Graphics Drivers

Visit nVidia and download the “GeForce 9M Series (Notebooks)” driver package, as this is graphics chipset in the Early 2009 iMacs. Run the downloaded setup utility, next-next-nexting your way through the steps, and reboot at the end when prompted. Upon restart, you’ll be able to properly max out your display to the iMac’s native resolution.

Audio Drivers

Boot Camp 2.1 actually ships with RealTek HD audio drivers, as evidenced by the lack of a yellow exclamation mark for this system in Windows’ Device Manager, but they don’t seem to work properly, since there’s no sound output.

Visit RealTek and download the “High Definition Audio Codecs” driver package for your OS. In this instance, I downloaded “Windows 2000, Windows XP/2003(32/64 bits) Driver only (Executable file)”, since I’m running Windows XP Pro SP2. Run this setup utility as well, rebooting again when done. After restarting, you should be greeted with Windows’ standard login sound, confirming the install worked.

Update: The Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard disc includes Boot Camp drivers for these iMacs. The Snow Leopard disc is a hybrid image: it provides the Mac OS X installer when viewed under a Mac OS X system, but shows Windows drivers when viewed in Windows. Just run the setup in Windows right off the disc, and you should be set.

For this little experiment, I chose three solutions offering varying levels of abrasiveness: Colgate toothpaste, Brasso metal polish, and Easy-Off oven cleaner. All three promise to leave their intended surfaces shiny and clean, and in the case of the latter two, free of scratches. We’ll see how each fares when put to use on both the front plastic and back metal of an iPod. To keep things clear, each polish will be used in a masked-off area, hopefully leaving a clear division among the results.

The target iPod is an already well-used 4G 20GB iPod, with most of its still working inner parts removed and replaced with padding just to help sustain its form while being polished. Donated to the cause, this iPod will be beat up even further, with even layers of light scratches, heavy scratches, and deep cuts, simluating everything from normal wear to keychain induced destruction. It has surely seen better days, and is now destined for that great Apple Retail Store in the sky, all in the name of science.

I started with Brasso first, since it has been recommended many times since my last scratch removal post, both by commenters and firsthand accounts. If you’re attempting this yourself, be sure to work in a well ventilated area, as Brasso smells very strongly of ammonia, and might start to irritate your eyes after a short while!

After only five minutes of polishing, the results were quite good, with nearly all of the light and medium scratches completely removed from the screen area. Deeper cuts remained, though their rough edges were significantly smoother.

Toothpaste was next on the list, and while it left the iPod minty fresh with a sparkling shine, its scratch-reducing effects were barely noticeable. Due to its sticky consistency, it was also more difficult to polish with than the more liquid Brasso, yielding poorer results for double the effort — a total flop.

Oven cleaner was last, and I really had no idea what to expect with it. Claiming to leave glassy surfaces shiny and free of scratches, it sounded like a possible winner. As it turns out, it’s not much more than a repackaged kitchen cleaner, resulting in a streak-free but still heavily scratched iPod. I’ll end up cleaning my glass top oven with this one, and nothing else.

With the front of the iPod clearly showing Brasso as the top choice, it was time to see what worked best on the scratched metal backing of the iPod.

Again, after just a few minutes with each polish, Brasso came out on top, while the other two trailed woefully behind. The Brasso-polished back still had quite a few scratches, though far less pronounced than when I started. All of them, including the deep cuts, had a very slick feel, whereas the others still left the surface pretty rough.

Convinced that Brasso was the right choice, I went back and finished off the front, cleaning up all but the most severe marks on the screen.

Given the results of my tests, I can easily recommend Brasso as a great iPod polishing solution that can be had for under $3 at your local stores. A full complement of high-resolution photos can be found in the Flickr photoset, detailing the starting scratches and wildly different results.

John Gruber mentioned that BBEdit 9.1 now ships with Consolas as its default font, so I decided to see if it had the same cursor problem I had experienced in the past. As it turns out, BBEdit’s version of Consolas works just fine, as seen in the image above. However, it doesn’t include the other styles like Consolas Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic.

Through one way or another, the copy of Consolas that ships with BBEdit 9.1 is different than the one that ships with Microsoft Office 2008. To make system-wide use of the working version, download BBEdit 9.1, mount and open the .dmg, and navigate to:

(Control-click BBEdit, and choose “Show Package Contents” to get inside the application bundle): BBEdit.app/Contents/Resources/Fonts/consola.ttf

Copy consola.ttf from BBEdit’s “Fonts” folder to your own Fonts folder at /Users/you/Library/Fonts, or /Library/Fonts if you want to make it available to everyone who has an account on your computer. Then, fire up your favorite editor, set Consolas as your preferred fixed-width font, and get coding!

