Apple

Related to Apple, Macs, iPod, iPhone, and other Apple products.

Mavericks, App Nap, and Theatre Software

It’s been six months since the first public release of OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and if you’ve been a dutiful theatre technician, projection designer, or other multimedia professional, you’ve likely avoided upgrading out of fear of broken applications. Good on you!

os x sea lion

Here’s a tip that will hopefully save you some grief as you plan your upgrade to Mavericks. Disable App Nap for all your show or live applications. Isadora, Quartz Composer, MadMapper, QLab, Air Beam, Ableton and more can all be affected by how App Nap puts your application “to bed” when they’re not “in use”.

Problems may develop in weird ways, such as QLab (v2) not fading video cues properly (likely QLab talks to a child process that is “napping”) or Syphon streams from other programs randomly freezing when they’re not the foremost application running on your Mac.

App Nap is built-in to OS X Mavericks, but you can disable it on a app-by-app basis by going into your Applications folder, clicking on the offending application and selecting File > Get Info… and checking the “Prevent App Nap” checkbox. Restart the Application.

Hopefully you get the chance to upgrade to Mavericks on your show machines as the theatre season wraps up for the summer!

Screenshot 2014-04-20 at 9.14.06 PM

 

 

 

Quartz Composer 3D Lighting with MIDI Control Surface

Playing around with 3D lighting in Quartz Composer. Shadows are rendered somewhat lamely, but still very cool for any sort of experimenting, prototyping, or less critical interactive components. In this demo I was testing out my custom Quartz nodes (Editor -> Add to Library ) for my Korg nanoKontrol MIDI control to manipulate parameters on the fly. Apologies for the crappy audio, my computer fans were blasting and I was too lazy to plug in a mic. Recorded with the most excellent Syphon Recorder.

Quartz Composer 3D Lighting with MIDI Control Surface – YouTube.

Link Aggregation with PowerConnect 2724

A stock photograph of my network closet. Server located below.

A while back I got a hold of a Dell PowerConnect 2724 Gigabit Managed switch (24 ports) for home use. It has a web-based UI to administer it, which makes it easy to manage. Although it only seems to work with Firefox due to some awkward login methods, overall it works just fine considering you aren’t managing it on a day to day basis.

One advantage of using a managed switch over an unmanaged switch (typically seen in consumer/home use application) is the ability to create aggregate links, which has many different names but is classified under the IEEE 802.1ax and 802.3ad standards.

So what is an aggregate link?

Link aggregation is a computer networking term to describe various methods of combining (aggregating) multiple network connections in parallel to increase throughput beyond what a single connection could sustain, and to provide redundancy in case one of the links fails.

Courtesy: Wikipedia

In my case, my Hackintosh has two separate gigabit network interfaces on it’s ASUS P5W DH motherboard, allowing me to plug in two network cables into it, both plugged into my PowerConnect. They act as one network connection at a theoretical speed of 2 Gbps, or double what a single link would have.

As to whether 2 Gbps is even required for my use, that’s debatable. I just think it’s awesome 🙂

Configuration & testing

What was odd was that in order for Mac OS X to recognize both devices in the link, I needed to make sure only one was assigned to the LAG in the PowerConnect configuration page. The server is connected on ports 1 & 2 of the switch, and as soon as I added both ports to the Link Aggregate group, one of the devices in OS X would report that it did not support 802.3de. I assume this is not standard configuration, but it definitely works. I came accross a forum thread that seemed to be having trouble getting the PowerConnect to talk to OS X, so perhaps this is the solution they are looking for. The trick is to only assign one of the ports to the LAG group, and leave the other port configured normally.

Suggested PowerConnect LAG configuration. Only add one port to the LAG.

To test the link, I ran iperf, an open source utility that streams TCP/IP packets from one computer to another and measures their performance. In order to flood the link aggregate successfully, I’ll need at least 2 computers connecting at gigabit speeds to saturate it.

I ran iperf as follows:

iperf -c 192.168.6.11 -t 60 -P 10 -w 9000

with t being how long it shoudl run in seconds, P being number of threads to run on the machine, and w being the size of the packet, 9000 bytes in this case. I ran it from my MacBook Pro and our family iMac over SSH. All machines had Jumbo Frames enabled, allowing more data to pass in a single packet at once.

The result was a whopping ~200MB/s or about 1.56 Gbps actual network throughput (different from theoretical maximum. Not bad for a quick software-based solution.

If I disconnect one of the links in the above tests, it appropriate dropped in speed by about half, and upon plugging it back in, it came back up to speed. Thus, this also provides link redundancy.

One note for other PowerConnect users though, for somer reason when Jumbo Frames are enabled on the switch and a machine, the Web UI becomes inaccessible. If you need to administer the switch again, simply step down your network interface to 1500 again and it should load.

Screenshot of my Hackintosh server admin connection.

iPhone 4: Just a phone, says Jobs

If you’ve been following the outrageous communications between Apple’s new PR department and the miffed adopters of the new iPhone 4, you’ll know that there’s apparently a design flaw with the new antenna system of the fancy new phone.

The way Apple’s been reacting suggests to me that this problem was known, but that there are some things that they can do in software to “solve” the issue, such as by recalibrating the signal bars, or even switching to a signal quality meter instead of a signal strength method. There’s probably also an issue with the baseband frequency switching speed, all of which just needs tweaking. That being said, I really don’t think it’s coincidence that for this model Apple just happened to start manufacturing their own overpriced rubber “bumper” which has become the official AppleCare suggestion.

