MacBook Pro quality sucks, Apple service does not.

August 16, 2007

My MacBook Pro is now 13 months old.

When it was two months old the hard disk died. Fortunately I’m real anal about backing up and I had a day old image on my Maxtor One Touch. My local reseller Mac House replaced the hard disk under warranty.

Four months later my firewire ports were not working. Again I had a recent image, which was fortunate since I need my FW800 to back up. My local reseller Mac House replaced the motherboard under warranty.

And now after 13 months (and no Apple Care of course) I cannot start my MacBook unless the power adapter is attached. The battery is no longer recognised. Again I went to my local reseller. Replacing the battery did not do the trick. So they need to investigate.

It seems like I need a new motherboard. Mac House advised me to phone Apple to discuss this with them.
Apple listened to my story and extended the warranty.

Perhaps there is some truth in this year old article Quality control problems or growing pains at Apple?. I for one am not to convinced about the quality of their hardware.

Customer care however is excellent.

Oh and always backup. I use SuperDuper.

2 Comments | apple, Mac OS X, macbook | Permalink
Posted by Ronald Pulleman

ATG 2007.1 on Mac OS X with MySQL

August 13, 2007

For some weeks now ATG 2007.1 is available. My entry about installing ATG on Mac OS X explained how to install ATG 2006.3 on Mac OS X Tiger which is not supported by ATG . It got a few hits, so perhaps an update is needed.

Pre installation

  • Have jboss-4.0.5GA ready. This is the only version supported by ATG 2007.1.
  • Have MySQL ready. Only 5.0.20 is supported. However I have used 5.0.45 and so far it seems to be working fine. Make sure you use the InnoDB engine instead of the MyISAM.
  • Create an ATG user on MySQL in a way you seem fit
  • Add export JBOSS_HOME=<your JBOSS 4.0.5GA path here> to .bash_login. If you use another shell, you know what to do.
  • Take care of your permissions.
  • Download ATG2007.1 for Unix

Installation and configuration

  • Run ATG2007.1.bin
  • When asked to enter the path where to install ATG, remove the space. It will make things easier.
  • When asked for JAVA_HOME use /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/ 1.5.0/Home or your preferred version.
  • Drop your license files in <ATG folder>/home/localconfig
  • Add the following line export ATGJRE=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/ Versions/CurrentJDK/Commands/java to dasEnv.sh
  • Copy MySQL JDBC driver (mysql-connector-java-5.0.7-bin.jar) to <JBOSS_HOME>/server/atg/lib
  • Add a mysql-ds.xl to <JBOSS_HOME>/server/atg/deploy and fill in the correct database name etc.
  • Create a file, like this: /home/localconfig/atg/dynamo/service/jdbc/JTDataSource.properties
    The ATG documentation states to create a jbossconfig folder with a change to a manifest to point to that path. I skipped that.
  • Edit this JTDataSource.properties. It should contain:
    JNDIName=java:/MySqlDS
    and
    $class=atg.nucleus.JNDIReference
  • Run datascripts:
    • /Applications/ATG2007.1/DAS/sql/install/mysql/das_ddl.sql
    • /Applications/ATG2007.1/DPS/sql/install/mysql/dps_ddl.sql
    • /Applications/ATG2007.1/DSS/sql/install/mysql/dss_ddl.sql
    • /Applications/ATG2007.1/DCS/sql/install/mysql/dcs_ddl.sql

    I used mysql -D <dbname> < /Applications/ATG2007.1/DAS/sql/install/mysql/ das_ddl.sql --user=<username> --password=<password>

Some notes

Adding Darwin to <ATG folder>/home/bin/DynamoEnv.sh is not something I use anymore as I did in 2006.3. I will assume Solaris. This will make patching easier, as Robert Hellwig found out.

Unlike ATG 2006.3 ATG2007.1 JTDatasource.properties can contain $class=atg.nucleus.JNDIReference

The executing of the SQL scripts was not correct in the previous Blog. The user and password command was wrong. Why didn’t anybody tell me?

