Tuesday, April 17, 2007
script type="text/ruby" Impossible? Ha!
Check out Dion Almaer's blog with a description of the prototype and a demo page.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Adobre Reader 8.0 Direct Download Link
I previously posted a direct download link for 7.x version of Adobe Reader and a bunch of people found it useful. So here is the link for version 8.0:
AdbeRdr80_en_US_i386.dmg
Enjoy Adobe Reader without the hassle of dealing with Adobe Reader Download Manager.
AdbeRdr80_en_US_i386.dmg
Enjoy Adobe Reader without the hassle of dealing with Adobe Reader Download Manager.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
iAlertU - Alarm System for your Apple MacBook Computer
When I saw the light saber fight video and tried the app I thought that it was cool, but sort of useless. The other day I stumbled upon the iAlertU application that uses the sudden motion sensor (SMS) to protect a Mac against thieves. Too bad that it is so easy to bypass it by using earphones :-/. But I have to admit that it is a creative idea and more useful than the mac saber.
doc.java.sun.com - Multilingual JavaDoc and Source Preview Site for JDK6
If you are a Java developer, the doc.java.sun.com site is worth checking out. I don't care so much for the translations part of the project, but what is great is that you have access to both JavaDocs as well as the source files of JDK6.
James Gosling announced the project in mid October and since then the site matured a lot!
James Gosling announced the project in mid October and since then the site matured a lot!
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Apple 10.4.9 Software Update follow-up
Today, I got an email from Apple Tech Support:
It seems that they have noticed my activity on Apple support forums, where I was helping users to resolve the problem with the latest 10.4.9 software update, that I wrote about last week.
The good thing is that Apple is interested in knowing more about this issue - hopefully with the intention to prevent similar problems in the future.
The bad thing is the way they are doing it. How do I know that this email really comes from Apple? How can I be sure that it's not a Trojan horse mass mailed by some malicious person who's trying to misuse my willingness to help?
Attached to this email email is a binary application, that I'm supposed to run. I don't know if it's just me and my strong sense of self-preservation, but isn't it something like rule #1 in all "security for dummies" books not to run applications coming to your email from unauthenticated sources?
I think that Apple should have just send me an email pointing me to an apple.com website where I could download the application from or they should have signed the email and the attachment with a key which certificate was pre-distributed with MacOS X.
Besides, if all that Apple wants to do on my computer is to gather some data, they could have used a script that I could easily review instead of a binary application that can do a lot more than just "capture data".
I'm not pleased that my blog has turned into a Apple complaint site. I really hope that Leopard will bring enough excitement to have me forget about all of this.
UPDATE: I sent an email back to the Apple Tech Support asking them to publish the application on their website.
UPDATE2: An Apple engineer contacted me regarding the email. I ran the application and reviewed the content of generated dmg file. It contained all the system logs present on the computer and some extra files, like output from the
One think I really don't like is that I had to agree to this License Agreement that protects Apple, but I haven't seen a single sentence mentioning how Apple is going to protect my private information contained in the logs. :-/
Dear Apple Customer:
You've expressed an issue on Apple's Discussions forum with the recent Mac OS X 10.4.9 software update.
Apple would like to investigate the issue by collecting some data from your system.
If this is acceptable to you, please run the attached "Capture Data" application. Then, simply attach the file that's generated into a reply email (to this email) This file will contain logs, configuration information etc.
Thanks for your support in assisting Apple Inc.
It seems that they have noticed my activity on Apple support forums, where I was helping users to resolve the problem with the latest 10.4.9 software update, that I wrote about last week.
The good thing is that Apple is interested in knowing more about this issue - hopefully with the intention to prevent similar problems in the future.
The bad thing is the way they are doing it. How do I know that this email really comes from Apple? How can I be sure that it's not a Trojan horse mass mailed by some malicious person who's trying to misuse my willingness to help?
Attached to this email email is a binary application, that I'm supposed to run. I don't know if it's just me and my strong sense of self-preservation, but isn't it something like rule #1 in all "security for dummies" books not to run applications coming to your email from unauthenticated sources?
I think that Apple should have just send me an email pointing me to an apple.com website where I could download the application from or they should have signed the email and the attachment with a key which certificate was pre-distributed with MacOS X.
Besides, if all that Apple wants to do on my computer is to gather some data, they could have used a script that I could easily review instead of a binary application that can do a lot more than just "capture data".
I'm not pleased that my blog has turned into a Apple complaint site. I really hope that Leopard will bring enough excitement to have me forget about all of this.
UPDATE: I sent an email back to the Apple Tech Support asking them to publish the application on their website.
UPDATE2: An Apple engineer contacted me regarding the email. I ran the application and reviewed the content of generated dmg file. It contained all the system logs present on the computer and some extra files, like output from the
top and ps commands.One think I really don't like is that I had to agree to this License Agreement that protects Apple, but I haven't seen a single sentence mentioning how Apple is going to protect my private information contained in the logs. :-/
End of the MacBook Problem Saga?
