Growl is absolutely essential to have if you use an OSX computer everyday. Many people say that Growl should be included with OSX and I completely agree. Growl is a unified desktop notification system, which doesn't sound very interesting.... but it really is! Growl's website say that it, "lets Mac OS X applications unintrusively tell you when things happen." That is true but you really have to see it in action to experience its utility.

If you have ever used an instant messenger or some type of notification system, your familiar with those small popups that show up in the corner of the screen when you get a message, or an email, or a calendar event is approaching.

The problem is that each program has its own way of implementing those popups that result in different looks and sounds. It's also the case that many programs leave out this functionality altogether because it is extra work.

Growl provides a public interface to programs of all types and from all different vendors. It works well as a traditional notifier for IM, mail, and calendar events but it does much more. Because of its simple API, many programs utilize it to display their simple events. For example, CyberDuck, an FTP utility that you will read about soon uses growl to notify when uploads are complete, or when a connection has been terminated.

There are many applications that support Growl by default and many plugins for applications that don't. There is one plugin called "GrowlTunes" that shows a Growl popup every time a new song is played. It's very useful because you see immediately the title, band, star rating, and the album art. GrowlTunes also makes it very easy to flip through songs without having to bring up ITunes!

Notifications show up with a unified look and they can be set to stay on screen until clicked, or to fade away after a certain time period. Everything is customizable.

The bottom line is that this is one app that you have to have. It's free and you can get it here:

http://growl.info/

Current Version 1.1.4  |  4.4MB  |  9/12/2008

The current resurgence of Mac sales has led to a lot of first time Mac and OSX users (myself included). Six months later, I still love my Mac and I have found that the joyful experience has only increased since day one. Most of this has been due to useful OSX apps and utilities that I find everyday that make something easier or more fun.

With that said, I think it is helpful for new OSX users to get a running start instead of collecting these useful little tools one by one. Sure there are lots of websites that offer these kinds of lists but they are usually way off, too large, or they don't review them.

I'm not going to be including things like Firefox, VLC, or Skype because not only are those found on other platforms, but they are also very widely known. Those are tools that you install first thing without even thinking about. The tools that I will review are lesser known (at least to non-native OSX users) and which may be harder to find.

Every week I'll try to include another program that I have come across that is not included with OSX, but it is something I use often if not everyday.

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I recently ran into a problem involving Linux, EXT3, LBA48 and lost partitions. The whole scenario was quite complex but to make a long story short, I was able to fix the problem completely. This post isn't so much a chronicle of the problem. It is more of a highlight of the tools that I used to solve it. 

SpinRite: SpinRite was of course the first tool that I used. Spinrite is handy to have around and it’s a good starting point for a couple of reasons. First off, it is often the case that damaged sectors or some low level corruption causes problems. SpinRite is a smart utility that can not only detect, but also fix, many of these issues. SpinRite can also tell you if your S.M.A.R.T. status is accurate (or if SMART is even on). In this case, SpinRite helped me diagnose my problem further. I booted SpinRite and it absolutely refused to run citing that running would most likely damage data on the disk. Not good.

SpinRite's reasoning was based on an "Invalid Partition Size". I looked further and found that both disks in the system were reporting 137GB in total size. I knew this was wrong because the disks are not the same size and both are bigger than 137GB.

If that size sounds familiar it should, I knew immediately that this was a BIOS issue. I stepped into the CMOS settings and found that in fact, both drives were reporting 137GB but also that both drives were set to auto detect. Auto detect? I shouldn't be having this problem and in fact, this machine had been running fine for years in this exact same configuration.

After trying every possible combination, I went against my better judgment, in desperation. I decided to apply an available BIOS update. After flashing from "A02" to "A06" firmware...... nothing changed. I decided to try one more time experimenting with CMOS setting. To my surprise, I did another reset and both drives came up and reported their correct size. What caused this? I don't know. What solved this? I don't know. I really can't say exactly what gave this machine the kick it needed but sometimes tech is a mystery.

Anyways, it doesn't matter. I have already said that this isn't meant to be a chronicle of events and in fact a lot of my troubleshooting methods have been left out favoring brevity. Getting back to my original point, I wanted to highlight some of the quality tools that helped me solve this problem. I have already mentioned SpinRite. The other two tools that deserve mention are the UBCD or Ultimate Boot CD and PTD, the Partition Table Doctor. UBCD is actually a collection of many different free tools including targeted disk maintenance tools from manufacturers like Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, etc.

PTD was extremely useful once everything was stable again. Since the drive was suddenly seen by the system as a new size, the partition sizes did not match the drive geometry. PTD was able to search for, find, and repair all of my partitions in a non-destructive manner. I have used this software before with equally impressive results. PTD supports FAT16/FAT32/NTFS/NTFS5/EXT2/EXT3/SWAP and it really works and works well. PTD can operate within windows on an attached disk or from a boot disk on a dead system.

I'll leave you with links to these three tools. One of them is free, the other two are not. If you’re in a situation where your important data is at risk, you may have to decide if the price is worth it. This is essentially why I wrote this. There are tons of shareware sites out there that tote tools that claim to do what these tools do, but do you really want to spend your money on chance? These are quality tools that worked for me. If you’re desperate, you might want to give them a shot.

You may be able to find free tools that do all of this and if so great! SpinRite gave me essentially the same information that some of the UBCD tools did. You may be able to get away without SpinRite although it is valuable in its own regard.

SpinRite: http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

UBCD: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

PTD: http://www.ptdd.com/

This one is pretty simple but it was hard to find.

I found a good tutorial on using the vncserver tool inside linux and it even covered initiating a proper desktop one your in using startkde or startx. One thing that I couldn't find was how to manually set the listening port for vncserver.

I looked all over and I couldn't find a straight answer. Finally, I found this.

vncserver -rfbport PORTNUMBER

example: vncserver -rfbport 6700

Again, this is pretty simple but it was hard to find. It isn't even mentioned in the man page.

While playing with a Cisco Aironet 1200 access point in the lab recently, i ran into a problem.

Dot11Radio0 is reset

Reset? It isn't up, and it isn't down. Well, it doesn't work so its pretty much down. It just threw me because I have never seen a "reset" interface status.

Long story short, while messing around I had entered the "mbssid" command within the radio's interface config mode.

 This put the interface status into reset mode. "no shutdown" wouldn't even bring the interface up, which makes sense. I never administratively shut the interface down. It was a configuration error. Anyways, after playing around for a while and seeing similar problems online, without solution, i realized what i had done and reversed it.

"no mbssid" within radio interface config was my solution.

There may be other problems which may cause a reset status, but this was mine. Try my solution, it might work for you also.

To everyone who confuses 1Mb and 1MB, and everybody who expects a 100MB movie clip to transfer in one second over a 100Mb LAN link .... this one is for you.

This is something that I just found today and I thought it was extremely interesting. It is a low level review of the architecture of Mac OS X. If focuses primarily on the components of the kernel, and some of the misconceptions surrounding Mac OS X and what it is composed of. It gets pretty geeky, but if your into that kind of thing, I would recommend checking it out. It actually answered a lot of questions that i had. The video is about 45 minutes long.

Direct link: http://chaosradio.ccc.de/24c3_m4v_2303.html

Download the Movie (158 MB : MP4) : Inside the Mac OS X Kernel