I was visiting a news site with my OSX Leopard based MacBook Pro two days ago and was prompted to install RealPlayer in order to watch a video. I’ve never had any particular problems with RealPlayer in the past, so I said “yes”, and didn’t really think much more of it.

Yesterday I noticed that my Airport (wireless) network connections were dropping every few minutes. I’d have a great connection, then suddenly it would freeze. I’d turn Airport off and then on, and my connection would be back to normal. None of the other machines in my house were experiencing any difficulties when this happened. The disconnects were very irritating: I tried rebooting my Timecapsule, connecting to my secondary wireless network, restarting my Macbook, and still the problem persisted. What could be causing the problem? I hadn’t changed anything recently that I could recall.

Then I remembered RealPlayer. First I made sure the actual player wasn’t running. Then I opened a terminal session and checked running processes (ps -ax | grep Real) There were two Real player related processes active: the name of one which I wrote down was RPDAgentHelperD. I killed both processes manually, and my network connection returned to rock solid (I.E.: normal) stability. Of course, each time my Macbook rebooted, it relaunched the processes.

I permanently disabled them via System Preferences (System Preferences=> Accounts=> [ my account ] => Login Items. There on the list was a Real Player helper service, which I deleted. And now my MacBook Pro runs without “help” from Real Player.

Was the problem strictly related to RealPlayer? Did I somehow pick up a “trojan” or “hacked” version of RealPlayer? I’m not sure. However, if you are experiencing Airport connection stability problems with your Macintosh, you might want to check and see if you have any RealPlayer components running.

I received my second Macintosh a couple of weeks ago and thought I’d share some photos and thoughts regarding the new arrival.

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I’m sitting here in front of my second computer, more commonly known as “Irene’s game computer.” It is going through the process of installing Windows Vista at the moment, for the third time in less than a week due to various hardware and driver issues.

I’m typing this on my Macbook Pro while Vista’s install process chug, chug, chugs away. My Macbook never seems to have off days- it always just boots up and works. On the other hand, Windows is far superior for games…

For the curious, the various failures of my wife’s game computer really had little to do with Windows or Vista. The hard drive failed, which was precipitated (I soon discovered) by a failing fan. A couple of days later, as I was installing the replacement fan, I decided it was time to install my hand-me-down video card into Irene’s computer. Unfortunately, her motherboard didn’t have a PCI-E slot, so I also had to install a hand-me-down motherboard. I didn’t have a copy of Windows XP at hand, so in went Windows Vista. Shortly thereafter, I realized that this was the infamous Asus M2R32 motherboard that can’t go into standby with Windows Vista: this of course frustrated me since I am trying to use standby mode rather than leaving computers on all the time as a compromise between my need for immediate responsiveness and a desire to minimize my energy waste. Thus I have replaced the motherboard and CPU, which has led to another OS install, which brings you up to date.

On the upside, when all this is over the secondary game machine here will have more or less tripled in gaming performance. Win!

Still, it is comforting to have something to blame for the situation, and Vista is a handy target

I seem to have reversed the forces of entropy! The new server is basically operational, and this blog is now being served by fresh, clean hardware. I’ll post something detailing the innards of the new box this upcoming weekend.

Interesting gotchas from the install

• always pay close attention to disk space when migrating / backing up old servers: I spent several hours trying to fix a problem that was nothing more than my old server running out of disk
• Linux drivers still have problems with network autonegotiate: Or maybe it’s Cisco/Linksys with the problem? For about a decade now, twisted pair Ethernet hubs and NICs have often failed horribly when trying to agree on 100 versus 10 Mbps, and particularly on full versus half duplex. I noticed my file transfers between my two Linux boxes were very slow (on the order of 60 KB/s). I checked my Cisco hub status monitor and, surprise of surprises, both Linux boxes had negotiated themselves a half duplex connection. I changed their configuration to forced 100 Mb/s full duplex, and suddenly I was getting upwards of 6 MB/s of encrypted transfer
• Linux GUI software is sometimes better than the command line: Examples include:
• • installing OS packages/software components- in the GUI, you get a nice list showing what you have installed already and can search component descriptions visually
  • sftp: the command line sftp must use horrible default settings- I was barely able to get to 1 MB/s using it between two computers on a 100 Mbps LAN (the maximum on a 100 Mbps network would be around 9-10 MB/s); the GUI based FileZilla, on the other hand, happily pushed bits at about 6 MB/s
  • USB file system mounts: plug a drive in to the computer, and the GUI autodetects it and pops up to tell you it is mounting it and it just works: basically, just like Windows and OSX

