Ivory Tower - October 2006

By Ted Bade

At the moment I am a bit miffed at Apple and its lack of useful customer support. I want to relate what happened not so much to complain about it, but as a warning. Don’t let this happen to you...

I discovered a few minor hard drive problems on our soccer ball iMac, nothing major but something that should be repaired. I decided to use a copy of Tech Tools that I was given when I bought an Apple Care warranty on my G5 PowerMac. I ran the utility and it managed to completely destroy the directory of the hard drive it was repairing. Wow!

Although I was very upset at the time, I wanted to understand why this happened. I opened a support call on my Apple Care plan and sent an email to the Tech Tools people. The outsourced support person I got when I called Apple had no idea what the problem was. Additionally, since I used the copy of Tech Tools on an older Mac, not the one that the warranty was for, they wouldn’t talk to me unless I paid. Although I was curious, I wasn’t willing to spend a lot of money looking for the answers!

I tried Apple’s discussion web site. Doing a search turned up nothing. But then I have always felt that support search sites are terrible for finding answers. The last person with a problem never phrases the question the same way you would, so important information is easily missed. Searches for too specific a item generally provide no information. If you search for too generic a term, you get so many hits that it would take weeks to read them all. So, I posted a new question on the Apple site, and waited.

The next day I got a nice reply from the Tech Tools people and on the Discussions web site. Both indicated the same thing. Apple had changed the file structure in the Tiger version of Mac OS X. Which means older version of Tech Tools will mangle the directory rather then repair it. This was what had happened with my machine.

I don’t hold the Tech Tools company Micromat, responsible for this. Their product works as promised and when it was made they had no idea the file structures would change. However, Apple could have done more to alert me, their customer and loyal fan, to this issue. I am really miffed at Apple for not letting me know that a product they sold me, if used, would destroy the directory of any Mac OS X 10.4 drive I owned. What would it have taken Apple to send an email to AppleCare customers that said something like:

“Hi Apple Care customers,

The version of TechTools we sent you as part of your Apple Care package will not work if you upgrade your machine to MacOS X 10.4. Please contact Micromat to upgrade your version of Tech Tools to a version that works with MacOS X 10.4.”

I am not even asking for a discount on the new version! I would have been very happy with a simple notice. Instead, I have a mangled hard drive. The sad thing is that Apple often touts the fact that their customers hold onto their Macs longer then PC customers hold onto their Windows-based PCs. One would think that a company who is pleased with the longevity of their machines would think about things like this. We are not talking about a very old machine. We are talking about a single OS version change. It is stuff like this that will give Apple a bad reputation for support.

So resolve my own issue I bought a copy of Data Rescue II from a company called Prosoft. This gem of a program was able to pull all the data from the drive (which by the way wouldn't even mount on the desktop), and move it to a folder. I was then able to extract those items I needed to get the machine back up and running with all the data and preferences intact. Data Rescue II recovered everything, even some files that had been deleted! Pretty cool. And yes, I did have backups of just about everything, except for a few recent photos. The funny thing is that one of the things that was almost lost in this catastrophe wasn’t data specifically, but organization.

My wife had spent a bunch of time on vacation organizing files, removing unwanted items, and updating things on that machine. While not much of the data had been changed, but hours of time were spent reorganizing the data. Luckily for me, (since it was my idea to “fix” her computer’s drive), Data Rescue II was able to keep things organized as they had been before the damage.

While we are talking about backing up data, we should consider where to back it up to. While you can backup to a CD or DVD, it is a lot faster both to backup and recover data with an external hard drive. There are a number of complete external drive packages that are available at reasonable prices. However, if you are even just a little handy with some basic tools, you can generally save money by building your own.

I recently wanted a second backup drive. A local nationwide vendor had a very good deal on a 250GB Hitachi drive (around $40 after rebates) and a FireWire/USB 2 enclosure for about the same. To build the drive, I needed to take out four screws to open the enclosure, four screws to secure the drive into the enclosure, plug two cables into the hard drive that were in the enclosure (power and data, which only go on one way and are so different its impossible to confuse which is which), push the enclosure back together, and finally replace the four enclosure screws. Five minutes maximum. Then I plugged it into my Mac’s USB 2 port and turned it on. I used Apple’s Disk Utility to format the drive (I thought about partitioning it, but didn’t). Done!

I have been using one such system for about four years. I haven’t had any problems with the drive or the data on it. Of course, I don’t run the drives all the time. I turn it on when I need to use it and back off when I am done.

Next month we will look at a program for performing incremental data backups. There are a number of programs that can help. I tried one that I think is pretty cool. We should also consider a promised feature of the soon-to-be-released Mac OS X 10.5, called Time Machine. http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.html We haven’t heard all the details yet, but apparently this feature keeps track of your data and changes to your data, so you can roll back time and recover items you lost. We could have used that feature!

When will the virus scams stop? - Back in August you might have heard about a couple of people who said they could break into a MacBook Pro in a short time. They completed the attack, keeping their method secret, since they did not want this information to become easy to do.