Back in November I wrote an entry about all the problems I had with a MacBook, that I bought for my sister and how I returned four MacBooks before I finally got a fifth that actually worked (see "A Basket of Rotten Apples").
After posting the entry I though that my troubles were over, but had no idea how wrong I was. Only one week later the battery on that MacBook died.
There were no signs of problems before, the battery performance was good and it was already formatted according to Apple's instructions. MacOS X failed to recognize the battery and the charger would not detect it either. It look as if there was no battery in that notebook. There was just a battery crossed with an X and text "No batteries available" in the menu.
Since at that time, I was already in Slovakia (my home country), I was happy to find out that the 1 year complementary Apple Care warranty program had worldwide coverage. After browsing a little I found out that it usually takes no time to get the battery replaced. With all this information I called the closest Apple dealer and explained to him my situation. I got an estimate 4-6 weeks!!!
It seems that Apple has no direct representation in Slovakia and thus all the service parts as well as regular orders are being handled via a Slovak company that is somehow connected with Apple in some other EU country. The whole thing is very confusing, nontransparent and worst of all causes enormous delays in orders and repairs. The Apple dealers in Slovakia are pretty unhappy about this whole situation, but as one of them told me, there is nothing they can do about this.
So I waited and waited and finally on the last day of January (about 6 weeks later) I got an email from the dealer that he finally got my replacement battery. So I borrowed my sisters notebook and went to visit the dealer. New battery worked fine, but during this repair I noticed yet another problem - the infamous MacBook Discoloration!
The dealer was kind enough to order a new keyboard cover immediately, but he wasn't able to give me estimate on this repair.
Only one week later, my sister called me and told me that the second battery had just died - in a same mysterious way as the one before. So besides the keyboard cover, yet another battery replacement was on my repair list.
According to discussion on this blog, there is a bunch of people who had two or more batteries replaced, one after another due to the same issue. Apple claimed that that this was not a notebook, but rather battery related issue.
Another month went by and I finally got my sisters notebook fixed. It has been more than two weeks now and the battery is still working and there haven't been any new issues so far. I don't want to be premature, but I hope that this is it - end of the saga!
All the problems are fixed now but I still feel ashamed for all the trouble I had with a notebook that was supposed to be great.
After posting the entry I though that my troubles were over, but had no idea how wrong I was. Only one week later the battery on that MacBook died.
There were no signs of problems before, the battery performance was good and it was already formatted according to Apple's instructions. MacOS X failed to recognize the battery and the charger would not detect it either. It look as if there was no battery in that notebook. There was just a battery crossed with an X and text "No batteries available" in the menu.
Since at that time, I was already in Slovakia (my home country), I was happy to find out that the 1 year complementary Apple Care warranty program had worldwide coverage. After browsing a little I found out that it usually takes no time to get the battery replaced. With all this information I called the closest Apple dealer and explained to him my situation. I got an estimate 4-6 weeks!!!It seems that Apple has no direct representation in Slovakia and thus all the service parts as well as regular orders are being handled via a Slovak company that is somehow connected with Apple in some other EU country. The whole thing is very confusing, nontransparent and worst of all causes enormous delays in orders and repairs. The Apple dealers in Slovakia are pretty unhappy about this whole situation, but as one of them told me, there is nothing they can do about this.
So I waited and waited and finally on the last day of January (about 6 weeks later) I got an email from the dealer that he finally got my replacement battery. So I borrowed my sisters notebook and went to visit the dealer. New battery worked fine, but during this repair I noticed yet another problem - the infamous MacBook Discoloration!
The dealer was kind enough to order a new keyboard cover immediately, but he wasn't able to give me estimate on this repair.
Only one week later, my sister called me and told me that the second battery had just died - in a same mysterious way as the one before. So besides the keyboard cover, yet another battery replacement was on my repair list.
According to discussion on this blog, there is a bunch of people who had two or more batteries replaced, one after another due to the same issue. Apple claimed that that this was not a notebook, but rather battery related issue.
Another month went by and I finally got my sisters notebook fixed. It has been more than two weeks now and the battery is still working and there haven't been any new issues so far. I don't want to be premature, but I hope that this is it - end of the saga!
All the problems are fixed now but I still feel ashamed for all the trouble I had with a notebook that was supposed to be great.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
500GB eSATA External Storage with Throughput Upto 67MB/s
I was suffering from full-hard-drive disease for a couple of months. So last week I finally ordered an external drive to hold the piles of data I store on my MacBook Pro. This is what I got:
The Seagate 7200.10 hard drive is a hard drive, there is not too much to say about it, except for the usual complaint that 500GB ain't 500GB of free space, you get 465.8GB with this baby.
The Vantec enclosure looks really good and has a very good feel to it. It feels much better than any other enclosure I put my hands on. Very sturdy, slim, well designed and well assembled. Thanks to the fact that it's aluminum based it keeps the hard drive REALLY cool - during heavy use it is just a bit warmer than my hand.
I picked the Vydeo/Meritline eSATA card based on the "feature set /price" ratio and didn't really know what to expect because there is not as much written about it on the Internet as I'd like. Luckily there were no surprises so far.