  I am leaving the GUI (KDE) running on this box; now if I could only get the remote desktop (tightvnc) to work without corrupting the keyboard input, I’d be set

• sometimes it is best to give up: One of the things that didn’t work quite right was my install of vncserver/tightvnc. This software allows me to remotely connect to my Linux box with a graphical interface: I use it around the house (not over the Internet) when I’d rather not go and sit in front of the server. Unfortunately, the current install with Mandriva only works until you try to actually use it: at that point, you encounter two problems
• • the vnc session fails with a fatal “fixed font not found” error. I fixed this by installing the XFS package, but it took me several hours to figure out
  • at this point I was able to open a session and see it on my other computer. Unfortunately, anything I typed came out garbled: E.G.: typing “l” would seemingly send an “r” character

  I banged my head against the wall for hours trying to get this fixed, then read this post. Apparently, this “bad character mapping with Mandriva’s tightvnc implementation” problem has existed for months…

• Avhai/ZeroConf/Bonjour are cool: I decided to set up the new server so I could get at its filesystems using my Mac. to that end, I configured Avhai. To get this to work, I followed some guides referred to by this guy. The short story: install and config netatalk, then install (if necessary: it was already installed in my Mandriva build) Avhai for the afp service you just added. Avahi and its friends are really just advertisers: they aren’t “services” in and of themselves, but the let other machines on your network know what is available. For the record, my file share services are blocked by my firewall: sorry Once complete, the services offered by my Linux box show up on the Mac: file shares, terminal services, and potentially other things. I also noticed that the network performance of AFP seems better than SMB. Note that this is purely a seat-of-the-pants observation

There will likely be a few more brief outages over the next couple of weeks as I finish up installing things and tuning the configuration a bit.

I played World of Warcraft a couple of years ago when my Nephew and family decided to check it out. I didn’t mind it, but was just starting to get into EQ2 when we moved and so it was a bit frustrating in that regard. Within a month or two we moved back to EQ2 and have stayed there since.

I’m still playing EQ2 each weekend with my family, and having a lot of fun. But every once in a while I think back to World of Warcraft fondly and imagine that it might be fun to try it out again. Interestingly, WoW is pretty much the only MMOG available for the Macintosh, and so it seemed like a logical progression that one day I would install it on my MacBook.

Of course, I don’t want to go to the store and buy it, and I decided to try out the demo download. It often makes me chuckle when I realize that I’m using an Internet connection dozens of times faster than my modem of yesteryear… and yet the size of the things I download has more than kept pace with the increased bandwidth available:

Ah, a mere 11 hours… well, almost time to read a good book

Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field apparently put on a relatively quiet show at MacWorld today. Apple stock dropped about $10 on comparatively underwhelming (to the analysts) product announcements- basically, there was no iPhone this year.

The big announcement was the MacBook Air. From my perspective, this is a rather boring release: a very thin MacBook with an underpowered processor, low-end (Intel) video processor, and no user ability to add RAM, upgrade hard disk capacity, or replace the battery. Nothing about it appeals in any way beyond its impressive industrial design: it *is* pretty thin, I’ll give them that. But it still weighs over three pounds, so it isn’t exactly what I’d call “light”. Of more interest to me were the Time Capsule NAS/Airport hub and the improved Apple TV set top device.

Time Capsule is basically network attached storage built in to an AirPort (802.11n) and Gigabit Ethernet hub. But the important consideration is that it works with Leopard’s Time Machine backup application to perform wireless continuous backups. I like backups, so much so that I now have about 1.2 terabytes of hard disk storage dedicated purely to backing up my computers. Unfortunately, I just spent several hundred dollars setting up backup for my MacBook. Buyers remorse…yes, that’s what they call this.

Apple TV has been around for a while. It is essentially a small set top box to store and stream video to your TV. The idea originally is that folks would have digital movies and such, or DVDs that they would rip and store on the Apple TV. Unfortunately, its lack of any built-in mechanism for acquiring legal movie or TV content limited its appeal. The MacWorld announcement regarding Apple TV doesn’t really change the device at all: it gets a software update, and that is about it. The big news is the introduction of licensed movie content available for rental and download directly using the device. 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Touchstone, MGM, New Line, Sony, Miramax, Lions Gate Films: they are all on board to provide movies for Apple TV. Oh, you live in Canada? Oops, sorry, no movies for you.

