At last! A Mac Mini Server!

There have been many arguments over the years about Macs being more expensive than PCs and though I have often thought that the arguments justifying this opinion are mostly without base, they seem to have stuck quite firmly in the minds of the consuming public and the business community in particular. In one area though the reverse, since the release of OS X, has always been true: a Mac Server is significantly less expensive than a Windows Server.

However, a Mac Server has generally remained mostly outside of the purchasing range of a small businesses, especially those focused on low-cost, due to the general need to buy a Xserve, a rack, and all the associated costs. Now for those in the know, a Mac Mini accompanied by a copy of OS X Server (10 user version) has for many years been the easy route around this problem, but required a bit of know-how and was certainly not an off the shelf purchase.

Now this has all changed with the release of a new Mac Mini Server by Apple. For the low price of £799 (inc. VAT) you can have your own dual 500GB, 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 4GB of RAM and an unlimited edition of  OS 10.6 Snow Leopard Server. Now that’s affordable. Even for a small business with only a couple of computers. And off the shelf and with you within 3 working days!

Now for those Borg lovers who are already going blue at the notion that a Mac can be cheaper than a PC I have one reply: it’s the licences stupid. With the Mac Mini server you get an unlimited copy of Apple’s server product, no user restrictions, fully featured, add as much as you dare to the little powerhouse and if you need to add a second cheaply (and no rack required just a 12″ square of desk space).

Now back to the licences. Appleinsider has a great example of the cost comparison between the new Mac Mini Server and a similar SME orientated Windows servers:

See how cheap? I can’t wait to have an opportunity to install my 1st Mac Mini off the shelf server. If you’d like to read an indepth review I highly recommend the Appleinsider review by Daniel Eran Dilger. Read it here.

Update

Macminiloco has published it’s annual “The State of the Mac Mini”, which gives an excellent breakdown on the new Mac Mini. Read it here.

It’s the little details

It’s the little details about Apple’s products that make them so great. I’ve been using Address Book for years. I store all my contacts in it, some 987 people and companies at last count. But Apple’s not perfect and for years I had to cobble together solutions from one place or another to ensure that my contacts were synced with my mobile, especially as because of the American focus of Apple they were particularly slow to realise the scope and penetration of mobiles in the European market and add native support in iSync for new models as they were released. Fortunately the developer and open-source community has always made up for this gap and I’ve been able, with a little hacking and manipulation, to keep my phone’s contacts synced for the last five years or so.

Syncing calendars has always been much harder and before I traded my Nokia N73 (never have I used a more robust phone, although I have to confess in it’s second life with one of my friends was short lived (it died under the heel of a stiletto – RIP)) in for an iPhone I generally ignored my calendar applications and relied instead on iCal for my daily schedule, after all my laptop generally comes with me as frequently as my phone, so not the end of the world. However, since the syncing of the iPhone was so good, I have moved on to relying on my phone…

This has however not been without consequences. I rely upon my calendar alarms to remind me of most of my appointments, if it is not alarmed, with a busy schedule I often don’t see some appointments that come without reminders, even when I’m staring straight at them. Over the last year one area that this has effected is my remembering of birthdays, when I relied on iCal I was required to be more observant, now I’m less so, and as Address Book’s automatic generation of the birthday calendar creates effectively a read-only event from the perspective of the calendar I’ve not been able to add reminders for myself. This is clearly a little detail too far for Apple…

Fortunately tonight I stumbled across the following solution, courtesy of the forums over at MacRumours and in particular the skill of Andrew Bussman who wrote the following AppleScript:

tell application "iCal"
	tell calendar "Birthdays"
		set all_events to every event
		repeat with this_event in all_events
			tell this_event
				delete every sound alarm
				make new sound alarm at end with properties {trigger interval:-21600, sound name:"Basso"}
			end tell
		end repeat
	end tell
end tell

Which when you compile and run in AppleScript Editor adds an alarm to all your birthdays! It’s great and simple solution to the problem of adding alarms to your birthday’s calendar. Once run in a few seconds it adds a reminder to all your birthdays. I imagine the only problem will be that you’d have to run it again once you add any additional birthdays. I think Andrew has proved it should be a relatively easy process why can’t Apple solve this?

Still buying PCs

Oh dear… Off to a client this morning who despite agreeing with me about buying a new Mac ended up buying a new PC four weeks ago. It came with Vista not Windows 7 and despite it being “cheap” (I’m yet to find out how cheap) and urgently needed (they could have just boosted their ram (at significantly less cost)) it is still in its box. Why oh why are people so blindly faithful to the PC platform? Especially in SME? Sometimes I just despair.

How many tabs did you have open?

