Henk van de Goor's Bloggers@large

I think the title of this post largely sums up what the difference is between Mac and PC. However, if you work long enough with both OS's - like I do - you'll find things you don't like with both platforms. Usually when I blog about computer annoyances, it is about Windows annoyances. But this time I'll write about a specific Mac OS X annoyance I endure every day. Just as a bit of background: back in 2002 I switched from one company (Lost Boys) to another (VGM). The first company was a full-fledged Internet company, the latter a pre-press company that also had a Internet department. I was also faced with the question: "what kind of PC do you want?".

I decided that I was going to switch to a Mac at work (I only used Windows up until that point). I got a nice Mac Powerbook G4 with OS X 10.1 Puma on it. Back then Apple also included a OS 9 emulator so people could still use OS 9 applications. As I never had worked with Os 9 before (although back in '90 I worked with Apple Classic) I had a fresh start with OS X. To be honest: switching from one OS to another didn't cause big problems. There where a few things that I had to get used to. The biggest issue I had in the beginning was, that closing a window did not close the application. So after a while my mac started to slow down a lot. It then occured to me that all applications I started where still in the dock. Duh! So after finding out that you need to do a "apple-q" that was solved.

Fast forward to today: I now have a MacBook Pro (Intel) at work and am running OS X 10.5 Leopard. I like my Mac a lot even though at home I keep using PC's with Windows XP, Vista and even Ubuntu Linux on them. I have a big love-hate relationship with Vista - the most crappy Windows version in Mickey$ofts history (can't wait till Windows 7 is ready). When it comes to stability I have to admit that Windows XP and Vista both are just as stable as OS X. However: OS X runs always smoother than either Windows OS when it comes to multitasking. I suspect that it is the OpenBSD based kernel that helps out here.

But I digress. So what is my #1 annoyance with OS X you might ask? Well besides the crappy Office 2008 (not Apple's fault off course) there is 1 thing that really keeps coming back. It's the gui where the maximize button - the (+) button - does NOT maximize and fills your whole screen. Both Windows & Linux and even OS/2 Warp back then, all maximize and fill your screen. Instead it just 'zooms' to the maximum hight of your screen. So in Mac OS X, the (+) button simply resizes the current window to what Apple thinks is its optimal width and height, taking into consideration the current window contents.

So each and every time that I want to browse full screen, or want to edit that Word document full screen etc. etc. I always find myself resizing the f****** window. Day in, day out. I would have thought that by now so many people have switched from Windows to Mac OS X that Apple would have included some kind of tweak or preference for this in the OS. But no. Instead you will have to find some (sub-optimal) third-party program (like Megazoomer).

So, dispite what my post title says, I do swear at my Mac. Almost every working day.

I just installed Mac OS X Leopard on my PowerBook G4. Well, not really 'on' it: I actually used my external 160gb firewire disk for that. I know that some applications are not compatible with Leopard, so I try to play it save. Also I didn't know how smooth it would run on my PowerBook which is just based on a G4 and not the latest Intel platform that Apple is using nowadays. So I'm just experimenting, to put it that way. But I have to say: so far so good. It took about 2 hours before I had installed and copied my stuff, but it looks great, I love Safari 3 (I'm writing this entry with it), and I love stacks; it's makes things a lot less messy on my desktop.

I will definitely need some more time to check things out a bit more in-depth, but so far so good. I was even surprised to find out that with Leopard you get Front Row back! That was something that was not officially included with Tiger for my PowerBook. All the other stuff - Time Machine, Spaces etc - I will need to check out later. One thing that surprises me so far, is that it runs relatively smooth on my 1.5ghz G4 with 768mb ram. Even the new finder with it's "coverflow" like interface seems to work smooth. Amazing!

All I can say so far: Microsoft Vista, eat your heart out!

Yesterday I finally bought another external harddisk: an Iomega 2.5" firewire/usb 2.0, 160gb. I have a Mac PowerBook G4 and some time agao I made the mistake of splitting the internal 80gb harddisk into 2 partions: one for my applications and one for my data. Off course I always ran out of space on my application partition because of the very annoying way OS X uses swapspace. I tried to relocate that swap parttion to my Data parttition but whatever fancy utility I tried, it did not work. So I just wanted to switch back again to one big - well "biggish" - partition.

