2007.10.07 - Part 1
Adam: Hey, Mac geeks. It's time for your MacCast, the show for Mac geeks by Mac geeks. I'm Adam and this is the show where we discuss all things Macintosh. How are you doing? Welcome back everybody to another episode of the MacCast. Things are cruising along; got back from the Podcasting and Portable Media Expo. You heard a couple days ago the special episode that I put out with Victor (????? 0:39) from the Typical Mac User Podcast. I talked a little bit about podcasting. I have some more of that special stuff to deliver out for you probably in the next coming weeks or so; great iPod discussion with a bunch of good Mac podcasters: Dave Hamilton from the Mac Observer, Mac Geek Gab; Bill from iProng Radio, Bill Palmer; Ken Ray from Mac OS Ken and, also, with Victor (????? 1:05) from the Typical Mac User podcast. We all sat down and had a great discussion. I want to put that out for you in the next couple of days, but right now, we've got regularly scheduled MacCast to get into. Not a whole of Mac news going on in the last week or so, but we have some things to talk about plus some great listener feedback and stuff to discuss. So, without wasting any more time, I'm just going to dive right into it. First off, I want to take a minute to acknowledge and thank our sponsor Audible at audible.com. If you go on to audible.com/maccast right now you can sign up for a free trial of their Audible Listener Gold Account and along with that you're going to get a free audio book. You are free to cancel that at any time. Try it out. If you like it, which I think you will, go ahead and stay subscribed and you're going to get a free audio book credit each and every month. If you don't, you can cancel and keep the free book. If you're not sure what to get, listener Jeffrey has a recommendation. He recommends Keys to the Kingdom by Garth Nix. This is actually from a series of books. The first book in the series is called Mister Monday. There are seven in total, one for each day of the week. Currently, the first five are available on Audible. He says they are a great listen and you should certainly check them out. So, thanks to Jeffrey for that recommendation and thanks to Audible for supporting the MacCast. Head over to audible.com/maccast for your free audio book today.
Starbucks launched its iTunes Wi-Fi access at the Starbucks in New York and Seattle. This was on October 1st. I'd be very interested to get thoughts and impressions from any of you who live in those areas. I, being in San Diego, don't have access to that, but in essence what they are doing is giving you free access to the iTunes Store when you go into Starbucks in either of those regions now. They are going to be rolling this out to other cities across the United States, although it's a very, very slow rollout. I'm not really sure why. I can't imagine that there are any technical issues holding this up, but it must be sort of a beta testing kind of thing. I think they are going to test out how it's received in New York and Seattle and then take it from there and see if they want to continue to roll it out in other locations. Like I said, I'd love to get anybody's thoughts or impressions. If you want to send an audio comment to MacCast at gmail.com that would be great. Let us know what you think about free iTunes access.
Along with this Apple, Starbucks is also doing a promotion, about a month long, little longer than a month long promotion where they are giving away a free song per day. When you go into Starbucks and you pick up your coffee they'll give you a card for a free song on iTunes. You don't get to pick the song. They actually pick the artist and the track and then you can take the card -- it's got a code on the back -- take it over to the iTunes Store and redeem it for that song. The first couple tracks that were out were from Bob Dylan, KT Tunstall and Joanie Mitchell and the program continues. I've actually challenged myself to see if I can't collect one of each of the cards. I don't care so much about the actual tracks, the songs on iTunes, but I'm trying to get one of each card. I, obviously, can't afford all that. That's expensive to go into Starbucks each and every day, so I've got some friends helping me out with that. If you'd like to help me out collecting those cards and you redeem it for the song but don't want to hold on to the actual physical cards, you can mail those to me to Adam Christianson at the MacCast. The address is 6965 El Camino Real, Carlsbad, CA 92009 and I would really appreciate that.
