apple

We just hired some new people at Six Feet Up which means we had to buy new laptops. Every once in a while I will assert my seniority and upgrade to the latest and greatest Apple hardware and pass mine on down the line. This time around the hardware I couldn't resist was the unibody MacBook Pro. I love the look and the feel of it. I had been putting off re-installing and upgrading the hard drive in my old MBP for a while. Procrastination pays off again! Installing the 320GB drive in the unibody MBP took all of fifteen minutes.

The reason for the HD upgrade was two-fold, one was a slight bump in performance (7200 RPM) and the other was obviously storage size. Recently I have become less impressed with OS X as a development platform and have been wanting to try another OS. We have a few people at the office that are running Arch Linux and our summer intern showed me some pretty cool features of the OS. I liked the Arch philosophy and it looked like a good candidate for a dev platform.

Now this is where the 320GB HD comes in handy :)

The Triple Threat

I had seen my fellow colleagues dual booting into OS X and Arch Linux. They were using reFit as a boot loader and I was pretty impressed with the set up. Having been a long time Parallels user, I also remembered that it could take a bootcamp partition and use it as a VM in OS X. Thus the dream was born, the triple boot: OS X, Arch Linux and Windows XP.

Having just received a copy of Snow Leopard I decided it was finally time to re-install and give my OS X installation a breath of fresh air. So first things first, I created a clone of my drive with Carbon Copy Cloner and proceeded to google around a bit to find some hints on how to install all three OSes on my MBP.

I ended up using several different sources to get started. First was a blog entry that covered the most of the information that I needed. Of course it was aimed at using Vista and Ubuntu so I had to interpret it slightly. Looking back at it, there is still one thing I need to do, set up a swap file.

Update: I found a nice how-to about how to set up swap space on linux (quite old but still relevant it seems). Here is the gist of what I ended up doing:

$ sudo mkdir /work
## make a 1GB swapfile
$ sudo dd bs=1024 count=1M if=/dev/zero of=/work/swapfile.1
$ sudo mkswap /work/swapfile.1
$ sudo swapon /work/swapfile.1

Then add the entry at the end of your /etc/fstab so that it gets created on boot.

$ sudo vim /etc/fstab
...
## here is the swap file entry
/work/swapfile.1 none swap pri=5,defaults 0 0

You can add more swap as needed by adding more swapfile.n files. I had to go in later and add a total of 6GB (double my RAM). end update

Second I used the AchWiki page dedicated to the MacBook to setup the Arch Linux side of things. The ArchWiki is quite impressive and is loaded with useful information. Sometimes you have to use several pages to really figure out what is going on, but overall it's pretty concise. One handy tip was to change the UID and GID of your OS X account before using it so you can line it up with the same IDs in Arch Linux, thus making sharing home directories easier. One extra step that was needed was to create a new 'group' in the 'Accounts' preference pane in OS X so that my group showed up with a name and not just a GID.

Live and Learn

I learned a few valuable lessons while installing everything. The first lesson was realizing I should have read the bootcamp docs before I started. There is some helpful info in there including the fact that you have to use XP SP2 or higher to install. All I had lying around was an original XP Pro install disc. I attempted the first install with that disc and ended up nuking my OS X install since only one partition was showing. Common sense should have prevailed here, but I was in a hurry. A download of SP3 and a re-install of OS X later and I was back on track.

GRUB

The biggest pain I had while installing the three OSes was accidentally installing GRUB directly onto /dev/sda. Both the tutorials I was using told me NOT to do this, but apparently I was in opposite day mode. The GRUB install had the immediate effect of not allowing me to boot into Windows but still but still able to boot OS X. I was still able to boot into Arch Linux via the GRUB screen. As an interim fix, I added windows to the GRUB config file. Arch Linux sets up a windows partition example, I just had to change the partition number.

I finally got around to backing up my OS X partition so I was able to try fixing the situation (and potentially borking all the installs). First thing I tried was to use the XP install CD. Which included following these steps:

1. Boot up with the Windows install CD
2. Go into recovery mode
3. Select windows install (usually number 1)
4. Run the FIXMBR program from the prompt: C:\> FIXMBR

This didn't quite fix the issue, Windows would now just boot up to a black screen and Linux wasn't an option from reFit anymore. After some more googling around I was able to find a post with a potential fix on the Apple support forums.

I booted up into single user mode to fix the master boot record.