Update: Bare Bones has apparently changed the version of Consolas that ships with BBEdit versions later than 9.1, and they now have the cursor problem as well. You can still get the 9.1 demo here, which contains the working font.

Download and Install Tun/Tap

Hamachi for Mac OS X depends on some other tunneling software, a Tun/Tap kernel extension which does the low-level work. Download the latest Tun/Tap package and install it.

Download and Install Hamachi

Next, download the latest Hamachi for Mac OS X. Installation is a bit more complicated than the Tun/Tap drivers. Unzip the archive, and open up a Terminal window, and type “cd”, followed by a space. Don’t press Return just yet… Instead, drop the Hamachi folder right into the Terminal window, which will insert the path to that folder after the prefix you just typed: cd /Users/you/Downloads/hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-osx. Press Return, and the Terminal’s new working directory will be the Hamachi folder — this is just a quick drag-and-drop shortcut to avoid typing out the path to a folder you already have available.

Once in the Hamachi folder, type sudo ./install. Enter your administrator password to perform the install.

Hamachi should now be installed, and you can initialize it for the first time by typing hamachi-init. This will generate public and private encryption keys in your Home folder, under .hamachi/ (the initial dot makes the folder hidden in regular Finder windows).

With both set-ups out of the way, it’s time to start using Hamachi!

Run Hamachi

Configure Tun/Tap by typing sudo ./usr/sbin/tuncfg

Start up Hamachi by typing hamachi start followed by hamachi login.

At this point, you should be connected to the Hamachi service, but without a VPN for your computers to join. If you already have a network, or plan to join a trusted friend’s network, you can easily join it by typing: hamachi join SomeNetwork.

Most likely, though, you’ll need to create your own network: hamachi create MyNetwork

Now you should have a virtual network in place and can go online hamachi go-online MyNetwork.

To see other parties on the network, run hamachi list

If other computers are online, you’re ready to connect to them with any higher-level software like iChat via Bonjour, the Finder’s “Connect to Server” command, Safari, etc.

To log out of Hamachi and shut down VPN connections, type hamachi stop

For more information about how to use Hamachi, you can view its manual by typing code>hamachi -h

“Please review your billing information and approve it.”

After checking out my billing information twice, and still getting that error, I found the answer on an Apple Discussions thread: Make sure your credit card verification code is entered in the Account Information screen. Why iPhoto doesn’t highlight or complain about the missing required field is beyond me, but overlooking this tiny field causes problems that hardly indicate their source.

Enable SSH Access

By default, SSH remoting is disabled on MediaTemple accounts, requiring you to explicitly enable it in the Server Administrator control panel section for your primary domain:

Once there, set SSH on “Enabled”, and save your changes. MediaTemple’s easy-to-use configuration tool couldn’t make this step any simpler.

Connecting and Creating a Repository

Fire up Terminal in your Applications/Utilities folder under Mac OS X, or grab the latest version PuTTY under Windows, and connect to your MediaTemple host as serveradmin@yourdomain.com. For example, if your site were example.com, you would connect as follows:

The domain “example.com” is in there twice, first because it’s part of your full username, and second to point SSH at the right server. (If your SSH client complains about not being able to connect, you can try replacing the first @ sign with its encoded version, “%25″.) Type “yes” to confirm adding example.com to your known_hosts, if asked, then enter your administrator password to finish logging in.

Enter the following commands to switch to your “data” directory (provided by MediaTemple), and create a basic repository for your code/information:

Create a repository (replace “tests” with your desired repository name, using underscores for spaces). Letter case is important, so if you capitalize any part of the name now, you’ll have to capitalize it later when using it. The bit about “fsfs” is to use a specific Subversion database type recommended by MediaTemple — it’s the default type for newer versions of Subversion, but it’s best to put it just to be safe.

You can repeat this to create as many repositories as you wish inside the “repos” folder.

Log out of MediaTemple:

Checking Out Your Repository

On your local computer (not on MediaTemple), decide where you want to keep your repositories. I recommend someplace easy to get to like /workingcopies/, but a repo can go anywhere you prefer. Check out a copy of the repo you just made:

Be sure to replace “1234″ with your four-digit MediaTemple server ID number that can be found in your Service Activation email.

