Write Rights Aren't Right

As I mentioned in my first post, I have my new Mac set up differently from my old one. Instead of using an account with administrator rights for daily use, I have separate administrator and personal accounts. For the most part, this hasn't caused any trouble, and often when I try to do something that requires administrator rights, such as dragging an item to the Applications folder, I am prompted with an Authenticate dialog. Thus, I usually don't have to switch to the administrator account at all.

However, there are some programs that want to have write access to the folder that they're in, or to files in the folder that they're in. All the programs that I've encountered so far that have this property are games. Often, a game will save its high scores to a file within the executable's folder, rather than in some globally writable location. Sometimes even the options are stored in a file in the executable's folder, rather than in the user's Preferences folder as they should be. This can cause problems, when trying to play the game from a user account, ranging from settings and scores not being saved, to the program unexpectedly quitting at some point, sometimes immediately after launch.

At first I tried dealing with this intelligently; I would launch and play a game as the administrator, allow it to create a high score file, and then set global write permissions on the high score file. Then I could play from the user account, and scores would be saved. But finding which file(s) or folder(s) to make globally writable isn't always easy, plus having to do this for a number of games takes time. So eventually I got lazy, and for every game that wouldn't work properly from a user account, I just recursively set the game's entire folder to be globally writable. It's not the end of the world if someone accidentally deletes a game, after all.

Oddly, I still have a game that doen't work at all from a user account, even after setting its folder and everything in it to be globally writable. It is Komi, which brings up an error dialog shortly after launch:



I am at a loss as to how it can not work properly after making its folder and the entire folder's contents globally writable. It must be trying to write something somewhere else in the file system, which is rather disconcerting.

Exclusive Intel Mac Pic!

The big news at this year's WWDC was of course the announcement that Apple will be transitioning their Power Mac line to use Intel microprocessors. Everybody's talking about it.

But one thing that hasn't really been discussed is what the new machines are going to *look* like. As we all know, Apple always overhauls the design of their computer cases whenever they introduce a major overhaul to a product line. A Power Mac G5 looks very little like a Power Mac G4, for example. What you might not know is that Apple already has prototypes of the new Intel based Mac cases. And I have an inside source who was able to sneak me a picture. Since I'm worried about getting sued over this, I'm not going to display the image inline; click below if you want to see it.

Intel-based Mac exclusive image

As you can see, Apple continues to be at the forefront of innovative industrial design. I believe that this new design will be as popular as that of the G4 Cube or the iPod Mini.

I Got Tiger

I recently purchased a copy of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger. But rather than getting the $129 stand-alone package and installing it over Panther on my 6 year old Blue & White G3, I opted for the $2000 package in which Tiger is delivered preinstalled on the hard drive of a dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5.

This machine is amazingly fast compared to my previous one. Since both the machine and the OS are new, I have no idea how the OS itself compares to Panther. But using the G5 for the last couple of weeks has been an absolute joy.

...Except for a few problems. There's this weird bug I've encountered in which interface sound effects stop playing. In other words, there's no longer a sound effect when an item is moved to the Trash, or when the Trash is emptied. It's not a general audio problem, because I can still play music, watch video with sound, and play games with sound effects with no problem. It's just interface sound effects. And it's not just the Finder, either. Mail doesn't play an alert when new mail is received.

The most disconcerting thing about this problem is that the only way to fix it seems to be to reboot the machine. I've been using OS X ever since 10.0, and I think that this is the first bug that I've seen that can be fixed by rebooting, but not by logging out and then logging back in.

I think that the bug might be triggered via Fast User Switching. Until I got the G5, I've been using OS X the way that I believe Apple expects most home users to use it. There was only one account that had Administrator privileges, and it was also my personal account, which I used all the time. When I set up the G5, I decided to use a different approach, which I've heard recommended by others. I created an Administrator account that would only be used when it was needed, and a personal account which does not have Administrator privileges. So while migrating software from my old machine to the new one, I was switching between both accounts frequently. I believe that this somehow causes the sound bug.

I've seen another problem as well, which so far seems to coincide with the sound problem, so I can only assume that they are two symptoms of the same underlying cause. When the interface sounds don't play, the machine also won't go to sleep. At least, not on its own; I can put it to sleep manually just fine. But I have it set to sleep automatically via the Energy Saver panel, and it won't do so when the bug is in effect. Again, both problems are fixed after a reboot.