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.

Calvin and Hobbes GoComics Widget

My family and I are sworn Calvin and Hobbes fans. I have followed Calvin and Hobbes on my Mac's Dashboard Widget called FreeComics. FreeComics used to pull many comic strips from gocomics.com. A few days ago, GoComics changed the URL format for Calvin and Hobbes and made it very difficult to link to the image file. As a result, my widget stopped working and I was left wanting for Calvin and Hobbes. Reading the newspaper is unthinkable. Indian newspapers' quality decays exponentially. The quality of journalism and ethics is lower than a worm's belly button.

I had to find an alternative for my Calvin and Hobbes Dashboard Widget. There was no way I was going to visit GoComics.com's website for my daily dose of C&H and nor was I going to subscribe to their email service.

The solution was absolutely elegant and brilliant. For quite a while now, Safari has provided a feature called Web Clips. Web Clips allow you to take a snippet of any web page and place it in your Dashboard as a widget. So all I had to do was:

a) Navigate to http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes in Safari.

b) Click on the Web Clips icon (the one with a scissor).

c) Mouse over the comic image and select the nearest matching web page element.

d) Click in the selected element and adjust the size if needed.

When done, click Add in the top right bar, and voila, you have your Dashboard web clip! Enjoy your comics distraction-free!

iPhoto '11 nightmare

My nightmare in getting rid of iPhoto '11 and downgrading to iPhoto '09 lasted 48 hours. What's wrong with iPhoto '11? Plenty of things! Here's a little list:

• Slow. iPhoto '11 is slower by a few orders of magnitude as compared to iPhoto '09. Speed of response is just unacceptable.
• Complex paths to simple operations. In iPhoto '09, I used to be able to edit event names, album names, descriptions very easily, with a single click. Not so anymore. The information window in iPhoto '11 is just clumsy and non-intuitive.
• Places. This is a killer, and this is what prompted me to downgrade. I don't own a GPS enabled camera. I tend to manually enter location information by dropping a pin on the map. This used to be very simple. Click on the information icon on the photo, search for your place and drop the pin. Now what we have is a tiny rectangle in the information window and a clumsy method to drop a pin. It is frustratingly impossible to accurately pinpoint your location. Also, there's a bug which causes duplicate letters to appear when typing for a place name!

My nightmare:

My TimeMachine disk had failed. I had to re-format it after I upgraded to iPhoto '11. There was no possibility of a rollback.

The solution:

Initially, I tried iPhoto Library Manager. This is a wonderful piece of work, thought out meticulously by someone who understands the needs of proper photo management. While it is aimed at merging and splitting multiple iPhoto libraries, I used it for its "Rebuild Library" feature. iPLM can rebuild a photo library based on all the metadata it can find.

To rebuild your library:

• Delete iPhoto '11
• Install iPhoto '09
• Apply the software updates to iPhoto '09 (I had to apply two updates)
• Install iPhoto Library Manager
• Open iPhoto Library Manager, select your default photo library and hit Rebuild Library.
• iPhoto will be launched by iPLM and you will see your photos being imported and metadata being applied.
• Wait for a long time. My 45000 photos took 30 hours to import and fall in place.

After iPLM finished its job, I had a properly rebuilt iPhoto library, except I lost all my geo-tagging data. iPLM is still unable to read and apply Places data from the new library. I believe future updates of iPLM will make this possible, but as of this writing, this isn't the case.

I had geo-tagged a lot of photos. Losing my geographical data was unacceptable. Luckily, I maintain a second backup of all my photos - slightly less frequently than TimeMachine. I use rsync to backup my photos to another hard disk. Restoring from this backup would mean losing the last three months worth of photographs.

My next step was to export the last three months' photos to another folder, delete the iPhoto library, restore from my rsync backup and re-import the photos from the last three months. I had to re-tag and re-apply some of the metadata, but it is easier to do so for three months worth of photos than re-applying geo-tags for the entire library.

Lessons to be learned:

• If you value your photos, maintain a second backup in addition to TimeMachine. You may use Carbon Copy Cloner to do the job. I love CCC!
• Don't upgrade in haste without having a proper rollback support!

iPhoto '11 is nothing but a redesigned interface and a boatload of new templates. Again, DO NOT upgrade to iPhoto '11. Apple, have you done your QA at all? Or are you totally engrossed in all your iPods and iPads and iDoodads?

Do NOT upgrade to iPhoto '11

I made a big mistake last week. I hastily upgraded to iLife '11. Who wouldn't be attracted by Apple's slick marketing? Apple used to design applications keeping the end user in mind. Clearly that is not the case anymore. Apple now designs applications to throw in more features and releases applications without any proper testing. Net result - iLife 11 is a SHODDY JOB. This is the clumsiest interface that I've ever seen.

I shall not even begin to describe the nightmare I'm facing. To my dismay, my Time Machine backup disk failed, so I don't have a proper backup and can't roll back to iPhoto '09 easily. I am faced with a terrible task of having to downgrade my iPhoto library almost manually, since I clearly cannot live with iPhoto '11.

So dear friends and readers, sit out on this version of iLife and iPhoto '11. It is definitely not worth it. Let Steve Jobs get back to the bloody Mac and get his act together. For now, they seem to be just an iGadget company.