Yes, that’s right: once again the CRTC has managed to impede another cool technology. It took us years to get satellite radio, TiVo is only just arriving, and TV shows on ITunes are limited to Canadian only content like Corner Gas and NHL hockey. Hurray for Canadian content…. Oh well, maybe one day someone will take the CRTC and its regulations, pack them up in one of those ugly metal shipping containers, and ship them to some country that wants them. Like maybe Zimbabwe: that would be a good home for the CRTC.

I have a deep, dark secret to admit: I often send email using HTML/rich text features. I know, it is shocking: but I fear the seductive features of things like fonts, bold facing, and colour have turned me from the true path of pure text.

When I started using the Macintosh, I set my email options to use rich text format for composing messages:

You’d think that, with this setting, any email message I compose would be formatted using rich text, right? Well, apparently Apple wants to think on my behalf. In their infinitely wise thinking, the setting above is actually more of a request than a command. Apparently, they think I mean “use rich text, if you think that’s wise”. Because what really happens with the above setting is that rich text/HTML format will be used *if* I put something in my email message that demands rich text. Like a font change, or a different colour. Otherwise, the message will still be sent as plain text.

I discovered this behavior after my friend Chris noticed that emails I was sending him were arriving devoid of any formatting, with lovely courier-style fonts. I don’t see a quick way to fix this other than to maybe select some kind of odd font or always make at least one character in every email I send boldfaced or some such. I’ll probably just ignore the problem for now

In computers, bugs are a fact of life. No matter how much someone might claim that an application or operating system is “perfect”, the truth is always quite different.

Take the Macintosh, for example. I’ve been using my MacBook Pro for a while, and am pretty impressed with its behavior. But “bug free? Heck no. Here are a few recent examples of “unexplained” behavior:

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As anyone reading this blog knows, I bought a Macintosh recently. Heck, all I’ve written about during the last couple of weeks has been my MacBook Pro. I am pretty happy with my new computer, but I’m the first to admit that a Macintosh isn’t exactly an economical alternative to a PC.

Or is it? I read an article today that made me stop and think (click the “Continue” button to get past the advertising). The idea put forth by this article is, firstly, that Mac OS X is better than Vista (debatable). And secondly, that Macintoshes are cheaper than more or less comparable PCs…this latter flies in the face of any comparison of shelf price I’ve ever made. It simply can’t be true…or at least that’s what I thought until I read the article.

The basic idea: PCs, whether they be Dells, HPs, or Lenovos, are cheaper than Macintoshes by a significant margin when you buy them. However, when you try to sell them, their resale value is far less than a Macintosh.

Resale value? What the heck- who resells a PC? They are worthless after a couple of years. Not so with a Macintosh, apparently. And that’s exactly the point the article makes. Even two or three years later, the Mac you bought for $1,000 is still worth $700 or so, while the PC is barely worth the effort to drag it to the trash heap.

Hmmm. The author of the article makes an interesting point, I suppose: enough so to make me reconsider some “rules” about how I buy and use computers. But one thing the Macintosh still can’t win on- computer games

I can never leave well enough alone. If 2 GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro is good, 4 GB of RAM would be better, right? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. So I set out to expand the memory of my new Macintosh, and have a few tidbits to share.

Can your MacBook Pro be expanded?

As I understand it, there have been a total of two “releases” of Intel-based MacBook Pro. The first came out late in 2006 and was in distribution until approximately June of 2007. That version used a version of the Intel chipset that, for reasons that remain unclear to me, could only address 3 GB of RAM. Note that you could *install* 4 GB, but that the machine itself wouldn’t actually use the memory above the 3 GB boundary due to mapping conflicts. I believe this first version of the MacBook Pro came with 1 GB of RAM standard.

Apple quietly updated the MacBook Pro during the June time frame of 2007. The new models use the Intel “Santa Rosa” chipset, and can now support up to 4 GB of RAM. These newer MacBook Pros come standard with 2 GB of RAM, with of the two slots in the machine filled (I.E.: two 1 GB SODIMM chips).

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