Category: Technology

A Very Hungry iTunes

I’m totally digging the new iTunes 7. Every release I geek out of ther changes Apple makes. I haven’t had a single bad experience upgrading to the next version. They just keep making the dang thing better. I like the new Coverflow interface, the super cool album art finder and the greatly improved iPod settings ‘panel’. But there are two things I’d like to mention that detract from such a robust program; the new UI elements, their darker than normal look and the huge memory usage. I’ve found fixes for the UI but have no fix for the memory usage. 🙁
Black is the new Aqua

I don’t care for the BIG BOLD LETTERS used for the header in the Source list. It’s rather distracting. Another issue with the source list is the amount of wasted space between the different groups. But hey! It looks like someone felt the same and posted this hint on macosxhints.com. No more BIG BOLD LETTERS!

What is up with the dark and dreary black and grey UI elements? Where’s the pretty aqua blue? Oh, ok so this is a ‘new’ version of iTunes, we get it. Yeah…So, Paul Barlow to the rescue with his great little Aqua4iTunes app. It replaces that dreary black and grey with nice shiny aqua buttons! Check out his great little beta here.

So far I’ve found fixes for the big things that bother me. Now let’s talk about something I can’t fix. The amount of memory iTunes uses when invoking the Coverflow view.
Feed me Seymour!

Below is a screenshot of iTunes at idle. At this point all I’ve done is open itunes and let it sit for a moment. I’m not playing a song, downloading anything, or updating my iPod. Just idle.

iTunes on wo coverflow

iTunes is using a very comfortable 34MB of ram, no biggie. Now lets turn on Coverflow.

coverflow on

I flipped through my albums for a few seconds and the memory usage increased to 563MB of ram. That’s 1/3 of my total memory dedicated to one single applicaion. Wow. I have a modest library, with about 8GB of music. Ok, so let’s turn off Coverflow and reclaim that memory…

coverflow off

Uhhh..Ok iTunes where’s the rest of that ram? 329 MB is still being used? How do I get that back? What if I close Coverflow, wanting to free up some resources to open another program? I have to close iTunes and reopen it. Groan.

These are minor compared to the other problems I’ve been hearing about. So I’ll chalk this up to a new version glitch/bug/rushtogetitoutthedoor problem. Here’s to hoping this memory monster will one day be tamed. I’ll just be glad I’m not running this on a G4 iMac with 245 MB of ram! Ouch.

How to Zen an Intel Mac Part II

This is a rough draft, I just wanted to get something up ASAP. More details to come.

UPDATE: See the post How to Zen an Intel Mac Part III


All credit goes to Jeff Abernathy, Ameer Abdelmalek, Corey Webb and Queanna Jones. I just sat around and watched HD Movie Trailers in a Parallels Virtual Machine. 😉

To make things quicker you will need more than one Mac.
One to image with windows from your Zen imaging CD
One to serve the image you just created
One which will be your target Mac you want to have the dual boot set up on.
Once you Create your Windows image you can reuse that on multiple dual boot macs.

Creating the Windows image
1) Stick your Zen imaging cd in your mac and install the zen image, just like you would on a PC. This will wipe everything and make your shiny mac a Windows only machine. With our setup the Windows partion is on partion(1). This is bad. EFI/GUID wants Windows to be on the 3rd partition. This is why just installing windows from an intall cd works while just imaging that zen partition from the imaging cd does not.
2) Once imaged, don’t restart it!
3) Boot into Target Disk mode
4) Use NetRestore Helper to create a master disk image of the drive. I would save this as something informative like zenbase.ntfs

Create the OS X image
1) If you have a base image you use to deploy over multiple machines, image the target mac with your image.
2)Install and Run Bootcamp to create your partitions

Install the Windows image
3)Use NetRestore Helper to restore the zenbase.ntfs image to the newly created windows partion.

Fix the boot.ini
1)boot off of XP SP2 disk and run bootconfig /restore

a good boot.ini will look like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

See that partition(3) part? That’s the kicker.

If you fix the boot.ini before creating the .ntfs file, then you only have to do it once, instead of at every deployment. This could be done with a WinPE CD or by bringing down an add-on image with the right boot.ini in it. Unfortunately, Linux mounts the NTFS partition read-only, so editing it at the command line is not an option. – Corey Webb

Apple.com

I’ve posted the PeopleFinder widget that Jeff and I made up on Apple’s website.

onapple.png

Jeff added a lot of cool functionality and code optimization to make it a really slick little ldap widget. Perhaps version 5.0 will have even more neat stuff!

You can download it here.

How to Zen a Intel Mac

Two of the members of the A&S ITS group here at SLU have discovered how to get a Novell ZenWorks image onto an Intel Mac. Dan Shown and Matt Goeke put their heads together and have documented the process here. This is a huge success for our group here at SLU.  We can maintain our Universal OS X image across both our PPC and Intel Macs along with being able to keep our Zen image congruent across all machines, PC or Mac, across the entire campus!

Awesomely Bad Error

Check out this error a co-worker of mine discovered while trying to dual-boot his MacBook Pro.

wowerror.png

In a nutshell we tried to edit the partitions after running the Boot Camp Assistant. The problem arose when we started to use the Zen imaging utility (SUSe based) to partition a chunk of the Windows partition. This error is telling us that we fubared something really good and now need to reinstall the whole OS.