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I tried setting up internet sharing on OS X today and it wasn’t as intuitive as you might expect. My Mac Mini is connected to my home network using an Airport connection. I wanted to share that connection through the ethernet port so I could run a VOIP phone in that same room. I turned on internet sharing in the Sharing preference panel expecting that to be all I would have to do, but it didn’t work. It couldn’t find a DHCP server.

I dragged out my laptop so that I would have a better chance of finding out why the DHCP server was there. I connected it to the ethernet of the Mac Mini and still didn’t get a DHCP server. I did some searches on the internet to see if this was a known problem. Apparently, internet sharing isn’t quite as simple as flipping a switch.

The problem with internet sharing is that the computer doing the sharing must have the appropriate IP address in order to share. If your Airport has an IP address like 192.168.1.1, your ethernet IP address must be set to 192.168.2.1. If you have addresses like 10.0.1.1, then the IP address of your ethernet port must be set to 10.1.2.1. It looks like these values are hard-coded by Apple. So if you are connected using Airport and want to share your ethernet, this is what you have to do:

1. Go to the Network preferences and see what IP address your aiport connection has.
2. Go to the ethernet section of the network preferences and change the DHCP setting to DHCP with manual address. Set the address to the same number as the airport IP address with the last two digits set to 2 and 1 (e.g., 192.168.1.3 => 192.168.2.1).
3. Restart/Start internet sharing in the Sharing preference panel

This should get your internet sharing working, but you may still have to change your DNS setup on the computers you are sharing the connection with. They will use your sharing computer as the DNS server which probably isn’t what you want. You should change the DNS values in any client computer to the same DNS settings of the Airport in the computer that is sharing the connection.

Setting this up was actually a bit more complicated than I expected. I’m really surprised that it isn’t documented better somewhere.

I recently install Apple’s latest version of OS X Snow Leopard. So far I have to say I’m not terribly impressed. About the only enhancement that makes any difference to me is the Exchange support, and most people don’t need that. Anyway, I’ve had a few problems in other areas with Snow Leopard and installing ReportLab is one of them.

I did some digging around on the internet and found a lot of partial solutions, but nothing that completely worked for me. What finally did the trick was the following.

cd /Developer/SDKs
sudo mv MacOSX10.4u.sdk MacOSX10.4u.sdk.bak
sudo ln -s MacOSX10.5.sdk MacOSX10.4u.sdk
sudo CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.0 ARCHFLAGS='-arch x86' python setup.py install

Not pretty, but it gets the job done.

I tried out MacFUSE and SSHFS a few months ago when I started to work remotely. While the connection speed was much faster than SMB, the connections weren’t very stable. Any type of network disruption (including sleep) would cause the machine to lock up. The only way to get operation of the machine back to normal was by rebooting (ick!). After a couple of days of that, no amount of speed increase was worth it; I had to go back to SMB.

Recently, I’ve been getting fed up with the slowness of SMB again, so I thought I’d check on the status of MacFUSE and see if they’d made any progress. Lucky for me, they had been working very hard on it. The most recent version of MacFUSE is much more stable. It doesn’t lock up my machine any more. Now when it loses a connection, it displays a window asking if you want to try to reconnect on to eject. This is a huge improvement.

Everything isn’t sunshine and roses though. While it doesn’t lock up the machine, the reconnection dialog has never worked for me. In order to reconnect, I have to cd out of any mounted directories in any open shells, then unmount and remount. I guess I’ll see in the next few days if this remaining annoyance drives me batty. Hopefully some day soon they’ll have a fix for this as well.

While it’s always possible to script an Applescript Studio Application using GUI scripting, it’s pretty clunky to constantly be referring to windows and buttons. The good news is that it’s not too difficult to add custom commands to your application. However, you will need to know some Objective-C to do this.

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Apple is always being touted as a “hardware” company. This comes from the fact that their real profits come from the sale of computer hardware. The software they write is really just written to facilitate the sale of that hardware. It is believed that their markup on hardware is around 30%; not a bad profit. But in this day of Dell computers that start at $299, most people can’t imagine spending $1500 for a basic Apple computer.

However, the recent announcement about future Macintosh computers running on Intel processors instead of PowerPC processors has really shifted the landscape in my mind. Many people are dreaming about low priced Macintosh computers or dual-booting Microsoft Windows and OS X, but I don’t think either of those are ideas that Apple is interested in. I really don’t see that using Intel chips is going to reduce the price of Macintosh computers significantly. Why would Apple do that if that’s where their money is coming from? And, I’m quite sure that Apple has no interest in you running a Microsoft operating system on their machines. It occurred to me that this might just be a contingency plan.

If you haven’t noticed, for a “hardware company” Apple sure does create a lot of high quality software: OS X, iTunes, iDVD, iMovie, GarageBand, iPhoto, Keynote, Pages, Final Cut, Motion, Shake, etc. Currently, these are only sold to the small percentage of people who own Macintosh computers, which is a pretty tiny percentage compared to those that run Wintel systems. It seems to me that a company with this much software could live pretty comfortably if all of this software was available for commodity hardware. Apple switching to Intel might just be the first step to that end. Think about it, if this Intel plan starts to turn sour, Apple could turn to Dell to create systems that run OS X, and the rest of Apple’s software. This could very easily bring a large enough influx of OS X users on Dell systems to compensate for the profit losses on the hardware. I would expect the prices of things like OS X and iLife to increase to compensate even more though.

As the years go by, this switch to a non-hardware company seems more and more likely to me. Every year Apple tends to use more PC hardware in their Macs, and in my mind, are becoming less integrated and appliance-like as in the days of yore. Personally, it saddens me to see this as Apple is the only remaining bastion of hope for true innovation in personal computing. Let’s just hope that my premonitions of Apple are wrong.

I installed Tiger today on my Powerbook. I hate to say it, but it didn’t go too well. I guess it was partially my fault. I tried to do an “archive install,” but the free space on my aging hard drive was pretty minimal. The installer said that I had enough space, but it was wrong. The archive went fine, and the install worked, but it failed to put my user accounts and settings back. I was able to move the user accounts from the archive into the new installation, but the network settings were just gone.

Once I started using Tiger, I got a little more annoyed. I use a Dvorak keyboard mapping instead of Qwerty. For some reason, whenever any application pops up a window to authenticate you, it switches the keyboard to Qwerty. This is *really* annoying. I worked around it by making Dvorak the only choice of keyboard in my account.

Another thing that irritates me is the new look of Mail. Why in the world did they create *another* style of toolbar. It just makes no sense. Especially, when they made it uglier than the normal toolbar. Performance-wise, though, the new Mail does seem to be improved.

While my first impressions certainly aren’t glowing like they usually are after installing a new version of OS X, one feature does shine through: Spotlight. Searching for things on a computer has never been this easy.