g16g - my footprint in blogistan

I have to say I am rather disappointed with the quality of Apple products of late, both software and hardware. Here is the complete list of recent annoyances:

• Right-click on my Wireless Mighty Mouse works sporadically at best from the first week on.
• After a year, the right analogous sound channel of my Airport Express ceased to function. The problem was reported by many other users on Apples support site. To my knowledge, Apple never solved or even commented on this problem.
• We never got Apples Airport Extreme to work properly. We experienced continous drop outs and problems with the connected PPPoE server. The Airport Extreme even repeatedly went into an infinite loop trying to connect to the PPPoE server and had to be hard reset. Similar problems were reported my many users on the Apple support site. Again, no help from Apple.
• A small bug (a real one) managed to creep in and stay between the LCD panel and the backlight panel in our 23″ Cinema Display. The monitor now clearly shows the poor insect all the time. Not sure whether or not this is a flaw in the design but I never saw that on any other LCD monitor.
• The aluminum casing of my Apple Keyboard was warped. Despite of the rubber foots mounted below the keyboard, the plastic almost touches the desk surface. When I hit the control key (on the left edge of the keyboard), the plastic knocks on the desk, making the keyboard sound as if something was broken.
• The hinge of my PowerBook G4s display loosenened considerably.

All this is annoying but would be much less so, if apple had a decent warranty period and an accomodating service. That is not generally the case, though. All Apple components are covered by a one year warranty period, only (as opposed to five years I get at Eizo, for instance). Service at Gravis (the most common Apple dealer in Germany) is friendly but most of the time not really accommodating and/or helpful. For instance, they were not willing to exchange the broken Airport Express even though the warranty period expired only a couple of weeks before I reported the problem. Instead they offered to provide a cost estimate for 60€, which is about 2/3 the cost of a new Airport Express.

Org team, My Apple dealer in Frankfurt, is an entirely different story. When I walked in with the loose display hinge almost two years after I bought the PowerBook, a friendly guy from maintenance asked me if I had half an hour, disappeared and reappeared with the hinge fixed. He didn’t even want to see my receipt.

All this isn’t really surprising, you say? Why should I expect high quality peripherals from a company which has its strengths in software and processing hardware? Why should I expect accommodating service from a Store with centralized maintenance? Well, I guess I overappreciated apples design and I also really wanted to believe …

Having said all this, at least the quality of the operating system and the quality of the PowerBook is still much better than any other hardware I owned until now.

Being an Apple devotee, not getting Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) as early as possible was not an option. After one day I am thrilled. I upgraded from Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Tiger) on my PowerBook G4 and almost everything worked out of the box. Almost … I thought I’d share what didn’t work and how I fixed it.

1. Drop outs of my Wireless network

I experienced periodical drop outs of my Wireless Network to the point that the network completely failed. Restarting the airport on my PowerBook did the job but that was of course not a solution. Gregg Keizer reported the same problem here. Installing the Login & Keychain Update 1.0 seems to have fixed this problem. So far, everything works fine.

2. LightTPD cannot launch after login

The standard installation of LightTPD from Tiger didn’t work on Leopard. LighTPD was started by the LaunchDaemon after Login but somehow the configuration file

/Library/LightTPD/lighttpd.conf didn’t survive the upgrade. I noticed this in my console log which showed that launchdaemon tried to start LightTPD every 10 seconds:

03.11.07 22:19:06 com.apple.launchd[1] (de.netzallee.lighttpd[828]) Exited with exit code: 255
03.11.07 22:19:06 com.apple.launchd[1] (de.netzallee.lighttpd) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
03.11.07 22:19:16 de.netzallee.lighttpd[832] 2007-11-03 22:19:16: (configfile.c.847) opening configfile /Library/LightTPD/lighttpd.conf failed: No such file or directory>I “fixed” this glitch by simply removing the file /Library/LaunchDaemon/lighttpd.plist.

3. TimeMachine works rather slow

After upgrading to Leopard, I tried TimeMachine. Getting it going was easy but it worked rather slow (less than 10 Megs/sec). I have not yet run TimeMachine again but it seems as if Spotlight was still busy building its initial index which repeatedly interrupted TimeMachine. I’ll try again tonight …

Other than these three issues, Leopard works like a charm. There are a dozen of pages elaborating on how great Leopard works so I’ll spare you the advertisement. After all, seeing is believing.

I already dread next Monday when I’ll have to face my Windoze box with that last-century OS again …

Lately I came accross a hilarious quote about the state of the art of software architecture from Will Tracz. Here it is:

“The state of the art in software architecture is like teenage sex:

• It is on everybodys mind all the time
• Everybody talks about it (but they don’t really know what they are talking about)
• Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it
• The few that are doing it
  • are doing it poorly
  • think it will be better next time, and
  • are practising it unsafely.”

Today is Bonn Marathon. I didn’t know until I found our street locked down and busy with inline skaters and people cheering and clapping. So Rebecca and I joined the crowd and did the same. I suspected watching a marathon was more fun that running one (I am really not much of a runner) but I didn’t expect it to be that much fun. As you can see on the photo, one group of people living on my street even had a breakfast buffet on the street and a flag, saying “Returning now would be silly” (that was on km 32). Another example why I like Bonn so much.

although spring has just begun it already feels like summer here in germany. A sizzling almost-thirty-degrees-centigrade finally got me off my screen and into the green as you can see in the photos.

I reactivated my Mountainbike and managed to get through the first 1100 meters height difference without embarrasing myself too much (I think).

Another time consuming hobby of mine is model plane flying. The photo below gives you an idea just how relaxing model plane flying can be - it shows my favourite slope in the Siebengebirge near Bonn.

Aaaaah, global warming could be so nice if wasn’t for all those annoying side effects … bummer.

It turns out that there is a better way to host an open source project than my blog. XHSI has moved to SourceForge.net.

Among many other goodies, SourceForge offers a decent bug and feature request tracking system, discussion forums as well as file release management. See you there.

Beta 4 focuses on usability and operations. I have added a preferences dialog and configurable logging to help track down the bugs that I could not verify so far. Setting the X-Plane home directory is now possible via a browsing function. I hope that solves the biggest setup problem that many of you reported about. Beta testers: check out the “About” dialog

Boy am I thrilled. So much encouraging and constructive feedback in the first couple of days after I went public with XHSI. This is my first exploration in the open source domain and I have to say it’s some fun. It works, too. Again, thanks everyone!

I’m not so sure my wife likes every aspect of my new obsession, though. The night on which I first published XHSI she had to put up with me nerd sitting next to her, euphorically reloading and commenting on blog and forum statistics: “252 views … 255 views … hey, I got someone from down under … gee I think I’ll get 500 views before midnight. Is that cool or what? …”.

Beta 3 is now available for download.

Beta 2 is a bugfix release - it should fix the bug encoutered by Intel Mac users. I am afraid I could only blind fix the bug - I don’t have access to an Intel Mac at the moment. Check out the XHSI downloads section.