1. I need to copy my VOB files off the DVD into one giant file by doing a vobcopy -l -t myvideo to copy the files from the DVD to the present directory. The DVD will already have to be decrypted
2. I’m ripping from a PAL DVD to an NTSC DVD, not from an AVI or MPEG file. Therefore, I need to point to my .vob file like as follows:

   mencoder -oac copy -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd -vf scale=720:480,harddup -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=5000:keyint=18:aspect=16/9 -ofps 30000/1001 -o myvideo.mpg myvideo.vob

3. If you are ripping TV episodes, you will probably want to separate each episode into chapters, so note the times in which each episode begins and ends and enter this into your dvd.xml file

1) Install Netatalk

2) Setup a share, name it something appropriate for your backup use

3) Connect your external HD, name it identically

4) Start your Time Machine backup. You don’t have to let it the backup complete, we just need two files from this backup. One is a file entitled .<yourMacAddress>, and the other “.com.apple.timemachine.supported”. Copy these files over to your AFP volume

5) Make sure these files appear in your AFP volume:

cd /Volumes/<yourVolume>
ls -al

6) Mount your AFP volume. It should appear listed in /Volumes with the same name as your external drive volume (if your external drive is mounted simultaneously, it may have a “-1″ attached to the end of the file name. If this is the case, unmount both so that all you have in /Volumes is your AFP volume as titled in step 2 and 3

7) Your disk should appear in the Time Machine preferences pain now, and it should show you when the next backup will be. To invoke a backup now, right click on your Time Machine icon in the dock, and click “backup now”

A .sparsebundle disk image will be created on your network volume containing your backup

Firstly, you will need to disable ACLs on your backup volume, see:

How to delete files in a Time Machine backup through the terminal

To delete backups older than a certain date, execute the following Unix command in your terminal:

sudo find /path/to/backupset -maxdepth 1 -ctime +1 -exec rm -rfv {} \;

Change the path to your backup to:

/Volumes/<yourVolume>/Backups.backupdb/<yourMachinename>

The -ctime +1 means “a creation time of older than 1 day”. You can change the +1 to +2 (or any other number) to look for backups older than 2 days, and you can remove the plus if you would like to look for backups exactly n number of days old.

Doing so seems to be safe - the next time you invoke the Time Machine interface the old backups will simply be gone from the timeline.

As discussed in both the AppleInsider and the Siracusa Ars Technica Time Machine reviews, deleting hard linked files like this is safe - by deleting a hard linked file you are not deleting the original as long as there is another copy of the file somewhere else. IOW, in order to completely delete a file you need to delete all copies of the file, including hard links. If this doesn’t make sense to you, the bottom line is that deleting old backup sets seems to be a safe thing to do

sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/<yourVolume> -d

Will disable ACLs on your backup volume. Then you can go in and delete stuff via a simple:

sudo rm -rf

(these files are all owned by root)

You can use the GUI to delete backup sets as well, but I intend to run scheduled scripts to automate deleting old backups in order to keep the number of files and disk usage on the drive down…

All in all, while OS X Mail is still missing several advanced email features, there seems to be enough there for me to use on a semi-regular basis, but I will still require some part-time use in Thunderbird. There are several nice new features that may make this inconvenience worthwhile though.

Here is a feature by feature comparison of things that make it or break it for me:

IDLE support

Finally! I didn’t even realize that Tiger Mail was missing this feature, but it makes sense, as Tiger mail was extremely chatty and unusably slow for me due to wanting to constant resynchronize. Why IDLE support was missing from Tiger Mail is beyond me, this is hardly a bleeding edge feature. One question though: why would there even be a checkbox to turn this off? Why on Earth would anybody want to turn off IDLE support?

Mailbox subscription support

Mail still does not allow me to unsubscribe from my personal folders, only public and shared folders. However, while it is a pain to have to waste screen space with my archived folders, and while Mail is chattier at startup having to examine folders I don’t care about, the addition of IDLE support seems to help a great deal - at least it keeps performance in check

Multiple identity support

This is still a deal breaker for me, I will still have to use Thunderbird for sending mail as non-default identities. This is my biggest feature request for Mail, and frankly I don’t know why Apple has left this out all these years. Even lowly Entourage has this feature, AFAIK!