It's funny because I've actually had a hard time with my local Starbucks actually giving the cards. I'll go in for coffee and they won't actually hand me the card. I've had to ask almost each and every morning, so that's not such great news for Apple who, I'm sure, put a lot of money behind this promotion. I don't think that's the experience at all of the Starbucks. I've talked to some friends and they say they're readily handing out the cards, but there doesn't seem to be any shortage of them. If you work for Starbucks or if you can get copies of those I would love to collect them. It's almost like collecting baseball cards, which is pretty cool. I'm enjoying those free tracks and I'm sure some of you are as well. There was some good news last week for you 15-inch MacBook Pro owners, especially if you've been experiencing battery issues. Apple released Battery Update 1.3, which updates your firmware in your battery and addresses battery performance issues on the 15-inch MacBook Pros. Once installed, the battery update will update any additional batteries that you insert into your MacBook Pro, so if you have multiple batteries each one of them will receive the update. You only need to run the updater from Apple once and it appears to improve overall battery capacity. From some of the reports I'm seeing online people are reporting better battery life and battery times, so if you were having troubles with your battery you're certainly going to want to pickup this update. Another problem that seems to have surfaced that Apple is acknowledging now and promises a fix for is a freezing bug with the new aluminum Intel-based IMAX where they've become completely unresponsive. It's very strange. The Mac continues to still run. If you've been playing music the music will continue to run and iTunes in the background. Your mouse will continue to move, but you won't be able to click on anything, so it manifests itself in a very, very strange way. The only way to reset it is to actually power down your Mac. For those of you who don't know how to power down your Mac if you should experience a freeze like this, you know, I hear reports of people just pulling the power cord. That's not really the recommended way to do it and you may or may not be aware that if you simply hold down the power button on your Mac for about five or six seconds it should turn off. If it doesn't then you might have to resort to the unplugging thing, but 99.9 percent of the time holding down the power button will eventually turn off your Mac. The issue seems to be related to the ATI graphics hardware, the ATI Radeon HD graphics hardware and the drivers on the Mac, so Apple has acknowledged the issue. There is no current fix and the latest 1.0 and 1.1 IMAX software update packages don't appear to fix things, but Apple says they will issue a fix soon, so stay tuned for that. Actually, the updates, the 1.0 and 1.1 IMAX software updates, do seem to actually, on some of the Intel MAX, trigger the issue and may make things even worse. If you haven't run either of those updates you may want to hold off on those for a little bit and see if Apple doesn't release the 1.2 update that addresses this IMAX freezing issue. We all know last week that Apple caused quite a stir when it shutdown the iPhone jail breaking and hacking of the iPhone SIM; the iPhone SIM unlocks. They caused a big to-do; lots of coverage in the press with the 1.1.1 update. A lot of people were very upset and wondering how they're going to get third-party ups back on their iPhone. How, when and if the iPhone Dev Team is going to be able to re-unlock the iPhone, whether we're going to see the SIM unlocks. There is some progress being made. I know some of the SIM unlock techniques are now back up and working. There are some ways and some methods for actually reverting your bricked iPhones back to becoming functioning iPhones, getting them back on AT&T; using the original SIMs and now there is some news out of Hackintosh saying that there may be a way to re jail break the iPhone using over a year old TIF exploit in the Safari browser that isn't patched in the iPod Touch or the iPhones. This exploit could be used to lead to a buffer overflow, which could allow for arbitrary code execution and that arbitrary code execution could be the backdoor that is needed to re-unlock the iPhone. This exploit is similar to exploits that were used for hacking the PSP and could allow for third-party apps to be put back on the iPhone.
The iPhone Dev Team, as I mentioned, does currently have a method for restoring the iPod and Wi-Fi functionality back to bricked iPhones using third-party SIMs. If you still have your original AT&T; SIM you can actually get back on the AT&T; network. That is documented and the information is available on the iPhone Dev Team Wiki and so there is now some relief for those of you who may have bricked iPhones after that 1.1.1 update.
