the same place as the US keyboard but offers additional ones using Ctrl-Alt. This would fix the problems with @, “, \ and | but still leaves ~, ` and # wrong just as with the standard US layout. € becomes Ctrl-Alt 5 and £ is Ctrl-Alt 4. I am not sure if I prefer that or not.

The right solution would seem to be for VMware to map the keyboard through to the guest in some way.

Update: 30 May 2008. It seems the right solution is rather different as the helpful people on the VMware forum pointed out. For Windows, what you need to do is install the Boot Camp drivers. These are intended for Mac systems that dual boot into Windows and contain all the dedicated drivers for the Apple hardware. Quite a bit of it is not relevant for a VMware guest but other parts, such as the Keyboard drivers are. They are to be found on the Mac OS X install disk which is in a magic format so that, when mounted on a Windows system, it looks like a Windows software install disk. Allow it to autorun (or force it if necessary) and the package will install. Then, after a reboot, new devices will appear in the Keyboard menu which solves the problem. Now the characters that appear on the screen are the same ones as printed on the keys. I wonder how you do the same thing in Ubuntu?

Team Fusion have announced the availability of the first public test of the new version. The big advantage for me is that they will be supporting multi-screen clients so I will be able to virtualise my EasyWorship preparation platform—the last major application I have on a real PC. I wonder if that means it will be usable from a MacBook live to a projector?

This *is* available for Mac OS X despite the Firefox Add-ons page saying that it is not. Go to the author’s page to find it.

This is an excellent plugin to check web pages that you have written or other sites for conformance to standards.

As I said earlier, the internal debate about which system to switch to has been decided and I have bought a Mac Pro (base specification + an extra 2GB memory) with VMware Fusion for virtualisation. Not that there was anything wrong with Ubuntu that I discovered but I needed new hardware and this was good value and has a reputation for quality and reliability. The alternatives were big name PC brands like Dell who wouldn’t guarantee that anything but Vista would work (or sell it without an OS) or independent box builders who don’t seem to stay around long enough to provide backup.

My first impressions were, not surprisingly, very good; Apple have the capacity to Wow! you at first look. Then came the period of terror when I wondered if I would ever get used to it. After three weeks (one of which I was away) I think that I am mostly over that but a few things are proving a bit difficult. I am not getting on very well with the Mighty Mouse. Having configured it to get rid of the Dashboard popup every time I press the scroll nipple too hard and configuring a proper right click, I still have problems controlling it. Scroll; forward is ok but keeping it smooth on the way back is quite hard, and some applications require you to be very accurate. I may need to get a third-party rodent.

Some little things:—I wish full-screen really was full not just big! The desktop icons are a bit big for you to have many on the screen. Command(Apple)-X, C and V are a bit awkward for Cut, Copy and Paste. Giving the machine a sensible name was tricky (I am still not sure I have done it right). I would like my mounted disks to reconnect when I log back in.

I struggled for ages trying to get the TimeMachine backup system to write to my NAS until I discovered that it is not supported, so now I have put on a spare FireWire external drive (called Tardis for this. Using it for just account files rather than the whole system uses very little space.

The sleep system is very good but had an unfortunate side effect. The power consumption in sleep mode is so low that it triggered my Intelliplug to shut down, switching off power to all peripherals. This should be a *good thing* but one of these was the aforementioned FireWire disk. When the system was woken up it refused to recognise that a drive was even connected. I tried everything; unplugging, switching on/off and rebooting in various orders but finally what fixed it was using the other FireWire socket on the drive. I don’t know if the first one was damaged or if it was something else as I haven’t tried switching back and now have the drive on permanent power.

A surprising thing I have noticed is the number of updates I have been getting. I expected the initial batch after first switch on because it would be impossible for them to ship fully patched systems but I have had 13 since then in ones and twos including 3 to firmware. Also an unexpected number of them require reboots, even ones for the Safari browser—not the unix style at all. Otherwise they do install very easily and I am impressed with the Sudo based admin password system. It is much easier than keeping a separate Admin account.