# fdisk -u /dev/rdisk0
new MBR [y/n]: y

This fixed it, now I was able to boot into OS X and XP! I'm not sure if the FIXMBR was required or not, YMMV. Next I just had to re-install GRUB on the linux partition. I used the steps on the Arch Linux wiki about re-installing GRUB and installed it into the same partition as my Linux install (/dev/sda3).

Now reFit shows and boots into all three OSes properly. Success!

Bootcamp and Parallels

Next objective was to get the bootcamp partition working with Parallels. I chose to use NTFS for my XP install. Snow Leopard can read this by default, but it doesn't read and write by default. I found a little snippet on a MacFUSE forum somewhere that showed how to turn on the native read write support in Snow Leopard. Here is what I had to do.

Get the UUID of the partition with Windows installed on it (my XP install is on the fourth partition)

$ echo `sudo /System/Library/Filesystems/ntfs.fs/ntfs.util -k disk0s4`
6369b368-57d8-46e6-80c6-e6ac095fb604

Use your favorite editor to modify the fstab.

$ sudo vim /etc/fstab

Then add the following (replacing your HDs UUID)

# bootcamp partition in read/write
UUID=6369b368-57d8-46e6-80c6-e6ac095fb604 none ntfs rw

Next time you boot up you will have an NTFS partition that is read write in OS X. The rest of the Parallels install was straight forward. Now I can use my XP boot partition as a VM in OS X!

Final remarks

I'm quite excited to have three bootable OSes on my laptop giving me the best of all worlds! I learned a lot about boot loaders during this exercise as well. Though I'm still a bit hazy on how this works with reFit. Whatever you do, DO NOT install GRUB into /dev/sda! This set me back a couple days since I was using the laptop for work purposes as well.

Next step for me is to get OS X to recognize the ext3 partition and for Arch Linux to use HFS+ read write. None of the MacFUSE modules and ext3 helpers seem to work on Snow Leopard at the moment. Anyone know of any working solutions out there for Snow Leopard?

Update: I was able to mount the ext3 filesystem with fuse-ext2 using the following commands.

$ mkdir /Volumes/ARCHIE
$ sudo fuse-ext2 /dev/disk0s3 /Volumes/ARCHIE -o force,allow_other,volname=ARCHIE

This mounts the FS at the /Volumes/ARCHIE folder with read write capability and names the volume ARCHIE. One last thing that I haven't figures out is how to get this to work properly in /etc/fstab in Snow Leopard. end update

A good app launcher makes all the difference in the world to me. It is really painful when there isn't one available, "How the hell do I open an application?!?!". On OS X there is always the Spotlight functionality, but that has never satisfied my needs. I need to be able to manipulate the item from the launcher, not just open it. I guess "launcher" is a really bad term for it, in reality it's a "do a bunch of awesome stuff thingamajig", but that's not easy to say.

Quicksilver has been my "launcher" of choice for quite some time now and before that I was using Butler, which I originally tried out because of its clipboard implementation. Quicksilver was recently open sourced, since the lead developer now works for Google and their launcher product called Google Quick Search Box. This was pretty much the beginning of the end for QS. While there are still some folks working on the open source version, it has been a slow process.

I recently overheard Andi Zeidler talking about LaunchBar on Twitter, so I decided to give it a try. That has turned out to be an excellent choice. Quicksilver has been plagued with some really strange issues for quite some time. Most of them are bearable, but sometimes it can be really annoying when you are trying to get something done fast. In the week and a half that I've been using it, the program has really exceeded all my expectations. So what makes it better?

LaunchBar Pros

There are a lot of really nice features in LaunchBar. Here is a rundown of some of the features that make it one of the best I've used.

• Web searches are quoted properly, you can search for "Bob Marley & the Wailers" and get the proper results
• Setup of LaunchBar is orders of magnitude easier than Quicksilver. If you've ever set up the clipboard and shelf in Quicksilver then you know what I'm talking about.
• The default setup of LaunchBar makes much more sense, which is helpful for n00bs
• The clipboard in LaunchBar is really nice
• It doesn't assume that everything with a dot in it is a URL
• You can access each line of a copied item from a sub menu
• The clipboard menu tells you where the item was copied, and how many characters and lines it contains
• You can merge multiple clippings into one by using the ClipMerge functionality
• Using the OS X services menu items in LaunchBar actually works. This makes things like WordService useful again!
• LaunchBar is really fast compared to Quicksilver
• LaunchBar doesn't randomly forget its settings like Quicksilver would with the actions sometimes

LaunchBar Cons

While it has been an overall positive experience, there are still some things LaunchBar could learn from Quicksilver.