Apple this week released an update for third generation iPod Nano and iPod Classic owners. iPod version 1.0.2 updates the new Nanos and the iPod Classic. Apple says the iPod will provide bug fixes. Users are reporting that they are seeing better cover flow performance and scrolling performance. There's also a new option using an approved video out cable where you can now have the iPod ask if you want to use the video out features. Users are reporting that they are seeing improved calendar and contact syncing. If you want to pick up the update it is available using the built-in software update feature in iTunes 7.
Finally, in Apple news for today, the unofficial Apple Web Log is reporting that new iPhone ads are surfacing and now running on prime time television. The new ads are sort of switch-style campaigns. The three ads are titled Doug, Elliot and Stephano. Each one of the ads features an iPhone owner standing in front of a black backdrop relating their iPhone experiences. In story, the ads toward the end pull out and give you a wide shot revealing that the owner is standing on a street, supposedly somewhere in New York from the reports that I've been reading. It's an interesting campaign. I'm not so sure how I feel about the ads. They didn't come off as particularly compelling to me. It does appear that the iPhone owners are real iPhone owners and they may have been discovered via a forum on Apple's Website. I'll have a link to it. Apple has a Share Your iPhone Story form on their Website and the thought is that was how the iPhone owners were contacted, but interesting new ads. They are running on television now and are also available on Apple's Website. Again, I'll have a link to those in the show notes. Real quick before we move on, I want to thank another one of our sponsors The Digital Photography Connection at the digitalphotographyconnection.com. This is a great Website; a free resource for digital photographers of all skill levels. There's something there, really, everything from the novice to the pro. They have great free video tutorials on Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and offer some great general photography tips and tricks. They also have two top-ranked podcasts in iTunes. You can find those on the iTunes Store in the podcast section, Photoshop for digital photographers and Lightroom for digital photographers, so be sure to check those out. I want to thank the Digital Photography Connection for their support of the MacCast.
Now I want to clear up a little bit of confusion; something that I've actually been confused on. This is a mistake I've been making ever since the announcement of the latest round of MacBook Pros and this is surrounding the term “Santa Rosa”, which is a term for an Intel platform really. Many people have been confusing the term Santa Rosa, the press included, with respect to calling the new MacBook Pro's Santa Rosa MacBook Pros. The term has also been applied to the new Intel-based IMAX and it's really actually incorrect. Let me explain why. Let me explain what the term Santa Rosa means at least in Intel language. It is a platform and not an actual processor and by platform I mean it's actually a combination of three different chipsets that Intel offers: the Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, code named the Merom Processor. This is the one that uses the Intel Socket P and then the Mobile Intel 965 Express Chipset. This is the controller chipset, code named Crestline and then the final component is the Intel Wi-Fi Chipset, which is capable of 802.11A, B, G and Draft N specs. This is on a mini PCIe adapter and its code named Kedron. The information that I gathered for all of this, most of it came from a Tidbits article and I'm going to have a link to that in the show notes if you want to get more in depth into this. But, in essence, for a system to be termed a Santa Rosa system, it needs to have all three of these Intel-based chipsets within the system. For the Macs, they really only have two of the components. The MacBook Pros latest version of the MacBook Pros and the new Intel IMAX have the Intel Core 2 Duo Processors and they have the Mobile Intel 965 Express Chipset, but they are missing the Intel Wi-Fi Chipsets, so technically, they are not Santa Rosa systems. The reason why Santa Rosa is being applied to those systems is mainly an Apple issue. It's an Apple problem because as Apple releases updated to the platforms, the MacBook Pros and the Intel MAX, they don't give them new naming conventions. We need a way internally between ourselves to sort of refer to those systems. A lot of people picked up on the Santa Rosa code name and technology and just applied that to those systems, so it just kind of stuck. Really, the new MacBook Pros and the new Intel-based IMAX are not Santa Rosa systems. I'm not really sure what we should call them. A logical choice for the Intel-based IMAX would simply be the new Aluminum Intel IMAX and just hope that clears it up for you. It certainly cleared it up for me and, again, I'll have some links in the show notes where you can find more information if you want to get more in depth into this subject. Well, it is October and the big thing that's happening this month as Apple