A very brief introduction to virtualization on the Macintosh and a high level comparison of VMWare Fusion 3 and Parallels Desktop 5. [View on SlideShare to see the notes]

How I hate Microsoft Word's Edit|Paste Special menu item. Why can't Microsoft assign a keyboard shortcut to it? It is a maddening oversight and it makes me crazy when I just want to past some unformatted text – stop typing, reach for the mouse, click Edit, click Paste Special, click Unformatted Text and finally click OK. Four mouse clicks and one interrupted workflow later I have my unformatted text. Apple applications have a Paste and Match Style menu item with a keyboard shortcut – ???V. That shortcut is a bit of a handful but it still beats the tar out of doing it the Microsoft way.

Today I found a solution, at least for Word:mac 2008. TidBITS published the AppleScript-based workaround over a year ago in Word 2008 and the Paste Plain Text Dance and then updated it with a better version of the script in Updated Paste Plain Text AppleScript for Word 2008. Follow those tips and you'll soon be pasting unformatted text from the keyboard in Word.

I made one small change when I implemented it on my MacBook. I wanted the keyboard shortcut to match Apple's so that I only have to remember one shortcut. To assign ???V as the shortcut instead of ??V as in the tip, change the name of the script to Paste Plain Text\smoV.scpt. Adding the “o” adds the Option (?) key to the shortcut.

I use ssh all the time, but I rarely use it to connect to my MacBook. Today my MacBook froze hard and I tried to ssh to it from my Linux box in an attempt to recover. The ssh failed with the following error message:

    dean@xbrain:~$ ssh 192.168.1.200

    Received disconnect from 192.168.1.200: 2: Too many authentication failures for dean

My first thought was that DenyHosts had borked me but that turned out not to be the case. (If you aren't running DenyHosts you should be.) I tried ssh with debug messages turned on and the client was offering the correct public key but the server was rejecting it. I ended up just doing a hard reboot of the MacBook but I still wanted to solve the prolem.

Next I assumed that something in my private or public ssh keys was borked. Searching on the error message I was getting led me to believe that I had file permission problems somewhere but my .ssh directory had all the correct permissions – 0700 for the directory and 0600 for all the files inside. I edited sshd_config with the intention of enabling PAM and password authentication. Instead the following two lines caught my eye:

    StrictModes yes

    MaxAuthTries 1

First I changed the value of MaxAuthTries to 3. I was rewarded with a new error message from the ssh client.

    dean@xbrain:~$ ssh 192.168.1.200

    Permission denied (publickey).

After that when I turned on debug messages for the ssh client I could see that after the initial public key authentication failed it tried to find other allowed authentication methods and when it failed gave me the error above. Next I changed the value of StrictModes to no. After making that change I could successfully ssh. This confirmed that there was a file permission problem on the server side.

    StrictModes

    files world-writable. The default is "yes".

I had always assumed that StrictModes only applies to the user's .ssh directory. It turns out that it also checks the file permissions on the user's home directory and will balk if the home directory is writable by group or other (everyone). My home directory was writable by group and this was the root cause of the errors I had been getting. (The default user group is staff on OS X but it varies on different operating systems and distributions.) After removing group write permissions from my home directory and restoring my original sshd_config settings everything started working the way it was supposed to. From a review of my Time Machine backups it looks like some time in December I accidentally (or perhaps even intentionally) changed my home directory to a drop box which turned on group write permissions. Doh!

I should have looked before I wrote my last post on MySQL because there is an updated version of the MySQL package for OS X 10.5. (And it has been available for quite a while too.) I undid everything I had done previously to get MySQL working before and I downloaded and installed the 64-bit version of this new package. I even took myself out of the wheel group.

After installing the updated package I found that I could not start MySQL from the command line or the prefpane. I tried adding myself back to the wheel group but I still couldn't start MySQL. To fix the problem I still had to follow the recommendation to change the ownership of /usr/local/mysql/data that I originally found here. Then I removed myself from the wheel group and I could still start and stop MySQL from both the command line and the prefpane. I'm not sure that changing the permissions is either really necessary or the best solution to the problem but it works.

Then I tried restarting the system to see if the permissions on /usr/local/mysql/data/<computer name>.local.err were getting reset like they were before. They weren't, so that's one less problem to deal with.

Finally I tried enabling automatically starting MySQL on system start and that works now even if your user is not in the wheel group.

So now (almost) everything in the MySQL package for OS X 10.5 works out of the box.

