If you choose not to sign up for MobileMe, there is no option in preferences to remove the sync icon (which you will never use) from the menu bar.
Fortunately, holding the Command (Apple) key and dragging the icon to the desktop should detach and remove it.
I started writing this post some months ago back in September but never got around to finishing it. At first this post was going to be me singing my praises for Ubuntu and how well Ubuntu supports the Macbook Pro. Unfortunately in that time I’ve now moved to Mac OS X…
I ran Ubuntu on my Macbook Pro seemlessly for just under 3 months before upgrading to Intrepid Ibex. The upgrade went smoothly, except for my office printer no longer working. This lead to Ubuntu’s demise on my MBP. After re-installing the driver 3 times I decided I’d remove CUPS in case there were left over configuration files causing issues. Unfortunately I stupidly marked all CUPS components with ‘remove completely’ via synaptic. I then watched synaptic systematically remove nearly all my system packages… nautilus, firefox, gnome, the lot. My bad.
After 3 days of recovering my data and failed attempts to re-install, and have my Macbook boot Ubuntu without live CD assistance, I gave up and installed Mac OS X. This in itself is no fault of Apple or Ubuntu. Apple never meant for Macbook’s to run Linux.
Two issues arose when I moved from Windows Vista running on Bootcamp to native Ubuntu.
1) Rewind to mid-August, after reading up on hardware compatibility, and how to put Ubuntu on my Macbook Pro, I wiped my Windows Vista and OSX partitions and installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy). That was a whole lot of fun - only realising Apple had crippled my “Superdrive” with a firmware update, I couldn’t read my Mac OSX Leopard DVD (I’m not the only one - £400+ for Apple to fix it, no thanks!) and only able to occasionally read the Ubuntu installation CD.
I managed to overcome these hurdles with a trusty 16GB Rally 2 USB stick and a WD Passport external USB hard drive. I even splashed out on an external DVD-RW to make future re-installs easier.
2) In early September I noticed when running on batteries my Macbook Pro would switch off after only 5 mins. No prompts about low battery, no shutdown sequence, nada. Just power off immediately. At the time I put this down to poor power management by Ubuntu. Just last night however (running OS X) it did exactly the same thing. So it looks like another hardware fault on my £1350 (with academic discount) laptop.
The firmware upgrade happened some months ago, possibly autumn 2007 but having no reason to use the DVD drive for months, I never noticed until I switched operating systems. The instant-power-off-issue-with-no-warming issue has only manifested since August. Co-incidentally just as my 1 yr of Apple Care expired.
So despite it’s low profile form factor and decent performance, I vow never to purchase another Macbook again. It’s a regular PC laptop for me next time…
Not long now until Ibex is released. However, I ran into this issue again this morning so I thought I’d document the solution for others.
Occasionally when starting Firefox or Thunderbird on Ubuntu (I’m running Hardy Heron 8.04), the window will lose all decoration. No title bar, no minimize, maximize or close buttons and will maximize to fill the window - making it very difficult, if not impossible to move.
In Firefox, this can be easily solved by pressing F11 twice to jump in and out of full screen mode. Thunderbird has no option so we have to work around. Close Thunderbird then edit the following file:
Find the following line and edit the attributes to match those shown here:
<rdf:Description RDF:about="chrome://messenger/content/messenger.xul#messengerWindow" width="800" height="600" sizemode="normal" screenX="5" screenY="5" />
Credit goes to SvenRieke for this workaround.
Well it’s almost been a year since I last posted something here. I’m not even sure this is a worthwhile post but it’s one of the few free evenings I’ve had in a long time. I finally have a bit of time to sit down and log into Google reader and check up on what I’ve been missing.
Like 108,000 other people (at least, according to feedburner) I read Coding Horror. Jeff speaks a lot of sense, though he has deviated this year and if I’m honest I lost interest for a while. I’ll let him off though as I think in recent weeks he’s back on form. One thing I keep stumbling upon - in books (unfortunately I don’t have my Martin Fowler books with me to cite page numbers), magazine’s, news articles and blogs is this…
“Let me be quite clear on this point: if your team leader or manager isn’t dealing with the bad apples on your project, she isn’t doing her job.”
In case you didn’t catch that, I’m referring to the overly politically correct use of ’she’.
Now before I continue, I’d like to point out, I have absolutely nothing against women - I’m no sexist, in fact I think a mixed management/development/whatever team makes for the best results (so please hold off clicking that comment link to flame me for two more minutes…).
But… it’s really grates with me that authors and editors feel pressured to refer to hypothetical characters as female due to the politically correct zealous times we live in now. This particularly rubs me up the wrong way when reading books about programming - as we all know, we have a severe shortage of female programmers in our industry - I’m sure Joe programmer and I won’t be offended if they dare to use ‘their’, ‘they’re’, or heaven forbid… HE!
I think it draws more attention to the fact they’re not trying to sound sexist when ’she’ is used rather than a gender neutral ‘they’ or ‘their’. OK I’m done.
Well so much for getting a Sony Viao. I bit the bullet and bought a new Santa Rosa 15″ Macbook Pro in the end. After a patient 18 day wait between ordering and delivery it finally arrived last Friday.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m no fan of OSX so I also picked up a copy of Windows Vista. For the 48 hours I’ve used Vista it doesn’t seem to be too different. It does feel like there’s now an additional click to get everywhere, a lot of things have been moved around (but in a methodical manner).
A lot of the nerdy stuff has been hidden, Add Hardware is not an easy spot unless you switch to classic view in Control Panel. Simple things like disk defragmenter now has no graphic display on it’s fragmentation. It feels as though MS has swept this stuff under the rug so the focus on productivity instead of maintaining the OS, which is fine but I imagine for “Power Users” this is annoying.
I digress, what I wanted to mention in this post was an issue I’ve had with Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) and running Eclipse. Each time I started Eclipse, Vista would prompt me with a “Open File - Security Warning”, informing me the program I am executing has an Unknown Publisher. Despite unchecking the ‘Always ask me about running this file’ option, it would repeatedly do so.
After some Googling I thought I’d found an answer. Check file properties, at the bottom of the General tab, click the Unblock button. No joy. Once I’d clicked OK, if I returned to the properties screen the file was blocked again. It turns out the problem was downloading Eclipse using IE7 and NTFS’ ’streams’.
I tried the suggestion of running Sysinteral’s streams and deleting the stream information but I encountered an ‘Access is denied’ message as well. Copying eclipse.exe from my system drive to my USB flash drive and then copying it back again sorted the issue.
