Mac Issues

So now that thats through, here's a few nits on OSX right now:

1) Cisco VPN -- don't use the latest, use 4.6.04.0061. And then periodically that wont work, you need to do a:

 sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

To get it to come alive again

2) Mighty Mouse -- I like the mouse but the buttons stop working which requires a reboot of the mac. After lots of googling and searching the Apple Tech Support forums I found that others are having the same issue. The answer appears to be shutting off the side buttons via the mouse preferences. Of course that sort of disables part of the reason you paid $50 for a $5 mouse (and USB at that).

3) Sleep/Display issues -- I use a PowerBook 15" and at work I use a Dell 19" monitor and at home I use an Apple 21" Cinema display. I've found that unless I unplug the monitors before putting the mac to sleep then when the mac comes back out of sleep it hangs with the spinning ball and only a reboot will get the mac back. Seems to be a driver bug, but just unplugging the monitor and letting the mac adjust before I close the lid works around this.

4) Quickbooks Pro 6 R2 -- When you enter new items in the checkbook register the "record" button doesnt light up. The workaround is to press "command-c" which will then light the record button. Would be nice if they fixed this BASIC problem. Seems Tiger caused it for them. Perhaps they're holding off on fixing it to force people to QuickBooks Pro 2005...

5) Xcode -- While Apple seems to imply that Xcode works for Java development (and i'm admittedly a novice Java developer) I spent hours trying to do something basic in Xcode -- I had 3 Java classes I wrote and wanted to use the Jakarta Commons CLI classes with my code and for the life of me I couldnt figure out how to do it. In the end I gave up and downloaded Eclipse and had it going in 5 mins literally. Apple needs to get real about Java development on the Mac or just point people to Eclipse.