Switchy Mailbox

A reader writes:

Dear Mr. McSwitchenstein , Do you have any advice one how to migrate archived emails stored in a .pst file to a Mac? I have about 2 GB of archived email that I would need to migrate in order to switch myself over at work. (I don't yet have an opportunity to move all of my email to the cloud.) Thanks, Juana B. A. Switcher II

This is a great question and one that I've pondered for a long time. There is a business opportunity for someone here.

First of all: switching to the cloud is no longer difficult for a moderately technical user. Get a Gmail account, enable IMAP, connect to that account via IMAP in Outlook, and just copy folders wholesale from your PST to the IMAP account. 2Gb is not a lot of mail these days to copy into the cloud for free. And once you've put it in Gmail, Google looks after it and makes it easy to get it elsewhere.

There might be other reasons you're stuck cloudless, though. Perhaps you're not permitted to store that information with a third-party host. Perhaps, like ol' Switchy, you've got 12Gb of mail in PST format which you can't afford to host in the ether.

Seems to me that you've got two options:

1. Convert those PSTs to mbox format and import them wherever you want

mbox is the most basic format for email storage. It mirrors the RFC 2822 format for email messages, which in turn is still used as the wire format for SMTP mail delivery. mbox is the ASCII of email; it's ancient, primitive, current, universally understood, and thus a perfect archival format.

How to convert PSTs to mbox? First of all, you have to have a copy of Outlook which can open the PST. Secondly, you're going to need proprietary software—none of which I've tried or can recommend. Things like MessageSave look like they'd do the job, but I can't vouch for them. Try searching for "PST to mbox".

2. Keep a copy of Outlook around

This isn't as convenient as actually moving your Outlook mail to your current email client, but if all you want is a long-term solution for accessing your mail archives then a virtualization product like VMWare or Parallels could well suffice. Keep your VM image handy with Windows and Outlook, and your PC format mail archives will be accessible long beyond your switch.

There's one more possibility which is worth mentioning. The next version of Microsoft Office for Mac will no longer ship with Entourage but instead a first-class version of Outlook for Mac. It's entirely possible that Outlook for Mac will read PSTs and be able to export them into Mail.app. Fingers crossed.

Switching Checkpoint

OK, so now we've recapped and closed off a previous two-parter, it's probably worth quickly taking stock of the current switching situation. The "switch sitch", if you will.

A previous post laid things out neatly in terms of three "things I like" and three "things I'm struggling with". On reflection I think this is actually a serendipitously powerful technique for measuring where I've got to with the Mac: the subtlety (or not) of the issues corresponds to the depth of my current concern; the severity corresponds to my overall happiness or otherwise.

So without further ado, things I like:

• even though I'm far from a Unix guru or expert, I'm beginning to enjoy the Unix-ness of OS X. I like the transparency of the innards of the platform very much. In a similar spirit, MacFuse is fantastic.
• multiple monitor support in the OS seems to work beautifully in a way I could never achieve with Windows. I plug the MacBook Pro into my LCD at work and it remembers that the laptop is on the right and the external monitor is the primary display. I plug it into my monitor at home and it remembers that the laptop is on the left and the external monitor is the primary display. I plug it into a projector at work and it remembers that the laptop is on the left and is the primary display. It works exactly how you'd want it to.
• Growl. This as far as I'm concerned is background real-time notifications done right. It is a sleek Smart Car to the Windows notification bubble's Model T. I like Growl a lot, and I especially like that now I have it I find that software I'm already using (Aperture, MarsEdit, last.fm, Spotify) just picks it up and starts using it. Great stuff.

but there's stuff I'm struggling with too:

• the insanely unpredictable and useless "Zoom" buttton (the green blob at the top-left of a window). In any given situation, with any given window, I can never tell in advance what clicking it is going to do. I just clicked it in Safari and the window grew about 50 pixels to the right. I clicked it again and the window grew about 50 pixels to the left. WTF? Want to maximize your iTunes window? Click the green button... but no! In iTunes, "zoom" apparently means "become miniature". That's fucked up.
• although the OS does multiple monitors really well, application support is scarce. I'm forever rescuing application windows from remote corners of the screen because they're trying to be on a monitor which has been disconnected. Tweetie For Mac, I'm looking at you in particular right now.
• Spaces is a real mess. They did fix a bug in a point release of Leopard where switching to one space and then back again would change the z-order of all your windows... but still: I can't tell you how many times I've found I can't interact with an application in Space n because it's displaying a modal dialog in Space m. Lame.

Next time: some essential utilities for survival in Mac-land.

