And here’s another thing about Leopard…
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Leopard on November 13, 2007 at 10:27 am
Our Leopard family has started to have cubs as the updates come in thick and fast. But one change that was unexpected and definitely for the better, is Firewire handling.
As far as we are concerned this fast connection interface has always been better than the SCSI it replaced, One of our office drawers is full of cables and inevitably half a dozen SCSI terminators of different types, dating back to the old black ones that only Quadras used. The memories of SCSI are not pleasant: of getting the correct ID and which devices in a chain prefer to be in which order. No, SCSI was never a favourite here.
Stirring Polenta
Firewire, on the other hand, is simple to connect up, even to a live Mac. The new 800 version makes USB2 seem like stirring polenta and especially for sustained disk writing when Firewire 800 is so much faster. We have a couple of Western Digital My Book Pros, here, with triple interfaces for both Firewire 400 and 800 as well as USB2 and we have tried them all. But the first drive we bought kept dropping its Firewire connection and needed the rigid digit treatment and pulling its cables to get it to mount again. Western Digital sent a replacement but that did the same. So they sent another and let us keep the first as well.
While the third My Book has worked flawlessly, under Mac OS X 10.4 the second was always flakey. However, since installing Leopard both drives have performed trouble-free. Whatever was wrong with Firewire in Tiger has been fixed in Leopard.
Periodic dances
The periodic maintenance scripts have also been fixed. Usually they run in the early hours of the morning but now Launchd taked care of them and is intelligent enough to run missed events on srat-up or reawakening from sleep.
The scripts are now stored as plain text files in: System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-X.plist
The X is either daily weekly or monthly. In the past editing the times meant a trip to Terminal and Pico or using a tool such as Onyx. But now any plain text editor will do the task.
Above is the daily script with the time it runs changed to 9.05 (Note that the Finder’s Apple-Shift-4-spacebar to copy a window also copies its shadow). A lot easier to do once rather than doing the sudo periodic daily weekly monthly dance in Terminal. And if you screw things up and didn’t make a back-up before altering the script, just go to Time Machine and retrieve the old one.
You are using Time Machine, aren’t you?
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