In this two part video I show how to disable all facets of "resume" in Apple's latest iteration of OSX - Lion. Resume is a novel idea on a cell phone, but I find it rather annoying on my desktop and laptop PCs. Per app resume usually means that I am opening copies of apps in a cluttered state that isn't necessarily productive, and reboot resume means I can't even reboot to get back to a clean workspace. If I want to leave my computer in a state of suspended animation, I can use Sleep - I don't prefer it to automatically treat every scenario like sleep.

In part one of this two part series, I show how to disable per-app resume functionality:

In part two, I demonstrate how to disable full system resume on restart/reboot:

This second method involves updating a system file. It's relatively low risk, but as always - you assume all risk involved with updating settings on any system files. I've been using this for a few weeks now with success - your mileage may vary - don't shoot the messenger :)

So, for the past couple weeks I have been baffled - every time I try to update apps on any of my Macs, the update fails and I am presented with a dialog box that says "To update this application, please sign in with the account you used to purchase it".

One big problem - I already was.  I only have one iTunes account.

So.. yesterday, I decided to monitor the console - in doing so, I noticed that each time I tried to update, I saw an error with mds - a spotlight derivative.

Interestingly enough, all of my mac machines use SSDs.  Because they use SSDs, I have made several enhancements to my machine to prevent excess drive writes (to prevent un-necessary wear on the SSD).  One of the common "Enhancements" I make is to completely disable spotlight, and also add my main HDD to the list of locations NOT to index.

So, I wondered if this could be causing the issue.  I re-enabled Spotlight, and removed my drive from the blocked locations.  I waited for a while to allow spotlight to finish indexing (the magnifying glass icon in the upper right corner of the finder will have a "dot" in it while it's indexing".  Once it finished, I reopened the App Store and guess what - everything worked fine.

Apparently, the app update process requires spotlight.  Maybe this is done to "find" apps in the event that the user has moved it from it's original location?  Not sure, but - for now I'll leave it enabled I guess.  

If you're having trouble, too - follow these steps and things should start working again!

As I have mentioned on this blog more times than I care to remember, I'm a bit of a geek.  I love tech, love making tech work well, and love integrating tech into anything where tech can be integrated.  One of the places I have decided to integrate as much tech as possible is in my home.  This is not unique, most homes nowdays are getting exceedingly complex, simply because the range of "cool" devices for the home is growing.  In fact, home networks are sometimes as complex as a small business or small corporate networks.  

Unfortunately for most people, integrating tech into their home means huge expense, because the only choices are to buy (more expensive and generally poor performing) wireless devices, or to retrofit a finished home with wiring to support the necessary infrastructure.  Retrofit usually means tearing apart walls, rebuilding walls, and trying to snake cables through existing walls.

Knowing the pain that this causes, when I was building my house 8 years ago, I wanted to run tons of wire to support anything that I could dream up.   Technology 8 years ago wasn't anywhere near where it is today - but I knew it would get there, and I knew awesome hardware would only come down in price.

For starters, I wanted multiple three way jacks in every room of the house - each containing two pieces of CAT-5e (For phone and gigabit ethernet, or dual gigabit ethernet) and a piece of quad-shield RG6 (for cable TV).  I also wanted to run speaker wire in the living room for surround sound, and speaker wire into all of the bedrooms and the ceilings of the bathrooms.  Additionally, I wanted to install my own alarm system - I didn't want the cookie cutter piece of crap my homebuilder offered - I wanted an alarm with the features I wanted, the sensors I wanted, and wanted it all installed the way I wanted it installed and where I wanted it installed.  Finally, I wanted to run some power wire and RG-6 to several points on the outside of the house so that I could easily install a surveillance system.  At the time, that seemed nutty - but today they are so reasonably priced, I'm glad I ran the wire long ago.

Keep in mind, I decided to build this house when I was 26 years old.  I knew that I wouldn't be able to afford everything right away - but, wire is relatively cheap.  Wiring a newbuilt home is especially affordable when you can run it yourself before the drywall is installed and pay your friends to help with a couple of cases of bud light =).

So... I bought almost two miles of wire.  More quad shield RG-6, CAT-5e, Speaker Wire, Power Wire, and other miscellaneous wire than you could possibly imagine.  Enough wire that it took me two trips in my 1993 Eagle Talon hatchback (with the seats DOWN, mind you) to get it out to my house.  Now, if you saw my house - you'd wonder where in the hell all this wire was going to go.  I live in a modestly sized home (1700-ish square feet) on a slab.  It took an entire weekend - but I ran nearly all of that wire - even to places I didn't know if I would ever need it.

Flash forward 8 years to today.  Nearly every wire has been properly terminated and is active and available for use.  I use business class networking gear and firewall and have a 50 megabit internet connection.  My surveillance system is active and can be monitored even when away from home.  The alarm is exactly the way I wanted it, my home entertainment center is modest but all of the wires are hidden, and all of the rooms upstairs have volume controls and in-wall or in-ceiling speakers.

So - it's done?  No way.  "Done" is not in my DNA.  I continually upgrade and replace hardware, and sell my old goods on eBay to keep the tech fresh in my house.  As my network has grown and gotten faster, it's reach has gotten further (external devices remote from my home), and it has gotten more complex - I decided it was time to start monitoring it.

This is especially more important to me now that some internet service providers are starting to monitor their users and apply caps.  My ISP is not one of those, but it really has myself asking "how much bandwidth do I use?".  Most of my services in my house (netflix, xbox live, vonage, etc) all consume bandwidth just to operate - and to me, these are very much all "black box devices" and I have no idea what they are using.  So I have decided to start a series of articles describing the answers to this very question.  So to start off, I wanted to describe my home network and how I'll be monitoring it with an awesome piece of software provided to me from Paessler called PRTG Network Monitor.

