Posts Tagged ‘os x’

Indexing the Cloud

I think from now on I’ll give all my machines names based on buzzwords. It makes for some awesome error / status messages. Today’s message from Spotlight after upgrading to OS X Lion definitely didn’t let me down. I had to share.

The cloud is a big place..

 

As an aside.. be sure to give plenty of time after the upgrade is finished for Spotlight to index things again. While my laptop isn’t unusable, it slows things down quite a bit.

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Sep 17th, 2011

Enabling Tab Complete for Python Shell on OS X

I have been struggling with an issue for a bit while trying to get tab completion working on the python shell on OS X. I’ve been working on a Django project and not being able to tab complete has been a bit obnoxious. It took a few sessions of searching around to find out what’s going on, so I thought I’d share it in one place. Turns out that the default shell settings are ready to go with tab complete (I spent a lot of time making sure configs were correct), but OS X simply doesn’t ship GNU readline. Instead, Apple just symlinked BSD libedit which is problematic because the default python readline module links to GNU readline.

Someone has already created an egg with readline statically linked just for OS X so the fix is super-easy. Just install the standalone readline module with your favorite python installer. I used:
sudo easy_install readline

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : May 30th, 2011

.local CNAME Queries Failing on OS X 10.6.5

I was helping my sister with an issue with connecting to her school’s email server from her MacBook last night and discovered something interesting. Her school uses a webmail.domain.com address for the front end for OWA which is just a CNAME to its real address – a .local address. This all worked fine until a few weeks or so ago – we later pieced together that that’s when she upgraded to 10.6.5.

It seems that in 10.6.5, OS X can’t follow that CNAME for some reason. I could ping the .local address just fine and the browser connected just fine, but when I tried to use the .com CNAME’d hostname, it would fail. The kicker? The dig utility seems to ignore all of this madness which made it lie to me, and that did not help at all while troubleshooting.

I was able to find an Apple forum thread about this with someone saying that rolling back the mDNS binaries to those shipped with 10.6.4 seemed to fix it, but it didn’t help in my case (and some others in the thread). I personally don’t use anything at work or at home using the .local domain, but I hope this gets fixed soon as it breaks a lot of Microsoft-centric networks as a lot tend to use .local for one reason or another..

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Dec 7th, 2010

How to Treat Painfully Slow DNS Lookups in OS X

I’m not really sure what made this suddenly appear, but I’ve noticed over the past few days that my initial connections to websites have started taking longer and longer. Today, it became painful as the browser would say it was “Looking up example.com” for a good 3-4 seconds (if not longer) before loading the page. Once the lookup completed, the site usually came down pretty fast. Thanks to a (not so quick) Google search, I ran across this forum thread. It turns out, disabling IPv6 in OS X speeds things up quite a bit. To disable, go to System Preferences -> select the network interface you’re using (probably Airport) -> click Advanced.

Then, in the TCP/IP tab, change the drop down next to “Configure IPv6″ to “Off” instead of “Automatic”.

This worked for me. My browser and other various apps no longer take several seconds before loading pages on the web!

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (1) : Apr 15th, 2010

The Difference Between an Apple and Microsoft Upgrade

Like a good little Apple fan, I went out and purchased a copy of the new Snow Leopard OS from my local Mac store yesterday. I got it home, popped open the box, popped the DVD into my MacBook, told it to upgrade and in 45 minutes or so I was playing with the new features of Snow Leopard. This really was my first operating system upgrade as an Apple fan and I have to say I was impressed. I was an Apple fan before the Leopard release, but I didn’t do an in-place upgrade for other reasons at the time.

Why is this cool or even worth noting? Because that was all I did. I didn’t look at some chart to see which copy of Snow Leopard was right for my computer. I didn’t have to double-check that I was running the 32-bit version instead of 64-bit. I didn’t run my computer and peripherals through some software to make sure they were compatible. All I cared about was that I had a MacBook running Leopard, so I purchased Snow Leopard and popped the DVD in the drive. And guess what? My computer now runs faster! In fact, I am now using something like 6 GB less disk space than before.

The other cool part was that I didn’t reinstall any software, nor did I re-activate anything. Unlike doing an upgrade with Microsoft software involved, I wasn’t treated like a pirate and required to jump through hoops to use my software again. I just loaded it again. The user experience from the store to upgrade complete was very smooth and straight-forward.

While it’s certainly true that the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was far less of a jump than Windows XP to Vista or even Vista to 7, but it really doesn’t matter. I had to put far less care into the upgrade and just did it. And that (among a few other things) is why I do, and will continue to do for the foreseeable future, recommend Apple products to those who ask me their opinion on what computer to buy.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (4) : Aug 29th, 2009

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