Power Mac G5: The lights are on but no one's home

The recent ice storm that crippled New England and left me looking for other shelter seemed to have killed my 2005 Power Mac G5. The night of the ice storm the lights in the house blinked off, then on, then off again... They stayed off for four days, along with the furnace, until the power company put my town back on line.

A week later, when I attempted to start the G5 in my home office the main power light came on, and stayed on when ever it was plugged in, and the desktop would not begin the boot sequence, nor were any sounds emitted such as the fans starting up.

With lots of other things to take care of I delayed troubleshooting it, but thought that it would eventually require a trip to the Apple Store Genius Bar for a drop off. Today I finally did a search and came up with this little wonder:

How to reset the SMU on a Power Mac G5

The SMU (System Management Unit) is a microcontroller chip on the logic board that controls all power functions for your computer. If your computer is experiencing any issues regarding these functions, resetting the SMU may resolve the issue. The functions controlled by the SMU include:

* It tells the computer when to turn on, turn off, sleep, wake, idle, and so on.
* It handles system resets from various commands.
* It controls the fan.

The guts circuit board did not look the same as in the photo on their article, so I started pushing all the transistors and every little silvery bumps I could find. Close to my RAM memory slots, I finally found a tiny, round, silver button on a small black square base that was in fact slightly pushable.

Upon reassembling the tower's side door and re-inserting all the cables, I was very happy to hear that little whir of the fan as the computer took its first breath after being resuscitated. The prospect of waiting in line at the Apple Store during Christmas week was something I was not looking forward to.

  Introducing Flash Mini - Squeezing Flash on the iPhone

Just when all the news of porting Flash to the iPhone has died down, I stumbled across what appears to be an internal document diagramming how Steve Jobs intends to do just that with a product code named Flash Mini. Who knew!?

Read the full story for more...

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  Leopard Day 0: A Day in the Life a Mac Fanatic

www.flickr.com

7:00 AM

Wake up early (yes, 7AM is early for me) to prepare to go to the Apple Store opening at 9AM

7:10 AM

Check the Apple website and find that the countdown still reads 11 hours. By 10/26 they didn't mean morning of 10/26. Back to bed.

4:45 PM

Leave work to head over the Apple Store at the Natick Collection Mall

5:30 PM

Join the line camped outside the locked doors of the Apple Store. A kid in front of me walks the line, returns to his father to report that they are #38 in line.

5:35 PM

The frumpy old guy next to me starts chatting with about Macs. Says that he's a web developer that works at home and uses Dreamweaver and Flash on PCs and wants to trash them for Macs instead.

  Connect to your home computer from anywhere

The October edition of MacWorld magazine includes a walkthrough of how to remotely and securely access your computers at home even though you may have a dynamic IP address which may change at any given moment. The article, Remotely Access Your Mac, considers the situation where you might be on the road but need to access files on your home computer, but without known your home IP address this would be impossible. The author carefully describes how a company DynDNS solves all that. With a DynDNS account choose a host alias or provide a full domain name, then you run software on your home computer which periodically maps that name to your home computer's (or home firewall/router's) IP address.

The article mentions briefly the concept of running a home webserver with this configuration, although a reference to a July 2005 article on MacWorld is cited, The Weekend Website, which provides very basic instructions for using Mac utilities for setting up a home website or web-based photo gallery.

For a comprehensive article regarding how to setup and secure a Linux server at home, see a recent article in Red Hat Magazine, How to Setup a Home Webserver.

  Fastest Growing Tech Companies and the Rebounding IT Job Market

CNN Money published an article on the rebounding of the IT job market, citing the best places to live for jobs in IT, as well as which companies are growing the most and which skill sets are in demand.

Where the tech jobs are now
The IT job market is rebounding, but where you live matters.
Plus: Do you have the hottest skills?
By Anne Fisher, Fortune

To my surprise, Adobe was ranked 4th in hiring, although 91st in growth, and Red Hat ranked 2nd in growth, six percent higher than 3rd ranked Apple Computer.

  Making ColdFusion MX on Mac OS X use JVM 1.4.2 instead of JVM 1.5.0

If you're running ColdFusion MX and you've installed the Java 5 update for Mac OS X during one of the regular prompts to install software updates then you will encounter problems because ColdFusion MX 6 or 7 is not supported to run on Java 5, but only Java 1.4.2 at the highest.

There is an easy solution to this problem. You'll find that previous versions of the Java VM are still installed on your Mac, but they are simply not the default.

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  Cringley Speculates About Apple's Plans to Win the OS and Application Markets

In this week's edition of I, Cringely, Bob Cringely reflects on Microsoft's struggle to maintain dominance in the OS and applications market while the project schedule for Vista withers on the vine. Furthermore, Bob speculates that for Apple to remain competitive, eliminate its vulnerabilities, and even beat Microsoft on technical merits, Apple will have to entice independent software vendors to continue developing applications for OS X. Just how will Apple do that? Bob thinks Apple will buy Adobe.

Killer Apps: For Apple's Windows Strategy to Work, It Must Replace Microsoft Office and Buy Adobe Systems
by Robert X. Cringely, April 27, 2006

  Kurzweil Keynotes Bio-IT World; Interview in CIO Mag; Using Text-to-Speech

The Bio-IT World fifth annual Life Sciences Conference and Expo on Biotechnology and Bioinformatics is to be held in Boston the week of April 3, 2006 (which coincidentally happens to be at the same time and location as the Linux World Expo). The conference will begin with a keynote lecture "Reprogramming Biology" by Ray Kurzweil, one of my favorite technology luminaries whose ideas constantly fascinate and inspire me.

