eriksmartt.com/blog

3D modeling the Earth

Google SketchUp for OS X finally released to the public this week (as did Google Earth Beta 4 for OS X, Linux, and Windows, in case you missed it.) If you’re not familiar with SketchUp, but are at least remotely interested in 3D modeling, I suggest hoping over to the Google SketchUp Tutorials and having a peek. The first few tutorials elicit a jaw-dropping “it can’t be that easy” reaction.

On first glance, Google offering a 3D modeling program seems a bit strange. I mean, what could this possibly have to do with search, right? But the key is to look at it differently. If you’ve used Google Earth, odds are high that you’ve also tried looking a major city with the “3D Buildings” option enabled for that all too futuristic, flying-through-the-world experience. But what you notice when you do this is that there aren’t enough 3D models, and they tend to lack detail. So how do we get from flat, satellite photographs to rich 3D models of every building in the world? Well, you start by giving away a free, easy to use 3D modeling program that can import/export into Google Earth… And then you let your customers (happily) do the work for you. (Co-creation at it’s best.)

For more, see:

• How do I place a SketchUp model in Google Earth?
• Google’s 3D Warehouse

Below: an example SketchUp model (of the University of Texas tower) geo-positioned over a Google Earth map tile

Edit in TextMate…

If you’re a TextMate junkie, check out this “TextMate Tricks” post on the Macromates blog about the “Edit in TextMate” input manager for your Cocoa apps (like Mail.app and Safari.) Very, very handy!

SSH Tunneling on public networks

I’ve been traveling a bit this week, which means I’ve also been accessing the net on untrusted networks. For general web surfing this doesn’t both me, but when it comes to editing my blogs or accessing any web service that doesn’t authenticate over SSL, I’d feel better if I knew my passwords weren’t floating past some coffee shop’s network admin in clear text. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution: SSH tunneling.

There’s plenty of information online that describes how SSH tunneling works and how to set it up, but not surprisingly, you have to do a bit of Googling to actually find concise, step-by-step instructions that actually work. So here we go: Erik’s Three-Step Plan for Looking Like You Know What You’re Doing SSH Tunneling. (For the record, I’m using a PowerBook running OS X, tunneling to a server running Ubuntu Linux.)

[STEP 1] On the remote server I’m running Privoxy (an HTTP proxy.) On a Debian/Ubuntu box, getting Prixovy running is as complicated as typing: sudo apt-get install privoxy

[STEP 2] Assuming you can SSH into your remote server (ie., no firewall blockage), launch Terminal.app and issue something like this: ssh -N -L 8118:127.0.0.1:8118 remoteuser@serveraddress (changing “remoteuser” and “serveraddress” appropriately.) Using the -N flag you’ll still need to authenticate with the server, but you won’t actually get a command prompt — the window will just look like nothing’s happening.

[STEP 3] Tell your browser to use a proxy for HTTP and HTTPS running at 127.0.0.1 on port 8118.

You’re done! You can now hit WhatIsMyIP to see it working.

Of course, just like other three-step programs, there’s a little fine print and few extra details that might help to know:

1. Privoxy is an HTTP proxy, which translated means that instead of your browser asking a server for a web page, you’ll be asking Privoxy and Prixovy will relay the request and pass the resulting content back your way. Using a proxy is handy when: (1) You want to tunnel your browsing activity, and/or (2) When you’d like to have the proxy do some content manipulation for you (which is what Privoxy was written to do.) This content manipulation can be anything you want, but most of the time it means stripping out advertisements and possibly cleaning up bad HTML before the browser sees it.
2. If you haven’t used Privoxy before, you might want to read the docs and poke around in the config files to tweak as needed.
3. By default Privoxy runs on port 8118, hence the 8118 mapping the ssh statement.
4. Save yourself some time by storing your proxy settings for future toggling. To cover most OS X apps you’ll be creating a new Network Location for this. Go to the Apple Menu / Location / Network Preferences to create a new location profile. Toggling can be done using the Location menu under the Apple menu. For Firefox (which ignores the system-wide proxy settings), you’ll need to enter the settings directly into the Firefox’s Preferences or install the SwitchProxy Firefox plugin to enable a pop-up menu for proxy switching from the Firefox status bar.

Happy Surfing!

Apple Boot Camp: Windows XP on Apple hardware

I hope this isn’t a late April Fool’s joke, because it seems Apple has decided to officially support dual-boot on Apple hardware. It’s too late for them to collect the bounty, but Apple’s Boot Camp allows XP to run natively on Apple Intel hardware. The page also mentions that Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) will include this capability as a supported feature.

Xcode Plugin for Symbian OS

A friend sent me this link today: “Xcode Plugin for Symbian OS.” I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s the most promising OS X development solution for native Symbian apps that I’ve seen.

(Screenshots)

Great corporate blogging: Why Adobe CS2 isn’t coming to MacIntel

Here’s a great example of using a corporate blog to explain an unfortunate product decision to customers, “Living Photoshop: Macintosh and the Intel switch“.

The blogger, Scott Byer, is explaining why Adobe isn’t going to release a MacIntel version of CS2 — the summary being that transitioning their entire development over to XCode wasn’t feasible for CS2. It’s what Adobe’s Mac customers need to hear (that there’s a significant technical hurdle which didn’t make sense for a product currently in the market), but it’s not the kind of thing that a press release can explain. In other words, it’s important information, but without bloggers, there’s no clear channel for how to communicate this stuff.

