I just upgraded to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Since my SuperDrive is dead, I was going to install from a second Mac booted into FireWire drive sharing mode. The install disk refuses to run in this mode. I used OS X disk sharing, but had to first run a couple commands:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true

then restart Finder, and enable sharing on the machine I was installing to. It doesn’t make any sense that I would have to enable sharing on the MacBook being upgraded. It took longer to find these commands than it took to do the actual remote install.

So far, most of the reviews posted last week by major review sites seem reasonably accurate. Unfortunately, they fail to mention a major flaw in 10.6. Finder no longer displays file sizes in proper bytes and megabytes, but in the strange new format that is inexplicably gaining popularity. Instead of using the natural base-2 prefix convention, 10.6 uses base-10 prefixes. Fortunately, the command line programs still report the proper sizes. Now Finder reports my user directory is 5 GB larger than when I check using du -sh ~/. I have looked all over for a fix to this problem, but still haven’t found one. I need to find something like:

defaults write GB.retard.setting.for.lusers -OFF
–comment by “Drunkus Rex”

Arrg! Text edit is doing strange text replacements now… It keeps changing ‘-sh’ to ‘-ti’. I already disabled some of the other replacements, but keep finding more that I don’t want. Now I have to find what is causing this one…

The new XCode only supports iPhone OS 3.0 or newer. This unnecessarily limits the customer base for our applications we hope to release in the next few weeks.

I am enjoying the built-in VPN. I finally ditched the awful Cisco VPN client. The 10.6 support for Cisco VPNs seems to work well.

Closing tabs after viewing video fullscreen in Safari finally works. Under 10.5, hitting cmd-W would try to close the whole window. Now it only closes the active tab.