• No custom triggers. This was one of my favorite things about Quicksilver. You could assign a keyboard shortcut to any "subject, verb" action. LaunchBar does not have this concept. It has "abbreviations", but it's not the same. I liked to be able to type "ctrl + option + cmd + l" and go to the login window. You can still do this in LaunchBar, but it takes more keystrokes.
• No social bookmarking support. Quicksilver has a nice delicious integration that allows for the indexing of all your bookmarks and their corresponding tags. I used this feature A LOT. My brain is on the web, Quicksilver helped me query it very quickly.
• LaunchBar doesn't have the concept of plugins like Quicksilver does. If it isn't there, then your only option is Applescript. Applescript sucks.
• LaunchBar doesn't have the concept of a persistent clipboard or shelf. This is another feature from Quicksilver that I use A LOT.
• Running unix executables from LaunchBar requires an open terminal window. Quicksilver can do these tasks in the background. LaunchBar has the ability for these scripts to be placed in the "Actions" folder. However, you have to have a property list file next to it that tells LaunchBar to run it in the background. This is less than optimal, especially for pre-existing executables.
• LaunchBar doesn't have the same "comma trick" as Quicksilver does. I rarely use this feature, so it's not a big deal for me. You might be able to exchange some of the behavior by using the ClipMerge facility in LaunchBar.
• With LaunchBar, you really need to read the docs to get the most out of it. There are a a lot of hidden gems in the form of keyboard combos. With Quicksilver it was usually pretty self-explanatory how to do things. Luckily the LaunchBar docs are very informative.
• You can't start entering text like you could with Quicksilver by presssing "." and typing some text. LaunchBar has an "Enter Text" action that allows you to do something similar. Someone in the forums suggested that you assign "," to the "Enter Text" action. This works out well.
• Performing "actions" on the "subject" are not as easy in LaunchBar. For instance, there are usually some actions hidden in the context menu of the item, you can right click or use a keyboard combo to open it up, but that's kind of a pain

Conclusion

In my humble opinion, LaunchBar is the best launcher out there right now. It could still stand to learn a few things from Quicksilver. But overall LaunchBar is the superior application. Hopefully there are devs watching the LaunchBar forums that will implement my requests :) While I wait for them to be implemented, I'm using a stripped down Quicksilver that just contains the delicious and shelf plugins to fill in for that missing functionality of LaunchBar.

If you haven't given a try yet, I strongly recommend you download a trial of LaunchBar 5 and take it for a spin.

We're back for another round of AppleScript and Party Shuffle. Last month I wrote about adding missing party shuffle features using AppleScript. I noticed that there was one issue with the scripts. If you selected an album that had multiple discs then it would add all the discs to the party shuffle ordered by track number. So for example, you have an album that has two discs with three tracks a piece. Then you would get this:

Disc One Track 1
Disc Two Track 1
Disc One Track 2
Disc Two Track 2
Disc One Track 3
Disc Two Track 3

This is obviously not what we wanted. I spent a little time today updating the scripts so that they behave correctly. Now if you select the same album as our example above this is what you will get:

Disc One Track 1
Disc One Track 2
Disc One Track 3
Disc Two Track 1
Disc Two Track 2
Disc Two Track 3

This of course assumes that you have properly set up the disc number and disc count for your tracks. I'm pretty anal about this kind of stuff, so my library has them all set (even Disc 1 of 1). If the disc count is not set then the script will assume that there is only one disc and won't go through the disc sorting routine. You can get the latest scripts here:

• Play Album(s) Next In Party Shuffle.scpt
• Add Album(s) to Party Shuffle.scpt

My name is claytron and I'm a party shuffle addict.  There, I said it.  In my opinion the iTunes party shuffle feature is pure awesomeness.  I have been using it like mad since it was introduced.  I'm still amazed when I talk to iTunes users that haven't used it.