So - below you will find a diagram of the majority of the devices in my home - not everything is on this particular diagram, but the most important bits are:

Crazy eh?  Yeah - I didn't realize how much crap I had until I set out on this trek to start monitoring everything.

So, from the outside world, my home is connected to the internet via a 50 megabit cable connection through a Motorola DOCSIS 3 cable modem.  This connection offers a pretty stable 50 megabits downstream and 5 megabits upstream - more than enough to supply my media devices with the media they need, allow me to VPN into my network to use my resources or monitor surveillance from remote if needed, and provide some extra speed so that surfing the web doesn't slow to a crawl just because I'm watching netflix.

The motorola cable modem meets my home by way of a Cisco ASA 5505 firewall appliance.   From here, access is split through the house via two Gigabit Cisco SRW2016 business class switches - one in the computer room, and another downstairs.

All of the desktop and laptop computers in my house are really focused on performance - they all have SSDs for their boot drives, and on laptops - this is the only drive.  They have a minimum of 8GB of RAM, and powerful processors.  Since space comes at a premium on SSDs - none of my laptops and desktops contain anything more than temporary data.

So where is all of the data?  It's on the server.  The main machine that is the centerpiece of the home is a dual quad core Nehalem Xeon server with 4TB of RAID5 disk space, 24GB of RAM, and dual gigabit ethernet adapters.  This contains a basic O/S install that houses a few fileshares and a copy of VMWare server.  VMWare runs five seperate Virtual machines - a Domain Controller, a Subversion Server, a Web/Email Server (internal only - used for development testing), a generic Windows XP Snapshot VM that I use whenever I want to "test" a piece of software and then revert to a clean image, and a newly added PRTG Network monitor machine.

The rest of the devices in the home are either wired or wireless, but are mostly either network appliances or network connected media devices, printers, or other simple systems.

So - that is a quick introduction to what is going on in my world.  This network started with a single domain controller and two laptops and over the years has evolved into this behemoth.  This network not only keeps me entertained at home, it also supports my livelihood.  Being a professional developer by trade, this network often serves as an important test bed for products or technologies that I am working on.

As you can see, without a proper monitoring solution - outages or breaks in my network can be as hard to find in my home as they would be in a small corporate network.  Keep in mind that networks like mine are becoming more and more commonplace in homes as even the most mundane devices are given wireless network access.

Over the next several months, I am going to be posting several articles ranging from the installation and configuration of PRTG Network Monitor (in my experience, the best network monitoring product you can find, bar none), to real world findings as I continually monitor the network I just described.  Specifically, I am interested to see exactly how much data I use over a month, a quarter, and a year with devices like AppleTV, XBox, Vonage, etc.  It is by monitoring my usage that I hope to put some sense behind the bandwidth caps that some ISPs are enforcing nowdays.

Now - keep in mind, I don't torrent, I don't host a website or e-mail server in my home, etc.  Regardless of how crazy my network configuration seems - my usage model is pretty standard.  I'm hoping that my real world results will equate similarly with that of many of my readers, and I hope you will find it interesting.

Next up - I will be discussing installation and configuration of PRTG Network monitor.  Stay Tuned!

So I'm setting up a new machine and I have over 25 e-mail accounts I monitor on a daily basis.  I don't feel like setting all of those up all over again one the new machine in Outlook 2011 - lucky for me, I've found a way to migrate your data:

• Install Office 2011 on the new machine.
• If You've loaded Outlook, use command-Q to quit.  Make sure no office applications are running.
• Locate the folder "~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identites" on the old machine (for those of you who don't know, ~ is UNIX shorthand for your home folder.  In other words, if your username is HomerSimpson, then this will be found at "/Users/HomerSimpson/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities"
• Backup this file to a portable external drive or burn it to a CD.
• On the NEW machine, rename (if you wish to backup) or delete the folder that occupies the location mentioned above.
• Copy the folder you've copied from your old machine from your external drive or backup CD on to the new machine in the same location as it was on the old machine.
• Load Outlook
• It will ask you to re-enter all of your passwords to get them stored in your keychain on your new machine.  Once you're done - you're good to go.

So I consulted with a few of my friends who currently are Verizon CDMA customers to ask them how their current device handles being forced to choose between voice and data connections.

Unlike the current GSM AT&T 3G iPhones, which can maintain Voice and Data connections simultaneously, the new Verizon iPhone, based on CDMA technology is forced to use one or the other but NOT both.  This is also the case with any other Verizon CDMA device.

According to my friends, Verizon maintains a voice-priority network.  In other words, lets say you are browsing the web and a phone call comes in - your data connection is terminated.  While talking on the phone, you simply cannot switch to speakerphone, minimize your phone, and use any apps that require network connectivity.  As far as any app is concerned at that point, it's "off the network".  It will be interesting to see how some existing apps misbehave if the iOS developer hasn't correctly implemented the "reachability" classes for network connectivity monitoring.

The bad thing is - this also holds true for tethering.  A few of my friends who use Verizon tethering said that it's a real pain in the ass if they are tethering and/or sharing their connection by way of a hotspot and then a phone call comes in.  When this happens - all network connectivity drops while the voice call is in place, and then the connection resumes once the voice call ends.

In any case - this is a huge flaw that makes this initial launch on Verizon's network less than stellar.  Of course, this restriction mirrors the same behavior of the original iPhone on AT&T's Edge network.  It was only with the introduction of the 3G AT&T iPhones based on the GSM protocol that you could begin using voice and data at the same time.

Moral of the story - if you think you may want to use some apps and use data at the same time as a voice call, or if you don't ever want your data connections to be spontaneously disconnected by a voice call - Verizon iPhone isn't the answer for you..... yet.