Windows 8 Copy Dialogue Box

The only thing I care for in Windows 8 is that nice new copy dialog. I like it very much. It is very pretty and slick.

It shows you in real time the progress of the copies. The graph is pretty cool and shows you the up and down progress. Lot of people will rave about how cool it is and how innovative Microsoft has done with Windows 8.

Unfortunately, this is not new.

It may be built into the OS but the implementation and concepts are not new. I've been doing this for a few years now; using muCommander.  muCommander is an old-school norton like mc file manager (Midnight commander) that is cross-platform. I've been running it under OSX and Linux for years.

I also like the ability to pause /resume my copies and limit the speed with muCommander.

There was also iStat on OSX but that no longer works on Mountain Lion.

You can get similar verbosity in the command line with Rsync. Rsync (by default) won't give a graph but it will give you everything else you need. Like all POSIX cli tools, you can pipe rsync and output to an external log for post analysis. Rsync is great at giving real stats when it comes to viewing sequential and random copies (both small and large). If you are good with regex/grep, I bet one can grep and pipe a 3D overlay graph, generate a PDF report using rsync with ImageMagick/Ghostscript. If you now Python, you can generate an .xlsx Excel file of your copy.

Regardless of who had it first, I still think it is a cool feature. They should implement this natively on other operating systems in the GUI's File Managers. Or use muCommander!

Link: http://www.mucommander.com/

Classic MacOS 9 on a 2012 iMac at 2560x1440

If you ever wonder how Classic Mac OS 9.0 would look on today's modern hardware, this would give you a rough idea.

Running SheepShaver (a Mac Emulator), I got OS 9 running on my 27" iMac. I can surf the web using a browser from 1999. It comes in handy when you want to open a decade old Filemaker database.

Nice indeed.

Windows and Thunderbolt. What works and what doesn't.

So, I've been playing with Thunderbolt on Windows and here is a follow-up report.

My motherboard is a GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UP5 TH. I am running an i7-3770K Ivy Bridge CPU with 32GB of RAM. I got to say, it is a very sweet motherboard CPU combo. You can allocate resources and memory in the BIOS. 

Most Thunderbolt drives should work with exception. The Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter (STAE121) works great. See screenshots below.

Connected via Thunderbolt. You wont get this performance with USB 3.0.

Built in SATA.

I also tried the LaCie 2big and it shows up in the device manager as drives but since they are in Mac software RAID, I could not mount them. I didn't want to reformat my drives but the drives checked out fine in Windows 7.

Sadly, the new Drobo 5D will not work with Windows via Thunderbolt.

Drobo has posted the following:
http://support.drobo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/677/~/windows,-thunderbolt,-drobo-5d-%26-drobo-mini

USB 3.0 works on the Drobo 5D just fine. This is a major bummer for those looking to use the Drobo in Windows. This may change in the future.

Thunderbolt mini-Displayport works but I could not do a iMac Target monitor connecting to a Windows machine. Next, displayport via Thunderbolt only works with Intel integrated GPUs. On the Ivy Bridge models, it is the HD4000. I could not get my Kepler Nvidia GPU to pipe the display out to Thunderbolt.

So those are my initial findings. I have not seen any other personal blogs regarding Thunderbolt usage under Windows on the net. Maybe this will be the first post of its kind.

Thunderbolt still seems to be very much a Mac exclusive for the time being.

Blu Ray player on Macbook

Frys recently had a sale on an LG USB portable BluRay Player for $40. I though to myself, why not.
When I got there, there were only open box models and I was able to score one for around $30 and some change.

I'm still not a big fan of optical drives. I remove them from all my (PC and Mac) laptops and replace the bays with SSDs. However,  a cheap DVD burner is nice to have around and it is another reason for me not to boot into Windows.

So how does it work? Well, there is no supplied blu-ray player for OSX so you need to go out and source one. I went out and bought MacGo's Mac BluRay player. There is a trial if you want to test it out.  I know PC folks will complain that you have to go buy an app. This is a fair argument. However, you will end up doing the same on Windows because the OEM supplied Cyberlink ones are pretty limited.

First of all, performance is fine. I thought USB 2.0 limited bandwidth would cause problems and it did on some machines. I simply moved the USB cable to another port which usually solved it. No stuttering  or lag issues. I played the LG player on both my Macbook and MacPro.