The Big Idea

A quick recap. I first used Microsoft Windows 20 years ago.

• 1989: summer job developing DOS software and poking around with Windows 2.0
• 1991: contract work porting DOS software to Windows 3.0
• 1994: hand-coding Windows Metafile generation in Windows 3.1
• 1997: investment banking IT: the joy of Lotus Notes on Windows NT 3.51
• 1998: different investment banking IT: developing and deploying ASP/DHTML applications on Windows NT 4
• 1999: part of the Internet Explorer early adopter program; attended the IE5 launch in London
• 2000: internet bubble: designing and managing server-side Java on Windows 2000 Server
• 2001: picked up my launch copy of Windows XP at PDC in Los Angeles
• 2004: telco innovation: market-trialing telecoms services deployed on Windows Server 2003
• 2005: shark-jumping: early adopter of the most ridiculous Windows-based server product ever
• Feb 2008: retirement of my home Windows desktop; purchase of a MacBook Pro
• Apr 2008: switched at work from a Windows-running IBM ThinkPad to a MacBook Pro

I started this blog with the idea that I could write about one man's attempt to switch from Windows to Mac after a deep history and familiarity with the former. I could share experiences, gotchas, workarounds, joy, sorrow, rejoicing and cursing. I knew it would be a journey worth documenting, and indeed it was. Moreover, I thoroughly regret not having documented it.

But perhaps instead I could tell the same basic story but with the twist of starting from the year-and-a-bit-in point. At this stage it's less about the perilous leap over the wall and more about a different and deeper experience: learning to be a Mac power-user having been a Windows power-user. To me that's a much more interesting story in any case.

I know it sounds a bit suspect; bear with me. If it doesn't work out I'll maybe just put the switchy.net domain on ebay and forget it.

...and, thirteen months later - Part II

It's still the little things. Even the famous Mac Boot Beep turns out to have a fascinating provenance and history, including the obligatory Steve Jobs anecdote one might expect. And, sadly, I've been hearing a lot of the Boot Beep recently.

My personal MacBook Pro is fine, indeed literally better than new since over the course of the last year I upgraded the hard drive and replaced the keyboard. My work MacBook Pro, on the other hand, since last Thursday plays the Boot Beep just great but apart from that does pretty much nothing at all. No display, no Apple logo, no sad Mac icon, not even a backlight on the display.

Not a problem, you'd think. Until the replacement arrives I can just use my personal laptop, right? That's true to an extent. Much of what I use for work (Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, corporate directory) I can use on my personal laptop without getting on the corp network—but a handful of vital other things remain available only to trusted machines on the LAN. And to get on the corp network at Google one needs the necessary client certificates (stored on the hard drive). And naturally Google's policy is to encrypt all user data on laptop hard drives. The VPN software requires the same client certificates and anyway isn't to be installed on non-Google equipment. What's a switchy guy to do?

Enter a technique which seems like utter magic to someone still emerging from decades of Windows use.

• Step 1: put the apparently-dead work laptop in Target Disk Mode by holding down the T key while turning it on. Wait for the beep, wait another ten seconds, then release the T key.
• Step 2: connect home laptop to work laptop with a 6-pin firewire cable.
• Step 3: boot the home laptop while holding down the Option key. This will bring up the Startup Manager and allow you to select to boot from (incredibly) the work laptop's hard drive which is now mounted over Firewire.
• Step 4: boot working hardware (home laptop) from hard disk in broken hardware (work laptop).
• Step 5: enjoy the corporate Leopard image, complete with client certs, hard drive encryption, all my work stuff... running on my home machine.

This was a joyous moment. But wait: it gets better.

I used this configuration for a while this week to get some work done which needed doing on the corp network. Before long, though, I got to thinking. The work laptop is basically now just an external hard drive which I'm booting from... so why don't I just clone the disk onto an actual portable external hard drive and boot from that instead? I'd just been reading about using dd to clone a hard drive, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

• Step 1: boot personal laptop from its own hard drive. Put work laptop in target disk mode (as above) and connect via Firewire.
• Step 2: plug the portable hard drive into the personal laptop. Now the personal laptop has two external volumes attached: the work laptop's drive and the portable hard drive.
• Step 3: determine which disk is which in terms of device nodes. In Terminal.app, run "diskutil list" (see the man page for more information about diskutil) and check the output. For me, the work laptop's drive was /dev/disk1 and the portable drive was /dev/disk2. You'll see what I'm talking about.
• Step 4: unmount the drive you're copying from. I used "diskutil unmount /dev/disk1". You don't want any background processes trying to write to the disk as you're doing a bytewise clone of it. Once you unmount it you've taken care of that
• Step 5: in Terminal.app, run "dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/disk2 bs=100m". Make very certain that you've got the two parameters the right way around otherwise you're going to mess up your source disk.