has promised us is that Leopard should be launching toward the end of the month, but it's triggered actually a lot of questions from you. I'm getting a lot of emails about Leopard; what do to about preparing for Leopard. We're going to be covering that on an upcoming MacCast. Another big question is when is Apple actually going to start selling Leopard? They haven't come out officially and announced a launch date. There's a lot of speculation going on in the press and on rumor sites. General consensus seems to be that the date would be sometime between October 22nd and October 26th. Historically, if you look at how Apple has launched the OS's, they are typically launched on a Friday, so that would point to the 26th, which will be the last Friday of the month. I'm not so certain of that date. I've come out kind of publicly on the MacCast loop saying that I think it's going to be more toward the end of October, maybe the 30th or even the 31st, which could be very interesting if they had a midnight October 31st Halloween launch of OS X Leopard. That could be a lot of fun in the Apple stores, but most people feel it's going to be the 26th. Apple, again, has not come out and officially given a date. There are even some rumors that it might be delayed until November. I think that would be a lot of bad PR for Apple and the latest updates released out to developers have really not had many bug fixes in them, so it seems to be that the code has stabilized. I have heard though from some developers that it's still not feeling really polished or finished, so I'm not so sure how I feel about it. I wouldn't want to see Apple rush this release; push something out that isn't ready. I'd almost rather see them take the bad press hit and say hey look, we need more time to finish it up. We need more time to solidify things and lock it down, but if they can make the date this month look for it to be happening likely on the 26th or later. A lot of people were really wondering about that.
The other big thing that's in the press surrounding Leopard is…well, a couple things…one, the system requirements. Many people are wondering about the system requirements. They did come out and make a change. It is going to support Power Mac G4 processors or better, although the G4 spec got raised. It was originally an 800MHz or better. The G4 they pumped it up a little bit. It's now going to require an 867MHz or better G4 processor and then, of course, G5's and all of the Intel IMAX are going to be supported. The last thing is Boot Camp. Boot Camp expiration, you may or not be aware of, but you should be aware that Boot Camp currently is in beta. If you are using the version 1.2 or earlier that beta expired on September 30th, so it already is expired. What happens with the expiration is you won't be able to run the Boot Camp Setup Assistant, which is the tool that you use for partitioning the drive; burning your driver CD. It's also the one that you are able to use to reclaim the Windows partition, so if you're using version 1.2 you're going to want to upgrade to the current version, which is 1.4. The 1.4 version is good through December 31st of 2007 or upon the release of OS X Leopard, which is going to have Boot Camp built into it. If you want to continue to use Boot Camp you're going to need to buy Leopard, otherwise, you're going to be running unsupported. Again, all that means is that you're not going to be able to use the Setup Assistant after December 31st of 2007, so just something to be aware of with the Leopard release. As I said, I'm going to be covering sort of upgrading tips just like I did with the release of OS X Tiger. I did an OS X Tiger prerelease special, will be doing one for Leopard and in that I'll go over some of the tips and tricks and things that I do to prepare for the OS. I'll also cover the different upgrade methods, everything from doing the straight install over upgrade through an archive and install through a complete erase and install, backup tips and tricks and all those things; just walk you through the process of how I go about doing an OS upgrade on Mac OS X. Many of you find that useful and look forward to hearing that episode in the next couple weeks prior to the launch of OS X Leopard. Now, something very unusual and pretty frustrating happened this week to our friend Victor (????? 21:09) from the Typical Mac User Podcast. I'm calling this Keychain gone wild. Victor had contacted me earlier in the week and he was just frustrated. He was at a loss. He didn't know what to do. He said he was having all kinds of problems with his Mac, specifically when he would try and launch iChat. He had gone through an update and iChat was requesting authorization to the Keychain. If you have been using the Mac for any period of time, especially if you've gone through a software upgrade with an application that uses the Keychain to store authentication information, you'll get this little popup that says hey, I need to access the Keychain. Do you want to allow this application to access the Keychain? Typically, you click the little button that says Okay, allow access. Victor was trying to do that and his system would simply beach ball and then eventually lockup and he just couldn't get anywhere with