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.

There are a bunch of reports of Mac OS X 10.5.7 update breaking sleep on a variety of machines ranging from PowerMac G5s to MacBooks. I can personally vouch for having issues with my MacBook Pro and MacPro*.

The recommended fixes range from resetting the SMC on MacBook Pros to pulling all external USB and Firewire devices from the machines. As usual, a number of people are running the Repair Disk Permissions voodoo with little effect other than the feeling of well-being you get from taking a strong, well-documented placebo. Other suggestions include resetting the PRAM and NVRAM.

None of these suggestions have worked for my MacBook Pro. It’s incredibly frustrating and is going to make my laptop essentially useless if I can’t put it to sleep and wake it back up. Note that I get one free sleep by closing the lid. Subsequent attempts to sleep the machine cause it to freeze in a kind of blacked-out state. It seems to be running, but the display stays dark. I’ve heard reports of people being able to put their machines to sleep manually, but I haven’t tried this yet.

Worse, I tried running a system restore from Time Machine with an install disc. When the installer finally loads, the backlight turns off. Using a flashlight(!) to see the contents of the screen, I’m not given an option to select a restore point from my Time Capsule backup. I might be able to do a full install and restore up to my last safe point, but this scares me.

I strongly urge people to avoid 10.5.7 like the swine flu and stick with 10.5.6 until this is fixed.

* the MacPro issue is separate and involves it waking up sporadically from sleep

Update: this Apple Discussion thread describes the problem and a fix. The problem appears to be related to wireless network locations with disabled ethernet ports. Re-enabling the port seems to fix the issue.

Update 2: The fix worked. Re-enabling the Ethernet port seems to have fixed the sleep problem. Weird, but glad to have an answer. Thanks to the intrepid and persistent people in that apple discussion thread. I’ll keep looking for a fix for the issue with my Mac Pro.

Installation is painless. They’re shipping Nambu as a zip file which you can drop in your Apps folder. Currently FriendFeed and Identi.ca support is disabled adding to the “beta-ey” feel of the app. It may be a little rough around the edges. Some other features seem unfinished. Twitter Groups, for example.

What does work is pretty cool. Nambu presents three different views. A combined view showing a straight-up list of tweets, an Outline view, with a tree on the left showing different types of communications, and a multi-column, browser-like view similar to that of tweetdeck. The People group in Outline view presents a list of thumbnails of profile pictures and hovering over them shows a dark iPhoto-styled palette with additional information about the person.

Another nice feature that should be built into Twitter itself is automatic short-url previews. Hovering over the domain name shows the full link and the link-shortening service in a popup. Nambu provides tr.im and pic.im as integrated options for link-shortening and pictures and calls these part of the “Nambu network”.

Searches show up as a new group in the Outline view or grouped with your friends tweets in the Combined view. A way to hide these would be useful as they can overwhelm your friends pretty easily. They get updated so it’s easy to track specific topics in real-time.

Growl support and badges on the dock icon provide ample notification options.

I don’t think I’m quite ready to replace Twittelator Pro on my iPhone yet, but I’m definitely going to give this a shot on my desktop.

Update: after a day, Nambu’s become inoperative on my laptop. I saw two entries in my Twitter accounts, possibly a result of my MobileMe preferences sync. Deleting my preferences file for Nambu had no effect. Maybe I’ll try it again in a month or so, though, after Neilio’s recommendation yesterday, I may just install Tweetie on Monday.

This is a new low for the Logitech Control Center. Now that it’s stopped crashing, it’s started causing other programs to crash. Honestly though, I’m not sure where the blame lies in this case, but I do like TextMate a lot more than I like that Logitech Mouse, so here we are. (Maybe I should revise the scoring in this entry’s title)

A word about writing software: it has to work. This is important. Also important, it has to do so without crashing. This is especially true of software that is written as an interface layer for hardware, or “driver software”. When this low-level, system software blows up, it can seriously ruin your day. Don’t think, “oh, it’s just a control panel, it doesn’t matter if it crashes”. It does. It’s where the user interacts with this shiny new piece of hardware and if it sucks, well, all the shiny packaging won’t cover that up. They will feel ripped off. And if you’re going to put a platform sticker on that packaging, like, “Mac OS X” or “Ubuntu!”, please make sure that the included software is not just something cobbled together with a collection of system hacks by a couple of interns. Software is hard, serious business. It is not to be undertaken lightly. End digression…

It is with the utmost humility and sheepishness that I say that the Control Center software no longer sucks as hard as it once did. In fact, it seems to do exactly what it’s supposed to do, and that is make my mouse work and not crash while doing it. Kudos to you Logitech! It works in Leopard and has support for the thumb-wheel (which I’ve mapped to Exposé and Spaces). It even has a slider for setting the mouse tracking multiplier. (hint: leave it at 1x)

I will even go as far as installing the driver software on my “new” media machine later today and trying it out with the S530 Wireless Keyboard and Mouse.