As with most of the malicious deeds happening to Macs these days, it later came to light that the MacBookPro they were using was modified! According to one article I found, the company that performed this attack was forced to post a disclaimer that indicated that they had modified the machine. Apparently, they could not make the attack work using a stock MacBook Pro! Take a look at their page: http://www.secureworks.com/newsandevents/blackhatcoverage.html

I am getting really, truly sick of companies spending all their time trying to “prove” that the Mac is as vulnerable as a Windows-based machine is. Heck they can’t even prove that a Mac is even vulnerable at all. All they can prove is that, if you cut holes into the Mac OS or the machine, you can use these holes to attack it. Every piece of malicious code, every attack that has occurred to date on Mac OS X has been conceptual only. If you do this, and that, (usually stupid things no users would ever do), then it can be compromised.

When I first heard about this Wi-Fi break in, I expected it would only be short while before someone pointed out they were cheating. The bad thing is that people don’t read detail, they read headlines. So these idiots managed to cause some negative PR to those people who only look at the headlines. I am afraid that eventually, without a real virus, Mac users will be scared into buying protective software. But that’s what viruses are all about, selling antivirus applications. It’s scary.

As always, I feel I must point out that I don’t believe that Mac OS X is not vulnerable. Someday probably someone will figure out how to write a real piece of malicious code for it. However, I believe that Apple and Mac OS X has two things going for them. First, as so many people like to point out, since Macs aren’t as popular as Windows machines, a malicious piece of code can cause a lot more trouble with a Windows virus. The other thing a lot of people don’t point out is that there is a lot, lot less animosity toward the Macintosh and Apple than towards Windows and Microsoft. There are many people who feel that Microsoft’s business model is not totally ethical. Not to mention hurting the goliath of the computer age is a sure way to get a feather in one’s cap!

Apple on the move - In August, Apple released versions of both its server and Pro desktop lines which include an Intel CPU. Also at the WWDC keynote Steve and company provided a very nice early demonstration of Mac OS X 10.5.

This new OS has a few features that look like they might be very useful. If you want to learn about what’s coming in 10.5, visit the Apple website: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/index.html

There are a number of interesting items to learn about.

In mid September, barely a month later, Apple made another announcement. This time it was all about the iPod and the iTMS. You probably heard they released a new version of iTunes and are now making movies available through the iTMS.

I have never been a fan of squint graphics, those graphics that you need to squint at to see ’cause they are so small. Sure, it is cool that you can take a video or TV show with you on a small device, but I just never got into watching tiny graphics!

One of the better aspects of Apple making movies available, is they upped the size of the video to 640x480 video, much larger then the previous version. Of course, doing this meant that the iPods and iTunes, and QuickTime needed to be updated, which they were.

If you haven’t tried the new version of iTunes yet, you might want to consider the upgrade. It is one of the most impressive versions I have seen. [Special note: at the end of September some issues with this new version of iTunes were popping up. I haven't experienced anything myself.]

The appearance of the program is a lot slicker. Apple modified iTunes to take advantage of album art. There are two views that let you search for music using it! I found this very fascinating. If you ripped your own CDs, iTunes will download the album art for them as well, as long as they have it.

The free album art works in theory, although, you might have to play with your MP3 tags to get it to work. A number of my own ripped albums came up blank. Of course, most of these items aren’t available at the iTMS (this surprised me since I have some exotic music tastes!). I happened to find a neat little Widget called Amazon Art that will search Amazon.com’s database for album art for you while you play a song. It works very well and I had a lot of fun playing a wide variety of my music! It let mes finish my album art database. It also can send the search to Google images so you can browse artwork and perhaps find what you are looking for;

http://www.dashboardwidgets.com/showcase/details.php?wid=1395

Another really cool feature of the new iTunes is the organization. As long as items in your library are properly labeled, you can pop into video, movies, music, radio streams, etc section. Previously, you needed to run a search for a type such as audio book or video. Overall, I really like the new version of iTunes!

I expect that selling movies through the iTMS will do well. About a week after the launch, Disney corporation pointed out that they sold 125,000 movies through the iTMS, making about $1 million in profit.

I haven’t tried one of the iTMS movies yet, so I have no personal idea what the quality is like. Also, not being a collector of movies, I am generally content to catch them at the theatre or on the Pay-Per-View cable feature.

A couple of other things that Mr. Jobs brought up at this presentation are also interesting; First of all that the iTMS accounts for 88% of the legal music downloads! Wow, that is quite impressive! Along this same line, Apple’s music store is now the 5th largest retailer of music in the US. While this means there are companies selling more music, all of those companies above Apple sell hard CDs and only some sell online. This makes me believe that digital music sales are definitely a force to be considered! Oh yeah, I forgot to point out that Apple is the largest seller of music in the 21 countries that it sells music.

Well, that is enough for this month. Lots and lots of new technology for us to consider and play with, and more is on the horizon.