More MacBook Pro notes

• Setting up Active Directory required an AD's username/password, something it doesn't in Windows, but it bound itself nicely to the network and now my network shares do not require individual authentication to work.
• VPN on Request is a load of codswallop. It apparently was designed to respond to a specific set of APIs which are not generally used by cross-platform apps or protocols, SMB among them. This is important because adding network shares to your startup items apparently requires the VPN be on at my employer's, and VPN isn't set to automatically turn itself on from remote locations.
• The solution to this is to keep aliases to the automounted shares in the Documents folder, where they can be manually opened after switching on the VPN.
  
• Thunderbird is dog slow when running POPmail from a network share (please don't ask).

In general, this is beginning to work well.

Further notes on MacBook Pro

• Parallels' version of Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 is non-upgradeable: something about it prevents the usual sudo updatemanager -d method from successfully moving to Hardy Heron, complaining of insufficient disk space (perhaps a side effect of Parallels' compressed filesystems).
• The bug in Adblock Pro which makes blockable applets (Java, Silverlight, Flash) disappear or flicker away on Macs and Macs only (which began with Firefox in OS 9 on PPC Macs) is still present and must be solved by disabling "Show tabs on Flash and Java."
• CTRL-ALT-DEL fails inside of Screen Sharing regardless of the keyboard used (internal, external, Apple or Dell). This is a bug as far as I'm concerned, since Apple's crowing about how it uses the VNC standard. The VNC standard includes a full keyboard, one way or another. I am an idiot. Fn-Ctrl-Command-Del is Ctrl-Alt-Del on a compact keyboard.
  
• I still can't get external blog editing apps to submit blogs as anything other than drafts to Blogger.
• Parallels Transporter sucks. Sucks. Takes an hour to get to 1% and then mysteriously fails, even after optimizing the source computer's hard drive. This is betaware at best unless the folks at Parallels can answer this problem mentioned repeatedly across their forums.
  

MacBook Pro notes

I'm doing this blog entry from Qumana (see link at bottom of post) because I'm not impressed with Blogger's own Web 2.0 platform. Note to Blogger: if you're so freaking fond of AJAX, use it to update the captcha while I'm blogging so I don't get that irritating failed authentication error. Qumana was originally written for Windows, but since it's a Java app it was quickly ported to OS X.

Much of the last few years I've worked pretty closely with Linux. Linux is a damn good way to squeeze performance out of a cheap platform (e.g. used PCs). So, now that I have an irritatingly expensive laptop running OS X, XP SP2, Vista, and Ubuntu, I can test how webpages look in a buttload of browsers simultaneously side by side. The impetus to even learn Linux for me back in 2001 was so I could test our website on Konqueror.

Regrettably X11 is broken in Leopard, which effectively shits all over a number of popular cross-platform open source apps like OpenOffice, Inkscape, GIMP, etc. It's almost as if Apple were not-so-subtly telling developers to port to Aqua. NeoOffice is working like a charm.

The magsafe connector on the Pro is pretty strong. It feels like an electromagnet.

Note to Apple: Your laptops do not have full keyboards. Therefore, they do not have dedicated DEL keys. While Screen Sharing is a pretty application, it appears impossble to send CTRL-ALT-DEL to a host computer from the laptop, because the fn-delete combination is not recognized by the host as DEL or some other reason. We will connect to non-Macs, and we will need special keypresses not available from your keyboard (Linux needs support for SysRq).

Powered by Qumana

Adobe, kind enough to give you a BitTorrent client

I got my MacBook Pro this afternoon and spent quality time installing CS3 Design on it. I also installed Parallels and discovered that the Ubuntu CD I burned for installs has 52 defects on it, so I opted to download the Parallels-optimized Ubuntu installer.

Most are broken into several downloads, but there's also a torrent. I saved the torrent and just for kicks opened it knowing I hadn't installed any BitTorrent clients.

Opera opened up and obligingly started the torrent. Wait, what? I didn't install Opera. Application folder didn't have Opera in it. Fortunately right-clicking the O icon in the Dock and telling it to show me Opera in the Finder brought up a folder named MacOS with Bridge CS3 as a Unix executable -- and Opera.

Turns out Adobe Bridge has Opera encapsulated inside itself. Slick.

Testing IE8 Beta: Like Ohio, we expected better from you

IE8 Beta went public today, and I'm running it through Meyerweb's CSS2 test suite. Unlike IE7, which had exactly zero CSS properties missing in IE6 (sorry, supporting + and > operators doesn't count), IE8 appears to be the direction IE should have been taking for the last eight years.

Newly supported/fixed:

• Border-spacing
• Pseudoselectors like before: and after:
• Text-align:center no longer incorrectly centers block elements like TABLE but instead cascades down to their first inline element (i.e. cell text). Unbelievable.
• The inherit related problems from IE6/7 seem to have been solved.
• I also note that a rendering bug in IE7 that makes overlapping CSS menus momentarily render with transparent boxes has been fixed.

However, still unsupported in IE while supported elsewhere:

• Quote character declarations
• Counter-reset
• List-style-type and list-style-image
• Font-size-adjust
• Letter-spacing and word-spacing
• Caption-side
• First-line and First-letter
• OBJECT still shits the bed. Get on the stick, dickweeds. OBJECT was supposed to replace IMG two or three NYC skyscrapers ago.
• I haven't tested BUTTON's ability to send the correct properties yet, but I'm not holding my breath.
• XHTML mime-type? Not on XP at any rate: it still attempts to download the file rather than render it.

Sadly, FF and IE still don't support font-stretch or text-shadow.

IE8 has made some progress compared to the pile of fail that was IE7. It still falls damned short of where an XHTML browser ought to be, and the things we told Microsoft to get straight two years ago.

It's disappointing that nothing short of harassment influences the likes of IE's dev staff.