Discover your iPod touch
One of my most desired applications on iPod touch is to be able to take PDF and source code anywhere I go for discussion without taking a MacBook with me. The good thing about iPod touch is its ability to sneak into my shirt pocket or in a carrying pouch on my belt. Sometimes taking a MacBook along just for the purpose of viewing a PDF or some source code is deemed to be cumbersome. One obvious problem is that I have to carry my MacBook in the bag anywhere I go, for example, shopping. It is risky to leave the MacBook in the trunk. Many theft cases have been reported.
Discover is the best application that allows me to wirelessly transfer my files to iPod touch and view it. It is free and secured. Unlike other free applications of the same class, Discover is only limited to physical storage available on your iPod touch. It supports many file formats such as PDF, Office document formats (which I don’t use), and Unicode support (C/C++, Objective-C and more). Unfortunately, it does not recognize Ada source files. I hope BBase will support Ada in coming release.
Download Discover from iTunes store and install into iPod touch. Just launch Discover and connect (using any WebDAV enabled browser) to iPod touch with the IP address provided on the iPod screen. You can setup secured access with passwords to protect your iPod touch from unauthorized access.
iPod Touch
I received my 2nd generation iPod Touch 16GB today. I tried to make unboxing video but the result was not as good as I expected. Sorry guys. May be next time.
After I took it out from the box, I put it on screen protector film and soft silicon skin right away. I have heard and read about scratching screen, drops and oily finger marks on iPod Touch and iPhone. I think it is good to protect my investment.
I have an iPod nano which my sister gave me more than a year ago. I seldom use it but most often I use it to listen to podcasts and some music. The reason for me to acquire an iPod Touch is to explore some ideas and to develop some useful software for it.
iPod Touch is a very powerful device besides music and video playing. It is in fact a powerful PDA for many applications in my opinion.
Apple TV playlist
I have installed an Apple TV at my client’s office waiting area. His purpose is to educate his patients while they are waiting for their consultation. That is a brilliant idea as we had long and boring waiting experience when LA was consulting him.
The idea is to design different programs with advertisements and messages interleaved among documentary and his own educational videos for playback on different days of the week. And the most important thing is to allow the doctor himself to easily update his educational videos and advertisements anytime as he wishes from his new 24″ iMac.
After I installed Apple TV a few days ago, I realized it did not have movie playlist. After Googling for a while, I wasn’t alone. Here is a blog entry with the same problem. And I found out the Apple TV Software Update 2.3 allows movie playlist in iTunes to be seen on Apple TV. I downloaded the 2.3 update this afternoon, and after I activated the movie playlist in Apple TV settings, it is now able to play the movies in the playlist as desired.
I pondered why Apple did not ship Apple TV with new software update 2.3. It was released in November 2008. About the Apple TV software update can be found here.
Another ultimate experience
When LA birthed Richie, I was there with her almost the whole day in the labor room. That was the first awesome experience in my life. About three years ago, when LA birthed Nik, I was there with her in the operating theatre (OT). That was another more wonderful day in my whole life. I could hear her doctor cut open her lower abdomen (Caesarean section).
Almost a month after Nik was born, I suffered from retina detachment and had to undergo a surgery to repair it. That was myself experiencing the first surgery of my life. The experience was really awesome and I had some mixed feeling.
This afternoon, I had to test out some equipment in the OT while the doctor was performing laparoscopic surgery. Like the second experience, I had to put on the surgical gown and mask before entering the OT. Only this time I was with the doctor.
That's me in surgical clothing
Although the laparoscopic surgery was not invasive, it was thrilling enough to witness the live performance before my own eyes. At least, it has proven I have a strong stomach up to this level.
A good head start
Happy New Year 2009 buddies!
It seems like a good head start for me. Everything I planned for today seems to be smooth sailing although I am having one problem which I do not know why it happens. I guess I will need to toy with it and/or hack it to learn why it isn’t behaving as it supposed to be. If everything is running perfect before end of this month, I will acquire an iPod Touch to proceed further. This will be my first wish on this very first day of 2009.