But in order to do that I had to have a bootable external disc (firewire). So I bought one and cloned my harddrive (took about 2 1/2 hours for each partition) and erased my 80gb harddrive, cloned everything back and started cleaning up as thing were messed up a bit (dock wouldn't start). But after running Applejack it worked like a charm again.

To cut a long story short; I have reclaimed my harddisk and now I have a good extra harddrive. The cool part is that I have cut the Iomega in 2 partitions, one with Apple journaling etc. and the other using NTFS. Now, as you might know OS X can read NTFS, but not write to it. Well lucky you: if you want to write to your external NTFS drive as well, just head over to Lifehack.org and read the article "How-to: Read and Write NTFS Windows Partition on Mac OS X".

Enjoy!

I ran across some funny spoofs on the "Hello, I am a Mac. And I am a PC" commercials as it seems that Novell is now entering the market as well trying to sell SUSE Linux. Just sit back and let the movies roll :-)

Apple vs Microsoft vs Linux?

At my work we have a mixed network. Meaning that most people (95%) use Mac's and a few (management, secretary) use a Windows Winblows PC's. My collegue - one the few Windows users - was due for a new laptop and - partially because of my advice - he got a spanking new Sony Vaio VGN-FE41M. A stylish, well-equipped Core 2 Duo laptop with a really nice screen. Off course it came with Windows Vista - in this case the "Home Premium" version. Sony has a reputation for nice computers and this particular Vaio is no exception. It looks good and has plenty of features.

One of the first tasks though, is to get rid of all the pre-installed trial-software. Some of the software that was pre-installed wasn't even Vista-compatible! So my collegue had to go online and download updates before it would work; very annoying and stupid. Off course I advised him to get rid of the whole Norton stuff that was pre-installed (it is really bad software and cause more problems than it solves).

As my collegue found out - just like me - Vista is pretty different from XP. A lot of opions are located at weird places and what used to be simple tasks on XP, become really cumbersome on Vista. Sure, the eye-candy factor of Vista is a lot higher than XP (that by now really does look like it's 6 years old). Not to mention he was just as annoyed as me with the UAC (User Account Control) popping up every 3 mouse clicks.

Long story short: once he got his network working, he found out he could no longer connect to our fileserver, which is an Apple OS X server (Xserver). Whatever he tried; Vista kept asking for his username and password but for whatever reason, it would just not connect. Even our IT guy didn't know how to fix it (this was actually his first Vista PC). Really annoying!

As usual, Google is your friend, and I found out within 5 minutes that this is a problem with the version of Samba (not the dance-style) that OS X server uses. It uses a different way to authenticate the user.

The fix for this is also described:

Run secpol.msc
Go to: Local Policies > Security Options

Find "Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level"

Change Setting from "Send NTLMv2 response only"
to
"Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated"
Vista defaults to only send the more secure NTLMv2 protocol, which these NAS devices/Samba do not support.

But low and behold: on Winblows Vista Home Premium there is no secpol.msc! Very nice move Microsoft! Force your users to buy a more expensive version and deny them access to their own network. This really is ridiculous!

House of cards
Lucky for my collegue, and other Vista users, Microsoft still uses the good'old house of cards called "registry" to "manage" all setting and options for the OS (damage to the Registry can render a Windows system unbootable, even to a point that it cannot be fixed, and requires a full reinstall of Windows). And where there is a registry, there is usually also a registry fix. And this is no exception:

The key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\LMCompatibilityLevel

controls the security level mandated or allowed for logins. In Vista it defaults to 0x3, which means "NTLMv2 only". This is not supported by Samba, or at least not supported by any of the Samba servers I use (Mac OS X, Debian Sarge, or Buffalo TeraStation). This is despite the fact that the Samba documentation implies that it should work.

The fix is to change it to 0x1, which means "use NTLMv2 if available, or older versions if not." Reboot. Samba shares will work just fine.

Very nice Mr. Gates. Vista is just like a big Service Pack 3 for XP, except it doesn't fix things, it just makes things worse...


Ps: I run Vista Ultimate dual boot and I won't switch to it until I get a new PC - and SP1 for Vista exists.