Cyrus Squatter support

Mail does not support Squat (server side indexing of Cyrus Mail accounts), but since Spotlight seems to work so well and is no longer a pain in the ass in terms of performance (coinciding with the chattiness of Tiger Mail), I can live with this.

Ability to define what folders to check for new mail in

Leopard Mail will look for new messages in all mailboxes, which is an improvement - particularly for server side mail filtering. However, if you are subscribed to a busy mailing list and have some sort of notification turned on (e.g. GrowlMail/Mail Appetizer) there is no way to define what folders to check for new mail on on a folder by folder basis…
All in all, I prefer OS X Mail’s attachment handling over Thunderbird, its speed overall (especially after a few minutes of having Mail open having gone through all of my folders), its key bindings, unified mailboxes feature, and the new notes feature looks like it will be a real plus for me as well. Mail Appetizer is nicer than Thunderbird’s Growl plug (although Bundles seem to be really crashy and unstable in Mail right now)

Yes, Apple’s market share has been growing, but I think this is happening in spite of some of the decisions they have been making lately, not because of these decisions.

Apple has been making gestures at wanting to grow their market share. We’ve seen this with Boot Camp, with iWork, with Safari Windows, and other attempts Apple has been making to reach out to new markets. However, Apple is still the small guy in the market and seems to forget this. In order to really grow the Mac, it would be in their best interest to try to penetrate as many new and existing markets as possible to get Apple’s products out there and in mainstream usage, just like the iPod and iPhone.

In order to really achieve this level of market penetration, they need to focus on choice and interoperability, not simply bait, switch, and then start charging. This is what Microsoft does. This is what CDDB/Gracenote did, this is what you can do when you have a monopoly in a market. Apple does not monopolize the desktop space, as a whole.

Instead of starting a free service in iTools, and then later charging for it, tying in their own products to only work with .Mac, and barely keeping .Mac competitive, why not allow the iLife apps to work with any server seamlessly - treat them as equal citizens? Think about the sort of penetration they would reach if every hosting provider advertised interoperability with iWeb, iMovie, Backup, Time Machine, and all of the other apps Apple provides, provided how-to guides, and all that was required was… a Mac. There are a gazillion hosting providers in the world, and with things like network backup, content sharing, and all of these other web services really hitting critical mass, Apple would really become well known if they didn’t limit their audience to .Mac subscribers. Apple probably only makes enough from .Mac to buy them a bag of donuts anyway….

What’s weird is that this sort of thing is so inconsistent. Apple’s new version of iCal will work with their open source calendar server that will run on a variety of platforms. Why are they doing this with only iCal, and how long will they continue to do this? The other thing Apple needs if they wish to really penetrate new markets is offering something dependable. Why would a hosting provider invest into something like calendar server if there was no real indication as to how long this service will be free (without requiring a license fee), and what Apple’s developer relationships will be like with the rest of the world (which also seem skitzo)?

Why does iChat only work with AIM? Why is iMovie 08 far less useful, and now showing strong indications that Apple wants customers to upgrade to Final Cut Express?

I’m sure others can cite similar examples, but my main point is this:

• if you want to expand your market share, make consistent attempts to penetrate new markets, and emphasize interoperability and choice rather than trying to be something you are not. Apple is simply not big enough to play the lock-in game as much as they try to do.
• if you want to remain a niche market player, fine, but what’s with all of these gestures and half attempts? What are you Apple? Make up your mind…

I’m not suggesting that everything Apple offers should be free, far from it, but I’ve always been under the impression that .Mac, iLife, and pretty much all software Apple develops is a catalyst to sell Macs. Rather, it seems like Apple is trying to make as much money as possible with selling these products rather than taking into the account the larger picture of trying to sell more Macs and get the Mac into new markets. Really.. how much are they going to make in getting people to upgrade to Final Cut Express compared to the potential to sell new Macs because iMovie 08 is the bomb?

It’s just all rather strange to me, is all. With the crippled video card in the new iMac (making the machine much less attractive to Windows gamers - exactly the market they should be going after to expand themselves, IMHO) and the release of iLife 08 getting such mixed reviews, it seems like we’re seeing a lot more “WTF?!” being expressed within the Mac community, and rightfully so.

Does any of this resonate?

Mozilla Sunbird used to be pretty rough and ragged, but I’ve been impressed with their recent 0.5 release which came out earlier this summer. It seems to work just fine under OS X.