it. That triggered other problems with his Mac and he had been through everything; doing all the typical mojo that you go through, running the combo updater, running disk utility, doing repair permissions, running the Keychain utility for repairing the Keychain, I mean, you name it, Victor had pretty much gone through it and he was at wits end. He had taken the machine to the Apple Store. The geniuses, they even did a replacement of his hard drive thinking it was a hardware issue. That didn't resolve the issue. He just called me this evening and through the help of Steve Stanger from the Mac Attack, they ran across an article, actually over on 43 Folders. Merlin Mann back almost I think a year ago had a similar problem and he actually found some help from the folks over at Unsanity, so I'll have a link to Merlin's post as well as the Unsanity post on this information. It looks what happens is there's a daemon, the security D daemon, actually runs amok and this is triggered by some corruption in a specific file. Again, this is all triggered by clicking the little “Change All” button when an application pops up after an update to ask you about this. What happens is if there's corruption in this one specific file the security D daemon kicks off and starts eating up all of the system RAM. Once the system RAM is eaten up, of course, page outs start being triggered and the virtual memory kicks in and eventually the virtual memory will actually eat up all of your boot volumes, so this just causes all kinds of problems. It's really, really bad. At that point, the security D daemon will actually hang up and crash and when that's not running applications won't be authorized, they won't run and you're just going to have general headaches and heartaches. For anybody who doesn't know, daemons are things that are running on your system. Daemons stands for disk and execution monitor. These are long-running background processes that run on your system and perform various tasks. A typical common one…if you're a web developer you turn on Websharing, which is the Apache HTTPD daemon. There are also ones for FTP servers and things like that. The equivalent on Windows I guess would be Services. In essence, they're services that are running in the background. Typically, if you go into your utilities activity monitor you can see these processes. Typically, the process names will end in the letter D, so the Security D daemon is obviously called Security D. I was wondering about exactly what it did, so I checked out the man page and here's what the man page says. “Security D maintains security contexts and arbitrates cryptographic operations and security authorizations. Access to Keychain items is routed through security D to enforce access controls and to keep private keys out of user process address space. Authorization calls also communicate with security D to enforce rules contained the /ETC/Authorization database. All user interaction with security D is mediated through the security agent.” What happens is and kind of a key to troubleshooting this issue has to do with that /ETC/Authorization database. This was discovered and uncovered by the guys over at Unsanity. In essence, they found out that the corruption that triggers this whole thing happens in a file called the code equivalence database and that is found in the /VAR/DB directory on your system. That's what triggers the security D to go all wonky. What Victor discovered through this process was that the fix for it is to rebuild that code equivalence database and there really is no way within OS X to do that. Running all the typical rubber chicken kind of stuff doesn't do it. Really, the only way to get it to recreate is actually to do one of two things. You can go into the terminal and then access the /VAR/DB directory and actually rename that code equivalence database to something like code equivalence database.old and then reboot your Mac. When you do that it will actually cause it to recreate the file. The other thing you could do is you could try and go in and simply remove that code equivalence file. You could try to do it by going under the Go menu in the Finder saying Go to Folder and then go to the /VAR/DB folder and actually move that file to the trash, but if you are having problems with that security daemon you're actually not going to be able to authenticate to trash it. It's a hard one to get rid of. I'll have links to more information about this in the show notes as well as some terminal commands that you can run to actually rename that file in the show notes. Upon rebooting it seems to clear things up. That worked for Merlin Mann and seems to have worked for Victor. I just thought that some of you might have run into this issue and because it's so hard to troubleshoot I thought it was important to share with you. If you've been listening to the MacCast over the past couple of months you know that I own an Apple TV and I am a huge fan of the Apple TV. I think it's a really great product. I think it's an overlooked product by many Mac fans and something a lot of people can get a lot of value out of, but listener Chris had some questions about the Apple TV. The rest of the text for this Item can be found at, Maccast 2007.10.07 - Part 2.
