Leopard 10.5.0 problem spots

October 31, 2007 Leopard, Software Review 8 Comments

I’ve been using Leopard as my only OS for 4+ days now. Here is a first report on where I’ve encountered the most problems.

Safari:

I spend a lot of time with Safari (can’t use any other browser as my main browser). It’s the only Apple application that I use so extensively. So far I’ve noticed few thing:

1. It crashes way more than previous versions of Safari. I guess they’re using a code-base almost completely different from the beta 3.0 version that they released for Tiger. The beta Tiger version was almost bulletproof for me. I’ve had unexplained crashes so far at least twice per day. Most of the crashes happened when I started typing in a form.
2. It seems to be unable to block certain type of popup windows. I have the ‘Block pop up windows’ preference set, and yet I’ve had two or three instances where websites managed to show me some ads in a popup window. Not good.
3. Visual glitches: A site I visited changed the size of my main Safari window to a really small size and then back to full-screen. After the expansion to full size, the tabs bar got clipped and only a third of its normal hight showed. I couldn’t get it back to normal size without quitting Safari. (side note: I wish Safari had a resize blocking feature like Camino. I just hate it when a stupid website decides that my window size is not adequate for its display and ‘helps’ me by changing the size of my browser window).
4. Scripting: Apple changed the behavior of some AppleScript commands. The ‘open’ command used to open a new window with the URL, now it opens it in a tab. The kicker is that Safari doesn’t seem to respond to ‘make new window’ command. (I’ve worked around this one by modifying my code to anticipate a new tab instead of a new window and acts accordingly.)
5. Spontaneous cookie loss: It has happened few times already. I would be surfing and managing my various websites, (most of my websites rely on cookies for log in), and suddenly, I would be logged out. I looked over cookies and most of the cookies weren’t there. They simply vanished. Not all cookies, just some. I have no clue how to track this bug.
6. Web clippings don’t work: I’ve tested the Web Clip feature and it doesn’t seem to work. When I make a clip of a page, it appears correctly in Dashboard, but whenever I reload the Dashboard, the clip is empty. I tried it with various sites with the same result.

Folder Actions:

To show my geeky side, one of Leopard’s features that I anticipated the most is the enhancements to the Folder Actions engine. In Tiger, if you had multiple folders with folder actions, those actions don’t run concurrently. They run back to back. So if folder 1 fires its action and it takes a while to complete, folder 2 won’t fire its action until folder 1’s action ends. Leopard’s feature list promised to fix this.

However, not only they didn’t fix it, a bug seems to have broken Folder Actions further. Now, even if I have multiple folders with folder actions set up, only the first active one works. All the other ones don’t work at all. So now I have to choose which folder action I can live without and which ones are too crucial.

Leopard’s translucent menu bar

October 29, 2007 Leopard, Rant, Tips, how-to 1 Comment

One of the ugly new interface “features” of Leopard is its translucent menu bar. In my opinion it’s ugly, distracting and serves absolutely no useful purpose. I have no clue why any sane person at Apple would want to implement it.

There have been many complaints about it on the internet since Leopard reached people’s hands; and unlike the shiny Dock, so far, the menu bar has no workaround to fix the problem and make it opaque.

However, I found a very simple solution after two minutes of looking at this annoying eye sore.

It’s simple. Open your desktop picture in any image editor and fill the top 22 pixels with white. Now because the system caches the desktop image, the change won’t appear until you log out, or simply go to the System Preferences and through the Desktop & Screen Saver panel, select a different picture for your desktop and then select your original white top image again and done. You’ll have a white menu bar without the visual clutter.

Apache PHP and Mysql on Leopard

October 28, 2007 Leopard, Tips, how-to 75 Comments

Leopard brings one big change to web developers working with Apache, PHP and Mysql on the Mac. Apache 2 comes with Leopard along with PHP 5.

Here is what to do to restore a test environment.

First, you need to enable PHP.

Apache’s .conf file moved from /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf to /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Open this file with your favorite text editor and uncomment the line:

# LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

You don’t need to add the mime type for php, because it’s already done for you under leopard. The last line in the .conf file is:

Include /private/etc/apache2/other/*.conf

The ‘other’ directory contains a .conf file for php5. That takes care of the mime type and the index.php configuration for php sites.