Finder hang in Leopard
When I returned home this evening, LA told me her applications had hung. I checked and found not only that, the Finder was not responsive too. I had no choice but to power off and to restart the Mac Mini again. This had also affected my user account. The Finder had failed to launch after login and the Dock did not appear as well. But fortunately root user account was not badly affected.
I Googled and found some articles and solutions here, here and here. I exhausted all the methods and I did not have DivXNetworks and ApplicationEnhancer.bundle in the directories mentioned in these links. I decided to go my own way.
What I did was to delete everything that was related to DivX. Since I did not have DivXNetworks, so I removed DivX folders in “/Library/Application Support” and “~/Library/Application Support” and also the DivX programs in Applications.
After the deletion, Finder still could not launch properly. I launched Console.app to examine system logs and found some errors in cache files com.apple.LaunchedServices*. I removed everything with com.apple.LaunchedServices in /Library/Caches.
Viola! Everything is back to normal again. DivX is a third party enhancement software and is not very stable. It seems like DivX has messed up with the system caches and somehow prevented Finder to launch.
I have spent two and half hours mingling with this problem. I hope my experience will save some of your time if you have the same problem as mine. I am going to take my supper.
Good luck!
Snow Leopard
The Snow Leopard (Uncia uncia) sometimes known as ounce is a large cat native to mountain ranges in Central Asia from Afghanistan to Lake Baikal and Eastern Tibet. Snow Leopard normally weights 35kg to 55kg and slightly smaller than Leopard.
Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard is the next version of the world most advanced operating system with a smaller footprint compared to its predecessor, Leopard. Snow Leopard will take full advantage of 64-bit and multi-core technology to the height.
Since Apple introduced Mac OS X in 2001, thousands of new features have been implemented and introduced. In Leopard, the ability to take advantage of multi-core and 64-bit addressing have opened up new dimension in desktop computing. Virtualization becomes possible. New features such as Time Machine automatically backup the Mac hard disk without user knowing.
Snow Leopard, to be released a year from now, is going to be smaller than Leopard but more powerful. Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the foot print on hard disk, using less disk space, freeing them for more music, photos and videos.
Snow Leopard fully makes use of 64-bit addressing to increase the RAM size to the theoretically 16TB, 500 times more than what is possible today. “Grand Central” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard brings unrivaled multi-core support and capabilities to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speed, drives performance faster in today’s modern processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. The result: more powerful applications at faster speed.
HOWTO – Clone your Mac OS X hard drive
First of all, why do I need to clone the hard drive? Good question though. Here are a few possible answers:
- I have too much money to spend for a spare hard drive to clone my Mac hard drive.
- I want to have a bootable external hard drive, installing on an external USB hard drive is not possible.
- I want to upgrade my Mac’s hard drive, and I don’t want to do the installations and setup all over again
Obviously number 3 is my answer. I acquired a bigger capacity hard drive to upgrade my current 120GB hard drive in my MacBook. After some Googling around, I found an answer.
There is an Apple utility program called Apple restore or asr located in /usr/sbin. Connect your external USB hard drive and format it using Disk Utility. Open the Terminal in Applications -> Utilities. Type the following command line into the Terminal to copy your hard drive over your external drive.
% sudo asr -source /Volumes/OSX BOOT VOLUME NAME/ -target /Volumes/TARGET VOLUME NAME/
Replace “OSX BOOT VOLUME NAME” and “TARGET VOLUME NAME” with actual volume names. asr will take quite some time to copy the contents of hard drive to external hard drive. Get a cuppa, pop in your iPod earphone and relax.
When asr completes the execution, it will print a message:
asr: did not copy blessed information to target, which may have missing or out-of-date blessed folder information.
Then, bless your target drive with this:
% sudo bless -folder /Volumes/TARGET VOLUME NAME/System/Library/CoreServices
Now, the hard drive is bootable. Restart your Mac and hold down “option” key. A screen will appear allowing to choose which volume to boot from.
Another happy new Mac user
To follow up my article, “Am I a Mac advocate?”