The card is based on SiI3132 chipset and the driver supplied with the card is an unmodified Silicon Image driver (version 1.1.5). When I tried to install it however, it didn't work. But the one I got from Silicon Image support site worked fine (version 1.1.9). I had to restart my MBP to get MacOS X to recognize it though.
An interesting thing that I noticed is that when I copy stuff from the external drive to my internal drive (not the other way around), my computer gets sluggish. Particularly, all the operations that needed to access the internal drive became almost unusable because of slow responsiveness. I'm not sure if it's the internal drive getting overloaded with all the traffic, or something else, but it happens only in this one scenario (using loading data from the external drive to memory causes no problems).
The only other complaint I have about the card is that it is relatively easy to accidentally unplug. It is safe enough to use on a desk, but I don't even want to think about the data corruption caused by an accidental unplugging while using the computer on my lap.
I ran a few very unscientific benchmarks to see what to expect from my new toys. Here are the results.
- Hard drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 500-GB Hard Drive (16-MB cache buffer) - ST3500630AS
- Enclosure: Vantec NEXSTAR3 NST-360SU-BK
- eSATA Express Card 34: Vydeo eSATA 34: Dual Port 34mm Express Card
The Seagate 7200.10 hard drive is a hard drive, there is not too much to say about it, except for the usual complaint that 500GB ain't 500GB of free space, you get 465.8GB with this baby.
The Vantec enclosure looks really good and has a very good feel to it. It feels much better than any other enclosure I put my hands on. Very sturdy, slim, well designed and well assembled. Thanks to the fact that it's aluminum based it keeps the hard drive REALLY cool - during heavy use it is just a bit warmer than my hand.
I picked the Vydeo/Meritline eSATA card based on the "feature set /price" ratio and didn't really know what to expect because there is not as much written about it on the Internet as I'd like. Luckily there were no surprises so far.
The card is based on SiI3132 chipset and the driver supplied with the card is an unmodified Silicon Image driver (version 1.1.5). When I tried to install it however, it didn't work. But the one I got from Silicon Image support site worked fine (version 1.1.9). I had to restart my MBP to get MacOS X to recognize it though.
An interesting thing that I noticed is that when I copy stuff from the external drive to my internal drive (not the other way around), my computer gets sluggish. Particularly, all the operations that needed to access the internal drive became almost unusable because of slow responsiveness. I'm not sure if it's the internal drive getting overloaded with all the traffic, or something else, but it happens only in this one scenario (using loading data from the external drive to memory causes no problems).
The only other complaint I have about the card is that it is relatively easy to accidentally unplug. It is safe enough to use on a desk, but I don't even want to think about the data corruption caused by an accidental unplugging while using the computer on my lap.
I ran a few very unscientific benchmarks to see what to expect from my new toys. Here are the results.
- Copying my 13.22GB of mp3 files from the internal drive to the external drive:
time cp -r ~/Music /Volumes/ExternalHDD/BackUp/
8m29.645s = 26.5MB/s
(Keep in mind that the internal drive is the bottleneck in this test, not the eSATA drive)
I ran this test while in USB2.0 mode (the enclosure supports both eSATA and USB2.0) and the results were:
16m8s = 14MB/s
That makes the eSATA configuration 1.89x faster than the USB2.0 one. - Copying 13.22GB of mp3 files from one folder on the internal drive to another one:
time cp -r /Volumes/ExternalHDD/BackUp/Music/ /Volumes/ExternalHDD/
7m1.298s = 32.2MB/s
Considering that the files had to be read and then written to the drive, the number can be doubled to get the combined throughput. This makes it 64.4MB/s - Creating a 10GB file using mkfile command and storing it on the external drive:
time mkfile 10g /Volumes/ExternalHDD/10GB.file
2m37.377s = 65.2MB/s - Creating a 5GB dmg image file using Disk Utility and storing it on the external drive:
1m17s = 66.5MB/s - Encrypting a 5GB file stored on the external drive using openssl and storing the encrypted file on the external drive:
time openssl enc -in /Volumes/ExternalHDD/5GB.file \
3m24.313s = 25.1MB/s
-out /Volumes/ExternalHDD/5GB-encrypted.file -e -aes-128-cbc
Again, since I'm reading and storing the file on the same drive, the combined throughput is the double: 50.2MB/s.
Since this is a test that is very close to the real world usage, I ran it with the disk connected via USB2.0. The results were:
8m27.985s = 10.1MB/s or 20.2MB/s combined
That makes the eSATA configuration 2.49x faster than the USB2.0 one. - Copying a 5GB file from the external drive to the internal drive:
time cp /Volumes/ExternalHDD/5GB-encrypted.file .
2m39.271s = 32.3MB/s - Copying a 5GB file from the external drive to the internal drive and at same time copying another 5GB file from the internal drive to the external drive:
time cp 5GB-encrypted.file /Volumes/ExternalHDD/5GB-encrypted2.file&
5m46.592s = 29.6MB/s (counting with 10GB of data being transferred )
time cp /Volumes/ExternalHDD/5GB-encrypted.file .
Again the internal drive is the bottleneck in this test.
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