At first I thought it was something to do with Snow Leopard and HP’s printer drivers (the printer was an HP LaserJet P3005). However, even after installing the latest HP printer drivers the two-sided print option remained disabled.

It so happens that the printer driver was unable to automatically detect if the printer supports duplex printing and has to be “told” that the printer is indeed capable of doing so.

I went to System Preferences → Print & Fax. From there I selected the HP printer (the only one installed on my system). I then clicked the Options & Supplies button and in the resulting dialog, selected the Driver tab.

The checkbox that marked this printer as a Duplex Unit was unchecked so I checked it.

Next time when I tried printing, I got a Two-Sided checkbox. Also the Two-Sided drop-down, that would allow me to pick which edge I wanted to choose for binding, was also enabled.

You can also buy the Snow Leopard Family Pack for Rs. 2,900 or the Mac Box Set Family Pack for Rs. 13,500.

Snow Leopard Server Edition will retail for Rs. 28,100.

Update (10 Sep, 5:30 PM IST) – Snow Leopard is now available across Imagine stores in Bangalore

However, the site also says -

The simplest workaround I’ve heard of for the DFU issue is to copy one or two of the 10.5.5 frameworks files over the newer ones.

But till a definite guide is not released by the iPhone Dev team, we suggest you update to the latest build only if you have to.

Very few audio CDs are mastered like this. Of the 400+ audio CDs that I own, only one – Blue Man Group’s, Complex – is a Mixed Mode one. The data part of this particular CD has music videos and interviews with the people involved with the album, the audio part is well the usual (the so called ‘Redbook’) CD audio.

You can see how it can potentially confuse a new Mac user. Especially because dragging and dropping any one of the two CD icons on your desktop to trash gets you this rather elaborate message:

At least the behavior is consistent with the way a hard-disk with multiple partitions behaves.

Clicking on a link in a Web Clip, usually opens a new Safari window with that link. I had a weird thing happen to me after installing the iPhone SDK and the recent Mac OS 10.5.5 update. The links would try and launch Mobile Safari that comes with iPhone SDK’s iPhone emulator, which would crash immediately with the message: “The application MobileSafari quit unexpectedly.”

The same thing then started happening to hyperlinks in my e-mails. It then occurred to me that somehow, my default browser had been set to Mobile Safari. All I had to do was go to Safari’s Preferences dialog and change it to something more reasonable (Safari, Firefox or Opera) and things were fine again.

Minor rant – I find it ironical that to change your default browser, you have to go through the preference pane of another browser (which thereby acts a gatekeeper for other browsers on your system). I think this setting should be a part of the System Preferences pane.

If you visit a web-page that uses Kannada (Unicode), you’ll only see a bunch of “null-glyphs”:

When you see null-glyphs for a language, it usually means that the font required to display that language is missing. While on Windows the null-glyphs appear like a empty box, null-glyphs on Mac include a character indicating which language we are dealing with (in this case the null glyph shows Kannada “Ka”). This being Mac, you can expect a little more. If you increase the font size to something like 120 points, you’ll even see the Unicode range (in case of Kannada that would be 0xC80 – 0xCFF) of the language mentioned on the null-glyph itself!

As you can see, the null-glyph on Mac tells you a lot. Nice touch! but you still need the correct font if you want to read Kannada. Now some work was done by the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore on a Unicode font called Kedage, which you can download from Nick Shank’s webpage. Copy the font to ~/Library/Fonts (switch to Finder, press Command + G, and type in ~/Library/Fonts and press Enter). You should now be able to see Kannada correctly. Here is the Kannada equivalent of “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” (thanks Dr. Pavanaja, thanks Pooran for digging it out for me.) as it renders on my machine:

Nick Shank’s page also has a couple of keyboard layouts. Download any one of them (the first one mimics the ISCIIINSCRIPT layout of Windows). Unzip the file (if you are using Safari, the file will be automatically unzipped when the download completes) and copy the Kannada.bundle file to ~/Library/Keyboards. To use it, follow the instructions for enabling Indian language keyboards, the Kannada keyboard should now be listed in the keyboard layouts list:

Happy typing!

The softwares which are getting updates are -

1. FCP/Pro Apps
2. iPhoto
3. iLife
4. iWeb
5. iMovie
6. iTunes
7. Security update

Edit: Apparently most of these updates are old, they just showed up in my ‘Software Update’ today

Here are 5 Terminal commands that might be useful. I assume you already know how to start Terminal, and get around (i.e you know ls, mv, cd, rm, mkdir, clear):

lsof – list open files. Run lsof, and it’ll list open files on your system; including names of the applications that are using them.

