This was so harrowing an experience that I thought I would document it here for those who may be searching for solutions to this problem. My own searches yielded no results which could just mean that this problem was peculiar to me (and was caused by some meddling on my part!). Keep in mind the usual warnings. Now on to my experience…

I have Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Panther) on my PowerPC laptop and decided (for reasons not worth going into here) to install the latest version (9.0) of the Adobe/Macromedia Flash Player. The player can be downloaded at this page on Adobe.
The problems start right away. The correct option for my platform is Option 2 (PowerPC-based Macs) on the above page. However, there are two links under that section. One is an image with a downward pointing arrow (to signify “download” I presume) and the other is the text “Download .dmg file”. Problem: they point to different binaries! One (the arrow) points to a 7.0 binary (a Mac Classic one, I think) while the DMG link points to the right binary (9.0.x.x). There is a star next to the “Download .dmg file” link, but it seems to point to nowhere.

Fortunately, I did download the 9.0.x.x DMG. The install went well, but when I relaunched Firefox and Safari, the former displayed a blank box where flash content would be, while the latter displayed an error intimating that the Flash player plugin could not be loaded. A look at the console log showed that a necessary file was absent in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/Flash Player.plugin.

Next step: the usual uninstall/reinstall attempt. I downloaded the uninstaller from Adobe… well, there are two uninstallers linked to in two separate pages. The first one froze my computer requiring a hard reboot (probably my impatience after waiting for 10 minutes is somewhat to blame). The second did the trick and carried out the uninstall. A re-install however made no difference.

Time to get dangerous: I carried out one more uninstall, followed by removing all the flash related files and folders in the above-mentioned plugins directory. An attempt to re-install produced a Permission Denied error. I have seen that one before in a different context! Onwards to the Disk Utility to select my main disk and run Repair Permissions on it.

That did the trick. Re-installing from the 9.0.x.x DMG brought Flash back to life on both Safari and Firefox.

Trying to install PHP5 in DarwinPorts on MacOS X 10.3 (Panther) was so gruelling an experience that I thought I would document it here, for reference. A lot of it was made difficult by just the lack of information (such as where a particular package may be found).

I have 10.3.9 running on my Mac and already had DarwinPorts, X11 and XCode installed (the reason I mention the last two applications will become clear in a second). I also have Apache installed (1.3.3) and wanted to run some of my PHP code on the local webserver. Turns out I do not have PHP installed. No worries, port install php5 you say. That’s where the trouble started:

The port system failed while attempting to fetch some dependencies (cclient). Perhaps an update of DarwinPorts might solve that? Well, the update failed with complaints of missing X11 headers, to be found in the X11 SDK. The message was friendly enough to point out that the SDK was available as part of XCode. Unfortunately, it looks like I did not choose to install the SDK when I installed XCode (btw XCode — 1.x — is available for Panther, contrary to some web pages, and can be downloaded from the Apple Developer Connection after you register and login — for free).

To install the X11 SDK, what is needed is the X11SDK.pkg which unfortunately is not available for download, AFAICT, from the Apple download site (X11User.pkg is what you get when you download X11 from Apple). The X11 SDK, as intimated by DarwinPorts, is indeed available in XCode. Download XCode (1.5 in my case) and mount the dmg. You will find within, a directory named Packages which contains the sought after X11SDK.pkg. Install and enjoy!

You may be wondering at this point: what of my PHP5 install? That, I am sad to report, is still failing on installing cclient which it is trying to obtain from imap-2004g.tar.Z which is a version that does not seem to exist on the mirrors. I need to poke further…

Update: I gave up on PHP5 but did manage to successfully install PHP4.

Maopost.com has some (as you may have guessed) vintage Chinese propaganda posters. Check it out. If you really like themther eis even a Dashboard Widget to display the poster of the day on your desktop.

Most of you probably have a desktop computer, perhaps also a laptop, one or more hand-held device (Palm computer, iPod, etc), and a mobile/cell phone (and there is also the home phone, but I will ignore that here). The standard problem: keeping the information sync'ed up between all of them, without needing data re-entry.

What data?

At the least, contact/addressbook information, and calendar/task entries. Stuff that falls under the PIM (Personal Information Manager/Management) cloud.

How is it accessed?

You would think that in the Internet age you would store the information on a central server and access it using standard protocols supported by client applications. That, it turns out in my experience, is tougher than I would have thought.