It’s also of note that the comments list (the conversation) stretches far beyond the length of the original post. The customer feedback is mixed — ranging from “You guys suck, I spent $1000 on this software!”, to “Yeah, I understand the challenge first hand. Thanks for the explanation.”

iDontWork

After complaining quietly about the lack of upgrade-pricing for the new Apple iWork, I finally decided that if the new release runs faster then the current one it would be worth the upgrade. (For reference, I can type faster then Pages can display text on a 1.33 Ghz G4 PowerBook — and I’m not that fast a typist.) So I hit apple.com and placed an order.

The iWork package got here in a few days (inside a gigantic box with a bunch of that “packaged air” stuff), and I finally got around to starting the installation yesterday. I popped the CD in the PowerBook, and… the PowerBook spit it right back out. In again… ejected again. WTF? Third time’s a charm, and the CD finally mounted. I kicked off the installer… and the machine locked up. Wonderful. After ten to fifteen minutes of grinding noises from the CD drive, the OS recovered and I ejected the disk. Not one to give up easily, I rebooted the machine and make sure no apps were running before trying again. This time the CD mounted and I was able to launch the installer. However, shortly past the “100% Complete” mark, the installer popped-up an Error message and suggested I re-try. I did, with the same result.

At this point I assumed the media was bad, so over lunch I dropped by the local Apple Store. This, of course, was a mistake. Surprisingly enough, I was the only person at the Genius Bar when I was asked if I had a reservation. “No.” “Well, you can use the computers behind you to book a time-slot.” The next one free was four hours from now. “Since we’re both here, can I just ask a question?”, I ask. “Well, most questions turn out to be complicated.. but I guess. What’s the problem?” I explain the situation. “Hmm.. where did you buy this?” she asks. “Apple.com”, I say. “Oh, well we can’t help you then. We can only help if you bought the software from us. You need to call AppleCare.” I had a feeling this was going to be the answer, so I’ll just put this next line in bold for those skimming the article: You can’t get support at the Apple Store for Apple software bought from Apple.com.

Since I have a serial number and only need the installers, I did ponder just looking for a torrent, but I figured that having working media was a reasonable expectation after dropping 80 bucks for this software, so I went ahead and gave AppleCare a call. The AppleCare tech support guy was a bit more friendly, and thankfully we got it working. No need for a fancy story, but I wanted to point out the steps in case someone else needs them in the future:

1. Quit all running apps.
2. Go to /Library/Receipts/ and delete the pkg files for the app in case they’re corrupt. (In this case, the file is iWork.pkg.)
3. Delete the Application if some of it was installed (/Applications/).
4. Delete any applicable Preferences in ~/Preference/.
5. Launch Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities/.)
6. Mount the installer CD (crossing your fingers that it works.)
7. Do a “File…New…Disk Image from CD” and create a local copy of the installer CD. (NOTE: Make sure you have enough space on your hard-drive.)
8. When complete, eject the CD.
9. Use the Finder to find your new disk image, and double-click to mount it.
10. Using the Installer on the disk image, try to install the app.

When installing from the disk image, my installation completed and the apps now work. No idea what the problem was (it could have been corrupt files from the first install attempt.. it could have been a CD read error), but it’s solved now.

Failing boot drive…

Last week, the boot drive on my PowerMac (an old, 450Mhz G4 DP) finally decided that it’s time was up. Not bad considering the machine is something like 5 years old; But still, losing a drive isn’t a good thing if you’re not one to make regular backups.

The first symptom I noticed was that the machine was starting to use the “spinning beach ball” much more then normal and I was seeing some unusual delays working with local files. Thankfully, SMARTReporter quickly alerted me to the problem — the drive was dying. I started running SMARTReporter on both my machines a few months back. For awhile it seemed a little silly having a menu-bar icon for something that was unlikely to be a problem for many years. Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t change my mind about the importance of such a utility. I’m also a little surprised that OS X doesn’t notify about S.M.A.R.T. warnings unless you fire up Disk Utility. It seems like an easy enough thing for the OS to monitor, but I guess it isn’t a big deal as long as there are free utilities to do it.

Of course, knowing that a drive is failing is only useful if you’re prepared to do something about it. Thankfully I had another old drive in the parts bin, which I dropped into a Firewire enclosure and mounted. Backing up the home directories was priority number one, so I used Apple’s ditto command to mirror them. (Note: ditto is a command-line tool that ships with OS X. See man ditto for more.) With the home directories safe, I put the machine to sleep to buy some time while I picked up a new drive.

With a replacement drive in-hand, I dropped it into the Firewire case, mounted it, initialized it with Disk Utility, and fired up Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC). CCC is a disk mirroring utility that can create a bootable drive. There were a few errors along the way, but CCC was able to mirror the old boot drive onto the new one. With the cloning complete, I opened the case, swapped the old drive for the new, and rebooted. Presto! A few apps (like Quicksilver) were upset with the change, but for the most part, everything works just fine on the cloned system. And to top it off, since finding 30 GB drives isn’t easy anymore, I now have *much* more space on the boot drive!