And now you wait.

And you wait, and you wait.

And dd, inscrutably, just sits there doing its thing perfectly silently.

If you're anything like me, you're going to get impatient after a few hours. You're going to wonder what's going on and how much more time it's going to take. Is this thing working at all? Is it waiting for me to do something? Is there some "--verbose" option for dd which I should have specified? Do I really want to stop the thing from running, and lose the investment of these hours, to find out what's going on?

Don't stop dd from running. It turns out you can give it a nudge to get it to spit out its progress: in technical terms it responds to the SIGINFO signal. So press Ctrl-T in the terminal window (by default Ctrl-T sends SIGINFO to the foreground process) and after a few seconds dd will tell you where it's got to.

Prepare for disappointment. Throughput for me was a pretty crappy 2MB/s, meaning it'd take about 21 hours to complete the 150GB disk I was cloning; after three hours dd had copied only about 21GB. That's pretty terrible, especially for someone as lazy and impatient as me. I figured that there must be a better way, so I stopped dd and did a bit more research.

To cut a long story short, SuperDuper is the answer. It took about 90 minutes to complete and I ended up with a portable USB drive containing a clone of my work laptop's hard drive. I attribute the quicker drive-duplication time to a better raw transfer speed (perhaps transferring files rather than sectors allows for smarter caching and read-ahead at the filesystem level?) and also the fact that SuperDuper is only copying the actual data on the drive rather than including gigabytes of unused space.

And the happy ending is that booting my personal laptop over USB from the fresh clone (using the Startup Manager as above) works perfectly.

So now I've got a fairly portable solution which will keep me running until my replacement work laptop arrives. I can easily boot my home machine either from its internal hard disk or from the corporate Leopard image (complete with client certificates and encrypted home directory) on my external USB drive.

As a footnote, it's worth noting finally that I was in fact offered a loaner machine to tide me over until the replacement MacBook Pro arrives. They only have IBM ThinkPads spare, though, and I don't think I'm ready for the... ahem... switch.

More next time.

It's the little things - Part I

I never told the story of my switch to Mac at work.

After I got my MacBook Pro at home I switched on Hot Corners to activate Exposé. I soon got used to throwing the mouse pointer down to the bottom-left of the screen for what seems (to a Windows person like me) like a fancy visual kind of Alt-Tab. I soon got used to it and, hey, it's pretty useful and dare I say moreso than Alt-Tab. I was surprised that what prima facie seems like pure eye-candy is actually a genuine productivity feature.

Before long, though, muscle memory developed and I found myself at work slinging the mouse pointer down to the bottom left only to have my IBM ThinkPad stare blankly and nonplussed back at me, as if to say "and now what? You gonna click on 'Start'?". I didn't have Exposé and Hot Corners on my work laptop, didn't even have OS X come to that, and figured I needed to fix the situation. I needed a MacBook Pro at work as well, so I ordered one.

This is where it gets tricky, though. The machine that arrived the next day looked just like my home machine. The differences, I thought after a quick scan, were superficial and limited to everyday nonfunctional stuff

• home: glossy screen; work: matt screen
• home: 2.6Ghz; work: 2.4GHz
• home: standard Leopard build; work: custom Leopard build
• home: 200Gb hard drive; work: 160Gb hard drive

And so it was, until one day I accidentally executed one of the fancy new multi-touch gestures on the trackpad of my work machine. Ooo! So I guess they were kind enough to give me a Penryn machine and three-finger swipe is mine for the having. Wasn't long before I got used to lazy trackpad-based browsing using swipe for back and forwards.

You can see what's coming, though. Once again I've become sucked into depending on a feature which only works on one of my laptops. I'm seriously considering turning off the new multi-touch gestures on my work machine; I can't afford to upgrade my home one to match it.

Reassuringly expensive

In the UK they used to have adverts for Stella Artois, with the strapline "reassuringly expensive". Yes, Stella is £1.80 a pint, or whatever it was back then, but that's good pricey not bad pricey. That was the proposition as I understood it, anyway.

Apple have a similar gig (if you'll excuse the pun) going with memory prices. Take the 4Gb I just put in the home MacBook Pro this weekend: Apple price, a cool $600; Crucial price, $105.

Feeling reassured?

A sense of perspective

If you work with me, you may well have come across my "searchmonger" series of presentations on mobile search. What you may not know is that (a) most of the data is laid out in a treemap; and (b) I got the specific idea of using that visualization technique from using spacemonger, a piece of software for Windows which helps you comprehend where all your disk space is going.

