CHRISTOPHJPETERChristoph Peter

BACK UP OFTEN!!!!

Now that I have my mac mini set up as my home server I also wanted to backup its system drive to preserve all the configuration. I have an Airport extreme basestation that has a 500GB hard drive hooked up to it. I have used it to back up my mac book pro over the air and it worked just fine. When I tried to select it as the backup drive for my mac mini the time machine preference pane would crash every time. So I played arround with it and it appears that time machine is now able to backup to any afp:// file server. It is important that you mount it using the following instructions and not just click on it in the finder. It appears that apple does something differently when using the shares in finder.

Setting up time machine with a remote destination

This is done by pressing command + K in finder and using OS X built in ability to connect to different file servers

connect to server

You might get prompted for user name and password. Once connected the afp source shows up in your finder.

afp source

In my case that is the airport extreme base station called chrillo.Airport with the hard drive. This could also be another mac. Now head over to your time machine preferences and the click the change drive button.

remote time machine backup

As you can see it shows up with its Ip address. In my case I used the internal Lan IP

In Mac OS X when you close the window of an application the app usually keeps running in the dock. Wheter this is a good thing or not is totally different story, but for apps like mail and ical it certainly is since I want my mail app to keep checking for new mail without the window cluttering up my screen. So what if I want to add such behaviour to an Adobe Air Application.

 	var appIsPersistant:Boolean=false
 	var app=NativeApplication.nativeApplication
 	var window=stage.nativeWindow;

public function set appPersistant(b:Boolean):void{ // adding a simple property to your app b:Boolean whether its stays on or not
 appIsPersistant=b
 	if(b){
 		if(app!=null){
 			app.autoExit=false // preventing the app to exit if all windwows are closed
 			window.addEventListener(Event.CLOSING,hideWindow) // listening for the closing event of the main window
 			app.addEventListener(InvokeEvent.INVOKE,initWindow) // listening for the invoke event if the user clicks on the dock icon
 			app.addEventListener(Event.EXITING,appClose) // listening if the app should be terminated, to prevent the hiding of the window and allow termination
 		}
 	}else{
 		if(app!=null){
 		app.autoExit=true // if app is not persistant the app can close just as usual
 		}
 	}
 }
 public function appClose(e:Event):void{
 	window.removeEventListener(Event.CLOSING,hideWindow) // if the app should terminate with command + Q we have to remove the listener for the Closing event. Otherwise only the window will close but the app will not terminate
 }
 public function hideWindow(e:Event):void{
 	if(window.visible){ // if the window is visible the event behaviour is canceld and the window is hidden
 		e.preventDefault()
 		window.visible=false
 	}
 }
 function initWindow(e:Event=null):void{
 	window.activate() // if the user clicks on the dock icon the window commes back up
 }
 public function get appPersistant():Boolean{
 	return appIsPersistant // just the getter for the appPersistant propery
 }

by adding these few methods your app will exit just fine with command + Q but if you click the close button only the window will close and the app keeps running and comes back up if you click the dock icon

 I got my mac with Tiger and was amazed how well the networking worked in comparison to windows. Once I upgraded to leopard I wasn’t all that happy anymore. So here I want to address the bugs I came across and how I partially solved them.

Wifi problems:

At my parents house a have a simple WEP encrypted Wifi which used to work great, but Leopard simply can’t connect properly since it wants to force WPA security settings although its WEP. Nothing would solve the problem unless I ran the diagnose assistant. There it was recognized as WEP and I could get a connection. The big drawback is that I had to repeat this step every time my Notebook wakes up from standby. In addition Leopard does not remember the WiFi. It is listet in the Know Networks but I have to go through all these steps again and again.

Windows shares / SMB shares

At the very beging I noticed that my windows shared computers would not show up in the sidebar as they should. One thing you can do if your shared computer does not show up is to connect manually using this command:

smb://yourcomputersnameorIP

This will mount the lost share and you can access it.

 When I first heard about bootcamp I thought why would I ever want windows on my mac if Mac OS X is so much better but after I found out that the Mac Version of C&3 is not avaliable in Austria there was no other way than infesting my mac book pro with the evil. I thought it would be really easy, like Steve said, and followed the steps in the bootcamp assistant. I encountered pretty much every problem you can possibly have when installing bootcamp so here is what I did to finally make it work. 

•  Start the bootcamp Assistant. When prompted to create A partition you could get this Error ( german only): 

Ihre Festplatte kann nicht partitioniert werden, weil einige Daten nicht verschoben werden können.Legen Sie eine Sicherung der Festplatte an und formatieren Sie sie mit dem Festplatten-Dienstprogramm als Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Einzelvolume. Stellen Sie anschließend die Informationen von der Sicherung wieder her und starten Sie den Boot Camp Assistenten erneut.

•  In order to solve this Problem you have to boot the Mac from your OS Disc and start the Disc Utility. Select Repair Volume and wait till its done. After completion restart your Mac and you should be good to go. Launch the Bootcamp Assistant again and follow the procedure, it should work now. 
• Your next step depends on the Windows XP SP2 CD you have. There are some that are capable of Formatting a predefined partition(BOOTCAMP) and some that can’t. I had and Educational License from my University, which was not able to perform the task. So the Setup crashed on my serveral times till I figured this out. In order for Bootcamp to work you somehow need to reformat the partition named Bootcamp which has been created by the Assistant.
• go to www.freedos.org, download the full CD ISO, burn the Image to a CD using the Disk Utility. Boot the Mac from that CD by restarting and holding down the "C" key. Then select option 5 to run freedos from the cd.

format the partion by typing "format c:" into the dos console

•  Now you are already on the save side. Restart the Mac and run Bootcamp again, install Windwos and you should be fine.

When putting together this post I found a really good German HowTo on this problem. 

I bought my first mac (Macbook Pro) only a month before Leopard was released. At first I was amazed how well tiger 10.4 performed. I then upgraded to Leopard in the first few days after the launch and was really disappointed. Once the computer ran for about an hour the dock became laggy and unsmooth, window effects were just as bad. I found the reason for this to be the 3d glass effekt of the dock. One can solve this problem by deactivating this greatly advertised feature of leopard by typing the following lines of code into the console.
Solution:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

After this very simple step, I found my new OS to run as smooth as expected.