Notes

So there is this batch of Seagate disk drives that has a high (or more accurate above normal) rate of defects:

The faulty drives are all Seagate 2.5" drives that are manufactured in China, with a Firmware revision of 7.01. They are also all SATA interface. No other drives seem (at this stage) to be affected.

Guess what my Macbook Pro 17" 1st generation has:

I have good backups, but still... Time to find out if there is a Apple program to replace the drives.

(via João Pedro, and the local Mac mailing list)

Update: the counter-punch.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

One of the "news" items today is that some Java developers are switching away from Mac OS X because Mac OS X 10.5 didn't have the latest Java 1.6, either by default in the system or as a download.

The question I would like to ask those developers is: why didn't they switched when Mac OS X 10.4 came out? It also didn't have the latest (at the time) Java 1.5 available and it took some time to appear, and when it did, it was a port by Apple of the 1.5 update 2.

Historically, Java always lagged behind on the Mac platform because it was always ported by Apple. Engineering resources need to be placed where they will do the most good, and for Apple clearly Java was not as high priority as other things.

I think all people would love to see their favorite language supported right of the start. I for one would love to see the dynamic bridge between Cocoa and Perl supported by Apple in the same official way as Python and Ruby have, but Perl doesn't have a marketing message as strong as those two.

My advise would be to relax, take a breath, and wait.

I suppose you could always try and compile from the source, right?

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Every time I see people mentioning cloning their Macs (the most recently post about it was by Gruber I find the hours they choose a bit odd.

Like Gruber, most of the people clone during the night. What I find odd about that is that during the night your Mac should be turned off.

I prefer to do my cloning during my lunch break. The laptop is usually in my place of work, where I keep my main clone disk (the second is at home), its usually turned on (I'm working right?) and the time it takes to smart update matches the time I take to have lunch and play a bit with the kids.

It feels natural to use that off-period during the day than the night, but maybe I'm just odd that way.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

It's to have a excuse to have multiple GPUs. And why would I want that?

Elcomsoft's new password cracker attacks the NTLM hashing that Windows uses with a brute force method. The company claims that its GPU-powered attack speeds up the time it takes to crack a Vista password from two months to a little over three days.

smiles.

Really, 15 years ago I was at university when they deployed a 16 PowerPC CPU transputer. Right now, my graphics card is more powerful than that. Crazy.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

For those of you who have Leopard Fever and will install 10.5.0 in the Mac that you use for work (big pause here so that you can digest all the hidden tigers in this last sentence), be smart and at least use some protection.

Some links that might help:

• jwz on backups: a basic dual clone setup, the same setup I use for disaster recovery;
• SuperDuper!: I use this for my clones, not rsync;
• Carbon Copy Cloner: I used this before SuperDuper!. Recently upgraded, worth a look. I prefer SuperDuper! because the UI is simpler.

The basic point is: do not upgrade to Tiger without a tested full bootable clone of your current hard-drive.

By the way, cloning is not backing up. Backing up means that I should be able to retrieve deleted and previous versions of any file. Cloning does not allows me to do that. Think of cloning as disaster recovery only. You'll quickly be up and running again, but it will not save you from accidently deleting some files you worked on yesterday.

For backups, right now, I can't really recommend anything. I don't like any of the solutions out there. At first I would recommend Retrospect but in recent times it has been lagging (there still is no Universal version for example). Also I don't trust Apple's Backup.app, not yet.

With Leopard, you'll get Time Machine which has some interesting features (mainly the frequency of backups it allows), but do not forget that this is the first release of Time Machine, and if you have one piece of software in your laptop that must always work, its your backup solution.

So take Time Machine with a grain of salt. Do not depend solely on it for your backups.

The best thing about Time Machine is that it forced Apple to create a infrastructure inside Mac OS X that will allow backup applications to do incremental backups with ease, speed and therefore with greater frequency.

I do hope to see some big names in the backup software field to use the same fs_events magic that Time Machine uses. EMC insignia is talking about a new version of Retrospect for '08, lets wait to see what will come of that.

If you really want to take your data seriously, I would recommend you spend $10 and buy this book: Take Control of Mac OS X Backups (updated September 27, to include Leopard stuff).

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

An article about SIP and IM from Marshall T. Rose (you know, X.500 and most of the OSI stuff dude). Interesting read.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Whooa.... Google Mail gets IMAP...

This is huge. This makes me and my business a customer of Google Apps for domains. Pity that we just settled a year-long contract with other party. On the other hand, it will give Google a year to fine tune their IMAP server :).

(via Gruber - Daring Fireball).

Posted by Pedro Melo at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The number I took away from the Apple Fourth Quarter Results is 400k.

The Q3 ending in July had been the best quarter ever with 1.7M Macs sold. This quarter, even with a new version of Mac OS X pre-announced for October, Apple was able to sell 400.000 units more to 2.1M Macs. And most of those will now give an extra $100 to upgrade to Leopard.

That's the amazing part. The extra $17 per share in the last 24 hours (10%), ant the fact that in the penis-size-contest (read market capitalization) Apple just streamed past Intel and IBM, those are just road-side shows.