I regularly and bitterly complain about the shortcoming of my browsers. As a prolific internet consumer I have grown into the habit of having many windows open, which have in turn many tabs open. At the time of writing I am running the latest build of webkit as my primary browser, if I ask it to quit (the only way you can find out how many windows and tabs you have open) it reports back:

Yikes! How Many Webpages?

(Notice how webkit is reported as Safari (same in the menu bar (which is extra confusing if you happen to have both open at the same time!))

As it happens I recently restarted my computer so I don’t have Safari 4 also open, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. I’ll tend to keep some things running in Safari 4 just in case webkit crashes (which as it’s a nightly build it does quite often, but less frequently than Safari with this many tabs open). I do however have Firefox open, which it turn has five windows, with forty tabs open.

I also have about half a dozen custom Fluid browsers open at any one time to take care of the custom web services I use on a daily basis such as Google Reader (always over 1000+ articles to read… why oh why), Github (which my brother reliably informs me is the Geeks Facebook), Facebook (for us mere mortals), Pivotal Tracker (for my projects); in fact if I tend to use a service everyday I tend to have a fluid browser for it…

It was unsurprising then when I read Sal Cangeloso’s post entitled Why can’t I run 80 tabs in Firefox I experienced an all too familiar sense of déjà vu as he described his problem. My sprawling number of tabs is also generated by the number of ideas I have floating about in my head, a simple query to google to answer a basic problem can often lead to 10-20 tabs on its own, assuming you don’t stumble across anything interesting that is… if so add another 10?

Regular crashes in Safari 4 forced me to try out Webkit nightly builds (which are surprisingly more stable), unlike him I abandoned Firefox as a primary browser a good deal of time ago as I have never found it able to cope with a 100+ tabs  (which I frequently reach by the end of the day) without it becoming unresponsive or crashing; but still I suffer frequent crashes and all the attenuated irritation.

Like Sal I also initially thought that it was perhaps my older system, and before I upgraded earlier this year to a shiny new MBP (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM) it was much worse, but to be frank it’s not much better. Since fleeing from Safari 4 to Webkit Nightly I have tended to restart and reload my browser once a day (having it restore all previously open tabs), which has certainly made things better but not perfect.

It seems to me that there is a significant problem with web browsing on this scale. I have tried to use various web services to organise it efficiently from delicious, where I have thousands of bookmarks (once bookmarked never revisited – usually much quicker to just re-google) to google’s own bookmarking service (useless) to activating the full web history storage. Currently I am finding Safari / Webkit’s coverflow history helpful but its not enough.

Personally I think more and more of us are using the web in this prolific way and whilst I agree with Sal that there is definitely something up with our browsers I think that Google and the major browser developers have failed to adapt quickly enough to this changing phenomenon. Or offer us any tools to make it easier…

For example why in OS X.6 can’t I click on the Safari or Webkit icon in the Dock and see a list of sites I currently have open? When I have 20 tabs open in a single window I won’t necessarily remember which one it is, and so I end up cycling away through innumerable tabs. And though I try to keep them organised, being able to move tabs to different windows has helped, it’s certainly laborious.

The bookmarking tools in Safari / Webkit in particular are laughably basic. I use my menu bar bookmarks for bookmarklets such as my current favourites: Smush.it, TinyURL!, Translate into English, Send to Site Sucker, Google Bookmark… and there we go, googling a source url for Smush.it told me there was a wordpress plugin (which I’ll have to install) and now I have another tab open.

There does not seem to be much innovation in this area and I can reassure Sal that he’s not the only one suffering and that there has to be an improvement or progress in these areas soon (or it might just drive me mad!).

Keyboard where fore art thou?

So apparently spaces can behave very badly in Snow Tabby and tonight it killed my keyboard.

But thanks to the wonder of my iMac (it’s always good to have two computers or more (I have five)) I was able to google the problem and found a great solution here at Apple Support. Fortunately the solution from beach boy works a charm. So if anyone has the same problem.

Here is how to solve it:

- Use your mouse to create a new folder on the desktop

- Then trash it

- Empty the trash

and voila. I have my keyboard back!

Never rely on one backup solution

So continuing my posts on my virus stricken computer drama, see the earlier posts “Poking a hornets nest” and “Dropboxing my way out of a crisis” I had decided after the crisis with iSure (which we had been paying £8.30 a month for the privilege of using and had replaced with a free 2gb dropbox account) to see if we could place the accounts files in the dropbox.

Unfortunately it became clear after a day or so that this solution would not work. As the accounts files (Quickbooks Pro if you need to know) were accessed from two different computers very quickly duplicates started to appear. So it was off hunting for another solution. Fortunately I had one up my belt. I’d been using Mozy since it first went into beta on the Mac and I thought it’d be ideal for this.