The technology

If you live in a pure Microsoft world (Windows on your PC, laptop, handheld and mobile phone) you probably can stop reading, at this point, and add a comment exhorting me to come over to your side! Windows probably does a decent job of Sync'ing between your computer and your handheld or mobile phone. Throw in an exchange server and you probably get syncing across computers as well. Well, what about the rest of us?

The standard technologies (well, one of the standards: as the saying goes, the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!) for contact and calendar information are LDAP directories and iCalendar based calendar subscriptions and import/export.

Surprisingly both LDAP and iCalendar are supported by today's addressbook, email and calendar applications, including: Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Sunbird, Apple Addressbook (and hence Mail), Microsoft Outlook (from what I know), the many GNU/Linux/GNOME/KDE applications (Kmail, Evolution, Kontact, etc).

Well, are we done, then?

Annoyances

Unfortunately there are many annoyances to deal with:

• There aren't many free or commercial LDAP directory services available on the net. In fact, the only one I have found, which I highly recommend, is ScheduleWorld (which provides not just LDAP directories, but also standards based calendar service). This general lack of LDAP services pretty much nixes sharing your addressbook.

• Mozilla Thunderbird (to my knowledge) does not support lookup across multiple LDAP addressbooks for address completion, making use of LDAP just another bit tougher.

• Access to remote information is not a viable option today on iPods and various mobile phones. They do not support LDAP or iCalendar access to your information. The good news is that many of them provide two way synchronization (where applicable) using applications and drivers on your computer.

• There are a large set of iCalendar based calendar services available (e.g: the aforementioned ScheduleWorld, Google Calendar) As always there is a catch… well two in this case:
  • Most calendaring services use a publish/subscribe model and not a synchronization model. In other words, you can publish your Apple iCal or Mozilla Sunbird calendar to the server, or subscribe to your server calendar on one of these applications, but you typically cannot update either willy-nilly and have them synchronize with each other.
  • Free/Busy information: in order to schedule events involving multiple individuals, their free/busy information needs to centrally stored, accessible to the others. In a web-only system, this is trivial. In our multi-tool scenario, free/busy information needs to be synchronized.

Is there hope?

There is hope for the future, but my investigation has found nothing with enough coverage to make it worthwhile. The exception, if any, is ScheduleWorld. As far as I know, these are your options:

• Use a fixed write (write the information using only one interface), publish to server, and subscribe from many, model: either store your data in an application that supports pushing it to a server or store it on the server. Subscribe from all relevant clients.

• Use a service like ScheduleWorld which gives you: web-based read/write access to both calendar and contacts, a Java based multi-platform client to accomplish the same, and open interfaces (LDAP, iCalendar) for your multiple client applications. Beware of Apple Addressbook weirdness: not only does it often not import LDIF entries (from LDAP directories), it also does not sync LDAP directory entries to the iPod).

• Wait for better SyncML support.

• Hack up your own or use open source scripts to import data into client applications from public services such as Google Calendar.

• Use a service like Plaxo (which has come under much scrutiny and criticism, all of which you can read easily through a Google search on Plaxo) which synchronizes (only your contact list though) across multiple platforms (Apple Addressbook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook) and provides a web interface.

In my earlier entry on Mac software, I forgot one that is absolutely brilliant and a big help for those who have multiple computers, such as a workplace Windows PC. Synergy is a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse sharing application) without the V. In other words, it lets you share your keyboard and mouse across multiple systems, even if they run different OSes (MacOS, Windows, Linux, etc). Displays can be chained so that moving the mouse across the border of one takes you to the next computer. Even cut and paste works across systems and screensaver synchronization is possible (for some platforms).

Below are a set of applicationsy that nobody with a Mac should live without. Well some of them may just be eye candy but then again, eye candy is what a Mac is all about ;-). Non-freeware products are marked with the suffix [$].