Download it here, I think:

Logitech Control Center for Macintosh OS X

PS, say what you will about their driver software, Logitech’s website is still a festering pit of anal leakage. The text in the dropdown says lcc231.zip even though the descriptive text on the page is version 2.4. Download it anyway, it’ll grab 2.4 for you…

PPS, Logitech, I still love you. Please make a nice mouse with lots of buttons (like the MX Revolution) and make it Bluetooth. Some of us really like that! Thanks.

PPPS, if you’re still looking for an OS X alternative to Logitech’s drivers, try USB Overdrive. Lots of people rave about it, though it’s not free.

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.

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.

As many of you know, Apple recently decided to take the incredibly unpleasant action of bricking* users’ unlocked iPhones. “What’s that, boolean? People are in trouble?” you are probably asking yourself. Yes, people, it’s true. People are in trouble. People who love Freedom!

Now sure, anyone who’s taken the time to go through the docs and unlock their iPhone to, say, install nifty softwares on it and detach it from the monstrously evil AT&T cellular network are probably not all stupid enough to just blindly install an update without first checking to see if it would disable their (i)phone. Well, it turns out some people were. And it did. They probably didn’t think Apple would be mean enough to disable their devices on them.

Why not? Because it’s fairly unprecedented. Apple’s long had a fairly relaxed attitude towards people using their hardware in unusual ways. They were, after-all, born out of the Homebrew Computer Club back in the seventies. Remember the Newton? People are still hacking those things. The iPod? Yeah, they (used to be able to) run Linux, not to mention allow people to transfer music to and from the devices without having to use iTunes. Why would people want to do this? Well, iTunes isn’t available for Linux last time I checked.

So what gives? This is not the first onerous and somewhat insulting thing Apple’s done to its faithful. It’s not often you’ll hear me complain about a price drop, but when some people paid $499 for their brand new iPhone and then saw the price dip by $200 the next day, well, that smacks of gouging. Steve followed that with a sort-of explanation saying that as an early adopter, you take your chances. And that’s fairly true. But then they added insult to injury and offered a $100 rebate for certain buyers. Ouch.

Oh, and about the new iPods. They’re not all fun and delicious; the reviews are mostly positive, and they look great. Ars Technica claimed that the menus were a bit slow (yay, coverflow). One intrepid individual went a bit deeper though and measured the audio performance of the new devices. Turns out, they replaced the much-lauded Wolfson digital audio decoders (or DACs if you’re into the audio-jargon) with (presumably) cheaper and poorer-sounding Cirrus Logic units.

But maybe that annoying 22khz phasing can be buffed right out with a firmware update. At least they look pretty!

Got a bunch of iPod accessories? Maybe a dock and a video cable from a previous version? Well throw ‘em away and buy brand new ones with Apple logos on them, because only branded accessories with the right-encoded CHIP will work with these new players. Why? I can only imagine that this is some perverse form of AACS technology to appease the media gods and allow them to continue to use Apple as a media vendor. Or maybe in an Apple world, all devices should be Apple for a proper Apple experience and any deviation from Apple will result in a swift, yet careful bricking#.

But what about Steve’s anti-DRM rant? He’s all cool and the media companies are all evil! Aren’t they?

(I’m not sure when this became a dialog between my inner child and this grown-up-like character writing these things on his keyboard, but… I’ve got a thing going)

No, little boy, Steve is evil. Apple is a media company. Apple sits on the Blu-Ray consortium board along with Sony and a bunch of other evil people. They’re busily bundling DRM deep into OS X to allow for HD playback from supported devices. Note that this means you can’t play back HD content on UNsupported devices. Like iPods without an Apple branded cable. Or non AACS capable monitors.

Why is this a problem?

Oh, I dunno. I’m tired. Just go to sleep, damnit.^

1. Bricking – In this case, the term means, reset to “locked” state, usable only on the AT&T network and use of third party applications disabled. Not to say that the device is a completely worthless smoking pile of glass, metal and plastic.
2. Bricking – be sure to keep your thumbs to either side of the bricks when performing this maneuver because it is quite painful to get them caught in between.
3. If I were Stephen Colbert, and I’m not, I’d probably find a way to cleverly insert the term “Goldbricking” in here somewhere. But I’m not. /wørd.