Microsoft Office:Mac for the Retina Display

Microsoft released update 14.2.4 for Office:mac on September 19. One of the major improvements was support for the new Retina displays featured on Apple's new Macbook Pro line-ups. I installed the update, only to find that the new applications still launched in the low resolution mode.

I checked the Info.plist file and found that Microsoft has indeed enabled the "High Resolution Capable" mode, as can be seen below:

<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key><true/>

For some reason, Info.plist was not being loaded when launching the application. After searching, I found a simple hint to force Info.plist to load. Mac OS re-loads Info.plist if the application file's timestamp has changed. So, onwards to Terminal.app, and a few "touch"es got my office applications to launch in the beautiful high resolution mode which I have become so accustomed to!

cd "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/"

touch "Microsoft Word.app"

touch "Microsoft Excel.app"

touch "Microsoft Powerpoint.app"

Voila! The difference is just gorgeous.

As a last word, I will say that the only reason holding me back from switching over to Keynote is the poor implementation of vector graphics and total lack of "Smart Art Objects". This is a big win for Powerpoint over Keynote.

Wallpaper reverts to default "galaxy" at startup

Several users have been complaining about the Desktop Wallpaper reverting back to the default "galaxy" image when starting Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Refer discussion.

Apple will of course take its sweet time in fixing this issue. In the meantime, here is a workaround. I tried to force Dock.app to restart using the command:

killall -HUP Dock

This caused the wallpaper to be properly updated on my primary desktop. Note that I use ML's "Spaces" feature and I have four virtual desktops. Virtual desktop 2, 3 and 4 display the proper updated wallpaper even upon startup. The problem lies only with the primary desktop.

To make this process easy, I have created an application called "Killall Dock.app". Drop this in your Applications folder and include this item in your Login Items (from System Preferences > Users & Accounts).

Download "Killall Dock.app"

Wrapper application "Killall Dock.app" created using the awesome Platypus.app :)

iPhoto 9.3.2 generating high resolution thumbnails

I am in the process of migrating to a new machine, one with the awesome Retina display! Migration has always been a slow and painful process consuming 3-4 weekends. Most of the time is wasted in dealing with undocumented frustration, where things are subtly changed around enough to break everything else that depends upon it.

My recent annoyance has been with iPhoto 9.3.2. Granted that iPhoto 9.3.2 has been a welcome update. Apple has finally started paying attention to non-iOS software for a change. iPhoto is optimized for systems with the Retina display. Upon first launch, it prompted me to "generate high resolution thumbnails". I kept putting off the task for quite a while, but the nagging was quite persistent and I finally gave in.

To my utter frustration, a simple process like thumbnail generation takes more than 24 hours! Here's the progress meter after letting it run for 26+ hours:

I honestly hope it doesn't report an error at the end of this lengthy process :) Apple, have you really tested your software with real-life photo libraries? After about 9 years of iLife, it is expected that users will have a large accumulation of photographs. My photo library has more than 70,000 pictures. Spending 26 hours for generating thumbnails is ridiculous. That too on a 4 core i7 processor, with 16GB of RAM and an SSD hard drive.

Apple is going the Microsoft way indeed.

GPGTools, MacGPG2 and the IDEA cipher

I am one of those (un)fortunate guys who started using PGP encryption since 1998. It has been 14 years now and contrary to common belief, things have become increasingly more cumbersome to use. Cryptography on a day-to-day basis is hard to handle. This comes from a person actively participating in the information security arena. When I think of how average users would fare with cryptography, I shudder.

Ok, enough of rants, on to technical stuff. Upgrading to Mac OS X Lion saw a fair share of a few weekends getting sucked up in worthless non-productive technical housekeeping. Macports broke as usual. Downloading XCode took almost an entire day. But the greatest pain was offered by GPGMail and GPGTools.

For years, GPGMail had been floundering. Thanks to the valiant effort of a team of volunteers, the small community that insists on using Apple's Mail.app but needs PGP/GPG support still stays afloat. My problem this time was not directly related to GPGMail integration with Mail.app (as was the case with my Leopard to Snow Leopard migration. Those were dark days for GPGMail).

My problem with GPG/PGP has always been the dropped support for the IDEA cipher. When I first created my PGP keypair in 1998, it used the IDEA cipher. Today, because some patent encumberance issues, the IDEA cipher got dropped out. Therefore, every time I upgrade MacGPG, I have to recompile the package with IDEA support. I did that successfully, and my gpg2 output now shows:

$ gpg2 --version

gpg (GnuPG/MacGPG2) 2.0.18

libgcrypt 1.5.0

Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.

There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Home: ~/.gnupg

Supported algorithms:

Pubkey: RSA, ELG, DSA

Cipher: IDEA, 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH, AES, AES192, AES256, TWOFISH, CAMELLIA128,

CAMELLIA192, CAMELLIA256

Hash: MD5, SHA1, RIPEMD160, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, SHA224

Compression: Uncompressed, ZIP, ZLIB, BZIP2

So far so good. The problems started occuring when using the passphrase. For some insane reason, gpg2 never accepted my secret key's passprhase. I tried searching for hours at end on issues with pinentry, gpg2, IDEA, gpg-agent and what not, but no avail. I would be greeted with an "Invalid passphrase" message every time.

My solution? Get rid of the damn passphrase. I have had enough. I agree that I am a crypto wuss. The only way of getting rid of the passphrase was to migrate my key pair to a Linux machine and use GPG 1.4 on it. Oh yes, I had to recompile IDEA support for GPG 1.4 on my Linux machine as well.

Steps to enable IDEA support on GPG 1.4 for Linux:

wget http://www.spywarewarrior.com/uiuc/gpg-idea/idea.c.gz

gunzip idea.c.gz

gcc -Wall -O2 -shared -fPIC -o idea idea.c

cp idea /usr/lib/gnupg

Edit ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf. Add the following line:

load-extension idea

Now your Linux GPG 1.4 will support the IDEA cipher. Almost there.

Removing the passphrase from my secret key:

gpg --status-fd 1 --command-fd 0 --edit-key root@example.com < input

and here's the input file:

passwd

old_password

Y

save

Y

Last step, migrate pubring.gpg and secring.gpg back to my Mac. GPGMail works great. Yes, I feel a little insecure because I don't have a passphrase on my secret key anymore, but it is something I will trade off for a working mailer that uses PGP encryption. Crypto afficionados are now permitted to let loose their tirades and criticisms against me.