	Adium Multi-protocol Chat client that supports all the major services (Google, Yahoo, AIM, Hotmail, ICQ). Sports a great UI, supports Growl notification, lot of nice themes/templaets for chat window. Based on libGaim so suffers from the same lack of YMSG over HTTP support (which means Yahoo may not work if you are behind a corporate firewall). Alternatives: Fire, Proteus
	CyberDuck FTP and SFTP client/browser with support for Rendezvous/Bonjour. Provides bookmarking for frequently visited sites and synchronization with remote sites. Also supports resumption of transfers. Alternatives: Fugu, Fetch[$], Transmit[$], RBrowser, Interarchy[$]
	Desktop Manager Expose is nice but as any Unix-head will tell you a Windowing system is nothing without a Virtual Window Manager, and that’s where Desktop Manager comes in. Use your single physical screen as multiple virtual screens with neat transition effects, a desktop pager that can auto-hide, configurable shortcuts, and the ability to move windows across virtual screens and even make them sticky on all screens. The biggest drawback is the lack of a way to denote certain apps as always sticky At least an easier way should exist (such as a graphical button in the application titlebar) to make it sticky. Alternatives: Virtue
	Ecto Ecto is a multi-platform blogging client that supports a wide range of Blog servers and services (WordPress, Blogger, MovabeType, LiveJournal, etc). The UI is straightforward, the rich-text editor provides a good idea of the final look and feel, and there are some additional goodies such as inserting links from Amazon search. Ecto is not free, however. Alternatives: Qumana, Bleezer, Xjournal, MarsEdit[$]
	FireFox Unarguably the best web browser available! ;-) Tabbed browsing, fine-tuned privacy (cookies, forms, etc), zillions of extensions, and that’s about 1% of the available features. Forget that old notion that a Mac is best used with the inbuilt tools. Safari is no substitute for a real web browser. Alternatives: Camino, Mozilla, Opera, OmniWeb[$]
	Growl Growl is a notification system that provides other applications the means to notify the user of events. Various applications (including many listed here, such as Adium) support Growl notification. Notifications are customizable. Also See: GrowlTunes, HardwareGrowler, NetGrowler
	iEatBrainz CDDB etc are nice if you are playing, ripping or storing albums, but what about individual songs? For that you need the MusicBrainz service. And iEatBrainz is a client that lets you tag your iTunes collection (AAC or MP3) using acoustic matching from MusicBrainz.
	iTerm Terminal.App is for babies. iTerm adds the features that any Unixhead used to KDE/Gnome absolutely needs. For example: tabs for multiple remote terms. X style cut and paste. And a few other nice features.
	NeoOffice OpenOffice.org based office application suite that can read and write Microsoft Office files (Word, PowerPoint, Excel). Its a bit slow and sometimes has problems with advanced formats in MS files, but does the job for the 90th percentile. Alternatives: OpenOffice.org
	Quicksilver A launcher with an amazing number of features. Launch applications, visit bookmarks, setup custom shortcuts, open files, all with simple key shortcuts. Alternatives: Butler
	Taco HTML Edit A neat HTML editor that provides the basic set of features that makes it useful. Others like n|vu provide better WYSIWYG support but make it surprisingly more difficult to edit a page (such as by fixing table and cell widths, to use a random example). Taco provides a Live Preview that suffices to see what your HTML looks like. It also enables quick insertion of tags, performs syntax highlighting, etc. Alternatives: n|vu
	Thunderbird If Safari is inadequate compared to Firefox, Mail.app is a joke compared to Thunderbird. The list of features in T’Bird requires a separate web page altogether, but here are a few: multiple accounts with multiple identities, filtering, searching, labelling, Virtual Folders, LDAP addressbook, GPG (Enigmail), message aging, etc.
	Vienna RSS newsreader with inbuilt page viewer, tabs support, categories (including dynamic “smart folders” defined using filters — very useful for deleting those pesky “Open Threads” ;-)). One feature that would be nice is OPML synchronization with a service like Bloglines. Alternatives: BlogBridge, Feed, Jager, Lektora, , NetNewsWire[$], NewsMac, PulpFiction, Strider[$], Bloglines, NewsGator, Shrook, Gritwire, and various other online news aggregators (Yahoo, Google, FeedLounge[$], etc).
Other Useful Tools
Eavesdrop: packet sniffer Saft add-on for Safari Screen Spanning Doctor: MacOS support for screen resolution limits it to the highest available on your iBook/PowerBook, though it can support higher resolutions, such as on an external monitor. Screen Spanning Doctor helps you not only extend your screen to an external monitor, but also helps support the higher resolution.
What’s Missing?
A nice Podcast client. At least for me, iTunes, iPodder, etc do not cut it. If you do not have Tiger and want something similar to Dashboard try Konfabulator or KeepAnEye Better LDAP support in the AddressBook. Currently subscribing to external directories is a crapshoot — it may work, it may not!

The much awaited MacExpo Jobs keynote brought forth a much expected bit of news: the Intel based Macs are out, starting with the iMac and a new MacBook laptop. The Intel iMacs are priced the same as the G5s. So, will the prices of G5 iMacs drop? In the real world it probably would… but this is Mactopia and my guess is not…