"Reprogramming Biology" is the title of noted inventor Ray Kurzweil's opening keynote address. Kurzweil will expound upon themes in his latest book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, in which he predicts the next few decades will see the merging of human biology with the staggering achievements of "GNR" - genetics, nanotechnology and robotics - to create a species of extraordinarily high intelligence, comprehension, and memory.

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  Updated: Now Playing Pod for BlogCFC

Listen to iTunes for fun and profit!

The Now Playing pod has been updated to take advantage of the additional info present in the iTunes plug-in on Windows such as Amazon Associate ID URL, Amazon album artwork, and Apple Music Store URL. I've also added a Creative Commons license, and changed the pod behavior so when iTunes is stopped a message states that no song is playing but provides text, artwork, and URL of last song played.

The pod will link the album art or title to the Amazon URL with your Associate ID if you configure the Now Playing plug-in that way and if the plug-in sends that information with the now_playing.xml XML packet. The current Mac version of the iTunes plug-in cannot be configured for Amazon or Apple Music store, but if you use iTunes on Windows then you're good to go. At work I listen to iTunes on Mac, so you will only see the linked artwork in my pod on the left when I'm at home.

Download

  Getting Started with CFCPhotoBlog by Seth Duffey

Earlier today Seth Duffey released the first public version of his free ColdFusion based photoblog, aptly named CFCPhotoBlog, and is built on the Model-Glue framework by Joe Rinehart.

From the first time I viewed Seth's blog last year I was very impressed with the visual design of the blog, and I can't seem to stop looking at that damn bug. I'm excited to see that Seth has applied his design talents to the production of CFCPhotoBlog. The default skin looks fantastic, and I really like the clever features such as mapping photos on a world map based on the latitude and longitude of the location of the photo, something that you can optionally enter when adding a photo.

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  Apples, Softies, and Trains

Three Apple engineers and three Microsoft employees are traveling by train to a conference. At the station, the three Microsoft employees each buy tickets and watch as the three Apple engineers buy only a single ticket. "How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?" asks a Microsoft employee.

"Watch and you'll see," answers the Apple engineer. They all board the train. The Microsoft employees take their respective seats but all three Apple engineers cram into a restroom and close the door behind them. Shortly after the train has departed, the conductor comes around collecting tickets. He knocks on the restroom door and says, "Ticket, please." The door opens just a crack and a single arm emerges with a ticket in hand. The conductor takes it and moves on.

The Microsoft employees saw this and agreed it was quite a clever idea. So after the conference, the Microsoft employees decide to copy the Apple engineers on the return trip and save some money (being clever with money, and all that). When they get to the station, they buy a single ticket for the return trip.

To their astonishment, the Apple engineers don't buy a ticket at all. "How are you going to travel without a ticket" says one perplexed Microsoft employee. "Watch and you'll see," answers an Apple engineer. When they board the train the three Microsoft employees cram into a restroom and the three Apple engineers cram into another one nearby.

The train departs. Shortly afterward, one of the Apple engineers leaves his restroom and walks over to the restroom where the Microsoft employees are hiding. He knocks on the door and says, "Ticket, please..."

  Starting ColdFusion MX 7.01 on Mac with ColdFusionLauncher.app

I recently realized that the new CFMX 7.01 Mac OS X ColdFusionLauncher utility isn't documented, so while it may bore some of you, here's a brief description:

ColdFusion MX 7.01 introduced the first graphical (GUI) installation of the Server Configuration for the Macintosh OS X platform. Under this configuration ColdFusion now provides a graphical utility called ColdFusionLauncher.app. This utility can be found for example at the top level in the ColdFusion root directory such as /opt/ColdFusionMX7/ColdFusionLauncher.app.

When double-clicked, this utility will launch a console having three buttons:

• Start ColdFusion MX 7
• Stop ColdFusion MX 7
• Webserver Connector Utility

When the ColdFusion server is started or stopped from this utility status information is output to the console. The webserver connector utility can be started from the ColdFusionLauncher, but will prompt for the Current User Password before running.

While this utility is analogous to the JRun Launcher found with the Multiserver Configuration, the ColdFusionLauncher does not report details about the ColdFusion server such as Web Port or Directory.

Here's a walk through of installing ColdFusion MX 7.01 Server Configuration on Mac OS X.

  Around My Cube

Office snapshots on Flickr: My Geekdom Overfloweth

www.flickr.com

  Lots of public momentum behind CFMX 7.01 for Mac OS X

Todd Matthews posted to the CF-Talk list that eWeek has published a very positive article about CFMX 7.01 support for Mac OS X in production.

Macromedia ColdFusion Supports Mac OS X 'Tiger'

Yahoo's Finance news is running a similar, but longer article:

Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Offers Mac OS X ''Tiger'' and Mac OS X Server ''Tiger'' Support, Achieves Rapid Customer Adoption

Further, Sean Corfield just posted about a new CF_OSX Blog that is looking for contributors.

Also, check out my screenshots of the ColdFusion MX 7.01 GUI installation.

  Installing ColdFusion MX 7.01 Server Configuration on Mac OS X

I've put together a collection of screen shots to walk you through the new GUI installer for ColdFusion 7.01 for Mac OS X. Previously one had to perform several tedious prerequisite installations, but now CFMX is available in a clickable, user friendly installer.

Screenshots of CFMX 7.01 Installation on Mac OS X

For the first time, the System Requirements page lists support for production use of Apple Mac OS X 10.3.9, 10.4.2 and 10.4.3. Previously, the sysreqs had a footnote for for Mac to indicate support was development only.

Some versions of Windows now bear the Development Only footnote, including Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP.

For convenience in starting and stopping the server as well as using the web server config tool, check out the ColdFusionLauncher.app.

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