Up until today, there was only one iPhone in my household. This has changed. Now there are three iPhones, two of which are 3G S. And one of them is mine. I guess having two daughters helps with disposing of the old iPhone.

Moving all my contacts was easy. All I had to do was back-up my old iPhone using iTunes, then insert the SIM card into the new one. iTunes asked me if I want to restore from the backup or initialize the phone. I opted for the restore, and few minutes later I had all my contacts, messages and applications on my brand spanking new phone.

As far as my old iPhone was concerned, I erased all the contents from the Reset menu. It took about an hour to do so. Do not really know why but the process finished without a problem, and I was able to set it up as if it was a brand new one.
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Without wax,
yOOrek

I had a problem with my Mail.app for last few days. All over sudden one of my accounts started showing a little triangle icon next to its mailbox. Upon clicking on this icon it informed me that the connection to the server was refused due to minimum time between mail checks violation. WTF. When I went to Connection Doctor (you can find it in the Windows menu) all was looking OK. And yet, I had messages on the server that were not being downloaded.

Searched the net far and wide looking for a solution. Found nothing helpful. Some suggested removing preferences file. Bad idea. It screws up with with your existing settings. Sets up some new accounts but that’s pretty much it. In the end what fixed it was the removal and subsequent re-creation of the offending mail account. Now it works.

So, there you go, problem solved.
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Without wax,
yOOrek

Something I found on the net today. How to tame the unpredictable (at least to me) behavior of Safari tabs. Sometimes the link will open in new window, sometime it will open in the new tab. How is this determined? Who knows. Here is what I found – to prevent opening links in new window just type this in your terminal -

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool TRUE

Et voilà no more issues with new windows.
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Without wax,
yOOrek

This does not bode very well, this news about Steve Jobs taking leave from Apple until June 2009. I wonder if Apple would be the same should SJ go. Let’s hope for the best as far as his health is concerned.
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Without wax
yOOrek

I am slowly working my way through the intricacies of OS X programming. I started with, what I consider to be the simplest, Apple Script. The way I see it, it’s an equivalent of batch programming in Mac environment. Of course it is hundred if not thousand times more powerful than batch programs under Windows. More like power shell really. While trying to get started with Apple Script I came across these fantastic Apple Script for the beginners tutorials created by Craig Smith. I include the links to them for your convenience.

• Getting Started & Script Editor
  
• Variables and Dictionaries
• The Power of Lists
• Records & Repeats
• Testing & Shorthand
• User Interaction
• Errors
• Getting the Drop on Droplets
• More on User Interaction
• Math

I found them invaluable when making my first steps in this wonderful new world of Mac and OS X. Enjoy them.
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Without wax,
yOOrek

Something has been puzzling me lately. When I first set up my iMac and Time Machine, I remember seeing the backup progress window. As a matter of fact I took a screen shot and posted it on this blog.

TM Progress Window

Now, I am not able to get this window to appear during backups. The only thing that is showing is the backward moving clock in the menu bar. Ideas anyone?
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Without wax,
yOOrek

The other day I wanted to set up a subversion repository on my iMac. Sure enough there is subversion installed in /usr/bin. By running svn help I could see that it is fairly recent version as well (1.4.4). As I quickly discovered, subversion that comes with Leopard has not been compiled with Berkeley DB support.

Output of 'svn help' command

This has not posed huge problems however. I just grabbed the latest source code of Berkeley DB from Oracle site along with latest svn release from tigris.org, configured the build, compiled both and then a thought hit me. Why is BDB support not built in by default? Simple, really, when you think about it. The potentially huge subversion repository would not play along nicely with Time Machine backup. The file system based repository is a much easier neighbour to live with as far as TM is concerned. So in the end I decided to use the binaries that came with Leopard. I set up the daemon that starts the svnserve binary upon first use and shuts it down after some time of inactivity. More about it in my next post.
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Without wax,
yOOrek

Despite of what I have read on the Internet regarding iPods and Mac iTunes – namely that Windows formatted iPods can be used with Mac iTunes, my personal experience differs. Perhaps they can be used, but they definitely cannot be updated.

Anyway, I transferred the purchased music from my iPod to iTunes before restoring it and thus getting a Mac formatted iPod.

After the restore, the final sync and I can move onto syncing my iPhone.
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Without wax,
yOOrek 

WOW, why do people even bother with Windows. OS X is so much better. Anyway after two busy days and three late night (4am late that is) my iMac is almost ready for prime time. Here is the quick list of what I have done so far -

• Initial configuration (the one you have to go through when you start your iMac for the first time)
• Run the software update until all updates are downloaded and installed
• Hook up the Time Capsule to the network. (In the end I turned the wireless off as I do not have any n devices and iMac is hooked up over ethernet directly to TC)
• Configure TC using Airport Utility
• Install and configure MS-Office 2008
• Run the first Time Machine backup (all backed up in less than two hours)
• Download and install Lightroom 2.1
• Copy around 60Gb of photos from Windows machine to iMac
• Copy Lightroom catalog and point LR to the new location of photos
• Be amazed how good my photos look on that beautiful 24″ screen
• Be even more amazed how much quicker Lightroom is
• Configure mail, iCal, and Address Book
• Download and install FireFox
• Download and install Xcode (without this one cannot edit plist files)
• Download, buy and run O2M program to convert my Outlook 2003 pst file to mbox format recognised by Mac mail. (the extraction process still runs, which is not surprising considering the size of my PST file and the fact that stupid Outlook grants access to external program only for 10 minutes)
• Find a free FTP client software. In the end I settled on CyberDuck from cyberduck.ch.
• Find a free text editor that will integrate with CyberDuck. In the end I settled on TextWrangler.
• Configure the dock with stacks for photography related apps, development apps, office apps

What is still outstanding -

• Backup my iTunes library to DVD and restore it on the iMac
• Finish configuration of Lightroom by re-installing the export plugins, web gallery templates and develop presets
• Bring over all miscellaneous documents from Windows to iMac
• Have some serious fun with the new machine

That’s it for now.
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Without wax,
yOOrek

I’m running the first backup using Time Machine and Time Capsule.

TM Progress Window

I don’t know what other people are talking about when they say that the first backup takes ages (like overnight). The Gigabit Ethernet certainly helps. I’ve got half of my data backed up in just over an hour. Setup was quite painless despite that fact that I had to come to terms with Apple terminology. For example I still cannot work out why they want to name my iMac <computername>.local where I would like to see <computername>.<domain>.<com>.