If you develop multiple sites and you need virtual hosting functionality, scroll down to the end of the .conf file and uncomment the following:

# Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

That’s all the modification that I had to make to to the httpd.conf file.

Next, you’ll need to setup whatever virtual hosts you have in the virtual hosts file /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

For example, for each line that you set up in your hosts file like so:

beta-site-1.com 127.0.0.1

You need to make an entry in the httpd-vhosts.conf file like so:

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName beta-site-1.com
   ServerAlias www.beta-site-1.com
   ServerAdmin webmaster@beta-site-1.com

   DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/beta-site-1"
   ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/Library/WebServer/beta-site-1/cgi-bin"
   <Directory "/Library/WebServer/beta-site-1">
     Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews Includes
     AllowOverride All
     Order allow,deny
     Allow from all
   </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

One good thing is that the ‘upgrade’ install of Leopard does not mess with your hosts file, so whatever virtual domains you may have set up won’t be affected.

If you had Mysql installed previously, good news too, Leopard’s installer won’t touch it. I found mysqld running just like before the upgrade.

One thing changed with Leopard is the socket for Mysql. It moved to /private/tmp, so you may need to configure your php.ini file to point it to the new location.

To do so, open the file ‘/private/etc/php.ini‘, (if no such file exists, then make a copy of ‘/private/etc/php.ini.default‘ naming it ‘php.ini‘) and edit that.

You have two lines to modify:

mysql.default_socket =

becomes:

mysql.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock

and mysqli.default_socket =

becomes:

mysqli.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock

of course, from the sharing pref pane, stop the server and restart it and voila!

Leopard has landed on my iMac!

October 27, 2007 Leopard Be the first to Comment

Well, I finally took the plunge. After yesterday’s problems installing it on my iBook, I took all the precautions that I can and took the plunge and installed it on my iMac.

Steps:

• Buy a 1 TB drive from Costco.
• Plug it in and realize it’s dead.
• Exchange 1TB drive at Costco.
• Plug it in and it works!
• Check main drive using DiskWarrior
• Make a bootable backup using Superduper
• Install Leopard by doing an ‘Upgrade’ install.

Done!

All my settings seem to be working. Had a hiccup with my keychain. For whatever reason Leopard didn’t read it properly. But strangely, even though I created a new keychain with the same name, the new - supposedly empty - keychain had all my old passwords!

I haven’t bumped into any incompatibility yet with any of the software that I use regularly:

• Path Finder
• BBEdit
• PowerMail
• Interarchy
• Hogwasher
• Vienna
• Adium
• SpamSieve
• Ulysses
• Photoshop

So far so good. The only thing that needed work to get it back up to its previous working status was my Apache/PHP/Mysql.

Leopard second impression

October 26, 2007 Leopard, Software Review Be the first to Comment

Well, after my first attempt at installing Leopard by doing a normal ‘Update’ on the previous system, I couldn’t get the Finder to respond, no matter what I did.

I changed strategy and re-installed by doing an ‘Erase and Install’.

‘Erase and install’ worked perfectly.

It took about 45 minutes to install from scratch, excluding all printer drivers. I don’t use the laptop for anything other than managing the site, internet access and email while on the road; so printing is not needed at all. That saves nearly 3 GB of hard disk space.

After that I went through the step by step setup and created my user account and internet setup. Everything went smoothly. Setting the system’s preferences to my own settings took about 20 minutes.

My main reason for this test install is to test if my site management software works with the new system. Great news for me, it works flawlessly.

I performed few tests. In each instance my software downloaded and extracted submissions; formatted them and re-uploaded them to the server. So from that point of view, my mind is at ease with regards to leopard. Everything else on my system is not crucial. Even if there were some bugs, they won’t matter much. The important things work.

I’m still not sure about upgrading the iMac. I can’t do an erase and install on it without wasting few days getting back to my old setup. I may try the archive and install option instead.

For the record, this is the first time an ‘update’ style upgrade of any version of the Mac OS fails. I’ve been a Mac user for the last 22 years. Also, this is the first time I ever attempted to do an upgrade on a system that barely meets the minimum hardware requirements for the new system. So that may have something to do with the failure.

Leopard is a very slick cat so far.