Secondly, the MacGo's player does the job at a cost. It doesn't use the native built-in Blu Ray menus. You wont be getting those snazzy 3D animated intro menus. Maybe I did something wrong but I tried all the prefs and could not enable it. I've seen this before on Linux and other cheap bluray players. It can be a distraction but you still get access to all the content. See below.

For some people, this may be a GOOD thing.  I was able to skip all those "required" movie trailers and commercials that even plague my Sony BluRay player in the living room.

You do have the option of playing off an .iso disk image and from ripped folders/files.

Like I wrote earlier, performance wise, it does the job, You can watch Blu Ray movies on current Macs. I was able to play some the of the latest titles without issue like the Avengers.

Conclusion:
I was happy enough to go buy an 5.25" internal SATA LG BluRay recorder (also on sale at Frys) for my MacPro.

I wont be watching much BluRay movies on the Mac or (PC if ever). I normally just rip them to hard disk and re-encode down to 1080p 6GB h.264 MP4 so I can watch on my iPad or via XBMC.

Again, I now have another reason not to boot into native Windows. I was able to mount the BluRay player in VirtualBox on my Mac and I can rip BluRay to a shared Virtual drive. Encoding will be done natively on the Mac via Handbrake.

Links:
LG Model: CP40NG10
http://www.lg.com/us/data-storage/lg-CP40NG10

MacGo BluRay Player for OSX
http://www.macblurayplayer.com/

Mount,read,write NTFS on Macs and do the same with HFS on Windows.

The title of this blog is very long, "Mount,read,write NTFS drives on Macs and do the same with HFS drives on Windows."

If you want to share and mount drives between Macs and PCs you can either use FAT32 or exFAT formatted drives.

exFAT works on OSX versions 10.6.8 and higher and is preferred over FAT32 for support of files larger than 4GB. I actually like exFAT because it is the fastest middle-road solution when you take account Linux usage.

For most purposes, exFAT works great. However, there are times you want to have access to the 'other' OS preferred filesystem such as NTFS on Windows and HFS + on OSX.

I have a few large RAID drives that I would like to occasionally see from either side of the fence.

Hence, I decided to fork out the cash and buy commercial drivers from Paragon system to mount, read and write NTFS volumes on Macs and do the same for HFS+ volumes on Windows.

I've tried other products including various free ones but performance was lacking. I was pleasantly surprised with both piece of software from Paragon.

So today, I will do a dual review on both products as a single end-user.

Here is a HFS Plus volume under Windows 7.

A NTFS volume under MacOSX.

HFS + for Windows
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/
and
NTFS for Mac OSX10
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

Pretty much install and reboot. There is nothing to configure on Windows as I can tell. On the Mac, you have a System Preference pane.

First of all, I did not notice any significant speed handicaps. The drive access seemed as fast as native on both Mac and PC.  I've used other filesystem drivers such as NTFS-3G on Mac, Fuse on Linux and they all seemed very, very slow. Here, it is blazing fast. 7GB files took about a minute to copy and copy reliably.

Benchmarks on both pc and mac seem to indicate no performance penalty but the real test was real-world copies which appeared normal to me.

Both screenshots below are benchmarks of drives that were 60% full with operating systems on them.

USB 3, eSATA and Thunderbolt are both supported. Thunderbolt was not disclosed in their marketing but as you can see from the Windows screenshot above, a Samsung 830 SSD via a Seagate Thunderbolt adapter on a Gigabyte motherboard does indeed work. I was also able to connect a HFS formatted Drobo 5D via USB 3.0. All the USB 3.0 sticks and external drives I have in my possession work on both.

I run 64 bit on both OS so it is safe to say it works otherwise this review would not exist. I am running the latest Mountain Lion 10.8.2 and no problems to report.

Next, I tested them both by making and copying large encrypted Truecrypt container files.  TrueCrypt (for my mac readers) is an encrypted file container like an encrypted DMG that works cross platforms on Windows, Mac, Linux. Think of it as open source, open platform DMG that is encrypted.