Just came back from a business meeting which I delivered an Apple MacBook to a customer. She is a mutual fund manager and is totally new to Apple. The moment she took out her new MacBook from the box, her impression was “Wow! It is so beautiful, sleek and … “, something words could not describe.
I spent some hours to guide her using a Mac and she caught on quite well. She was most impressed when I showed her how I could help her using her Mac via iChat. Totally amazed, how iChat could allow her to share her screen to me and I could guide her to use her Mac and some applications over the Internet.
Another happy Mac user.
Am I a Mac advocate?
Yes, I am!
I started to use an Apple iBook with Mac OS X five years ago. And ever since then, I do my daily works like emailing, web browsing, IM/Skype, appointment, todo, word processing, spreadsheet and almost everything on Mac. Today, I am a total Mac advocate and I also develop software for Mac. Most of the Mac applications I worked on are easily ported to any UNIX systems such as Linux and Solaris or vice versa.
I have switched many people from Windows to Mac. I have helped businesses to switch from Windows to Mac. And the result? They are happy Mac users and I am a happy Mac advocate. Supporting customers in Mac is ever easier and hassle free compare to Windows. Supporting Linux and Solaris mostly as a server together with server applications cannot be compared in that way because the application area and environment are totally different.
Although the initial investment is higher comparing to any other Wintel (Windows and Intel) PC, Mac gives you awesome user experience you can never enjoy with Wintel. The end result, ROI or Return of Investment is higher.
Read my other article about Mac in business here.
Virtualization – Installing Ubuntu Linux with VMware on MacBook
I have successfully installed 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Linux on my Mac Book. Out of my expectation, the installation was rather quick and easy compared to installing Solaris 10. I had tried installing Solaris 10 on my Mac Book. Solaris installation was successful but I couldn’t boot into it. I wondered why.
My Mac Book sports an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz with 2GB RAM and 160GB hard drive. I am too skeptical to have 2 physical partitions on my hard drive. Thanks to VMWare Fusion, I can create virtual partition with it. After I have installed VMware Fusion 1.1.1, I created a Ubuntu-64-bit virtual partition and installed Ubuntu from the ISO disk image. With VMware Fusion, I can install directly from the disk image without having to burn a CD or DVD.
Since my Mac Book is codenamed Uranus, I called my Ubuntu on Mac Book, Uranus-Zeta. The idea is from the ζ-ring of Uranus
Like Linux, Mac OS X is a UNIX like operating system. Why do I need Linux? Well, there are a number of reasons. One being you can and another to learn new things. But these are not the reasons to motivate me. Being a software developer developing cross-platform software, I do tests on multiple platforms. Having Linux to run on my MacBook means I can develop and test my software on both Mac OS X and Linux environment without switching to my Linux/Solaris boxes. Another important reason is that I see the needs to support my clients on Linux arise and soon Solaris. Having the ability to run three different operating systems on one machine can be productive and versatile for me.
The other obvious reason is that I have a Core 2 Duo. Meaning I am having two 64-bit CPUs in one processor. It will be a waste of resources if I don’t utilize the computing power I already have. Assigning each CPU to run different operating systems and tasks is called virtualization.
With VMware Fusion, I can run Linux and Solaris side-by-side with Mac OS X without the need to boot into anyone of them at one time. This is a great feature when supporting clients in Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris.
Here are some screen shots (click to enlarge) of Uranus-Zeta:
Time Machine
I finally got a 160GB hard drive to upgrade my MacBook. I took out the original Apple’s 120GB, put it in an external enclosure and connected it to Pluto (Mac Mini) via USB. Since I already have a 30GB hard drive (code named Nix, a small moon of Pluto) as a backup for doing file to file backup on Pluto, it is quite troublesome to do file to file backup on regular basis. The result is I seldom do backup.
This 120GB hard drive was formatted to become Time Machine hard drive. I named it Charon. Charon is a larger moon of Pluto compare to Nix. The moment I configured Charon to be used as Time Machine’s hard drive, the backup began immediately.
