Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Notes on upgrading to Mac OS X Lion

In the engineering wing of my company a majority of us have upgraded to Lion from 10.6.8.

One of the reasons we upgraded was that we could use the new 1.7.x JDK offered by Oracle instead of using the 1.7.x OpenJDK from Google.

Unfortunately there's some work to be done and new ways of doing things in Lion that have changed from 10.6.8.

Some of the tasks you might have to work on, or feature changes you'll need to be aware of, will be:

1) Install more RAM.

     After the install I needed to go from 4 Gigs RAM to 8 Gigs RAM. An additional update. With the new Mac Book Pros with flash drives built in the last few months, 16 Gigs of RAM is even more desirable so I would recommend going to 16 Gigs if your IT department can afford it.

2) Installing the latest JDK 1.7.x from Oracle

     This is an easy download and install from Oracle. There seems to be a new path for the JDK and you'll have to work on your Java Preferences to reenable old Java versions.

3) Getting used to the new virtual desktop layout in Lion.

     Unlike prior versions, the virtual desktops are laid our horizontally and you add more from left to right, instead of classic cardinal direction layout having four desktops arranged in a square like pattern.

4) F8 doesn't seem to work to see all your desktops.

     You'll need to use F3 to see your desktops and add new ones by mousing to the upper right and clicking the plus sign.

4) Using Lion's VPN client instead of Cisco's VPN client

     Cisco seems to not have a VPN client for Lion yet. It stopped working for me once I upgraded to Lion.

5) Getting used to Lion's ostensibly slower user experience

     Lion is definitely slower and if you have encryption features turned on that could also cause additional slowness.

6) ITunes not working anymore if you have an earlier Lion DMG file since it doesn't automatically update ITunes to the latest version.

    Since you might get a Lion DMG installer from a few months ago the ITunes that gets installed could be a few months older and your ITunes will not launch anymore so you'll need to manually download ITunes and reinstall.

7) Having to work on password timeout settings since those will be overwritten. I had a 30 second timeout for a screensaver on my MacBook Pro, which would automatically lock my user session.

     You'll have to update your preferences under System Preferences for Desktop & Screensaver and Security and Privacy.

8) Vertical scrollbars are not automatically enabled.

     This was definitely a huge annoyance for those of us who like using scrollbars instead of the new gestures. Under User Preferences > General I selected Always for Show Scroll bars.

Thursday, July 05, 2012

Perry Canyon to White Rock Trail and back

Did a new ride just south of Brigham City today with my sister-in-law.

I found the ride on utahmountainbiking.com under Ogden Area rides. It's at the bottom of the page.

We rode in monsoon (raining or slight drizzle) weather for 90% of the ride so it was a change from what we did the day before when it was sunny and in the low 90s on Snow Basin mountain.

The trail is certainly hard to follow at points but the website is pretty good in giving directions. It would help if there were a couple more signs but we made our way around the loop in about 4.5 hours with plenty of breaks.

You're cautioned in that the trail is a little overgrown - especially when wet - and that parts of the trail are not well worn and can be considered primitive or faint since it seems to be one of the newer loops on the Wasatch front. Thankfully, the fainter parts of the trail are on the lower sections and the upper sections, whether on the Perry Canyon or White Rock Trail are easier to follow, the higher you go.

I would recommend doing it counter-clockwise like they mention on utahmountainbiking.

Also, follow the single-track up from the parking lot and you'll see the turnoff for White Rock inscribed on a tree limb with Grizzly on the left if you'd like to try clockwise.

Don't use any of the roads up to this point; unless you need to cross them to follow the single track. You should only have to cross the creek once in Perry Canyon too and that's in the beginning - within the first half mile.

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