Last but not the least, traditionally Apple has been very conservative in his guidances for the next quarter. Not so this time: Apple told analyst to expect $9.2B in revenue (for comparison, this quarter it was $6.2B). That's a 47% increase, so they expect a really big Christmas.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

With the recent arrival of HTML5-style SQL access in Webkit, we now have two approaches to the problem of offline storage available to us.

Comparing the HTML5/Webkit version with the Google Gears version, personally I prefer the Webkit one due to the async nature of the API.

With Gears, database access is a synchronous operation that might delay a critical event-driven application. By making those operations async, your Javascript event handlers can fire off a couple of queries and keep on doing their work. As a side effect, it introduces some parallelism into JS without the beautiful heavyweights of Gears worker pools.

I didn't see it written yet, but I assume that the Webkit implementation also uses the SQLite database, same as Google Gears. It would make sense given that the whole CoreData API also uses it. It seems to me that SQLite is becoming the standard SQL engine for this kind of thing, and with the work Google is doing with it and the fts engine, it can only get better.

I think that having these tools in our toolbox before a standard is defined is essential to provide real-world feedback. Committee-based standards are rarely as good as market-driven ones.

One thing that we cannot stop from speculating about, is the reasons for this code to appear right now. The blog post mentions that it was mere excitement of a couple of engineers with the spec, and I can understand that. But in my mind, having a decent offline mode in Webkit is essential to a proper Web-based SDK for the iPhone.

Of course, database access is only one of the parts to make a decent offline mode. In Gears, you have two more tools: a local server and a worker pool. The worker pool is nice but not required for a offline mode. On the other hand, the local server is. So it would make sense to implement some sort of local/offline asset manager next.

Yet, the worker pool is much, much more fun to play with and it could be used even with online apps. So I hope to see that first.

This would be less important if Gears was already supported in Safari, but we are nowhere near that point right now. The choice of C++ for the core of Gears has been pointed out in the mailing list as the main sticky point regarding a WebKit version: C++ and Objective-C are not the best of friends.

In any case, this is a step in the right direction. I welcome this efforts of implementation prior to standardization. And its nice to have new toys to play with.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

My problems with pain in the right arm are still here, and I've reduced my laptop-time.

So don't expect many updates in the coming weeks.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Hi, my name is Pedro and I'm a Pixel Lover Anonymous. I can't get enough of them, and its ruining my life.

Latest update of my workstation display setup brings the total usable display width to 4740 pixels across.

The setup started with a Matrox DualHead2Go Digital Edition to span a single DVI output across two 20" Acer Wide LCDs (see a Flickr set with two 24" I used to test it) but the results where not that good. Besides having my mac opening the windows between the two screens (after all its only one screen to him), I got a fuzzy picture and some edge-issues: part of one screen crossing over to the other. This last problem is probably due to the extra DVI-to-VGA setup I was using, given that my LCDs where VGA and not DVI, but I'm not quite sure.

So, up-to 1280x1024 dual external display, I think that the Matrox is a good solution.

But I had two 1650x1024 AS2016W... So in the end I went back to a previous setup: use the old PowerBook, attach one of the 20" to it, and use ScreenRecycler to make it appear as the third monitor in my main Macbook Pro.

So far, even with a 800Mhz PowerBook using this setup with VNC in the middle, performance is acceptable, and the image quality is perfect. You'll notice screen redraws while dragging windows, but thats not a problem for my line of work.

So if you want to expand your workspace of your Mac, and have an extra LCD and any kind of computer laying around, I would recommend ScreenRecycler.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

In case I need this again. After installing the official RPMs from the MySQL site for Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 on a fully patched CentOS 5, the startup script does not work properly, failing to start the server:

[root@centos5 log]# /sbin/service mysql start
Starting MySQL Couldn't find MySQL manager or server        [FAILED]

One possible solution is this patch. To apply do:

cd /etc/rc.d/init.d
patch -p0 < PATH_TO/mysql.rc.patch

And be done with it.

Also useful for DBI-related work is this. Log in to MySQL server as root and do:

grant all privileges on test.*  to 'melo'@'localhost';

Adjust melo for your local username.

This will make the installation of DBI and DBD::mysql work out of the box with cpan, testing everything in the process.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So after two days of tests, apparently I don't have RSI.

The symptoms where similar but as far as the doctors can see from the tests they did, the problem is in my neck. I have a strange twist in my neck, its bent in a strange direction and that causes tension to the tendons of the right arm, causing the continuos pain I feel.

In turn, that causes the rest of the arm to hurt, specially working at the computer.

So, given that I still have almost 30 years of work ahead of me, and doing something else apart from programming is something that I would like to avoid at least for some years more, I've started some treatments to see if it can be fixed.

Apart of the pills to ease the pain, and the anesthetic gels, tomorrow morning I'm starting at the local gym, with a specialized training program to strengthen my neck muscles. As far as I could tell, it will be a mix of swimming pool and some sort of machine. Also, I need to stretch my neck using something that was probably invented by the spanish inquisition.

But the coolest part is that I will have to start using a collar at work, an orthopedic collar.

So let the sex jokes begin!

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)