iPhone is good for business

January 12th, 2010 at 10:55 · Filed Under At Work, Gadgets, General, Phones, Technology, iPhone · Comment 

As I promised earlier in an article that I would write about my experience of using the iPhone. Well, here it goes…

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Miranda

April 10th, 2009 at 20:42 · Filed Under Blogging, Computing, Days in My Life, Gadgets, Mac OS X, Technology · 1 Comment 

Finally, I have got an idea what name to give to my iPod Touch. It was named “Adrian Hoe’s iPod Touch” to make things simple. The hardest part was to find a name which implies its usefulness.

I have several reasons to buy an iPod Touch but I am not going to talk about them here. One most ostensible use of it is that I am no longer required to lug my MacBook (code-named Uranus) everywhere I go. Since it replaces the function of Uranus when it is not with me, I name my iPod Touch, Miranda, one of the five moons of Uranus. Miranda is the inner most and smallest moon of Uranus and is also referred to Uranus V.

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A hot Sunny affair

March 26th, 2009 at 3:03 · Filed Under Ada, Computing, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris · 5 Comments 

I have been hesitating for another hot Sunny affair since the last one about three years ago. This is just another one I have been longing since then. The recent eclipse of Sun resurrects my overwhelming but sleeping desire. Although this happened near the time when Sun is setting, but it is never too late to do it again because Sunset is beautiful and romantic.

Will Sun set and never rise again? Here is my encounter of the hot Sunny affair.

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Is Apple dirty?

March 13th, 2009 at 2:00 · Filed Under Blogging, Business, Computing, Mac OS X, Marketing · 1 Comment 

I have been Apple Mac user since 2003 after ditching Microsoft Windows in 1998. Mac OS X is real UNIX operating system comparing to Linux which is UNIX-like. Thanks to Apple for spending quite a substantially huge amount of money to license the UNIX operating system. Ever since I had an iBook, I am getting more entangled with Mac. I shifted all my web browsing, emails, calendar, contact, photos, video, and even software development to Mac platform. Although I am still running Linux on Intel boxes and SPARC Solaris, I have become totally dependent and obsessed with Mac. I would crave for a Mac if I were to work on non-Mac.

Why?

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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 · 18 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.

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Another happy new Mac user

May 21st, 2008 at 16:19 · Filed Under Blogging, Business, Mac OS X · Comment 

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.

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HOWTO – Installing gnat-4.3 on Mac OS X

October 4th, 2007 at 23:15 · Filed Under Ada, Call Me a Geek, Computing, HOWTO, Hacking, Mac OS X, Software Development · 4 Comments 

Perhaps someone has written this before but it seems no where to be found. So I just write a simple HOWTO about installing gnat-4.3 on Mac OS X.

My installation is on MacBook 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running Mac OS 10.4.10 with Xcode 2.4.1. Pre-requisition is to have Xcode installed before installing gnat-4.3.

  1. Go to MacAda.org to download gnat-4.3 and other necessary tools. Launch the installation in the disk image.
  2. Make the following softlinks: 
    
$ ln -s /usr/local/ada-4.3/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.3
$ ln -s /usr/local/ada-4.3/bin/g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.3
  3. Launch gcc_select: 
    
$ sudo gcc_select 4.3

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