A major change from the initial ideas was to scale back the virtualisation to just a single XP guest. I realised that my plan based on a guest machine for each functional task was going to prove very difficult to maintain as there were a number of applications that would need to be on all of them to make it usable. The overhead of keeping them all up to date was going to be too much. A correspondent has also pointed out CrossOver Mac which works a bit like Wine for Linux i.e. allows Windows applications to run in the OS X environment as separate windows and without needing an XP guest (or licence). None of my troublesome applications are on their compatibility list but I am told that WaveCorrector works fine so I will give it serious consideration when I have completed the migration.

What I will do now is detail the application migration using the categories I used in the initial proposal post. You may ask why I don’t use more of the standard built in programs—well, I am used to others and, anyway, I still have to use a PC at work so the more that is common the better.

Browsing/Web

• Firefox. Very few problems, though some extensions are clearly not relevant. I thought that one of my favourites, HtmlValidator, was Windows only but on a second look there seems to me a Mac version so I will give it a try. I hardly used IEView (and I should test using a genuine Windows version anyway) but losing AutoHide will be a shame.
• CuteFTP I haven’t bought the Mac version yet as I thought someone said that seamless FTP was built into Finder but I haven’t been able to locate it.
• Zoom search engine generator. Installed in the XP guest but not yet tested. I am hoping that it will be quite a bit quicker.
• HTML Tidy Not tried yet. I mostly use it in the FireFox plugin and in the (sadly missed) NoteTab.

eMail/IM

• Thunderbird. Remarkably easy. Some extensions are not relevant but transferring the mail and configuration was just a matter of finding the profile and copying it across. The official guide and this blog post helped a lot. To quote the cliché “It just worked.” The only minor detail I had to tweak afterwards was to locate the Signature files. This is an application that is very sensitive to inaccurate mousing. See below for the Enigmail extension.
• PopFile anti spam system. It works fine but it was not easy to install—I have written a separate post about this.
• Pop Peeper minimal POP server status. For the moment, I have installed this on the XP guest. This is not entirely satisfactory as I need it more often than I have the guest running. I am wondering if there is a Thunderbird option to download the titles only from a POP server (which is what this program does). I use it to let Mary know that she has mail waiting as I am connected a lot more than she is.
• Exodus Jabber IM client. I am using the built in iChat at the moment. This works fine but doesn’t open my rooms automatically when I login.

Document processing

• OpenOffice for word processing and spreadsheets. I have installed NeoOffice, the Mac dedicated version of OpenOffice and I have found no problems so far.
• PaintShopPro for picture editing. I haven’t done anything here yet.
• NoteTab for plain text editing. I have been using a combination of the built in TextEdit and vi but I miss the real thing as it was so fast and flexible. Hint: to convert from a Windows file to a Mac one, use the terminal command tr -d '\r' < input > output. Most programs ignore the differences but some, like shell scripts, are fussy. Oh, and by the way, the # key is Alt-3 hidden behind the £!
• Adobe Reader. The built in Preview seems to be adequate.
• OmniPage Pro. OCR. Installing the printer/scanner drivers also put on OmniPage LE but I have not tried it yet.
• CutePDF pseudo printer driver. All applications I have used so far have a native “Output as PDF” feature so I haven’t needed it.
• DjVu image viewer. Not tried yet.

Family History

• Family Tree Maker for Windows. Installed in the XP guest but not tested yet.
• Resource File Viewer. Installed in the XP guest but not tested yet.
• Ged2HTML. Not tried yet.
• Some home grown software. I haven’t tried compiling my own code yet. I suspect the only problem may be the user interfaces.

Music preparation

• Rip—Exact Audio Copy with Accurate Rip. Not tried yet. Without direct access to the CD-Rom drive I can’t see this working very well.
• Digitise—Wave Corrector. Installed in the XP guest and it works fine for editing files except for a little graphical display lag. I haven’t tried it for analogue recording. This is an applications that requires rapid and accurate scrolling and I am finding that difficult with the the supplied mouse.
• Encoding—LAME. Multi-platform but currently only installed in the XP guest for Wave Corrector.
• Edit—Audacity. Not tried yet but it looks easy.
• Library & Tagging—MediaMonkey. Installed on the XP guest with no problems. I have no intention of getting into iTunes.
• Control—Sonos Desktop. The Mac version was installed. The version on the supplied CD didn’t work at all, a known problem with Leopard I think but I can’t recall the details. The downloaded version was fine.
• Download—µTorrent. Bittorent (which I always thought was only a commercial port of µTorrent) has a Mac version but it is very lacking in facilities compared to the Windows version. I am also having router firewall problems so it is not tested properly yet.

