From Journeyman to Master » Mac

Picasa on OS X!

simon — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 01:47:21 +0000

I don’t like iPhoto. Functionality wise it’s a fine piece of software. But I can’t stand it storing three copies of the picture. One original, one modified and one nobody knows what it is for. Picasa, on the other hand, stores the changes made to the picture (kind of like a version control system) and applies those changes when you view or edit the picture. You also have the choice to persist the changes. Picasa was the only reason I’m not completely Windows free (Parallels has problems installing the latest Ubuntu). It’s not the case any more since I discovered Darwine a couple of days ago. As you can guess from the name, it’s a Wine port in OS X. I’m really surprised it’s not yet a well known solution for the Picasa on Mac problem. It’s easy to install. Picasa works really well with it (except for the stupid font). Here is a screenshot:

People, sync your iPhone

simon — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:09:04 +0000

My coworker’s iPhone just became bricked. He brought it to the store. There was nothing they could do other than re-image the whole thing. And guess what? He’s never synced his iPhone yet. I guess there is one more thing for him to back up from now on.

As for my own iPhone, I won’t buy one unless it’s available from a carrier other than AT&T and I can simple pay 10 or 20 bucks for a data plan on top of the cheapest voice plan. Oh, it gotta be as small as a Blackberry Pearl and can be used with one hand.

Macterbate

simon — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 01:40:59 +0000

I bought a latest MacBook Pro the day they released it. It seems that I’ve formed a habit of buying new Apple products on the release day. Of course once I placed the order, I can’t help but checking the order status and following the shipment’s grand journey from Shanghai to Alaska to Memphis and finally to Calgary. I did that for about a dozen times on Friday. It was during one of those times that Chris said to me, “Are you macterbating again?” I paused for a second then burst into laughter. Really, I was not offended at all. Although I still don’t admit that I’m a Mac fanboy, no other word will be more appropriate to describe the state of my mind at the time. I think I’m gonna make a Lolcat picture about it (if my cat can ever cooperate).

Remote desktop and file sharing between OS X and Linux

simon — Tue, 29 May 2007 03:59:10 +0000

Remote desktop and file sharing between OS X and Linux (Ubuntu is the one I’m using). They should just work, right? Well, sort of. I tried various implementations of VNC for remote desktop. They are all slow. Keyboard doesn’t quite work because Gnome’s keyboard mapping is currently broken in Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. As for file sharing, I tried both Samba and NFS. The former requires quite some set up and is not very stable between OS X and Ubuntu. The latter requires the UID on both systems to be the same. I was not happy with any of these solutions. So I didn’t a little more research and ultimately settled down on the following two pieces of software:

FreeNX for remote desktop. It’s free and easy to install. You can get the OS X client from NoMachine. The speed of it just blows any VNC implementation and even Windows Remote Desktop away. I’m using it with a 54M connection and 1920 by 1200 resolution. It feels as if I’m using a local machine.
Netatalk for file sharing. It’s just a open source implementation of the AppleTalk Protocol Suite. Because of that, OS X can connect to a Netatalk server very naturally. The speed is also very fast.

Both of these two servers can be installed from the Ubuntu repository. You just use the afp protocol to connect to Netatalk. As I mentioned above, the NX client can be downloaded from NoMachine.

Blogging with TextMate

simon — Tue, 01 May 2007 04:47:30 +0000

I purchased a license of ecto a while ago. It’s a very nice blogging tool. Maybe even one of the best. But I haven’t been able to use it since I moved to WordPress. It just hangs when trying to retrieve the categories for the posts. After a couple of months, I actually found a fix for it yesterday. I though I can start using ecto again but my happiness didn’t last too long. Ecto doesn’t let me pick any formatting. It totally kills me because I use Markdown and need formatting to preview my posts. This problem seems to be caused by WordPress not sending any formatting options to blog clients. I guess I’m out of luck with ecto here. Luckily I still have the one editor that rules them all – TextMate (Sorry, Emacs). It can post, retrieve and preview MarkDown or Textile. I do have to manually create the header but that just further proves my geek status. This is the first post I wrote with TextMate. We’ll see how it goes.

MacBook Airport connection problem

simon — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 18:33:37 +0000

I own a first generation MacBook. But I don’t think I’m a hardcore Mac fanboy. So I’m gonna admit that there is an annoying problem that has been bothering me (although it’s pretty much the only complain I have). The problem is that the Airport will drop wireless connection from time to time when the MacBook is running on battery. After a couple of months of researching, I found this forum thread. Two of the tricks mentioned in the thread worked for me. First I tried switching to WPA2 pre-shared key only and using TKIP+AES algorithm. It worked perfectly for the MacBook. But I have other two stone age laptops with prehistoric 802.11b wireless cards which don’t support WPA2. That left me with the second option: ping some host (hey, what about www.google.com) every 5 seconds. It’s super lame but it does serve the purpose. Now I just wish I knew some OS X programming so that I could start or stop the ping depending on whether the laptop is plugged in or not.

It’s worth mentioning that the problem seems to only exist with consumer grade routers. When I was at Vancouver airport, I was able to use its wireless network without interruption for hours.

Welcome to the cool kid club, Dr. Venkat!

simon — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 20:47:04 +0000

Guess what? Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, my favourite presenter at NFJS, has just bought a MacBook Pro! I always think that Dr. Venkat should be a kind of guy using a Mac instead of a Dell Lattitude ever since I saw him at the symposium last year. Now he finally did it. Guess we will see more Macs at this year’s NFJS. Although it doesn’t seem that they have it scheduled for Calgary yet. Not good.

The link to Dr. Venkat’s blog entry seems to have some problem. It shows you a blank page when you click it. If you are using Firefox, just go to the address bar and press ‘Enter’. If you are using IE, use Firefox instead.

AirPort Express

simon — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 16:37:13 +0000

Jeff was telling me about the AirPort Express he just bought. It sounds like a really good product. Although from various reviews floating around on the internet and also some comments on Apple’s product page it sounds like it has a short life span. Some technician even found out the cause of it. Hmm… I don’t what to do now. It IS Apple. It DOES look really cool. Apparently it works pretty well when it’s alive. Hope Apple will fix the problem by the time I want to buy it.

Random rant

simon — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 21:12:20 +0000

I didn’t get too much done today because I spent a couple of hours trying to set up our development environment on my MacBook. Most of the stuff worked except the database. It turned out that Oracle hasn’t released a database server for Intel Mac yet. Most of the open source databases won’t work either because their syntaxes are not Oracle compatible. The only thing that comes close is EnterpriseDB. But for some reason our table creation script doesn’t work very well with it. I hate the idea of using VMware or Parallels. So I’m pretty much stuck with using Oracle on a remote box.

This unpleasant experience brought some complaints out of me:

How hard is it for Oracle to release a version for Intel Mac? It could be just a developer or preview version. Plus, it already works on Linux, doesn’t it?
What happened to ANSI SQL? Isn’t it supposed to be the standard?
Our application is quite Oracle dependent. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Experience tells me that it’s unusual for an application this size to switch database vendor. But it still would be nice if our database layer could be truly portable.

Safari rocks

simon — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 19:51:55 +0000

Thanks to Jeff, I’ve pimped my Safari. Now I have no reason not to like it. Thanks dude.