My typical modus operandi is to set the party shuffle to a rated smart playlist (3 stars and up or 4 stars and up).  Then if i want to add an album in the mix I can select it and 'Play Next in Party Shuffle' or 'Add to Party Shuffle'.  This is where AppleScript can come in handy.  Doug Adams wrote a nifty little AppleScript that allows you to select a track and add that track's album to the party shuffle!  This really comes in handy when my eMusic downloads arrive in iTunes.  I can sort my library by 'Date Added' and then select a track from one of the newly imported albums and have it start playing next in the party shuffle.  Totally effing awesome.

So herein lies the next issue.  Let's say I just downloaded five albums and imported them into iTunes.  You would think you could highlight a track from each album and then use the 'Play Next in Party Shuffle' script.  But instead it pops up with a selection dialog with all the albums in your library.  For me this is completely useless, I have 2000+ albums.  So I went ahead and modified the script to add the album for each selected track.

After doing so I emailed Doug about the modifications.  As you might guess, he gets a ton of emails with modifications and fixes for all the scripts posted on his site and can't possibly include them all.  I also don't think he quite understood the purpose of the modification.  But since most of the scripts are licensed under the GPL you can still benefit from my mods!

There are two scripts.  The first one is the 'Play Album(s) Next in Party Shuffle'  which allows you to select one or more tracks and have each track's album be cued up next in party shuffle.  The second script is 'Add Album(s) to Party Shuffle' which does the same thing except it adds the album to the end of the party shuffle.  That way you don't have to add an album in the middle of another!

Both of these scripts require that the party shuffle is currently playing.  I couldn't find a way around that in AppleScript (but I'm still an AppleScript n00b).  The only other item to mention is that I added a property to the top of each script called 'show_party_shuffle'.  If this is true then you'll be taken to the party shuffle after adding the tracks.  If you don't want to be switched over, you can set it to false.

There has been all sorts of excitement about Amit Singh's MacFUSE product recently on the internets. For the life of me I could not figure out why. Amit went ahead and cleared all that up for me in his Macworld 2007 talk titled "Taming Mac OS X File Systems".

The thing that really got me excited about this technology is the interweaving of the web and your computer. When he started showing of the DocsFS I was sold. The PicassawebFS was quite interesting as well. I wonder if the same thing would be possible with Flickr?

Ok so maybe no small children were eaten but Quicksilver is a very impressive app. I finally decided to give it a try a couple weeks ago and I'm still playing around with all the features. It took about three days until I could drop Butler and now I'm using QS exclusively. I had most of my Butler functionality set up within minutes. Triggers (keyboard shortcuts) for sleep and logout were a snap (using the extra scripts). The only difficult part was getting the clipboard history (pasteboard) to show up. I enabled the plugin but had to refresh the catalog for the Shelf & Clipboard. (UPDATE: Apparently you need to access the shelf and the clipboard before you can catalog them and use them via the QS menus. To do this, go to the QS menu -> Plug-Ins (underneath help) and then open them up) The last piece for me was getting custom pasteboards working again. This is where the shelf comes in handy. You can create a text clipping and send it over to the shelf for safe keeping and then access it via the QS menu (or via a trigger for the Shelf which I also have set up).

The possibilities really seem limitless for this app. I keep running into more and more excellent tips and tricks. Here are some links to help you on your merry way.

• Howard Melman's manual for QS.
• Nick Santilli over at The Apple Blog has been doing some good writeups and screencasts on the subject.
  • Screencast of how to get started from scratch (this one is a little old but gives you a good idea of how to get rolling)
  • His latest was a really simple but effective tip about using Quicksilver and the Finder together.
  • Screencast about the Clipboard features
  • Screencast about how to use the catalog
  • Another screencast about using scripts
• If you are feeling really geeky/social you can use Twitter + Quicksilver
• An enhanced iCal event and todo creator write up over at Hawk Wings

I have also been busy hacking away trying to make QS do my bidding. I wrote a little script that can open a terminal in iTerm for me based on my bookmarks. I've run out of sensical ctrl + cmd shortcuts so this fits the bill nicely. Now all I do is invoke QS, type single quote to go into text mode, type my bookmark name and then tab over to select my 'iTerm Tab.scpt'. Here is the code for the script. Just copy it and paste it into a file and save it as 'iTerm Tab.scpt' and put that script into your '~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions' folder (create it if it doesn't already exist)

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
	on process text thetext
		if thetext is "" then return 0
		
		tell application "iTerm"
			activate
			-- talk to the first terminal
			tell the first terminal
				launch session thetext
			end tell
		end tell
	end process text
end using terms from