To verify everything drop a simple file into your new repository folder at /workingcopies/tests, such as test.txt, and do:

Auto-updating MediaTemple

If you have some code stored in a repository that you’d like to automatically be made available to the world, such as a WordPress theme or web application, Subversion provides various “hooks” that can be run at times like pre-commit, post-commit, etc. Subversion hooks are nothing more than scripts which you define, and get run when the applicable action occurs. Here’s how to set up an automatically updating WordPress theme repository:

Connect to MediaTemple again, using the initial ssh command at the start of this tutorial, then change directory to where you want to use this repository on your MediaTemple server:

Check out a copy of your repository elsewhere on your server, using file:// instead of svn+ssh://

Again, replace “1234″ with your server ID, and also replace “tests” with your repository name (in both places). Now you have a copy of that repository on your server. Edit the hook so it gets updated automatically when you commit changes:

Make a copy of the post-commit hook example:

Use your favorite command-line text editor the post-commit script:

Change the entire script (below #!/bin/sh) to:

Exit, saving changes, with Control-x, y, Enter.

Make your post-commit script executable:

Finally, log out of MediaTemple again:

Now, after a commit, Subversion will automatically update the repo you have checked out on your server, and your changes should be reflected almost instantly.

There’s a lot more to using Subversion, so here are some hand-picked resources to keep you going:

Recommended

• Setting up Ubuntu Hardy
  A good reference for setting up SSH keys, which ensures only you can log in remotely, and helps automate repetitive password entry
• HOWTO: (gs) SVN multiple users
  How to allow multiple users to access your repositories on MediaTemple
• Version Control with Subversion
  The free Subversion book/manual
• Versions and Cornerstone
  Two great Subversion applications for Mac
• TortoiseSVN
  The standard for Subversion under Windows

Having started out with computers as a relatively old school Mac user — one who had to backup and erase a hard drive to partition it — I was immediately suspicious of the new-ish live-partition tool. To work around that, I tried booting the Leopard DVD and running Disk Utility from the Utilities menu, then partitioning the drive using that method. Again, I was met failure, but with an ambiguous “partition error” on which Disk Utility did not elaborate. The “Verify Disk” command reported that my volume was in good shape, despite my suspicions of corruption. DiskWarrior 4 also confirmed that the volume’s directory structure was intact. With 90+ GB free on my MacBook Pro’s 160 GB disk, how could I have “not enough space” to simply slice off a 20 GB Windows partition for run-of-the-mill use?

Out of quick-fix ideas, I decided to back up my Mac OS X volume, erase the drive, partition it, restore my OS X image to the big partition, then install Windows to the new smaller partition. Without a network-ready imaging utility like Ghost or TrueImage for Mac OS X (are there any?), I had to do this a slightly more complicated way:

1. Boot Mac OS X and connect to a network share on another computer (a networked PC, in my case).
2. Run SuperDuper! and back up the entire contents of the drive to the other computer.
3. When done, boot the Leopard DVD and run Disk Utility again, and erase and partition the drive into one HFS+ Journaling partition for Mac OS X and one FAT32 partition for Windows.
4. Boot a Windows CD, and “quick format” the FAT32 partition to NTFS (since Disk Utility can’t natively create an NTFS volume), then install Windows.
5. Install Boot Camp drivers from the Leopard DVD: The Windows volume on the Leopard DVD contains the necessary Boot Camp drivers. Nice touch, Apple!
6. Boot from the Leopard DVD again, but run Terminal this time — there’s no point-and-click way to connect to a network share from the DVD…
7. Typically, you’d do mount_smbfs to connect to a Windows share, but it failed with “mount_smbfs: failed to load the smb library: Unknown error: 1102″ (No luck with mount -t smbfs, either). mount_afp appears to work, though.
8. With no way to use SMB to get at the imaged Mac OS X volume made earlier, I downloaded a trial version of Extreme-Z IP, which provides AFP file and printer sharing support for Windows. After skipping prompts about Printer Sharing and automatically importing my SMB/Windows shares, it worked beautifully.
9. Back at the Terminal on the MacBook, mkdir /Volumes/Sharename; mount_afp afp://username:password@192.168.1.10/Sharename /Volumes/Sharename mounted Sharename from the PC onto /Volumes/Sharename on the Mac over Ethernet. (The hidden /Volumes/ folder is where all connected Mac volumes show up).
10. Back under Disk Utility, I was almost able to Restore the disk image to the proper volume over the network as if it were a local volume, but… it was grayed out in the file picker dialog.
11. The “Scan Image for Restore” button resulted in a failed process, but it DID add the disk image to the sidebar of Disk Utility, which enabled drag-and-drop such that I could restore it to the HFS+J volume.

