n3wblog » leopard

10.5.7 ongoing weirdness

boolean — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:15:38 +0000

I managed to fix the wake-from-sleep problem that I originally suffered from on my MacPro. A reboot (or two) seemed to fix it and it sleeps without waking up now. I am still seeing some pretty weird issues with other areas though, particularly the Finder. Mapping drives through Finder seems prone to issues, often taking a long time to list available drives under a particular machine. Seems to happen with both Apple File Sharing and Samba.

I also experienced a lockup on my MacPro using the Computer Name screen saver. I locked the screen, walked away and when I came back, had a black screen with a mouse cursor on it. Couldn’t bring up the login dialog or connect to it through SSH.

Hopefully Apple releases another fix for these and whatever other issues are lurking under the covers tomorrow when they talk about the Snow Leopard release at WWDC.

Junk Drawer

boolean — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 17:12:23 +0000

I woke up feeling a little creative this morning and didn’t feel compelled to put together shelves or unpack boxes. So I dug out my Korg EA-1, plugged it into my midi box (which finally has Leopard-compatible drivers) and whipped-up this little bit of synth noise.

Junk Drawer.mp3 (192kbps VBR MP3)

Junk Drawer.m4a (177kbps VBR AAC)

3’27″.

Updated Music Library Listing

boolean — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 20:42:10 +0000

I updated my online music library today. It’s been overlong. The current stats are 8436 songs, 27.3 days, 56.3 GB. That’s for a Smart Playlist gathering all checked tracks and excluding videos and podcasts. If including the full library, I’d have 12863 items, 41:12:51:32 total time and 82.34GB. This week I had to deselect a bunch of music and podcasts because I’d filled my iPod. Again.

As usual, the list was produced with iTunes Publisher. For kicks I downloaded the source tarball and compiled it in Xcode 3.0 in OS X 10.5 aka Leopard. I had to fix a few warnings, but overall it was a painless and exciting experience.

People! Settle down now! It’s no big deal…

boolean — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 22:01:12 +0000

Not since the release of the iPhone has so much noise been made about Apple. I am talking about Leopard, of course. It’s out now and you can get it from just about anywhere. Over 2 years ago, I wrote a great big review of Tiger. I’m not gonna do that for this release. Why not? Because it’s being covered to death by a lot of professional software reviewers and honestly, I have very little to add.

Far and away the best review I’ve read (and really the only major one worth noting) is John Siracusa’s from Ars Technica. He goes into quite a bit of detail and manages to shine light on many of the more technical underpinnings of this release. He also spends a fair bit of time ripping apart some of the UI elements.

well, I don’t find the look all that bad, to be honest. Much has been made of the translucent menu bar and the slanty, 3D dock. Y’know what? I kinda like ‘em! I also like the translucent menus with the rounded edges! The new, subtler shadow on the windows? I like them too. I even kind of like the darker look on the new folder icons, though I will concede that there are some contrast issues with the icons on them.

So far I’ve installed Leopard on 2/3 of my machines without any serious hitches. It did crash once during an upgrade install on my Dual G5 PowerMac, but after the panic wore off and I recuperated, I resumed the install after a reboot and it went through without a hitch. Performance is decent on both that and my MacBook Pro. I would even go as far to say as it’s “Snappy”.

Application compatibility is decent with some issues with Adobe apps. Bridge and Photoshop work though and for now, that’s enough for me. I haven’t had a chance to run any music apps other than Reason on them, but I expect Logic Pro will work just fine (and will probably upgrade to 8 soon anyway). I would say so far that compatibility is better than it was in Tiger initially. At least it seems to be. I’ll post findings as they come up.