Category Archives: Mac

Macintosh Computers

The Real Millennium Bug

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On one of my many trips around wikipedia I stumbled across a date that has been called the real millennium bug.
Contrary to belief, the computers which run the most important systems including most webservers and database systems run on a variant of Unix/Linux or Unix-like aka *Nix.

All these operating systems operate a time keeping mechanism that starts from 1st January 1970
The measure of this time keeping is that it counts in seconds from this.
Most versions installed are 32bit Operating Systems which means that the largest number in seconds that can be represented would occur at 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038
This is the Year 2038 problem (or Y2K38 bug) and the result is that all these computers unless upgraded to a 64bit OS (or other patches applied) will have their calendar reset to 1st January 00:00 at 03:14:08 on 19th Jan 2038. 64 bit OS’s will last well into the future – 290 billion years. A less radical solution of assigning the size of the time character to unsigned 32 bits would extend the problem till the year 2106 but could cause other problems. Other suggestions are to reset the date that is counted from from 1970 to 2000 which would extend the problem by 30 years.

I’m sure a solution will be found, but given that these operating systems are not found as often in home computers (with the exception of linux and Mac OSX operating systems) it has not become as well known but am sure that it will hit the press at some point in the future.

iPod Crash

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Yesterday my iPod crashed while I was listening to a Sigur Rós album
Normally when that happens (not necessarily while listening to Sigur Rós!) I hold the menu and enter buttons down for 5-10 seconds and it reboots, but this time that didn’t work
I did a google search and found a forum post on macrumors.com that worked a charm:

– Plug the iPod into the power charger ONLY and not the computer
– Toggle the hold switch to on and then off
– Hold the MENU and Select (center) portion of the wheel down simultaneously for ten seconds.

It means you need to have a mains charger which you don’t get out of the box when you buy a new iPod
I was about to get the putty knife out and pull the battery out to reboot it, which am glad I didn’t have to do

Cyclists jumping red lights and OSX junk accumulation

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The subject is about two entries really but I’m going to combine them into one blog post even though they’re not related apart from they were both thoughts/observations from the week.

I’ll start with Cyclists…
cyclist red light
I think it’s simply too dangerous to cycle in many parts of London, and being a Car driver I am largely going to have a streak against cyclists (apparently they are never wrong if you are in an accident with one). Having said that, I really think that they do bring some of it on themselves and shouldn’t carry the holier than thou attitude that many seem to.

I will never forget the morning where I was millimetres (it felt like that at the time and was probably a few metres) away from hitting a cyclist who jumped a red light. They were very fortunate that I was alert, that my brakes were in good working order and was therefore able to stop in time bearing in mind i was travelling at 25-30mph as I went through my green light. I will never forget the look on her face – there was no regret, apology or thank you. I was in complete shock. it was lucky I was only 10 minutes away from my workplace (though I was running late as usual) otherwise I would’ve had to stop in order to get my head straight.

Cyclists, along with Pedestrians, Motorists and Motorcyclists are subject in the UK to The Highway Code.

While Cyclists cannot be punished as easily as motorists can, dangerous or careless cycling is an offence that carries a fine of up to £2500. Note that cycling on the pavement is illegal and could be subject to a £500 fine. I have never heard of either of these being enforced.

I believe that cyclists jumping a red light should be fined and this should be enforced. It isn’t because police officers are usually based in cars or on the street and unable to catch them since they are more agile. Bikes don’t have number plates and there is no way to catch up with them once they’re out of site. So, how do you enforce this? Light-heartedly, I suggested that police officers should be sent out with lasso ropes to hook cyclists in from the street but this is clearly not practical. With a bit more thought, I came up with the idea that enforcing the highway code for cyclists could be handed over to traffic wardens on a commission basis.

Traffic wardens in the UK have become notorious for finding means of extracting more cash than ever from motorists in parking fines especially when they clamp them or tow them away. There are many private companies that are employed by UK councils to maximise the income often featuring a payment on commission system. Traffic wardens are generally hated by everyone in the country apart from their boss which would make them perfect for enforcing the law. So much so that some wardens in Scotland are equipped with spit testing kits so they can hunt down those that spit on them. If anyone can make cyclists think twice about jumping a red light, traffic wardens are the ones for the job. They are inventive and are used to having abuse thrown at them. They use bikes, mopeds, buses and cars to patrol their areas, and like nothing more than extracting money out of the public. They will spot whether you have parked 2mm into a no parking area or whether you’re 20 seconds late returning to your parking meter.

Rant over, I know there are plenty of perfectly safe cyclists out there, but the number you see who don’t wear helmets or have no lights at night – I always say to them under my breath that you’re not going to live long if you continue like that. For sure we don’t want to discourage cyclists, but if you are going to cycle on the road you need to obey the laws of the road. Otherwise you deserve everything you get if you get hit by a car.

Next, OS X…
I was doing a bit of a cleanup at the weekend when I noticed one of the partitions on one of my drives was nearly full
So I fired up one of my fave apps WhatSize 10 to find out what was taking up the most space these days and I was slightly alarmed about how much junk was in my startup volume:
• 787mb of Printer Drivers (most of which I don’t have)
• 385mb of saved install packages
• A 173mb Console Log
• 1.56Gb of iPod Photo Cache – bear in mind that the actual photos only take up 379mb – what’s going on here!

