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Steve Jobs

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While the web is filled with memorials, testimonials, quotes, etc about Steve’s passing, I figured it only appropriate that I say something… since while I am a System Administrator by profession, I am a Mac user by lifestyle. From the computers I’ve used at home since I was 5, to the servers I work with today, I work with Apple hardware. I’ve always loved Apple hardware, even when they made rather uninspiring devices during period between Steve Jobs’ leaving, then returning to Apple. I wouldn’t call myself a cultist, but I would call myself a skeptical believer. Apple has made some missteps in my mind (killing the Xserve, the rather drastic changes in 10.7 server, etc), but I do believe that what they do they do because they truly believe “this is how it should be”. It’s not just a “this will make us money” or anything like that. Steve, and Apple, both thought they were taking something that was imperfect, and bringing it closer to perfection. And he realized that perfection was out there, somewhere just beyond reach, so you had Apple products that evolved from generation to generation.

What hit me yesterday was that Steve basically bookended his career with the birth, and the (arguably) death of the personal computer. The Apple I/II, and the Macintosh were largely the birth of the real personal computer, and with the release of iOS 5, you have an iPhone, iPad that can be used PC free, which some argue has brought about the end of the PC era. I’m not sure if I agree with that, but it certainly is a step toward the lifestyle where we may have an actual computer at home, or work, but day to day, our lives will largely be played out on phones, tablets, etc. This is already the case for most of us, and will only become more so for others as time passes.

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SPSS 19 Deployment for Mac

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This last week the University finally got a site license for SPSS. This is a huge deal since I’ve had to run SPSS on a Terminal Server the past several years and have people connect to that with Remote Desktop to run SPSS.

With the site license came the ability to both do individual installs, which are tied to a specific machine, and the ability to use a Network License. For doing individual installs, I’d recommend the silent install option, which fellow Mac Admin Patrick Gallagher has detailed instructions on how to do here.

I really really didn’t want to go to each machine and do the install (even though the silent install didn’t require that), and I’d eventually like to put it on our image… so the network license sounded very promising. The idea being, you point the install at a license server, and as long as it can get the okay to run, it doesn’t care what machine it’s on.

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Flash Professional CS 3, Version 9, and Network Homes (on a Mac)

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Or, “How I stopped worrying and realized Adobe seemingly has crappy QA” (Just because you don’t support something doesn’t mean you don’t test against it)

This is another note, but it’s mainly for those of us in the Sysadmin world. I’m posting it mainly because I couldn’t find anything myself on this.

Flash CS3, e.g. Version 9, does a bit of an odd thing when you launch it for the first time. It copies it’s configuration directory to the local user account. This is so users can tweak settings and not influence the primary copy that’s in the Application folder. The problem arises with Network Homes (which, Adobe doesn’t support). This folder is about 25MB, and contains a whopping 1100 files. Coping that many files, over the network, takes a bit of time (even on gigabit). So, when  a user first launches Flash CS3 on their account, the Flash CS3 window pops up, but there is no indication it’s doing anything. It just sits there, and begs to be “force quit”.

But, if you give it a few minutes (depending on your network and storage capacity), it’ll eventually continue loading. The bitch is that it doesn’t tell you what it’s doing.

What finally turned my onto this issue was this adobe page: Modifying the component files — Flash CS3 which shows you where those files are copied to.

Thankfully, after that initial copy, things work fine.

So, you may be saying “But, you could just mass copy out those files to the home directories”. And yeah, that’s true. Except we have 1600 user accounts. Which at 1100 files, that’s about 1.76 million files on the system, which I don’t really want to do. But it would probably work for some of you.

So, word to the wise… just wait for Flash CS3 to launch. It’ll take a bit, but it’ll work.

Over the winter break, I think I’m going to set up my NHR scripts (that I’ve modified from Jeff’s originals) to redirect that Flash folder. Sure, first launch of flash will be “slow” because it’s going to have to copy those files out each time someone launches Flash when they login, but at least it’ll get them off the network, and copying them locally is still a hell of a lot faster than copying them over the network.

UPDATE: I tried modifying the NHR scripts last week, and found that redirecting the Flash folder made very little difference, since copying 1100 files locally is still not a “fast” thing to do. So, at this point, I have removed the redirection of all the Adobe files in Application Support. Now, that first launch will be slow, but after that, Flash launches in about 10 seconds. Sure, that’s 1100 files for each user on the SAN, but at least Flash is usable.