ExpanDrive

I recently found myself drawn into a Internet fight in the Mac vs. PC debate.  Stupid, I know—but this wasn’t your typical argument. The wayward poster was an IT professional complaining about (among other things) a lack of access to command line tools(!), unintuitive file structure(!!), and hard-to-find application preferences(!!!).

As the discussion wore on, he kept falling back onto one argument:  less than 5% of the systems he maintains are Macs, but learning to use them well would take up more than 5% of his time. I recently learned that the head of IT at my current day job also shares these sentiments.

While I’d say to say supporting all company infrastructure is part of an IT professional’s job description, one can’t deny the weight of this rebuttal in a job where free time is hard to come by.

Thing is, IT staff should love OS X. It’s stable. Fewer people write viruses for it. Macs tend to last longer and require less constant attention. Back in 2002, everyone at my old summer gig put G4 towers at their desks, and encouraged the faculty they supported to do the same.

So in the interests of debunking the “don’t have time to learn it” rebuttal, I’ve prepared a short cheat-sheet of the tricks I found useful in my IT days. Feel free to add any things you think I’ve missed.

shift+apple+G: Punch these keys in the Finder and jump to any folder on the machine. Some popular destinations:

/users/[username]/desktop/: Company computers always have messy desktops. Save your eyes the parsing by bringing the desktop up in a Finder window (apple+2 displays any Finder window as a list).

/Library/ and users/[username]/Library/: Need to delete a preferences or settings file for a reinstall? They’re located in here.

/Applications/:The default applications folder. However, the really useful stuff is located in /Applications/Utilities/, including:

• Activity Monitor – Lists currently running processes and their resource use.
• Console – Log files and error messages.
• Disk Utility – Diagnose and repair disk and permissions problems, create and restore images, RAID setup, and initialization.
• Network Utility – Ping, traceroute, port scan, and more.
• Terminal – If you’re proficient in an operating system that ends in “x”, this will be immediately familiar to you, and a welcome alternative to the GUIs listed above.
• Apple System Profiler – answers “how fast?”, “how much?”, and “what’s connected?”. This can be a little pokey if you’re just looking for available printers or an IP address, so you may prefer the system_profiler Terminal command in concert with grep.

/Applications/System Preferences/ or Apple menu>System Preferences… contains most system-wide preferences. The individual preference pane files are located in /System/Library/PreferencePanes. I remember spending a lot of time in Network and Print & Fax.

Preferences for individual applications are general found under the [application name] menu, to the immediate right of the Apple menu.

/Volumes/ displays all mounted disks in a Finder window.

apple+K connects to a server via IP address, DNS entry, or [server name].local. This supports smorgasbord of protocols, but SFTP is missing and FTP doesn’t work very well. There is a solution, however…

Holding down shift during restart to boot into safe mode.

Holding down apple+v or apple+s will boot a Mac into verbose mode or single-user mode, respectively. These display all sorts of diagnostic information instead of the oblique Apple logo and spinning dial.

Anything else?

Here is a sneak peak at the updated GUI coming in ExpanDrive 2

ExpanDrive 2.0 GUI

ExpanDrive 1.03 — it’s sorta ugly.

I’ve been exploring how to let users set custom drive icons for ExpanDrive 2.0, and after spending quite a while googling for any information on a cocoa/carbon framework that would help me do this, it appears there are few resources available on making .icns files. This post doesn’t add a lot of value to the subject itself, but will hopefully send a few people in the right direction.

The easiest way to create a custom icon in your code is with the (hard to find) IconFamily project. It’s a great wrapper around Icon Services, with more than a little added convenience.