Well of course now I've switched to Mac I'm going to need a new spacemonger---and to my joy, I found today Grand Perspective, which doesn't quite use cushion treemaps to do the business... but kinda looks as if it does.

Nonetheless: yay Grand Perspective!

I could fix this shit on Windows

At the moment I'm suffering from this crazy problem, both on my home and my work Mac. It's pretty annoying: I download a ".doc" file with Safari, and I end up with a ".doc.dot". I download a ".ppt" file and it gets saved as ".ppt.pot". Grr!

And while the linked thread gives some hints and clues which I might follow up on (I already installed 12.0.1, by the way: no difference), it just reminds me that I'm this new world where there's no regedit, no HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, no regmon and filemon and procmon... where are my Mac Sysinternals? I feel rather powerless without them.

Twins

So wow, I actually just Switched at work as well. I'm right now using my work MacBook Pro as a palmrest as I type this blog entry on my home MacBook Pro. Crazy. I'm so far up on Maslow's hierarchy of computing needs right now that I can barely see the ground any more. Get me oxygen!

I guess that after I switched to Safari at home I must have become used to the real (Cocoa) edit control keyboard shortcuts in most Mac software. And then having left behind the confusing FrankenMac Windows-ized Firefox 2 (Carbon) ones, staying on Windows at work was just too much... well, work. So here I am. With twins.

I'm starting to get productive on Mac in some ways. Exposé: I finally see what Mac users have been raving about all this time. Spaces: I'm gingerly getting used to it. TextWrangler seems like a decent text editor and Twitterific is good fun. I only used iMovie once so far but it did make editing and uploading a video to YouTube amazingly easy. Seriously impressively so, in fact.

I'm a keyboard guy, though, and so in some ways the Mac is disappointing. How do I assign global keyboard shortcuts to things, so---for instance---whatever I'm doing I can press Apple-Shift-T to bring up a terminal window? How do I pull down and explore menus with just the keyboard? Is there a way to navigate dialogs and messageboxes without a pointing device? This stuff eludes me so far.

I also had brief inner panic earlier today when I realized I don't really have within reach an actual physical functioning Windows machine. Everything I've learned over nearly 20 years of programming Windows and knowing the internals of the OS I'm using: suddenly no practical use whatsoever. All of a sudden I'm a platform expatriot with new mannerisms to learn and a new culture to absorb.

As an actual expatriot, though, living a very real 5,000 miles from where I grew up, I think I can make it. With stereo MacBook Pros, like an Apple-esque Jean-Michelle Jarre with a hand on each keyboard, I think I might like it here.

Bonjour le Mac

Mrs McSwitchenstein, on her nth Mac (currently a 24" iMac), has the monochrome laser printer; I'm lucky enough to have some super-duper crazy extravagant color photo printer thing. Most of the time this arrangement has worked because on the odd occasion we've required the other's printer for some unusual need we can just email files between us and be done with it. We invoice each other for consumables, reprints are half price, all good.

By contrast, tonight the incredible happened. Mrs McS wanted to print a color Word document but due to a recent change of infrastructure on the Mr McS side of things, ol' Switchy hasn't got himself Microsoft Office-enabled yet so couldn't deliver the goods. I still have no copy of Office so can't print my wife's .DOC files.

Hey, though, we're both on Macs... right? This should be the most straightforward thing ever... right? 

I figured I'd start at System Preferences, then... mmm... perhaps "Print and Fax". I see my printer but it says "Printer Sharing is turned off" and offers a button "Sharing". I click the button, ah-ha turn Printer Sharing "on", and the hardest bit... well the hardest bit was working out what to do next with the dialog box. No "Close" button. No "OK". No "Apply". No "Done". It was almost disbelief that even that extra click had been made unnecessary.

Running to the back of the house to Mrs McS's Mac, then, to the next step of tonight's adventure---and obviously the story concludes with the inevitable automatic discovery of the color printer, a complete automatic installation of the driver software, all the printing options appearing, and seconds later superb color prints coming from the Canon in my office all the way from the back of the house.

I talked to Mrs McSwitchenstein about Bonjour, Apple's service discovery technology based on zeroconf. She was très impressionée.

You're Welcome

So to all you who now have cheaper, faster, sexier, more powerful Mac laptops available to you: you're welcome. They were just waiting for me to buy the last of the old line.

Rats.

