| Monday
December 1, 2003 ADDED
LATER:
If you just got here by way of some Mac thread note that
most of these problems are LONG SINCE CLEARED UP, and not from the heading
of this page:
This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up
daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 -
7,000 words, depending. (Older
columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.
In other words, in a day book I list things as they happen.
Problems are often solved, often by mail from readers, sometimes by my own
efforts.
If you don't like reading logs of how people find and
address problems for God's sake stop reading now and get on with your life.
Ye gods!!!
Now back to the regular day book
==============================
It's column time. For my
problems setting up the Mac last night, and some laments, and pictures of
the Mac and of a small surprise box, see
last night's stuff including the final text. I'll have more and lots of
mail later. But it is column time...
The Mac is wonderful, but it is also very good at driving me
mad, and I am beginning to think that many of the defects are in Panther and
were not there in the original release.
[I am leaving this up as it happened; but there is a happy
ending to this, so do not take all the doom and gloom too seriously. Read
on, read on...]
Item: I have gone to systems preferences/security and made
sure that the box about demanding passwords for nearly any operation is
unchecked. It still demands a password for nearly anything I do.
Item: I have gone to the Get Info setting of the Public
folder, and tried setting various users to Read And Write, including all
others, plus Unknown, Administrators, guests, and such. In no case has that
allowed me to write to that folder from the network. The only folder I can
write to from the network is the "Drop Box" folder, and I cannot look into
that one from outside to confirm whether or not my operation was successful.
I can copy stuff from the Mac to the Windows Network, but never from the
network to the Mac. This is terribly inconvenient.
Item: Quite often it will not respond to the external
keyboard.
Item: often it will give me a colored pinwheel for a cursor
at which point I can to NOTHING, not close folders or anything else. The
last time it did that, I just held the power button down until it turned off
and turned it back on because I didn't have time to wait for it to stop
doing whatever it was doing -- and I had no idea what it was doing at all.
Sure. Macs are different. But a multi-tasking machine ought
at least to let me close folders while it is doing mysterious things.
Item: I can log in from the external keyboard, but when it
demands a password for changing any preference (this is after I have logged
in with the administrative user name and password) I must type the password
in from the Mac keyboard, not the external. Of course it is the same
password I already put in when I logged in. If I try to type in the password
from the external keyboard, nothing happens. The passwords are not entered.
Only from the laptop's keyboard. Except to log in the first time, when I can
do that from the external keyboard.
=================
The Mac plays music nicely, and I will start looking at
applications, but setting this thing up to work with a network required a
day and an external program. Most of the demo programs I downloaded like the
Journal program don't work any more after a day, I do not know why. I don't
want to buy and pay for and register for a hundred programs at $20 to $95
each just to try them out, and for reasons not clear to me once I get one
working for a while it stops working. That's likely unfamiliarity with the
system. Likely.
But I am about to build a 3 GHz Windows system, and my guess
is that I will have it built, OS installed, most user software installed,
and able to communicate with everything on my network except the Mac in
about 4 hours. I wasn't able to get the new OS installed and get the Mac on
my network in under 12, and I didn't have to build the Mac in the first
place.
There are many good things about this machine, but I haven't
found it particularly easy to use, and I very much dislike "Security" that
requires me to use a "Drop Box" from which I will then be able to move
things around inside the Mac only in the Mac. I cannot add to any data files
on the Mac from anywhere but the Mac console, and that is infuriating as
well as making it a lot less useful. To update anything I have to drop it
into the Drop Box, then go to the Mac and move it or do the update
operation. This is excessive security, and make the machine a lot less
useful to me.
======================
And now I have reset the Mac and it is no longer available
on the Windows network at all. I can see it but I cannot read from it much
less write to it.
Over on the Mac I see the network and I think I can connect
to it, but it means now that I can't even drop files from here, or move them
from here. Every net operation has to be done from the Mac console.
Interesting. Now that I connected to the Windows net from
the Mac, the Windows systems can connect to the Mac. Let's see if I can
write to the public folder now.
No. Only to the Drop Box.
I am going for a walk to clear my head, but this machine is
so secure that it's not really very useful to me. And one problem is that
many of those sending me advice tell me what works on the old OS X, but then
I find they aren't using the new; and since I am not familiar with either I
do not know what ought to work and what used to work but does not work now.
But I steadfastly maintain I am not this stupid. Why is it
that things that are supposed to make us smart work hard at making us feel
stupid?
====================
Well, I feel a little less stupid.
Thanks to Reader Matt Fulghum, and longtime friend and
associate Roland Dobbins, I have the Mac in reliable communication with the
Windows Active Directory Network. We are doing it through AdmitMac, a third
party program, that makes it considerably easier to get things running.
There are still very odd issues about shared directories and who I can give
permissions to: the Windows user name doesn't appear in the list of groups
to which I can give permissions, so all the elaborate security sort of
breaks down when you have to allow "others" full permissions; but that is
probably fixable as time goes on.
Slowly we are getting there. Now that the Mac is in
communications, I am garnering neat and cool stuff to DO with it, and that
will go in the column.
There are quirks. Some are very odd. But slowly we are
getting this under control. After all, I do these silly things so you don't
have to.
Impressions: the 15" Mac is handsome and tough, it's pretty,
and I've seen Glaskowsky get full service out of his older 15" Mac for years
so I know it can be very useful. Whether it is as useful as a full Pentium 4
Tablet PC is something to be determined by use and experiment. But the Mac
is pretty cool once you get past the odd security (some of which you just
learn to live with) and the very complex ways needed to set it up for
Windows networking at least with and Active Directory system.
Roland thinks the pinwheel is because 512 megs is too little
memory given the networking, and it will go away when I get more memory. I
am looking into that now.
AAargh. If you ever get a connection, keep it. I shut it
down on the Windows system, then had more mail to transfer in the text file
I am appending mail to for use on the Mac, and now I can't get access to the
Mac again.
I changed NOTHING. All I did was close the window on the
Windows machine. I hate this. Going to the Mac and trying to connect to the
Windows systems, I get a pinwheel. This is ridiculous.
OK. After 30 seconds of pinwheel, I can connect from Mac to
Windows. After THAT I can reconnect from Windows to Mac. Only problem is
that I can no longer write into the public folders over there. I could
before. Now I can't. Exactly why this should be I don't know, but it's
pretty repeatable, and enough to tell me: if you are using a Mac for a
Windows net you may have few problems, but if you are primarily a Windows
user and thinking of adding a Mac, understand that unless you are sitting at
the Mac console you are probably not going to read and write much to the
Mac. FROM the Mac you can get and send stuff. From Windows TO the Mac, it
works sometimes (shout for joy!) but then it will stop working.
The Mac is so concerned with security that it much impairs
its usefulness, at least to me. Incidentally, when I go set folder
security preferences, they don't seem to stick. I have no idea why. If I go
to set them again, they seem all right, but if I do set them again, often
that will in fact make it possible to read and write there again.
There's probably a simple explanation but I don't know what
it is.
==========================
And the key question here is
over in mail.
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