Give it the +D switch and a path as an argument, and it’ll show you all the files that are open in that directory. Very handy when an external hard-disk won’t eject, and the error message will not tell you what is holding it up:

$ lsof +D /Volumes/Movies
COMMAND    PID    USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE   SIZE/OFF    NODE NAME
bash       474 deepakg  cwd    DIR   14,5       1020       2 /Volumes/Movies/
diskimage  709 deepakg    3r   REG   14,5   14318026 1986830 /Volumes/Movies/Pan's Labrynth/Pans_Labyrinth_D1/Mac_DVD_ROM.dmg
...
...
...

You can even use lsof -i to see open IP connections on your machine.

$ lsof -i
COMMAND    PID    USER   FD   TYPE    DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
SystemUIS  120 deepakg   10u  IPv4 0x5523530      0t0  UDP *:*
Finder     122 deepakg   14u  IPv4 0x61c1e64      0t0  TCP localhost:49152->localhost:26164 (ESTABLISHED)
Dropbox    128 deepakg    8u  IPv4 0x580966c      0t0  TCP localhost:26164 (LISTEN)
Dropbox    128 deepakg    9u  IPv4 0x61c1a68      0t0  TCP localhost:26164->localhost:49152 (ESTABLISHED)
Dropbox    128 deepakg   12u  IPv4 0x61c166c      0t0  TCP 192.168.1.3:49153->nitro-bro.getdropbox.com:https (CLOSE_WAIT)
Dropbox    128 deepakg   13u  IPv4 0x61c1270      0t0  TCP 192.168.1.3:49154->nitro-bro.getdropbox.com:https (CLOSE_WAIT)
Dropbox    128 deepakg   16u  IPv4 0x7cd4a68      0t0  TCP 192.168.1.3:50844->getdropbox.com:http (ESTABLISHED)
Safari     159 deepakg   25u  IPv4 0x7c8a66c      0t0  TCP 192.168.1.3:52510->apache2-bongo.nitti.dreamhost.com:http (CLOSE_WAIT)

Intrigued? man lsof will get you more info.

du – disk usage. Running du will show you “blocks” in use by each file an directory in your current directory. Run du -h to get a “human-readable” value – i.e. the size of the directory in kilobytes or megabytes. If you don’t have any sub-directories in a directory, running du -h will just show the size of the files in the directory. To list the individual files and their sizes, just use du -ha

$ du -ha
8.0K	./.DS_Store
4.0K	./DotEmacs
348K	./Icon
 16K	./JobSchema.txt
 19M	./SetFour.zip
 24M	./SetOne.zip
 22M	./SetThree.zip
 22M	./SetTwo.zip
4.0K	./Top Secret.txt
 87M	.

file – determine file type. The other day I got an attachment on GMail without any file extension. I could drop the file into textedit, look its contents and try and figure out what it was or I could just use the Terminal command file. Run file with the name of a file and it’ll tell you what it is. Often it’ll tell you a little bit more than that, e.g. running it on – what turned out to be a png file – gives me the size and color info as well:

$ file Randomfile
Randomfile: PNG image data, 723 x 832, 8-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced

grep – prints the lines in a file that match a given pattern. I use it often as a poor man’s “find in files”. Some useful switches include -H: to print the name of the file in which a match is found, -R: to recurse subdirectories and -n to include line numbers where a match is found. e.g., to search for all files containing the word DocumentRoot in /etc, I would use:

$ grep -HRn "DocumentRoot" /etc/*
/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf:77:DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf:29:    DocumentRoot "/www/docs/dummy-host.example.com"
/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf:38:    DocumentRoot "/www/docs/dummy-host2.example.com"
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf:159:# DocumentRoot: The directory out of which you will serve your
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf:163:DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf:188:# This should be changed to whatever you set DocumentRoot to.
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf:307:    # access content that does not live under the DocumentRoot.
/etc/apache2/original/extra/httpd-ssl.conf:77:DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
...
...
...

find – finds a file based on several parameters like its name, size etc. While on its own it might not seem useful, it can come in very handy when used with another command. e.g. to add all files in my ~/Pictures folder that look like IMG_3 and are bigger than 30 MB to a zip file, I can do something like this:

$ zip archive.zip `find ~/Pictures/ -name "IMG_3*" -size +30M -print`
adding: Users/deepakg/Pictures/coorg/IMG_3951.psd (deflated 3%)
adding: Users/deepakg/Pictures/London/IMG_3358-02.tif (deflated 3%)
adding: Users/deepakg/Pictures/Converted/IMG_3368-01.tif (deflated 3%)

Do you have any favorite Terminal commands? Let us know in the comments!

Reading Indian language text:
There is nothing that you need to install to be able to correctly view data in these scripts. For example, if you visit the BBC’s Hindi website, you’ll be able to read the page withoud downloading or installing additional fonts (provided of course, you know how to read Hindi ). Firefox 2 on Mac OS X used to be problematic here, but Firefox 3 renders Hindi text correctly.