So again taking advantage of another free package, some 2gb before you need to pay, I installed it on the accounts computer and went back to sharing the file over the company network. So dropbox might have failed in my enterprise to handle these particular files (I suspected it might, but c’est la vie) but Mozy came through for me and provided a quick and easy solution to my problem.

In most of my personal dealings I use Mozy’s free service to backup the libraries of my MBP, whilst using dropbox to manage my files (I have a lot of files so I am using the 50gb account for that) as a type of replacement NAS as my one of my good friends @tsmarsh termed it. And I have to say it’s worked well for me so far and helped me out of a few sticky situations, so I’d recommend it to anyone who is looking for a peace of mind.

The benefit to these services when used free is that you can recommend them to your friends and family and get a little extra space each time someone takes up your referral, meaning it can satisfy a great deal of your needs without you having to spend a dime. All in all using this solution for my client has led them to a saving of £99.60, which in a recession the pennies truly count.

Dropboxing my way out of a crisis

So in my previous posting “Poking a hornets nest” I had to deal with a dead XP box at a clients. Fortunately for me I had moved the company files over to dropbox a couple of weeks prior. So when this computer went down I knew not only did I have copies of their files independently on two other computers I had a copy too.

After a comprehensive check of the other PC in the office I established that the virus had not spread, I have to say I did have some concerns that dropbox might make such a spread easier, but fortunately for the moment virus writers haven’t seemed to cottoned on to this method of transferring viruses! Phew. But I think that this is something they had perhaps better consider as a potential risk in the future.

One of the reasons I spent so much time in attempting to restore this PC rather than wiping and starting again was the accounts files for the company were stored on it and we had been using a service provided to the company for the last couple of years by Barclays Bank called iSure, though Barclays had sold them an unlimited account, it’s primary purpose was to backup the accounts files.

Not only was there limited documentation in their business subscription pack telling you what to do when a disaster, like the one we were experiencing, happened, an hour or two worth of phone calls to their support line (where I had to give limited security information (it would be very easy to fake)) I managed to log onto their site and find the files we needed.

Unfortunately although the computer was left on 24/7 so that backups could run twice daily and it had gone down on a Friday morning, the most recent copy of the accounts they had was from the three days earlier. So to save having the work done that week have to be repeated, as well as the lost days, I had to recover the data from the hard drive that had been affected.

If we had been relying on this to backup the company’s main set of files, some 30,000 files or so they would all have had to have been checked for validity. And though files might not be changed on a daily basis we would have needed to check just to be sure. Though I had to rescue the account files, with the others once my re-install was complete I just added the new computer and hey presto the files downloaded. Genius.

ClicktoFlash

We all love browser plugins, it’s one of the reasons that Firefox is so darn popular. But if you prefer the cleaner interface of Safari 4 (as I do) you needn’t miss out from some of these essential improvements to your browsing experience, the most important of which (in MHO) is Click to Flash, your own flash blocker.

Click to Flash is the wunderbar creation of Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch of Chicago it’s basic job is to prevent flash from loading until you want it to. Replacing flash files with this nifty clean-looking replacement image:

Click to Flash Replacement Image

Which you just click when you want to view the flash file in question. So no more annoying ads, preloading videos, Flash basically, which as I am sure you all appreciate is now a bigger preverbal pain in the butt since it was relegated to a sandboxed status is Snow Tabby.

So download, install and get back to browsing the internet quickly and efficiently, only seeing flash where you want to. Importantly it’s designed to allow sIFR images to load automatically, replace youtube videos with their H.264 equivalent played in quicktime where possible and allows whitelisting of sites where you always want flash to load.

I’m really enjoying this plugin, I hope you will too.

Poking a hornets nest

So I’ve been absent for over a week now from posting, with good reason. One of my clients who still uses Windows caught a nasty virus. Oh how I love viruses. Trojans in particular. Naturally as I was managing the system I ensured that they had adequate virus protection in place, we were running the free version of AVG (cost conscious client), as well as the Spyware Doctor Starter Edition provided by Google Pack for XP.

Our virus protection was good enough to detect the virus, but unfortunately not good enough to just heal it. So after disconnecting the machine from the network I switched over to my MBP to google my way out of the situation. I found out that I was dealing with a generic version of a normal everyday trojan, the type that patches and replaces your windows system files. And generally does lots of nasty stuff.

At first it looked like AVG had the solution and had a specific remover for the file. So off I went, read the instructions, downloaded the file and ran the remover. I rebooted the system. And voila a non-functioning machine. Great. I had to drive over to my house and grab some more specialist software to deal with the problem. After a quick search on trusty google. I figured out that it was probably most likely that I was dealing with a corrupted registry.

