Shure SE210 Earphones (upgrade from E2c)

When I bought my Shure E2c earphones two years ago, I was blown away by the sound quality. I never spend more than $50 for earphones before and after buying the E2c model I would never consider downgrading to anything less. Shure really knows how to create addictive high quality products. The quality of the sound produced by my old E2c earphones was so good that I had to get rid of some albums that I ripped into mp3s long time ago when hard drive space was measured in megabytes rather than in gigabytes.

After two years of slave-like everyday service my Shure E2c earphones started to show signs of wear and it became apparent that they were going to retire soon.

Afraid of being without a good pair of earphones during my upcoming transatlantic flight, I got a new pair of Shure SE210. The design has change slightly compared to the older model, but it still preserves the main features that I loved so much.



I've been listening to some music via these earphones for only an hour or so, but I can already tell that SE210 brings "great sound" to a brand new level. I don't consider myself to be an audiophile, but even my untrained ear can hear the big difference between the two. The new pair fits better as well as feels more comfortable in my ears.

J, lost his mind a couple of weeks ago and bought a pair of the high-end SE530. I don't even want to know what those sound like. I know that if I tried them, I would be tempted to pay an insane amount of money for them, so I better say away :)

Inflector/environment.rb Bug in Rails

Today I needed to get Rails to grok an uncountable noun "media". Easy you think, right? Just add an inflection rule.

So I went to config/environment.rb, uncommented the Inflection example and modified it with my "media" noun, just like this:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  ...
  ...
  ...
  
  Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
    inflect.uncountable %w( media )
  end

  # See Rails::Configuration for more options
end

# Add new mime types for use in respond_to blocks:
# Mime::Type.register "text/richtext", :rtf
# Mime::Type.register "application/x-mobile", :mobile

When I tried to run rails console or tests I saw an error like this:

me@Xbook:testapp$ ./script/console 
Loading development environment.
./script/../config/../config/environment.rb:55:NameError: uninitialized constant Inflector
/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.5/lib/action_controller/assertions/selector_assertions.rb:525:NoMethodError: undefined method `camelize' for "top":String
/Users/me3x/Development/DSE/mediacast2/apps/testapp/app/controllers/application.rb:4:NameError: uninitialized constant ActionController::Base

The problem turned out to be in the commented-out rails example in environment.rb. The Inflector.inflections block must not be nested within the Initializer.run block.

This fixes the problem:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  ...
  ...
  ...

  # See Rails::Configuration for more options
end

Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
  inflect.uncountable %w( media )
end

# Add new mime types for use in respond_to blocks:
# Mime::Type.register "text/richtext", :rtf
# Mime::Type.register "application/x-mobile", :mobile

10 Things I Hate About MacOS X Leopard

Almost everyone is hyped about the new release of MacOS. All those great new features. Auweeeeee! I'm a an Apple fan, for now - I'm starting to struggle to justify it. Leopard does have a lot of nice features, but it is missing a lot as well. Considering the delay of the OS, I'm disappointed mainly about these ten things:

1. JDK6 is missing - WTF Apple!?!?!?
2. Only read-only support for ZFS, unless you count the developer preview version at ADC
3. Where is Xray? - The neat DTrace GUI that used to be promoted on Apple.com website a few weeks ago Update: The app is now called Instruments and is part of developer tools. Thanks Ron and Barry for pointing this out to me
4. JDK6 is missing!!!!! Are you kidding me? Even James Gosling who liked to work on Macs, left Mac for Solaris
5. MacPorts break here and there - This might not sound like Apple's fault, but considering that Fink and MacPorts are the two main ways to get unix apps installed on Mac, Apple should have cared more about making sure that "things will just work"
6. Case sensitive FS is still only a second class citizen - I'm sick of all the dupes that iTunes and iPhoto creates, I'll be migrating to case insensitive FS soon
7. Mac Mini and possibly some other Macs, currently come with "upgrade only" Leopard DVDs - this means that if my Mac goes fubared, I'll have to install Tiger and only then I can install Leopard. Lame!
8. Why are Spaces one of the major features of Leopard? If I were Steve Jobs, I'd have added it long time ago, or if I added it only now, I'd be quiet and try not to attract too much attention to my past failures
9. JDK6 is still missing! - Seriously how much longer do we have to wait?!?!?
10. Why did Apple bothered to include built-in Ruby on Rails? Or should I say broken Ruby on Rails!?!? There was nothing wrong with installing Rails via MacPorts, but the one from Apple is already outdated and when I tried to upgrade it, it broke

MacOS X Leopard is "the most impressive Mac OS X version yet"? It's pretty good but hardly the most impressive without the latest Java.

SunWikis Used for San Diego Fire Emergency Coordination

I guess today is one of those days when I can really feel that what we do at wikis.sun.com is of great value - potentially life saving value.

As almost everyone in the world knows there are big fires in San Diego right now - even my family from Slovakia contacted me yesterday to check that my wife's family in San Diego is ok.

Today I noticed that SunWikis are being used for an emergency coordinations at Sun's San Diego campus: http://wikis.sun.com/display/Fires.

I'm glad that we could help the guys in SD and I hope that everyone is fine over there.

How to Install Mercurial Support in NetBeans

Getting NetBeans to grok Mercurial is pretty simple when you know all the gotchas. I already got stuck on the installation twice so I decided to turn this into a blog entry, so that I know what to do when I see the problem again. :)

To install Mercurial support in NetBeans, do the following:

1. Get Mercurial and install it. On Mac you can install it via MacPorts
2. Get NetBeans 6 and install it
3. Install the Mercurial plugin via Tools->Plugins->Available Plugins->Mercurial
4. Restart the IDE
5. If Versioning->Mercurials in the menu bar is disabled, go to Tools->Options->Miscelanious->Mercurial (on Mac NetBeans->Preferences->Miscelanious->Mercurial) and verify that Mercurial executable path is set up correctly - in my case, since I installed Mercurial via MacPorts, the path should be /opt/local/bin
6. Restart the IDE

The problem, I encountered already twice, is that if the Mercurial executable path is not set up properly, the Versioning->Mercurials menu item is disabled and NetBeans doesn't give you any hint as to what went wrong. For some reason the path on my Mac is by default pointing to my python directory, which is not correct. Once the path is corrected and the IDE is restarted, everything works as expected.

Apple to Bundle a Wiki Server with MacOS X Leopard Server

Now that Apple finally released information about MacOS X Leopard, I learned that a wiki server will be part of Leopard Server OS.

Mac OS X [Leopard] Server makes it easy for groups to collaborate and communicate through their own wiki-powered intranet website complete with group calendar, blog, and mailing list. Users can create and edit wiki pages, tag and cross-reference material, upload files and images, add comments, and search content with point-and-click ease. (Source)

Pretty interesting, right? I wonder how the wiki server is implemented. I'd expect to see a lot of eye candy, seamless integration with other Apple offerings, but I'm not holding my breath for too many features.

The website doesn't offer many details, but it seems that the wiki server is intended mainly for team collaboration and not for external facing sites like wikis.sun.com. I hope that I'll get more information soon. MacOS Server is not that easy to see around here. No wonder, after all, we have our cool Solaris everywhere. :)

SunWikis Update: 1000+ Wiki Pages in 10 Weeks!

Today it happened! We made it! Let's go and celebrate! The wikis.sun.com community created altogether more than 1000 unique wiki pages in just 10 weeks since our launch.

Number of users             1144
Number of spaces              94
Number of pages             1006
Number of page revisions    6362

These are just number, but numbers that mean great adoption of this fairly young project.

A big thank you to everyone who planted the seed!