Status-Q

Ah, this is cute… at least for those of us who are Mac users and have an Asterisk server managing our phone systems…

AsteriskC2D is a utility that allows you to dial a number directly from Address Book. After you’ve configured it in System Preferences you can click on a number in Address Book and choose ‘Voip Dial’. Your Asterisk server will call you and, when you pick up the phone, will call the selected number.

There are also plugins for QuickSilver and OnMyCommand which allow you to highlight a number almost anywhere in any application, and dial it on a real phone system quickly and easily.

You do need some configuration on the Asterisk server which, like most Asterisk configuration, is not for the faint-hearted, but it’s worth it.

In a wild burst of enthusiasm, I updated our other two Macs to Leopard yesterday.

These were both upgrades rather than clean installs, and I did fall foul of another glitch which can affect upgrades. It’s easy to fix once you know what’s happening, but ironically it manifests itself as an unresponsive “blue screen”, which appears when the system first boots after the OS installation and so can be a little worrying!

The issue is a third-party subsystem called ‘Application Enhancer‘ (‘APE’) which you may never knowingly have installed but which is distributed as part of a few popular utilities and so may be on your system. It doesn’t work under Leopard, which is fine, but unfortunately, early versions of APE will cause the Leopard login window to crash. If you do an Upgrade installation of Leopard, which doesn’t remove such things from your system, you never get a chance to log in to your shiny new OS!

Some argue that this isn’t really Apple’s fault, because APE puts hooks into the OS in ways that weren’t really intended, and is installed, like the Abomination of Desolation, in a place where it ought not to be. On the other hand, APE’s creator, Unsanity, point out that you have to be using a pretty elderly version of their library for this to be an issue.

Fortunately, there are various easy ways to make sure this doesn’t happen to you:

• Check, before you install, whether you have any of the following files on your machine and delete them if so:

  /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle
  

  (that’s the important one)

  /Library/Frameworks/ApplicationEnhancer.framework
  /Library/PreferencePanes/Application\ Enhancer.prefpane
  /Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist
  

• or, install the latest version of APE before beginning
• or, install Leopard by doing an ‘archive and install’ rather than an ‘upgrade’
• or, if you find you’re already in this situation, you can fix it by booting into single-user mode and running a couple of commands as described in Apple’s article on the problem.

So, perhaps because I’m a somewhat unusual user, two out of our three Macs hit issues on the Leopard install. This is bad. On the other hand, they were the most common issues others have faced too, and were quickly resolved by Googling.

I can’t comment on the long-term stability of Leopard yet, but I’m very pleased with how well everything seems to be working now it’s up and running. I was expecting a lot more pain, or at least inconvenience.

There was a nasty moment when I thought that one of my network printers wasn’t supported, but everything went much better after I went into the next room and discovered that it wasn’t actually turned on!

This is my first post from my Macbook Pro running under Leopard. So far everything is going swimmingly and I’m enjoying it a lot. As others have said, most of the improvements are under the hood, but in general I like the new stuff that is visible, and everything feels just that bit snappier. How much this is due to Leopard, and how much to the removal of a few years’ miscellaneous junk from my hard disk is hard to say, but it’s very nice.

I did a clean ‘Erase and install’, having first made a couple of clones of my disk using SuperDuper. I then used the migration assistant to copy all my docs and settings back from the clone, but I didn’t copy all the applications; I wanted to thin those out. The ones I wanted I’ve either re-installed from their original media or copied over by hand.

A couple of tips:

1. If you know that you want to do a clean install, then I suggest booting from your clone disk and using Disk Utility to format your main one before starting.

   Why? Well, during the install process each of your hard disks will be checked to see if they’re a suitable location for the installation, and then you’re able to choose between them. For some reason, certain disks can take a very long time to appear. There are various discussions about this on the Apple discussion forums, but the answer seems to be just to wait. In my case, I suspect because my hard disk was so full, it took over half an hour, with no progress indication, before the disk appeared and I could continue with the install. That was a few nights ago, and I didn’t have time to continue after that. It’s a big flaw, but it’s the only one I’ve seen in an otherwise painless upgrade process.

   This time, I had formatted the drive beforehand, and everything was very quick.

2. A new but little-known feature in Disk Utility is the ability to resize Mac partitions non-destructively. Like me, you may want to try out the very sweet new Time Machine backup system, but it needs its own disk or partition for the backups. I had a big external drive with lots of space free and was able to split it into two partitions to make space for Time Machine. This should, of course, always be done with care, and generally after, rather than before, making backups!

All in all, so far, I’m very glad I upgraded. Lots of things that I thought might not work are working just fine, and some things very much better.