On the previous blog entry, I got some questions on how you can tell MySQL to use InnoDB. Check your my.cnf or my.ini file. It’s in the ATG documentation:
ATG Doc

2 Comments | ATG, JBoss, Mac OS X, MySQL | Permalink
Posted by Ronald Pulleman

Blogging with WordPress and TextMate

July 31, 2007

Since I lost a large post last week, I decided to at least use a real editor for my posts. Since TextMate has the lovely blogging bundle as shown by Allan Odgaard in a nifty screencast I gave that a try. However it was not plug and play™ as I hoped.

Here are my experiences:

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | Mac OS X, TextMate, WordPress | Permalink
Posted by Ronald Pulleman

Code snippets in WordPress with TextMate

July 30, 2007

When you want to display code snippets in WordPress you are faced with WordPress going smart on you. Even in [Code] view it will not let you enter code between <code></code> without stripping spaces and what have you. It would be nice if the visual editor did something with code.

There is a WordPress plugin Preserve code formatting However when your blog is hosted by WordPress.com that plugin is of no use.

I’ve heard of people posting code through an image. That seemed a bit bothersome to me. So I played around a bit and the following trick works for me:

Type or copy the code in TextMate and use Create HTML From Selection (With Line Numbers). This will create a completely unreadable (in my eyes) piece of HTML. Paste that (use the code view of WordPress) and voila. Spaces, tabs, <, > are all preserved. As can be seen in the following snippet

    1 <ServiceUsage>
    2     <OperationUsage>
    3         <ServiceName>AmazonS3</ServiceName>
    4         <OperationName>StandardStorage</OperationName>
    5         <UsageType>TimedStorage-ByteHrs</UsageType>
    6         <Resource>476de2a71aa5a476f84d48e4d61c980-default</Resource>
    7         <StartTime>07/01/07 00:00:00</StartTime>
    8         <EndTime>07/02/07 00:00:00</EndTime>
    9         <UsageValue>220303585632</UsageValue>
   10     </OperationUsage>
   11 </ServiceUsage>

Only the <pre class=”textmate-source”> line will be converted to <pre>. I do not know why. The first “interceptor” you will be able to use for your CSS needs is :<span class=”text text_xml”>

I added the following line to CSS:

.text {
font:1.1em 'Courier New', Courier, Fixed;
}

Oh and do not use the integrated WordPress editor. That can really hurt if you overwrite your text per accident and the automatic save kicks in :-(

I lost my S3 blog because of that. So first I’m going to experiment with TextMate blogging facilities…

Leave a Comment » | CSS, Mac OS X, TextMate, WordPress | Permalink
Posted by Ronald Pulleman

iGTD and OmniFocus again

July 11, 2007

I read in the MacSparky Blog about a nifty Applescript script. It transfers my iGTD stuff to OmniFocus.

It did not transfer everything. It had some issues. However I was able to play a bit with OmniFocus with some real data, which was nice.

Somehow I missed my due dates in the main window. However you can clearly see Merlin Mann’s influence in the un-distract-ifying way of life. It is there, you just have to enable it. If you look at the date in the Action you wonder how to change it. Hovering over it and a small calendar icon appears. Also a project does not seem to have a date. However hovering over it it is there.

But I’m not sure. Un-distract-ifying is all nice and dandy. But do I need it, if I decided to activate my OmniFocus window on my Mac? I already decide to have a look at is. So it may distract me. Actually hiding is more distracting to me. Perhaps I get used to it. For now I’m still leaning towards iGTD.

And OmniFocus needs a QuickSilver plugin. I don’t want another hot key, which does not add anything. I know you can immediately assign a project and context to it, but I don’t want that, since the inbox is fine by me. I can review it later.

to be continued…

3 Comments | Mac OS X, iGTD, GTD, QuickSilver, OmniFocus | Permalink
Posted by Ronald Pulleman

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