After a few hours of restoring data, my MacBook Pro is back, with Mac OS X on one volume just as I left it right before the imaging, and a fresh Windows install on the other. Surely Apple never meant for Boot Camp to be this complicated, but they underestimated the extent of my tinkering and day-to-day use! I hope my documentation can help someone in a similar situation…

Resources

• Apple Support Discussions – Full restore from a remote disk
• AFP Third Party implementations

For those that do web development, though, the 3.0 release means another round of website compatibility testing in both the earlier release and now the current one. For the most part, this isn’t a new challenge, but Firefox can be a bit peculiar: Upon launching Firefox, it checks to see if another instance is already running, and if found, brings up a new browser window of the currently running version. So, launching Firefox 2.0 while 3.0 is running results in two 2.0 windows, and vice versa for 3.0. This effectively stops the casual user from simultaneously running both Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 side by side. As an added side effect, when you completely shut down Firefox and launch a different major version, your profile information can get skewed, resulting in sometimes strange bookmark appearance and lots of checking for updates to installed add-ons. With a little tweaking, though, Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 can be convinced to run independently, each with their own bookmarks and add-ons.

Mac OS X Instructions

Running two versions of Firefox under Mac OS X couldn’t be simpler. The freeware application MultiFirefox takes all the guesswork out of the process by automatically detecting Firefox versions in your main Applications folder and presenting you with a list from which to choose the Firefox versions you’d like to launch. Complete with self-updating (thanks to the ubiquitous Sparkle framework), MultiFirefox is the easiest way to pull off this multi-browser stunt.

Windows Instructions

If you already have Firefox (2.0 or 3.0) installed, it’s important to back up your crucial information before getting started. Navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\YourName\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox and copy your “Profiles” folder somewhere safe.

Once backed up, download Firefox 2 and/or Firefox 3, depending on what you already have installed. Launch each installer and begin setting up Firefox, but make sure to choose Custom settings. When asked for a place to install Firefox, change the path(s) to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3\ (or ...\Mozilla Firefox 2), instead of just “Mozilla Firefox”. In doing so, you’ll place Firefox 2 at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2\, and Firefox 3 at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3\. Both versions of Firefox should now be in separate folders. (If you already have one version of Firefox installed at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\, you may choose to leave that where it is and just install the other version in a separate folder, however you’ll have to make a note of which is where, and modify the following instructions accordingly.)

Create a new shortcut to Firefox 2.0 by right-mouse-button-dragging C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2\firefox.exe to your Desktop (for now), and choosing “Create Shortcuts Here”. Name the shortcut “Firefox 2″. Repeat for Firefox 3, changing “2″ to “3″ where appropriate.

You’re almost there, but now we have to tell Firefox to keep the two instances separate. Open the Properties window for the Firefox 3 shortcut, and add -ProfileManager (space key, minus sign, ProfileManager) to the end of the string of text in the Target field. Click OK, then run that same shortcut to bring up Firefox’s Profile Manager. Rename the existing “default” profile to “firefox3″, and also create a new “firefox2″ profile:

Once profiles are set, exit Firefox completely. With two profiles in place, each version of Firefox can have its own bookmarks, extensions, and other settings, without interfering with each other. Open up the properties windows for both the Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 shortcuts you made. Remove the -ProfileManager addition from the Firefox 3 shortcut Target, replacing it with -no-remote -p firefox3 (space key, minus sign, no-remote, space key, minus sign, ‘p’ key, space key, firefox3). Add the same to the Firefox 2 shortcut, again changing the 3 to a 2. Both shortcuts should now have the -no-remote option set, as well as -p followed by the designated profile that matches that Firefox’s version. In short, Firefox 3 gets the firefox3 profile, and Firefox 2 gets the firefox2 profile, seen below:

Click OK on both shortcuts to confirm the changes, and finally double-click each to run Firefox 2 and 3 at the same time!

Also, don’t miss LifeHacker’s Power User’s Guide to Firefox 3 for some excellent 3.0 tips and tricks, as well as ArsTechnica’s briefing of what’s to come in Firefox 3.1.

Update: Here’s another excellent tutorial on running Firefox 2 and 3 at the same time, including notes on the -no-remote switch and how it can make Firefox claim it’s “already running but not responding.” That firefox.exe switch appears to be a bit of a double-edged sword.

If you’re in the middle of a Transform or Layer Effects change and need to get your changes just right, you can adjust your view simply by holding the correct keys and using your mouse. On the Mac, hold Space and drag to pan around the background window. Command-Space-click on the document to zoom in, and Command-Option-Space-click to zoom out. Note that some of these key combos collide with the system-wide Spotlight commands, so you may consider remapping them in System Preferences, depending on your usage of each. Personally, I’ve moved Spotlight to Control-Space just to use these great hidden features of Photoshop.