Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

Notes

last update:

Happy, happy, joy, joy

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.

The question

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.

Odd

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?

Odd

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?

Leopard Fever

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!

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.

SIP and IM

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

Game changing

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).

400k

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.

400k

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.