Zero Sum Game

So I'm just getting comfortable with the Mac now. Readers of the previous post pointed me to numerous resources to help out, like this one, but in fact the best way forward turned out in fact to be following the overwhelming consensus and ditching Firefox. I'm now a happy(-ish) Safari user, enjoying the speed and Apple-ishness but missing my Google Browser Sync and all my extensions and wotnot. Ho hum. I imported bookmarks, turned on password saving, and I guess I'll suck it up.

And in other news I'm gradually shuffling around old Windows data from one drive to another, re-formatting from NTFS as I go, like some huge file-based game of Traffic. I'm getting there, and digital nirvana awaits. Already the photos have their primary home on the Mac, and I'm even gradually getting to grips with Aperture 2, despite its best attempts to elude me in its unique and inscrutable way. I'm getting there!

Gosh, and oh yes the Midi interface is great: I plugged the Mac into the digital piano for the first time last night. Worked first time, of course, and straightaway I had GarageBand transcribing everything I played. Damn thing is unforgiving timewise, though, and insults me repeatedly by pretending that every bar I play has a semiquaver rest at the beginning of it. Gack! I suppose I'm rusty, but right here is my incentive to practice again.

The title of this post, though, in combination with the above great leaps forward, augurs a sad ending. Just as I snuggle into Mac nirvana, Mrs McSwitchenstein is cast into Mac purgatory with an unfortunate accidental iPhone-toilet encounter. You don't need details, I'm sure. One step forward, one step back.

Modifier Key Madness

First of all, thanks to Micah in his comment for informing me that the green "plus" button is called "Zoom", and thanks particularly for his agreeing with me that the thing is pretty hopeless. I note tacit agreement from Apple in that it doesn't have a keyboard shortcut. Coincidence? I think not. But anyway, let's talk about modifier keys. You're going to think I'm nitpicking but remember this: I produce, in my job, primarily text. Email, PowerPoint, Wiki pages, Excel, code (yes, tragically in reverse order of volume of output). I use my keyboard a lot and for hours and hours every day. I've also decades of muscle memory invested in how it works. I have already this week spent literally hours perfecting emails. I edit text for a living. I expected change moving to a Mac, of course, but not total bifurcation. And certainly not trifurcation! This is so messed up! For instance, checkit:

• in Firefox, Command-left-arrow navigates back in the browser history when the focus is iny rich text edit window in Blogger. In the "Edit Html" textbox of Blogger, though, it means "home" (start-of-line). And in the Gmail compose window it does nothing. In a Safari multi-line text editor it means "home" (start-of-line). In SubEthaEdit the same.
• in Safari and SubEthaEdit, Control-right-arrow means "word-right". In Firefox it does nothing.
• in a Firefox text area, page-up and page-down move a page up and page down in the text area (yay). In SubEthaEdit, nothing. In Safari, they scroll the page up and down independent of the text area!

C'mon! I mean, seriously. Is this Firefox = FAIL or am I missing some grand unified theory of Apple Mac modifier keys? I shudder to think what would happen if I open up the lid of the laptop and add the "Fn" key to the mix. This is a big mess. And don't get me started on "Home" and "End". Ugh. Right now I'm editing this post afraid that I'll accidentally press Command-left-arrow meaning word-left but being taken to mean "back" in the browser, losing what I wrote. In other news, I watched a whole series of tutorials on Aperture 2 last night. It looks promising. And everybody's recommending Quicksilver so I feel sure that it will change my life. Stay tuned.

Bye Bye PC

The Switch is pretty much complete. The Dell sits dejected and silent (finally!) in the corner of the room and the MacBook Pro reigns supreme hooked up to the many silvery and slick peripherals which have outclassed but been subservient to the Dell for years. Everything's in place for the final transition of photos, videos, documents and music... not just putting my first foot firmly in Macland but removing my second from PCland. Here we go. It's been surprisingly difficult to get to this point, what with juggling things around between internal and external storage, and between drive formats and applications and wotnot. I think I've abandoned Picasa at least temporarily while I give Aperture a shot, but even with that switch I wanted to make sure that the way back was still in place if I needed it. It's only in the migration become apparent how much I'm actually invested in Picasa. But anyway, here I am. I've installed Caffeine, SubEthaEdit and iSlayer iStat. Firefox, obviously, and Aperture 2. Keyboard shortcuts are still causing me trouble and I'd love to get faster at doing things. Finder looks like I accidentally installed the Large Print version for the visually impaired, and I'm still waiting for Office 2008 since---very tellingly, I believe---the Microsoft Store on Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus is out of stock. Makes you wonder. By the way, Roomba turned up safe and sound. I think he was feeling a little threatened and neglected. You know how they are. TiVo was the same when we got Roomba.