In an earlier post I explored how to install MySQL from a package on OS X Leopard, but I left unsolved the problem of how to make MySQL start automatically on system startup. This morning while reading Mac OS X Hints a post titled “10.5: Join 'wheel' group as possible fix for system issues” caught my eye and started me thinking that perhaps it might also be a solution for the MySQL auto-start problem I had been unable to solve.

First I had to find a way to add myself to the wheel group so followed a link from that hint to another hint titled “10.5: Manage users and groups using a GUI tool“*. From there I downloaded and installed Apple's Server Admin Tools for 10.5. These tools are not meant to be used with the desktop version of OS X, but the Workgroup Manager tool works and can be used add a user to a group. I followed the steps described and added myself to the wheel group. It took me a couple of minutes to find the wheel group because the Workgroup Manager displays the groups' long names instead of their short names. In the case of the wheel group the long name is System Group.

After adding myself to the wheel group I opened the MySQL prefpane in System Preferences and checked “Automatically Start MySQL Server on Startup”. Then I shut down and restarted my MacBook. When it finished booting I logged in and MySQL was already running. Problem solved!

*Mac OS X Hints offers the following warning for this hint:

Warning: You should not play around with these settings if you don't know what you're doing. It is possible to break certain parts of the operating system, or to render it unusable.

You should definitely not add users to the wheel group unless you are reasonably confident that you know what you are doing and what the security implications are.

Apple made a minor but welcome improvement to Stacks with the 10.5.2 upgrade. You can now change the stack icon on the toolbar to a folder icon. So now instead of seeing this:

I see this:

I am much happier seeing the Application folder as my Application stack icon than I was seeing the 1Password icon. To change your Stacks icon display, right-click on the stack you want to change and select Display as: Folder. If you don't like it then change it back to Display as: Stack to see 1Password, Address Book, Adium or whatever icon is first in your Applications folder.

I installed the OS X 10.5.2 upgrade yesterday. Shortly after installing it I turned 802.11n back on in my D-Link DIR-655. It is much more stable now, at least so far. In thirty-six hours I have had just one dropped connection. Before the 10.5.2 upgrade I was experiencing dropped connections every few minutes. Unfortunately the 10.5.2 upgrade has caused WiFi problems for many users. It would be easy to blame other manufacturers like D-Link because 802.11n is still draft but many of the problems are with either older 802.11g equipment or with Apple's own Airport Extreme product. And WiFi problems aren't the only problems being reported with 10.5.2. I consider myself lucky to have had a problem free upgrade.

There are two options for installing MySQL on OS X, assuming you aren't running OS X Server which includes MySQL. The first option is to install it from source. The second option is to install it from a package. I've installed MySQL from source before and it is not a terribly difficult process, but for some unknown reason (perhaps related to my incorrigible tendencies towards sloth) I had a strong preference for installing it from the package.

The problem was that the current MySQL package isn't exactly compatible with OS X Leopard. I found a solution to that problem in this post on The Blog that Noone Reads. As suggested there, changing the owner of all of the files and folders found in /usr/local/mysql/data fixed the problems I had with MySQL after installing it from the package. Almost. Every time I rebooted MySQL would refuse to start from the prefpane. It turned out that there was a log file whose ownership was getting reset every time I restarted. The fix for that was to leave the ownership on that file alone and to change its permissions instead. Remember to change <computer name> to the computer name of your Mac before running the following command:

    sudo chmod a+rw /usr/local/mysql/data/<computer name>.local.err

After changing the permissions of that log file I am able to start and stop MySQL from the prefpane even after rebooting.

There is still one problem left to solve – I cannot get MySQL to automatically start. But as usual I decided to declare victory at the 90% success mark and leave a bit of the problem unsolved to satisfy the procrastinator in me. Besides, I didn't want MySQL to start automatically anyway.

After nearly a year of faithful service my MacBook developed the dreaded WiFi connection dropping syndrome. It started happening shortly after upgrading from my old faithful Linksys WRT54GL to a shiny new D-Link DIR-655. At first it happened sporadically, but gradually the condition worsened until the connection was sometimes dropping within a couple minutes of being connected and sometimes even less. I tried every fix I could find on the Internet short of downgrading to Tiger from Leopard. In the end the only thing that worked for me was turning off 802.11n in the router and restricting it to 802.11g only.

I am not too unhappy about losing 802.11n. But I bought the DIR-655 primarily to upgrade my home office to Gigabit Ethernet so getting 802.11n was really just a bonus feature. Even so, I am still hoping that the impending release of OS X 10.5.2 fixes the problem so that I can turn 802.11n back on.