Anyway after a couple of hours of running diagnosis software and playing with the Windows terminal via booting by CD. I stumbled upon a great mess, apparently the person before me had left a previous hard-drive installed in the machine with XP installed on, and inadvertently because the primary hard drive was connected via SATA rather than PATA my XP boot disk was ignoring the SATA drive and booting straight into the PATA drive.

So after most of an afternoon wasted. I went back to google to figure out how I might be able to resolve this. The answer came in creating a new boot disk. So I downloaded nLite and set about creating my own custom boot disk. Then to add a little more power to the mix. I installed Ultimate Boot CD and created my own special mix of Windows busting fun.

Unfortunately this sort of work is boring, time consuming and irritating. And it wasn’t until my seventh pass with UBCD’s anti-virus software I was finally sure that I had rid myself of the virus. I spent my time checking the other computer wasn’t infected (fortunately not) and looking for their startup and installation disks, in case I had to do a wipe and re-install. But joy of joy no disks.

I had started on a Friday morning, worked through Saturday and was now looking at having a delightful Monday. I was a bundle of laughs that weekend I can tell you. Though I did have time to conduct a complete re-organisation of the company’s shared files. Fortunately I had moved them off this computer to the wonderful dropbox a couple of weeks earlier. As I waited I gave them structure. No more dumping files in a single folder!

So come Monday. I was left with no choice but to wipe. The tech support on this was going to be too expensive. So I booted up with UBCD and wiped away. Wiped both drives to be sure. I then installed XP on the PATA and allocated the SATA as a backup drive. A much more sensible solution. But with no software CDs I was left with an interesting experiment, what should I buy to replace the software that was lost?

I’ll return to that in a later post, as well as assessing how well the backup routines we had in place to ensure no data was lost performed. Suffice to say I think that this is salutary lesson in why PCs are more expensive than Macs. It’s the IT support silly. At £25 an hour, three days of tech support to restore that PC had been expensive. It might have been cheap to buy but it ended up much a much more expensive purchase than a virus free Mac would have been.

The 64 bit Question

So I upgraded to Snow Tabby almost a month ago now, and despite constant checking of appfresh there are still a few programs that have not got on the 64 bit train yet… despite me crossing my fingers! So here is a delightful image of my Activity Monitor (unfortunately it doesn’t include all the 32 bit programs)

The most annoying of these has got to be the flash plugin, which frequently crashes and often wreaks havoc across my system. Adobe has had a year to correct this problem. Why hasn’t it been done already? What its really shown me is how many pages have flash installed, most seem unnecessary and could be easily replaced with HTML5 features (#dieie6 or if you must keep it add Chrome Frame! cheers google) For me the long death march for Flash has begun.

There are some programs that I expected to be converted to 64bit much more quickly amongst these are:

Google Quick Search

A great program, a worthy successor (or at least quickly becoming one) to Quicksilver, still very much beta – so why no 64bit love?

Evernote

Another essential program, no clear mention about 64bit yet – their most recent blog post on the topic doesn’t go into details.

Mozy

I use this program on all my computers to give me a secondary backup for libraries and essential files like contacts, calendars and the like. It’s particularly useful for my MBP and my Mac Mini, which I don’t care to try and backup using Time Machine over the network. But it’s had real problems since I’ve updated and it’s rather driving me nuts, so maybe I might start to look for a solution if it doesn’t get fixed soon, which is a shame really.

Update – After posting I thought I’d give it another go. But it seems to be stuck at the magic 60.5% complete. Crazy. Bye bye Mozy, it was good whilst it lasted.

Update 2 – So it’s been updated to version 1.5, still no 64 bit loveliness but maybe it’s going to be stable?

Coda

This is the most user-friendly web html coding program I’ve used, now I’m also partial (after some pressing from my web-designer bro) to Textmate, but I still regularly use this program for its great inbuilt previewing features and its easy-to-use ftp management. I can’t really live without it, but I’d really like it to have some 64 bit love soon!

iTerm

I like all my apps to be tabbed and a tabbed terminal was just a must. It’s updated frequently but no 64 bit love yet…

Skype

It’s just been upgraded for more Snow Tabby compatibility, but still no 64 bit version! Maybe the new owners will give it a more radical update in the near future (I’m hoping for proper integration with Apple’s Address Book)

Adium

Multi-IM compatible goodness, allowing me to log in to all my various chat accounts everywhere. I’m looking forward to it’s upgrade to 64 bit (and again Address Book love soon please – I’ve had some success with a program called AdiumBook but I hope for more)

and some that have been upgraded, but might have problems!

VLC

The 64bit version is working great for me, but apparently not so great if you use handbreak.

I’ll keep you updated as my conversion to 64 bit loveliness… later

UPDATE -

Growl

My favourite notification system has just been updated to include 64 bit loveliness. Yey!