Enabling keyboard for your language:
The next thing you probably want to do is to type in one of these scripts. Start System Preferences and choose the International applet.

Click on the Input Menu tab which lists input menthods and keyboards for different languages. By default this list is sorted by Input type, which can make it somewhat difficult for you to locate the language of your choice. So the first thing that you should do is to sort the list by the name of the language, by clicking on the Name header.

Scroll down and check the keyboards you want. Also check the “Show input menu in menu bar option”. Mac OS X Leopard typically gives you two keyboard layouts for most Indian languages. One of them is a phonetic layout (labeled as QWERTY in the list of keyboards), while the other follows a more traditional typewriter-style (usually INSCRIPT) scheme. The exception here is Tamil which ships with Tamil99 and Anjal layouts. The phonetic layouts are the easiest to use as you can type something as you would roughly type it in English, and get the equivalent Indic representation on the fly. For example, to type दीपक, all I need to do is to key in dIpAk. If you know the iTrans transliteration scheme, you’ll feel right at home.

Typing in your language
If you followed the steps above correctly, you’ll now see a small colored icon (next to the speaker icon) in your menu bar. Since default keyboard layout on Mac OS is US English, you’ll see the US Flag as the icon.

Clicking on it will show you a pull-down menu of keyboard layouts that you had just enabled. Select and click the keyboard you want to activate it. The icon will change to reflect your selection and you can start typing in any application that supports Unicode and Indian languages like TextEdit.

Viewing the keyboard layout
If you want to see the layout of currently active keyboard, go back to the Input Menu tab in the International applet. Check the Keyboard Viewer option in the list and close the window.

Now below the list of languages in your menu bar, you’ll also see an option called Show Keyboard Viewer.

Clicking it will show you the layout of the keys on the currently active keyboard. Of course, this applies only to INSCRIPT/Tamil99/non-phonetic keyboards. If you have a phonetic keyboard selected (the icon for a phonetic keyboard has a blue dot in it), you’ll only see the default English layout.

Since most Indian languages have more characters than can be accommodated on a standard QWERTY layout, only a subset of them are visible by default (just like the English layout shows only lower-case or upper-case letters at any given time). Hold the Shift key to see the rest of them.

This finishes our introduction to using Indian languages on the Mac OS. Leopard is still missing support for some important Indian scripts – most notably – Assamese, Bengali, Kannada, Oriya, Telugu and Malayalam. The infrastructure (UNICODE, shaping engine etc.) to support these languages is already there. Indeed, fonts and keyboards for these languages are available through 3rd parties, but they often lack the quality and fit-and-finish of Apple supported languages. I’ll cover enabling these not-so-out-of-the-box languages in Mac OS X in a future post.

Cut to the present and Mac OS feels as natural as Windows once did. I use it for almost all of my time and haven’t “natively” booted into Windows for over six months. There is one small thing that I still miss though – the way you can access menus using keyboard in Windows (e.g. Alt+F for getting to the File menu). Mac does have concept of keyboard accelerators – where an individual menu option is tied to a keystroke combo (e.g. Ctrl+T opens a new tab in IE and maps to Command+T in Safari), but it lacks an easy way to jump to an application’s pull-down menu. Here are a couple of workarounds:

Goto System Prefrences and under Keyboard & Mouse, check the “Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys” option.

On the new keyboards that come with iMacs, F1 and F2 control brightness while F3 invokes exposé. Checking this option will make them behave as regular function keys. You can still access their extended functions (e.g. F1 to reduce brightness), by holding down the fn key and then pressing the function key.

Next, click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab and check the Keyboard Navigation option plus everything underneath it.

Close Keyboard & Mouse preferences dialog.

Pressing Ctrl+F2 should now place the focus on the menu bar of the currently active application (press Ctrl+F1 before Ctrl+F2 in case Ctrl+F2 doesn’t work the first time). The Apple menu will always be selected by default and you can type the first letter of the menu option that you want to reach. For example, Type E to reach Edit, F to reach File and so on. You can even type more than one character to reach the right option (e.g. Fo to reach Format as the first letter conflicts with File). You can press the Down Arrow key or Enter to open the pull-down menu or use the Right and Left Arrow keys to move between different menu options.

The other keyboard trick you can use to get to a menu is through the help menu. Pressing Command+Shit+? will place you inside the “Search” box under the Help menu. Type the option that you are looking for, say “Open” (sans the quotes) and you’ll be presented with a list of options that begin with Open. Press the down arrow key to highlight an item in this list and the corresponding menu option will automatically be revealed and selected! In Safari, it’ll even search the History menu allowing you to quickly jump to a page you’ve visited before.

Unfortunately this trick doesn’t work with all applications. Firfox is the biggest culprit here. Command+Shift+? takes you to Mozilla support page in FireFox3 – a minor but annoying oversight.