I made my truecrypt containers 7GB to see if there was any corruption. I then copied a clone disk image of a fresh Mountain Lion install.  I made the container on my Windows system NTFS drive on the Mac and copied the DMG into the container. I then booted into Windows , mounted and copy the container to various HFS and NTFS drives. I was able to mount and copy, restore the clone image reliably.

It is safe to say, mounting TrueCrypted volumes on either platform works. For example, a HFS truecrypt container created on a mac will mount on the Windows side.


Next, in Windows, you can toggle hidden directories in the explorer. It was very nice. No more ._files or .DS_Store files.

See below. The first image is with the default Explorer view. Clean and tidy. The second image is after I enabled hidden file view in the Explorer preference.

The cons are:
Neither will see software raids created by the opposing OS. For example, I plugged my Thunderbolt LaCie into Windows (which works via Thunderbolt) and I can see the drives in the Device Manager but not the RAID volume.

Neither will see encrypted file systems created by the other.
For example, you can't see a FileVault HFS+ on Windows. To me, this is considered to be a good thing because I keep my work on encrypted volumes.

There are other issues as well. For example, symlinks, permissions, and extended attributes are not preserved on the Windows side when dealing with HFS drives. Certain mac files still use resource forks (which contain extended meta-data) and labels. If you copy them on Windows using HFS+ (copy HFS to HFS), they will not be preserved.

Below is an example. The script folder is highlighted in red label on OSX. Those attributes get stripped when you copy under Windows. Same with the broken link icon on files that have resource forks.

The meta-data, resource forks , symlinks are preserved on the mac side when working with NTFS drives. Meaning, if you copy specials files on OSX onto NTFS drives, you will be fine.
You just can't do that on the Windows side.

Apparently you can set an NTFS as a startup disk on OSX. I did no test this.

This is a minor inconvenience but it is something to know.  It is also disclosed in the manual.
You wont be able to use Windows cloning software to clone a Mac Drive. If you need anything that maintains permissions or meta-data, copy the files in the native operating system. The resource forks and labels are relics from the classic Mac past. I love my colored labels but this is not a show stopper.

Overall, I am pleasantly surprised. Both app drivers are $20 and you have the option of getting multi computer home licenses.

OSX: Automatically Unmount Volumes on Startup Login.

Don't you hate it when you start your mac and you have a bunch of unwanted attached drives mounted on your desktop?

Specifically if you have Windows (via Bootcamp) or rarely used drives you dont want shown or accessible. It gets annoying to see those volumes mounted. For example, I don't want my wife to accidentally delete files off my Windows partition. I also have a clone drive of my system and whenever I double click on an image, Photoshop may launch from the clone drive instead of the one on  my SSD system drive. I rarely use the clone drive except to mirror my working system drive once a week.

I prefer to manually mount those drives when I need them.

Here are the 3 drives I dont like littering my desktop: System Reserved, Windows, and my clone drive. System Reserve is the small boot partition that contains files to boot Windows. Delete any of those files and Windows wont boot.

 Here is my solution I found somewhere off the net (I can't find the original link).  You can write an Applescript  to do this. Create the Applescript to unmount and load at login via the "Login Items" under "User & Groups" in the System Preference.

Here is the applescript. Modify with the volume name and save as an application.

 set volname to "System Reserved" -- # name of target volume  
 set p to (POSIX path of (volname & ":" as alias))'s text 1 thru -2  
 set sh to "diskutil umount " & quoted form of p & " &> /dev/null &"  
 do shell script sh  

Next, with the compiled Applescript(s) applications, go to User & Groups and go under Login Items and add your applescript(s).  Also, I check off "Hide" so I don't see the script executes. It will re-run if you log off into another user and re-login back into your user account. Hiding it will run it in the background so if it errors,you won't see it.

Voila. Next time you boot, those drives wont show up.

You can easily remount the drives at any given time via the Disk Utility so this isn't a permanent thing.

Now, the only thing I can think of next is to stop OSX from prompting you to initialize a disk when it can't recognize the filesystem (e.g. Linux EXT4 or Vmware VMFS).

Handy computer gadgets: 5.25 Bay Tray

Here is a GREAT $11 accessory for your un-used front computer 5.25" bay. It is a blank drawer tray that uses one of the empty DVD bays in your case. You can get it for $11 via amazon (link).

It comes in handy for storing things like DVI-VGA / USB dongles, USB sticks, etc...