Ramblings of a Programmer

It appears that Apple has seeded OS X 10.4.2 build 8C21 to developers. Check out the article at Mac Rumors.

There is an interesting article over at The Apple Blog entitled “Boolean Searches in Spotlight” which talks about the use of the boolean OR (|) and the boolean NOT (-) in Spotlight searches. This is a nice tip to further define your search results with Spotlight.

iPodderX 3.0 has been released today. iPodderX is a very good podcast aggregation client for OS X.

Night before last, I used System Update to pull down and install Tiger 10.4.1. No problems, but I did not need to print again until last night.

I have a D-Link DP-300U print server to which I have attached an HP LaserJet 5L and an Epson Stylus Photo 820. When I first got my Mac on May 11th and setup the printers, I was able to print with no problems, although I have to use the HP 4L Gimp-Print driver for the LaserJet.

When I got home last night and needed to print a document, I found that the print queue was just sitting there saying that the IP for the HP5L queue was busy and it would try again in a few seconds. This happened a few times before I started investigating.

I tried several different things to get it to work. I reset the print server and removed all printers and added them again in Tiger. Unfortunately, I did not write down all the steps that I took, so I am not exactly sure what I did that actually got it working again.

Nonetheless, the update went smooth except for this one issue that I know about.

The latest stable build of the Eclipse 3.1 code path is now available for download. If you are doing any Java development on the Mac, you should check it out.
Eclipse 3.1M7

I was having problems with my DSL service tonight, so I dropped to a terminal window and did a traceroute on a trusty web address that I check in these situations. Unfortunately, just like I had seen on my Linux box in the past, after the packets from traceroute hit my router, they went no further. Everything was timing out.

I finally found that, just like current versions of Linux out there, the traceroute command that comes with Mac OS X uses UDP packets by default. In my situation, the router does not let them pass through.

ICMP packets to the rescue! With Tiger, the traceroute command now allows you to specify the -I command which forces it to use ICMP packets.

For more information, check out the article at macosxhints.

Apple has released the first update to Tiger today. OS X 10.4.1 is now available via the Software Update option from your menu bar.

Have you ever had an instance when using Safari where you are surfing around with multiple tabs open and you fat-finger the keyboard and accidentally hit the Command-Q or Command-W key combinations? Yep, Safari closes the current window or the entire application respectively… no questions asked.

That is where Taboo comes in. Once installed, it Safari will now provide a warning dialog when you try to close the current Safari window or the entire application with multiple tabs open.

My Power Mac arrived yesterday. I got everything setup late last evening. I had some issues that I had to take care of before that. So far, I am really enjoying the system. I was able to get all of my iTunes library pulled over from my laptop PC with relative ease. I even setup Eclipse and did some programming today. This puppy is quite fast compared to the laptop that I have and use for work everyday.

I find this very funny and I have used PCs for the past 20 or so years.  I just came across the DopplerViewer widget
on Apples Dashboard Widgets site.  The image that they use to show
off the widget happens to be a weather storm over a city in the
northwest United States which happens to be the home of a particularly
large software company.