Snow Leopard

June 15th, 2008 at 11:31 · Filed Under Computing, Mac OS X, Technology · Comment 

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.

Tags: , ,

HOWTO - Clone your Mac OS X hard drive

May 22nd, 2008 at 12:16 · Filed Under Call Me a Geek, Computing, HOWTO, Mac OS X · 6 Comments 

First of all, why do I need to clone the hard drive? Good question though. Here are a few possible answers:

  1. I have too much money to spend for a spare hard drive to clone my Mac hard drive.
  2. I want to have a bootable external hard drive, installing on an external USB hard drive is not possible.
  3. 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.

Tags: , ,

Tunnel X from Gutsy to Leopard

April 4th, 2008 at 22:08 · Filed Under Computing, Linux, Mac OS X · 5 Comments 

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.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Leopard unleashed!

October 28th, 2007 at 22:46 · Filed Under Ada, Computing, Mac OS X, Software Development · Comment 

Apple has unleashed Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) last week. It’s an awesome operating system beating all other OS flat out! New features such as time machine, desktop space, interoperability with Apple Mail and many more.

Time Machine is a repository with version control system to keep track all the changes to your files and directories. When you plug in a FireWire hard disk, Leopard will automatically version all your files and directories onto the external hard disk. You are able to go back in time to look for a file (or directory), which you have deleted or modified, and to restore them.

Desktop Space gives you more desktop spaces to organize your works on the screen. It makes switching from task to task simple and easy with a click of the mouse.

It will be a nice upgrade but if you are developing software with Ada, unfortunately, you have to wait for a while. Ada does not come with xcode yet. The folks at MacAda is still working on a stable and working version of Ada compiler.

Tags: , , ,