But amid all the chatter is this gem, straight from El Jobso himself in a rather intense conversation between a frustrated customer and Jobs, who has become an unofficial PR department in recent weeks (because really, who’s going to stop him?): “…retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it.” Oh really? Is this not the phone that coined the term Jesus Phone upon initial launch, only to be called the phone that changes everything, again? Surely Apple doesn’t sit around designing their phones with that level of enthusiasm.

UPDATE: So apparently that didn’t happen at all so you can probably disregard all that ridiculous analysis, but the statement still stands: it really is just a phone.

OTHER UPDATE: Also, Apple is apparently releasing an update to reduce the apparent bars on the iPhone which they were “stunned” to find was inaccurate for years. Ha. Ha. Right. But of course, they’re also “making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see,” which just means they aren’t really doing anything besides messing with people. Nice one Apple.

The most fascinating thing about Steve Jobs is how calm, relaxed, yet slightly cynical the guy is behind the veil of Apple secrecy. His statements are incredibly “far out” and airy, sort of like the way Jonny Ive talks about a-loo-min-ee-um. Another point for the Jobs = Ghandi conspiracy. I digress.

Ultimately what struck me this morning about this whole thing is really people, it’s just a phone. Steve Jobs said it, and his will be done, right?

Source

On iPhone 4 in Canada

The iPhone 4 came out about a week ago to great awe and amazement. I have yet to comment on it yet, simply because there wasn’t much to say. Apple has done it yet again, this time truly delivering a revision worth upgrading for, with a fabulous screen, front camera, and wicked power enough to start editing in HD in the palm of your hand.

That being said, I was disappointed to see hear that Canadians would not be in the running to pick one up until “June” according to Apple, but based on demand, I suspect that we won’t be seeing it for even longer than that. Remember how the iPad shipments got pushed back several weeks for International customers? Jobs claimed that this was going to be their “fastest rollout ever” but considering that customers are pounding Apple’s servers just trying to preorder the device, I suspect their will be difficulty staying on schedule.

While New Yorkers have been out of luck if they wanted to find an iPad, I just came back from the Southgate Apple Store in Edmonton and watched a young boy hugging his walking out of the store, so we might be in luck. Nevertheless, these situations suggest that perhaps Apple will need a new strategy for delivering devices rapidly enough. In order to have enough supply they’ll need to ramp up production far in advance of an announcement, and at 600,000 pre-orders/day, it’s going to get harder and harder to make sure launches are timely.

Fixing your CS3 Installation in 10.6.3

If you’ve been having issues with your installation of Adobe CS3 on the latest 10.6.3 OS X update, I have found a solution (for my case anyway).

Adobe has acknowledged the issue, albeit without a real fix for the problem. It offers three “solutions” to the problem, which is due to a System Serial number that exceeds 12 characters. If you’ve ever had your motherboard replaced on your Mac and the tech forgot to transfer your serial number into the NVRAM, you likely see “SystemSerialNum” when you open System Profiler. Apparently this crashes CS3. (Geez!)

For me this issue has been a long time coming: I’ve had the top-case on my MacBook replaced at least 3 times, and amongst those trips to AppleCare the techs forgot to re-place the system identifier sticker back on my computer. By the time it was time for a new motherboard, they had no clue what my serial number was so they couldn’t enter it. I have it on my original invoice though.

There’s a guy on InsanelyMac though that seems to have picked up the image to a Serial Number Utility (for Technicians obviously).

You can check out the discussion here: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t28529.html where you’ll also find the download links.

I did it and it solved the issue! I’m set to go!

Apple Headphones Washing Machine Safe?

It seems to break this long period of silence with something so trivial, but it seemed blogworthy.

After forgetting to take the headphones out of my shirt pocket, I realized after the weekend that the shirt had gone through the wash cycle. Not sure if  it went through the dryer too, but it definitely went through the wash, and felt very very clean, but works just fine, distortion free! Not bad Apple, although I wish I could say that they last very long, they seem to withstand *certain* elements…

Things have been busy, as always. I have some photos to upload, but once again I’m stuck in this chicken-before-the-egg dillema of whether to just upload my pictures or optimize my photo management so that it’s easier to do… sigh…

The Future of 64-bit

If you keep up with the latest processor and hardware technologies you know that 64-bit is the next big thing. For more than 15 years 32-bit has been the architecture of choice for almost all computers and devices, but as the limitations (in particular in the area of RAM) begin to be more apparent, the move to 64-bit becomes more and more important.

One of the problems facing Microsoft is the slow adoption rates of x64 Windows XP and Vista. If you listen to Security Now!, you may have heard of the important security features that x64 Windows brings to the table, and essentially restructuring Windows during this transition. While some people seem to disagree with me, 64-bit Windows just doesn’t seem to be compatible enough for most users, most often running into hardware issues or just plain incompatible software, despite the fact that 32-bit apps are supposed to run just fine in the 64-bit environment.

On the Mac side, things are a bit different. Not necessarily better, but definitely different, and it will be interesting to see how things play out in 2009, as it is suspected that next year will be that of 64-bit Apps (Notably Adobe CS4, and potentially some “legacy” Carbon-coded Apple applications like Final Cut).

AppleInsider has an excellent series on the history, present, and future of 64-bit, that, while focussed primarily on the Mac platform, has an excellent overview of the Windows perspective. Check it out, it’s an excellent read.

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