IconFamily lets you:

• create a multi-representation icon family from any arbitrary NSImage
• assign an icon family as a file or folder’s custom icon resource, so it will appear in Finder views
• read and write .icns files
• copy icon data to and from the scrap (pasteboard)
• get and set the elements of an icon family in convenient, Cocoa-compatible NSBitmapImageRep form

Here are a few short examples:

Create and write an ICNS file from a NSImage:

IconFamily* iconFamily = [IconFamily iconFamilyWithThumbnailsOfImage:someNSImage
                                    usingImageInterpolation:NSImageInterpolationHigh];
[iconFamily writeToFile:@"/Some/path/file.icns"];

If you don’t want to use interpolation to create your intermediate resolutions, it’s easy to set them by hand

- (BOOL) setIconFamilyElement:(OSType)elementType fromBitmapImageRep:(NSBitmapImageRep*)bitmapImageRep

There is also built in support for setting a custom icon for a particular file or directory, which is nice if you want to spam your logo on a few resources you’re associated with.

- (BOOL) setAsCustomIconForFile:(NSString*)path
- (BOOL) setAsCustomIconForDirectory:(NSString*)path

Easy.

This is not a joke. The Gmail team has enabled an “Undo Send” feature in Gmail Labs. There’s no black magic or voodoo; it just holds onto your message for five seconds in case you want a panic take-back. After that, the email is gone and un-recallable, just like normal.

I rarely use the Gmail web interface, but I’ve thought about writing a Mail.app plugin to do this for years. I can’t count how many times I’ve tried to scramble into the “Sending…” folder and delete a message before it escapes. I’ve never once pulled it off.

Ever worked on a project which necessitated IE6 compatibility? I have. It’s the worst. Joe Lifrieri, a freelancer who runs Hugs for Monsters, thought better of the problem and made some concept art for IE6 landing pages.

ExpanDrive v1.8.3 is a minor bug fix release which targets a few specific issues some users were having with connecting. The only noticeable new feature is that the program can now be licensed by double clicking the .ExpanDriveLicense file.

The download is available here and, as ever, the release notes can be found here.

The following blog post discusses the penultimate and proceeding episodes of Battlestar Galactica. It will “spoil” pretty much the whole series, so don’t read it if you don’t want that to happen.

This show has gotten boring. It’s not as bad as the last season of the Sopranos, but with a few more episodes I think it could have gotten there. With the exception of the two mutiny episodes, I feel like I could have skipped the everything since the supernova at the “Eye of Jupiter” and not missed anything I care about.

I watch Battlestar Galactica because it directly addresses two of my favorite themes: humanity on the brink of destruction, and the inevitable and probably fruitless struggle between humans and artificially intelligent robotic beings of our own creation (cf,M. Shelley, I. Asimov, F. Herbert, W. Gibson, J Badham, J. Cameron, L&A Wachowski).

But there’s been almost none of that. The last season has been spent mostly on forced drama. That episode where Ellen Tigh came back was the worst. First, they could not have picked a character I care less about to be the final “Cylon”. Then they spend two episodes following Ellen while she’s catty and manipulative. Were the writers worried they were losing the daytime soap demographic or what? And then there was a whole episode about Starbuck’s imaginary piano teacher. The third to last episode is not the time to introduce new imaginary characters.

Worst of all, no robots!

Boring stuff. At least there’s hope that the finale will be exciting.

Outstanding Questions:

Is anyone else confused about the species status of the “Final Five Cylons”? I mean, they’re human, right? Because it sounds like they and the humans both came from Kobol. And they invented robot slaves, just like the humans, who destroyed their civilization, just like the humans. They were never robots. So why does everyone keep calling them Cylons?

I don’t understand how the Skinjobs came to control the Cylon Empire. So, the original Centurions from the first war (call them, Cent 1.0s) wanted to make fleshy beings, the Final Five found them and offered to give them the technology they needed to grow Skinjobs in a vat. And then the Cent 1.0s let the Skinjobs take over? It’s like Skynet takes over the world, reverse engineers a new type of human, and then lets the new humans turn it off and take over. That just doesn’t make sense.

