Category Archives: Mac OS X

Dec 08

Fixing OS X ‘Dark-Dock’ Without Logout

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Since moving to OS X 10.6.5 and switching to 64bit, I have noticed from time to time the Apple Finder Dock can get confused. This usually happens on a right-click or control-click of an icon in the Dock to hide an application, force quit a running application or to use a contextual menu from the app icon in the Dock. This is kind of annoying. If it never happens to you, great and consider yourself lucky. If you also get hit with this every once and while, you know what I mean. You can logout to restart the Dock app or even reboot the computer to get it to restart the Dock, but here is a quick way, even if you never even use Terminal.app to quickly rectify the issue.

Here is what a piece of the OS X Dock looks like on my computer in normal mode

What the OS X Dock Should Look Like in Everyday Use

Here is what the same Dock looks like when it goes into what I call ‘Dark Dock’

What the OS X Dock Looks Like In 'Dark Dock' Mode

They don’t look all that different. Apple did this to mimic the functionality of Expose but for the Dock to try and give you some eye-candy to provide user focus on the icons you are working with which is great for the brief time you might be messing with something, but if you do have magnification on and it gets stuck you lose that as well as it feels like the Dock is frozen and waiting for you to hit an option or select something.

A quick way to restart the Dock and shake it loose is to drop into a Terminal / Console and issue a kill -HUP to the Dock process. This will stop and start the process for the Dock again and kick it back to normal. A quick way to do that is start the Terminal.app (Applications/Utilities) and then issue two commands. Pretty easy to do even if you are console-phobic.

You first need to find what the Dock process is and you can do that via this command.

ps -ef | grep Dock

It will give you the process number of the Dock process. You will need that for the second command to restart it. The process id is the second number. A command to restart the Dock process once you know the ID is

kill -HUP 187

In this example 187 is the number I got back from the first command. Here is a screenshot of my console in Terminal.app running this.

Finding the PID of the Dock then restarting it.

In the screenshot, I got 197 back as the ID of the Dock process. Then, I issued the kill -HUP 197 to toggle the Dock to get it unstuck.

Oct 15

Using Cron In OS X To Restart Symantec Backup Exec 2010 Agent

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Don’t get me wrong, I am happy Symantec finally released a Mac OS X 10.6 Agent for Symantec Backup Exec 2010 but it is a little buggy. So much so, that we feel we really need to just have it restart daily on the OS X servers. Here is what we did. This is just a simple cron job.

1. Login via Terminal or SSH to the OS X server
2. su to the root user (or sudo everything if you want)
3. enter ‘crontab -e’

crontab -e on os x

4. insert (i) the cron information because there will probably not be any existing cron information in there

crontab entry for os x for the VRTSralus.init restart

Then press the ‘esc’ and ZZ to save the crontab out. The above crontab entry will restart VRTSralus.init every day at 12:15. You can set it for any time you wish that makes sense or whatever.

After ESC and ZZ to save out of crontab entry

5. You can check to see if it is actually working by going into the /var/VRTSralus directory and looking at the modification dates of the error logs and pid file.

changing directory to /var/VRTSralus

6. Doing an ‘ls’ you can see the modification date/time of the pid and log files. They both get new modification dates whenever the service is started.

VRTSralus log and PID files

So, having the server restart it every day or so seems to make it run a little more reliably. There might just be something in the code that is buggy and perhaps they can fix it next release.

Oct 03

More On FFMPEG Settings That Work For Me

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After more and more testing off HD video, I am finding the best bang for the download speed buck is sticking with qscale 10 and chopping the frames to 15 while sizing the image size down to hd480. Here is an example -

ffmpeg -i 051810Perf1.m4v -qscale 10 -s hd480 -r 15 -async 2 051810Perf1.flv

Using a standard resolutuon that is based on 16 seems to be the best way to go. There are so many intricate elements to encoding video to flv to try and make it decent quality, but still large while having it load quickly for people with various speeds of broadband!

Sep 15

Using VLC as a workaround for DVD Region Codes

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Despite industry efforts to enforce DVD region limits, there are a lot of legitimate times for using DVDs coded for other regions in the in the US. A great example of this is in schools. Most international DVDs that are perfect for History courses and specifically for World Language courses where teachers want students to see and hear the language with native speakers in local context. Since the typical built-in applications with Windows or OS X have artificial limits to the number of times you can change regions, something is needed to bridge the gap.

Enter VLC. This is a wonderful piece of free and open source software for multimedia playback. They are even branching out into media conversion. It is a very mature tool and highly recommended. Using it instead of the Apple DVD Player.app or the built-in Windows apps you may be using is a great solution.

Other workarounds might include resetting the region change counts, etc. with the programs but that is a waste of time IMHO. Once you download and do the drag and drop install (on Mac OS X) you will be able to go into your CD/DVD System Preferences and change the mapping of what to do when you insert a DVD from the Apple DVD Player to VLC.

Changing the Insert a video DVD Preference

After you have mapped it there in your System Preferences (in OS X) when you insert a DVD of whatever region, VLC will launch and give you an initial controller palette. Pressing play will then prompt for the user to tell it where to obtain the media and in general all you will need to do is click over to the ‘Disk’ tab as it will recognize the DVD and click play. You also have full-screen viewing options as well. Playing the DVD through VLC will not prompt for a region code change.

VLC is not only great for handling region code issues with DVDs, but great as an all-around media player for Quicktime movies, .avi and other formats.

Sep 01

USB Device Sharing: Solution for Old Printer Driver

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I had a situation where we have a perfectly fine Epson Stylus Photo R2400 that is a few years old now but still a quality printer but we had been using it with 3 iMacs in a lab area. The Epson printer driver has some nicer features than the Gutenprint one that ships with the Apple drivers and we wanted to have the printer driver be set to that.

Via direct USB, the printer driver worked fine. The Epson driver was developed for PPC I believe and since it is such an old printer, it probably is the last version we will see. Rosetta also needs to be installed to handle it, but that is pretty-much automatic. So direct USB is fine and if you do printer sharing on the iMac that has a direct USB connection, you could get the machine that was piggy-backing on the sharing iMac to work with AppleTalk. But, when we upgraded to 10.6.x we lost AppleTalk on those iMacs and we lost the Epson driver nice stuff on two of the three computers. Sharing via Bonjour or IP did not work for the Epson driver, so we had to figure another solution out or re-purpose the printer.

So, enter the IOGEAR GUB431 4-Port USB Automatic Printer Switch

IOGEAR GUB431

It can be used without software, but the software is a critical piece because it can be set to do automatic switching. After setup, we got the old R2400 going and the three iMacs into the switch. Each iMac sees the native USB so the driver is happy and shows all the options the users like and the USB switch is smart enough to handle switching between the computers when a print job is dished to it. The default software setup is to have the computer printing grab hold and own the printer for 3 minutes then let go, but I changed the settings so it would automatically let go when needed by other iMacs. It seems to be working well and we will keep testing it with users to see if it can handle what we need. I like the solution and well worth a try to keep a perfectly good piece of hardware going even if the vendor might have some driver issues across the network. We could have tried a print server on ethernet, but I was hesitant to try it since printer sharing wasn’t even working. To clarify, one could print via Bonjour printer sharing, but NOT with the extra driver features Epson bakes-in to the USB type of connection which is a major deal for us.

The device has Mac and Windows software and seems very solid. So far, so good.

For more info checkout

http://www.iogear.com/product/GUB431/