GPS/Mapping

• Garmin MapSource. I have tried to install it on the XP guest but it doesn’t seem to work. This needs more investigation.

Presentation

• As this category primarily mirrors the church Windows system, it will remain on the Windows legacy system.

Security

• AVG anti virus. Although it will have very little use I have installed it on the XP guest and it works fine.
• ZoneAlarm firewall. Installed on the XP guest and works with no problems. The OS X firewall configuration is a bit opaque. I tried switching it to the most secure mode and all my access to the NAS and other network shares stopped working so it is obviously *too* secure. I will need to look into it more to see if it is possible to configure it but it doesn’t look as easy as ZoneAlarm.
• GnuPG encryption. The dedicated Mac version was installed using the excellent instructions at Zeitform. Only the base product, Preferences (for configuration) and DropThing were installed but I will probably add FileTool later. The Enigmail Thunderbird extension interfaces to GnuPG seamlessly and also provides key management. The only glitch was at the Windows end. I found that the GUI application wouldn’t export all my existing keys in one go (bug) so I will have to use a command line instruction.
• PINS password manager. Installed on the XP guest with no problems.

Programming

• I haven’t tested it for my own software, but I have installed the optional Xcode developer kit on the Mac which should provide all the facilities I need,
• MinGW Minimal GNU for Windows with compiler etc. I will need to install this on the guest if I am to continue to maintain Windows versions of software I have written.
• Tortoise CVS versioning system. As above.

Backup/Restore

• Backup4all. Installed on the XP guest but not tested yet (tut tut). The Mac TimeMachine backup mechanism is running and seems to do the job but I have gut worries about a full system recovery using it.
• Pen Drive Manager—replicates and backs up memory sticks. Installed on the XP guest and it works seamlessly but I can’t see this TSR type program working with CrossOver Mac!?
• WinZip. Installed on the XP guest because it may be needed. OS X has a built-in facility though I have not tried creating ZIP files yet, except via the command line

Other software

• Eraser—file and disk blanking system. Not considered yet.
• FreeUndelete—File recovery. Not considered yet.

Hardware

• 2 x 1280×1024 LCD monitors running an extended desktop. During the migration I am using one screen on each system. The dual head graphics card on the Mac should give no problems although the Mac desktop is geared up to wide-screen.
• The Mac Pro is reputed to come with a high quality sound system including digital in/out but I have not tried it in earnest yet
• SCSI connected Canon Scanner. This will probably remain in limbo though I will leave the interface card and software on the legacy system.
• External NAS for music store and backup. No problem except as noted above for TimeMachine.
• Network connected Canon MP600R Printer/Scanner. The supplied Mac drivers and software installed without problems, though a lot of the utilities have not been tested.

That is many of the applications covered but, except for mail, browsing and a little document processing, I haven’t migrated the workload yet with all it’s associated data. Watch out for the Part 2 update in a few weeks time.

As you may guess from the title, I have made the decision on how to switch away from Windows. It is not that Ubuntu had any problems but, having discovered that I would need to get new hardware anyway, the Mac PRO seemed to be the most reliable option at the best price. Yes, I spent more than I intended but they have jolly good salesmen who know their stuff down at Western Computer.

I have also scaled back the virtualisation plans to just a single XP guest running under VMware Fusion but I will talk more about that in a future post.

In general, installing software on the Mac is just as easy as on a PC; in many cases easier if you do the PC properly with a separate admin account—you don’t need to on OS X because of the Sudo based “run as admin” facility which really works. But some of the more obscure open source packages don’t have proper installers, probably due to low demand and/or lack of resources. One of these is the POPfile email classification (anti-spam) system. It works fine but is a pain to install with a dozen pre-req bits and pieces, some of which need to be compiled from scratch and even the documentation is a bit out of date. Having now done it, I will make my contribution to the project and publish an install script. Not a full blown installer, because I don’t know how to do that, but a scripted version of all the little bits that have to be done which will make it much simpler … [more]