One of the features in 0.5 is iCal support. I was able to subscribe to my existing iCal calendars no problem, as well as import iCal calendar files. It seems to work fine.

The main, compelling reason to use either iCal in Leopard or Mozilla Sunbird today is for its CalDAV support. CalDAV will allow multiple users to read and write to the same calendar. In other words, you could publish a calendar you created at home and write to it at work.

In order to do this, you will need a Calendar server to do this. Apple’s own Darwin Calendar Server is open source, and the developers say it is pretty much done. I’ve been running it without incident for quite some time now.

Like Apple’s other open source projects, setting it up is very easy to do. There is an included script that will install Calendar Server for you, and you can do this on any Unix-based machine. It obviously works out-of-the-box on Tiger Server or Cilent, but people have also gotten it running under Linux, and I had little difficulty installing it under FreeBSD using the Linux install instructions.

If you have access to any old spare computer with an internet connection, you could set yourself up a calendar server pretty easily. Apple includes a template configuration file, all you have to do is change the path to the calendar storage directory on the server, if you want, as well as setup your authentication to this machine. The default authentication is simply XML file based auth, all you have to do is type in a user/pass into the XML file for your realm.

The most common solution to this problem has usually and traditionally been one of the following:

1. Create separate pages for Javascript/AJAX compatible browsers and for the search engines
2. Don’t use AJAX at all, negotiate your content the old fashioned way - even if this results in a less user-friendly experience for your visitors
3. Use AJAX, accept the fact that your pages will not be crawlable by the search engines

For those of you that have played around with my media player on the NetMusician website you will have noticed that the beauty of this player is that the audio doesn’t cut in and out between page loads. Audio players that do this are a peeve of mine (especially ones that force audio on you with no way to turn them off!), I just think this is poor design.

The most common solutions to circumvent this problem have been:

1. Put the media player in a pop-up window
2. Put the media player in a frame
3. Load the content surrounding the media player as needed via an AJAX trigger

While solution #1 is often a workable solution, I think it is often rather awkward. Frames are a pain in the butt in general, and visitors can’t save direct URLs to the page they are on. AJAX is the nicest way to handle this, IMHO, but the search engine issue has always been a challenge.

Enter my Javascript function…

This function will read all of the HTML located within a div tag and will search for HTML hyperlinks. Internal, relative links are replaced with a Javascript link such as: javascript:ajax(’mypage’), external links and absolute links are left as is.

The result is that as long as you use internal links within your site, these can be converted into your AJAX/Javascript triggers on-the-fly via a Javascript onload event handler. For all non Javascript compatible browsers, this event handler will simply be ignored, leaving all of your links intact.

I believe this to be far easier than probing user agents and providing a separate set of links on the page for certain web browser user agents (or creating separate versions of the page). This makes it difficult to create links via a CMS, and is limited to the search engines you have provided user agent conditional statements for. This link rewriting technique, I believe, is a far more simplistic and effective approach.

I’ve uploaded a demo of this technique in action. Please leave a comment here if this is of use to you or if you have any questions… Enjoy!

Edit: modified function to work in IE

Search engine friendly AJAX demo

Since a number of organizations are using RT, I won’t go into detail as to how to set it up and use it for basic operation (unless you might find this guide written for my graphic designers detailing how to log time in RT of use). However, I will share some enhancements that have been quite useful.

One enhancement is creating a shared mailbox where RT ticket information is sent via its AdminCC function. I have configured myself as an AdminCC for each RT queue, and have setup mailfilter rules (to work with Courier IMAP, if you are using the Cyrus mail server you can create sieve rules) to file these messages into this shared mailbox based on whether the sender address includes the text “Firstname Lastname via RT”.

I have provided my designers with read access to these shared mailboxes so that all our correspondence on these projects is logged into this folder. As a bonus, we can append to these tickets simply by responding to them within our email out of this shared mailbox.

If you want to take this a step further, you can install the “CommandByMail” RT plug, which will allow you to resolve tickets and perform a number of other functions via email as well.

In my original set of instructions, I failed to include the flags necessary to deal with this gracefully (as it was able to do, but this wasn’t the software’s default behavior). I would update this document now, but this appears to no longer be necessary.

Apparently, a lot of users are using MacFUSE to handle NTFS file systems. Since I’m not a Windows person, I haven’t benefited from this feature, but this appears to be one of the compelling features of MacFUSE to a number of other users.