unixwiz

I went to Best Buy today to walk around and get out of the house. While I was there I walked past their little Mac section of the store. There was a man there looking and playing with a MacBook Pro. A Best Buy person came over and asked him if he needed any help. So the man proceeded to ask the Best Buy person how he would transfer his files from his PC to the Mac if he bought it. What I heard next just made me mad… She told him that in order to transfer the files to the new Mac he would need some expensive software or he could bring the PC in to Best Buy and they would transfer all his files over for a charge. Why is it stores like this try to get any amount of money they can out of people who are computer un-savy?

People it is really easy to move stuff between PC and Mac. Apple even has a small 2:30 minute video on how to do it.. Don’t let the Big Box stores charge you for something that is easy and any one can do it.

When I bought my MacBook Pro I opted to get the Apple Care Extended warranty. I am so glad I did now. Since I have had my MBP, I have had 3 different batteries and now tonight I called to get a new power adapter, as the cord where the magsafe adapter is is starting to come out of the boot. So I called tonight and talked to Steve, who was having problems with his machine, but once I told him what I needed he said “If you have enough battery, disconnect the power cable now. It may spark and cause a fire.” It has not gotten that loose yet, but it needed replaced. If you did not have Apple Care, it would cost you $79.00 + TAX to get a new one. All told the amount I would have spent on replacement parts would be over $400.

So my recommendation, if you are going to buy a Apple, get the AppleCare along with it.

Went and picked up MacOSX Leopard today… I decided to do a fresh install instead of trying to upgrade my current Tiger installation on my MacBook Pro. Well after backing up my entire hard drive to a external drive. I started the Installation. It took about an hour for it to install. The funny part is 30 minutes of it, was the installer verifying the integrity of of the DVD. First time I have seen an OS verify the entire disk before it started to even do an install to the hard drive. Anyways, 30 minutes after the verification was done, it was installed. The opening video is pretty cool basically flying through space. I then started the restoration of my files from the external USB Drive. Funny thing was as soon as I plugged the drive in to the MBP, time machine kicked in and asked if I wanted to use the external drive as a back up device. So I said yes and it started backing up what I had just installed while I was restoring files from the same drive.

Some little things I have noticed now:

1. If you leave iCal on the Doc, it now shows the current date, unlike Tiger only showing it if you had it actually running.
2. Everything seems a lot quicker than Tiger. But it could also be that I had not reinstalled Tiger since I had bought the MBP.
3. Coverflow in finder. It is cool for going through my documents folder.

I also picked up the new iLife 08. I like the new iPhoto. Now to just get everything set back up the way I had it before.. So far I like what I see, and like the new speed..

Well I got tired of not having a good Citrix client for Solaris X86, and the one for MacOSX sucks because of the fixed window size. (The solaris sparc client lets you have seemless windows, but the MacOSX one doesn’t for some really stupid reason.)

Any ways, I decided to try and figure out how to get the JAVA Citrix Web client to run locally with out the need for a web server. Well tonight I figured it out, and it works so far for what I need. It does give one error on startup, but it does not affect the use of the client as far as I know.

So how do you do it? Pretty “easy”:

1. Download the Citrix JAVA client (I got 9.3) from Citrix’s web site, Note, it will say that you should not try to install it your self… well I can’t read that part
2. Unzip it in to a directory, I.E. /home/{userid}/citrix
3. Create an App script, for example this is what I use for accessing GroupWise (eck!) from Citrix:
   #!/bin/sh
   CLASSPATH="JICA-coreN.jar:JICA-browseN.jar:JICA-configN.jar:JICA-seamlessN.jar:JICA-clipboardN.jar:$CLASSPATH"
   export CLASSPATH
   /usr/bin/java  com.citrix.ConnectionCenter -address:CitrixICA.Server.Addrses -InitialProgram:"#GroupWise 65 SP4" \
   -HTTPBrowserAddress:CitrixICA.Server.Address -TWIMode:on -desiredcolor:4
4. The desiredcolor make is so that it uses the higher color palette, otherwise you get the nice 256 colors
5. TWIMode is for the Seamless windows
6. Initial Program is the name of the App that is published on the Citrix Server.

I tested this from my MacOSX 10.4.6 MacBookPro, and from my Solaris 10 x86 machine. Works fine on both. I will say though don’t tr to run it in TWM (I ran it through vnc), not fun to deal with right now. Hope this helps some other people who are missing a good client for each of these os’. I am going to see about drive mapping next.

if you haven’t seen them on the tv already, there are 3 new Apple Mac tv ad’s. I was joking with a co-worker today that Apples new slogan should be:

An Apple a day keeps Dr. Watson away

For those who don’t know what Dr. Watson is, it is a program error debuger for Windows.

If Apple had a contest for new slogans I wish I could enter this to win something ;-)..