Time Machine is an innovative backup application in Leopard (Mac OS 10.5). The initial backup took quite a long time to complete. After it started, I went to bed as recommended by many users in Mac forums. I don’t actually know how long it took to backup.
After the first backup, the following backup is incremental. Time Machine stores hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month and weekly backups until hard drive is full. After a few hours of running, I have got some hourly backup. I tried to restoring some files which I purposely modified. The restoration is really easy.
Charon is a more affordable alternative to Apple’s Time Capsule which is selling at the price tag of RM1,199 for 500GB capacity. Of course, it comes with WIFI and USB port for network printing. I already have a WIFI router at home so getting a Time Capsule will render my current hardware redundant. After all, Time Capsule is more expensive than having Charon. 160GB hard drive costs me RM230 and the external enclosure RM75. Total is RM305. About 70% more affordable than Time Capsule. But after using Time Machine, I find Time Capsule will be a good investment for convenience and data safety. So start making more money and start saving for a Time Capsule.
Tunnel X from Gutsy to Leopard
I have been tunneling X from Linux to Tiger for almost two years without any problems and happy with it. After upgrading to Leopard, a disaster struck me. I was unable to access my Linux applications on my Ubuntu box. I used to do it with Tiger without any problems. When I ssh tunnel X from Gutsy to Leopard, I had keyboard problem. When I pressed some keys on the keyboard, I got numbers and some weird characters like close windows and minimize windows.
The problem lies within Apple’s new X11 in Leopard. The keyboard is not properly mapped after establishing the X tunnel. After searching the web and Ubuntu forum, I found a solution:
% ssh -X username@gutsy
% xmodmap -pke > ~/.keymap
% gnome-panel 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null & xmodmap ~/.keymap
Just do xmodmap map once will do. After that, ssh into Ubuntu and invoke gnome-panel.
Nokia 6300
It has been a week since I lost my Sony Ericsson K700i. Choosing a cellphone is always a chaotic headache. So many models! I had been a Nokia fan before I switched to Sony Ericsson 3 years ago. The most important feature I wanted for my phone is the Bluetooth sync feature which allows me to sync my Calendar, To-do, Address with Mac OS X. That was the main reason I chose K700i.
Another criteria is that I want a phone to look like a phone. The 6300 has got a classic phone look after Nokia releases so many garbage. Deciding on a model is never easy. I listened to many live user experience from friends and relatives and even youngsters who own phones as a hobby. Reading comparison and comments on Internet is never as good as listening to real people talking straight out of their minds.
Apple’s iSync and Nokia do not support this model for syncing via Bluetooth. I did some research and found the 6300 is using Nokia’s Series 40 software and there are many similar phones have been supported. I need to do a hack to iSync so I referred to the following sites:
- Koos Kasper.nl: How to iSync a Nokia 6300
- dabgotra.com: Nokia 6300, iSync, and Contact Photos…
By following Koos’ hacks, I managed to setup Bluetooth link and iSync away in less than 2 minutes. Now, my 6300 is populated with so much data from my Calendar, To-do and Contact. I have yet to try dabgotra’s hacks to iSync contact with photos.
I lost my cell phone
I had to go to one of my client’s outlet at Sentral Melaka to service their IP camera. When I arrived at the outlet, I received an SMS from LA followed by a phone call from Richard. He asked me lot of questions about his insurance claim and also to thank me for providing assistance and information about his insurance claim. I remembered clearly I put my Sony Ericsson K700i which I bought in 2005.
I was a Nokia user before switching to SE because I read about how seamlessly SE K700i syncs with Apple’s Mac OS X applications via Bluetooth. The SE K700i is a very nice phone with many features I love about. One of them is K700i can be used as a remote control for Apple’s Keynote presentation software. The control is via Bluetooth as well.
Soon when I realized it was not in my waist pouch, I quickly dialed the number using another phone. The phone had been switched off. Total silence. It’s gone! A phone which has been my friend for almost 3 years is now gone.
I went back to the outlet after taking Dmitry from school and the staffs told me they didn’t see it. Disappointed.
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