fiat voluntas Tua [translation]

I've been sick lately. Cough, cough.

So sick, in fact, that I decided it was time to install Panther. I like many of its fancy new features, and it's got a lot of obvious things that were missing from previous releases (such as password locking for screen savers and sleep mode), but still has some of the problems that have bugged me for a while.

The main one that's annoyed me was exacerbated by the necessity of clearing disk space to accomodate the fancy new developer toys in Panther. I had to delete the never-used Netscape, and then when trying to access an FTP link via Safari, it tried calling up Netscape. Silly Safari!

So I go hunting in System Preferences for the fix. Then I check file associations. Then I hunt through Help. I try Safari's preferences. No luck.

Finally I resort to a Google search and find this page, which solves the problem for me. Odd how Microsoft announced back in June 2003 that IE would no longer be developed for Mac OS X, yet an integral part of the system configuration is dependent on IE (or editing an XML file, though I'm not sure most Mac users would want to muck about thusly). Even odder is how Apple's website seems to contradict Microsoft's lack of enthusiasm for continued development of IE for OS X.

At any rate, at least that problem seems to be fixed now. Other upgrade headaches with the system were minor:

• I'm running out of room on my iBook--stripping out everything but the "basic" software leaves me with less than a Gigabyte of hard drive space. My Cube is faring a little better, but it could probably use a HD upgrade sometime soon, too.
• Every time I upgrade OS X, I have to go through and reselect various color options, and it always takes me a while to get used to the new colors. I'm not sure why this is, though in Panther it's mostly because the Desktop filename highlighting is cutesy rounded on the ends now.
• The graphical CPU Monitor from 10.2 is replaced with a fancier Activity Monitor, which means I had to hunt around to replace it properly in my Taskbar (a minor annoyance, but it stands out). Now if only I could figure out how to change the colors it uses.
• I had to remind the system to use 24-hour formatting on the system clock. Lame.
• While installing, the entire installation ground to a halt when it couldn't update iTunes. I tried again (taking iTunes out of the upgrade options), and it worked fine. I went back and tried installing iTunes, and it had the same problem. I consulted the error messages and found that it was a problem in /Library/Receipts/iTunes.pkg -- apparently my Cube had used a waaaaaaay older version of iTunes at one point, and the installer couldn't handle something in there. So I mv'd that directory to a .bak version and tried again; finally the installer figured out that I had a newer version of iTunes already installed, so it did nothing.

• I finally figured out how to use my Cube as an AirPort base station (not sure if this was possible before, but it was definitely easier in this version, but then I wouldn't have to worry about this at all if an AirPort Extreme firmware update hadn't completely hoerked my non-Extreme AirPort basestation).
• gcc and g++ are included with the Developer Tools (again, not sure if they were available before, but including Developer Tools in the box is nice).
• pico is included in the Developer Tools! (Hmm, too many of these items are just gushing about Developer Tools inclusions.)
• Preview now supports text searches! No more need for Acrobat at all (though that worries me since Adobe's a local employer--I guess they'll still get a little business from Windows users).
• X11 comes standard! Well, sorta--I had to go back and reinstall it when I noticed that it isn't installed by default (why not??), and the previous 10.2 version of X11 doesn't work under 10.3.
• Exposé looks way cool, though I still haven't gotten into the habit of actively using it.
• The fast user switching is great, makes me almost wish I was sharing my computer with other people. Almost.
• FileVault is spiffy but takes up a LOT of diskspace if you use it to encrypt all your mp3's.
• "Secure Empty Trash" -- finally something to truly get rid of that incriminating evidence you people have lurking on your HD.
• Mail allows me to view images now, but doesn't load them by default. How cool is that? (Hint: It's pretty damn cool.)

Last updated by eric Sat Dec 20 12:04 2003 | deed | link