Remember when the Rebel Cylons gave free will to their Centurion 2.0 slave beings? That was by far the most interesting plot element of the last season. It seemed clear that the writers were paving a way for the Cylons to be overthrown by their own robotic slaves. But hardly anything has happened since then. There was a brief shot of a Cent 2.0 looking discontent while cleaning up a bloody mess, and there was that brief scene where Baltar tells a Cent 2.0 that he’s clearly at the bottom of the hierarchy. Moreover, all of the dangerous Centurions are on the rebel Cylon Baseship with the human fleet, so they either have to turn on the humans (which would be unsatisfying), or sacrifice themselves to attack the Brother Cavil base (which is implausible). So either the writers have painted themselves into a corner, or they’re just going to abandon my favorite thread.

Some well-respected and some not-so-well-respected weblogs are linking to predictions about Apple’s iPhone OS announcement tomorrow. These predictions are sourced by the same person who said this about the original iPhone:

It’ll be coming out in January …All phone providers… Small as shit… Two batteries… Slide keyboard… Touch screen on the “outside”.

Predictions are valued asymmetrically. If you predict correctly you will treated as prophetic. On the other hand, if you predict incorrectly you will not be held accountable, regardless of how wrong you are.

I resolve to make more public predictions.

I’ve been paying the Apple tax, in one way or another, since 1984 and I’ve been doing it with a minimal amount of grumbling. But that last batch of MacBooks really irked me, especially the $700+ up-sell if you want FireWire. (Apple’s poverty prize, a three-year-old design with some new parts wedged into it, hardly merits mention here.)

Consider this your call to rebellion.

But some recent developments may finally crack the whip on Apple’s runaway markups. It’s gotten to the point that, roughly the price of no-frills aluminum MacBook, now you can get an iMac and decently sleek, ultra-portable Dell netbook.

The desktop machine buries the $2000 MacBook Pro in terms of performance, and the netbook does the same in terms of portability. That’s two machines for 30% less than the cost of one. And, in case you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the past month, yes: they both run OS X.

I realize that there are some DIY costs involved with the Hackintosh, and maybe 1% of users really do need the MBP’s combo of power and portability (with another 9% self-absorbed enough to think they do). Heck, I’ll even admit that if I were man of means, the light-up keys might just be worth the two grand.

But much like Sam Adams before it, I think Apple has drastically overestimated its consumer appeal in harsh economic times. As the hackers churn out more Grandma-ready mods, and as the economic grindstone keeps milling idiot consumers into tech-savvy flour, Apple will have to seriously re-evaluate its pricing strategy.

In January of 2009, Magnetk LLC reincorporated as ExpanDrive, Inc. While we liked our unpronounceable, vaguely memorable, certainly misspelled moniker – it was time rebrand around a better name that better reflects the direction we’re headed.

It will be a little while longer before ExpanDrive for Windows supports more than just SFTP and achieves parity with ExpanDrive for Mac, but we’re committed to co-developing these two products, and at some point, releasing a Linux version.

Today we’re releasing version 1.8.2 – the first major revision in about a year. Full release notes can be found here. We apologize for how long it took to make this revision – our development on ExpanDrive for Windows was slowed while we got our Mac client out the door. However, as 2009 progresses, we aim to consolidate the two products further and work towards feature parity. We’re not going to announce a timeline for the work, but it certainly is a top priority.

Version 1.8.2 adds many important features and fixes

• Renamed SftpDrive to ExpanDrive for Windows
• Fixed major issue where Windows Explorer would sometimes crash while SftpDrive was loaded
• Dramatically improved performance of interaction+save with all MS Office Applications
• Support for Window 7 and Vista 64
• Fixed major bug where some applications, notably Emacs, would suspect a file had been modified on disk, but hadn’t
• Updated licensing to match ExpanDrive for Mac
• Update Network Provider component for much better interaction with environments with DFS
• Many performance and stability improvements
• Fixed issue where some licenses would not correctly get installed