It’s easy enough to see machines that are on your segment of the network, and browse through any files they might be sharing. But these days machines do a lot more than simple file sharing. There’s no way, though, to tell at a glance if a machine is running ssh, sharing out its iPhoto library, or something similar.

If there are Macs on your network, you can use Flame to quickly suss out and display the services running on the machines in your VLAN. It’s still under development, but it still seems pretty handy. Enjoy.

Lest you develop the impression from my last few posts, gentle reader, that I am a one-dimensional, Windows-hating Mac fanboy, rest assured that my reservoir of bile is nearly inexhaustible, and certainly sufficient to allow a liberal spew of disdain over all major contemporary operating systems and their associated applications.

Take, for example, iWeb. I’ve never found it very useful, but that’s primarily because I’m already comfortable with a more technical suite of applications, comprised chiefly of BBEdit, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and WordPress. Though I eschew iWeb as a development tool, its merits are nonetheless readily discernable; in a nutshell, it makes website creation very easy for users who know nothing about HTML, Javascript, XML, RSS, AJAX, or any other dollop of the alphabet soup in which the modern Web floats, and no reason or motivation to learn about it.

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Its progress is insidious. It takes hold from within. Often viewed initially as a benign thing, it can quickly metastasize, growing alarmingly strong and fast, until its host has been subsumed, converted into a ruthlessly efficient vector for spreading it further into other, unsuspecting individuals.

I’m talking, of course, about Mac ownership.

Our department is now pretty much Mac-centric, but most of the other units in our division are still Windows-only shops (to say nothing of Linux). Yet just the other day one of the desktop techs, a staunch Windows user, declared that he’s in need of a new laptop. Since being able to run both OSes on a single machine would be a benefit in his work, he came over and asked about our group’s experience with Boot Camp and virtual machines. Now, since you can’t run OS X as a virtual machine in a Windows environment without hacking the OS, the only reliable single-machine solution is really to get a Mac laptop, and that’s the conclusion he seemed to have arrived at, too.

Now, it’s a given that he’ll be running Windows as his primary OS. But OS X will be there for the times he needs to roll out to help a Mac user. As a long-time Windows user who is (justifiably) deeply skeptical of the usual Mac fanboy faggotry , he’s certainly not going to just start guzzling the Kool-Aid.

But now he’ll have the cup right there on his desk. It might be empty, at first, but it’ll be there, waiting.

Sooner or later, he’ll take that first little sip.

I never bothered with Apple’s Boot Camp feature under 10.4 because I didn’t feel like repartitioning any of my production drives (at home or work) with a beta product, just for the dubious benefit of running a Windows operating system on Apple hardware (I already have three Windows boxes at home and another at work).

Nonetheless, I decided to give it a spin on my new MacBook Pro. After some initial frustration caused by not realizing Boot Camp Assistant only recognizes partitions made by Boot Camp Assistant (and not the FAT32 partition I’d set up with Apple’s Disk Utility, which seems stupid), I was all set to install XP. I had my partition, had my XP SP2 disc and some free time. None of it, however, did any good.

I don’t know why, but Boot Camp simply fails on this system. It reboots to a gray screen, then the MBP spits the XP install disc out and proceeds no further (unless you count a “bootable partition not found” error some minutes later to be progress). There’s been similar-sounding cases discussed on the Apple forums, but my OS X partition is (mercifully) both intact and bootable.

I’ve tried and failed to put the MBP through Boot Camp six times, always with the same results. The disc I used has been used to create successful Boot Camp Windows installations before, and I’ve even swapped media just to be sure. So I give up; I’m stumped. Anybody else had this problem?

Last night I upgraded my MacBook Pro to OS X 10.5. Yay! All was well. Then I got into work and almost immediately found that Safari 3 doesn’t play nice with JIRA. Boo.

I only mention it because I know that at least some of you visiting this site use JIRA in your own slave-pits, so beware! Note, however, that (of course) Firefox 2.0.0.9 doesn’t have this problem. The folks at Atlassian have reported something that sounds like the same issue, and have a patch for it.

Another couple of post-upgrade casualties were my erstwhile stalwart companions Fireworks 8 and VNCDimension, neither of which will even launch under 10.5. Looks like it’s time to crack the wallet open a little wider. Sigh.

My MacBook Pro has developed a weird behavior. It spontaneously turns on when plugged in to the power adapter. Each time it’s plugged in there’s about a 60% chance of it happening. It happens not only when it’s asleep, but when the thing has been previously properly shut down.

At first I figured it was the “Wake for Ethernet administrator access” feature, but I’ve since ruled that out; yesterday I opened the lid and waited about thirty seconds. I knew I’d shut it down the night before, and that AirPort had also been turned off, but I wanted to make doubly sure. No sign of life. Next, I plugged only the power cable into the thing, and it started right up, chime and everything. It’s something I can live with, I guess, but I have no idea why it’s doing this, and that’s irritating.