What on earth is going on? I’ve spent two weekends cleaning stuff up in various folders because I need the space for my iTunes library. Have managed to get my main drive up to 16Gb available now after finding two tv series’ in my movies folder and a site rip of some site which came to 3.4Gb. I’ve backed all this up to DVD. Still have the mammoth task of sorting my “to sort” folder and not sure what to do with the iPod Photo Cache, but it’s looking better!

Coke iTunes offer

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I remember this from ages ago that it was coming to the UK but saw it for the first time today
Really mundanely in the canteen at lunch I was hastily buying some lunch I noticed the offer on a bottle of Diet Coke
I’ve never bought a song on iTMS and since I now own an iPod & was in need of some liquid refreshment thought i’d give it a shot

So, I now have a barely legible Song Code to claim my free song – it appears that every bottle redeems a song as opposed to one of the US offers where it was only selected ones.
Here is the outside of the label lazily taken with my 1 megapixel mobile phone camera (so the quality is rubbish):
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What to buy will be a difficult one as it’s only one song. Would have to be something that I would want to have on my iPod.
I notice in the small print it says 1 code=1 song
but also says Offer limited to 5 free songs per person
Meaning if I do find myself buying more bottles of diet coke to redeem songs I can only get five
Also, being DRM’d AAC I will be pretty stuck with it on digital media

Time for a bit of iTunes browsing I think

Homeward Bound

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It’s 8am EST on Saturday in the New York Amtrak station and am beginning my return trip

By the time I get back it will be 8am GMT on Sunday after a 3 and a half hour train ride to Boston, a transit, checking in time, and flight back to London Heathrow. Add on the 5 hour time difference and you get to about 7am. An hour’s journey home and I won’t know whether it’s morning or night

It’s been a great 10 days which seem to have been non-stop. Think i need a nice beach holiday to recover from it.

The wedding went well, Boston was good fun and New York was great – Empire State Building, Central Park, China Town, Broadway, Times Square, Museum of Modern Art, and everything else that I can’t remember at the moment.

Couldn’t resist a stop to the Apple Store on 5th Avenue, and am now the owner of a shiny new 80Gb iPod Video (but shhhh! Don’t tell customs – they need to believe I had it before I went out) and a nifty app called Popcorn 2 so I can convert some DVDs easily into H.264 (mpeg4). Oh, and I’ll prob convert some of my huge music Video collection too so i can view it on the iPod

Thought I’d make one post on the blog while I had a few minutes to kill in the departure lounge.

Speak to you all tomorrow (I think!) or later on in the week

Apple’s WWDC 2006

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Well it’s been over 24 hours since Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco
We saw a preview of Leopard, news on apple stores, new dashboard widgets and the latest developments on Apple’s software apps

But I’m going to skip through all that because the most important announcement was the new Desktop Tower Mac officially announced as the Mac Pro
On the outside it looks pretty similar to the Powermac G5 but on the inside it is clearly far superior and has a pricetag that is more down my street
I’ve been belligerently sticking with my current mac because Apple have not released a computer that I have wanted to buy for over 4 years for various reasons (too expensive, no dual optical drives, i don’t need a laptop, all in one when I like my monitor etc)
But this one looks good

It comes in at under £2000 for the mid range 2.66GHz Dual Core 64 bit Xeon (based on Intel’s Woodcrest processor)
It comes with 1Gb ram as standard, and has the option of having up to 2TB of storage in it’s 4 internal Serial ATA hard drive bays
Five USB (two on the front) and Four Firewire (two FW400, two FW800) ports with one of each on the front
Two Gigabit ethernet connectors, Optical digital AND Analogue audio in AND out (so you can plug a normal microphone or headphone into it if you don’t have optical ones)
Four PCIe slots and capacity for 16Gb of Ram
But best of all it has the space for dual optical DVD±RW superdrives
Graphics cards are good and the processor kicks ass

Bluetooth and Wireless are optional extras but in reality you could add them afterwards and for cheaper by going to 3rd party suppliers
If you want to read more It’s all in the tech specs page

Remember, this is essentially a PC motherboard so any hardware that works on a PC will more than likely work in this

I will definitely be checking this out and gonna find out what I would be able to retrofit from my current setup

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My G4 and why I still haven’t changed it!

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I’ve been saying for about the past 3 years that I need to replace my Mac (and before anyone gets excited no I still have the same Mac).

It’s now 5 and a half years old – the longest i’ve ever kept the same computer going and been through more upgrades than any other. In that time there has not been a single mac that I have wanted to buy to replace it. Apple’s systems with PPC processors are also not as easy (or cheap) to upgrade processors and even then the motherboard would hold it back.

I really wanted to replace it this summer, especially since I’m going to be going to Boston in September for my cousin’s wedding and could get a good deal if i “smuggle” it in with my luggage. However, the intel mac mini was a horrific disappointment with it’s low spec graphics and SATA laptop hard drive. Wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole as it has waste of money written all over it. Am kinda hoping there’ll be a mini tower when apple upgrade the Powermac G5s to Intels in the next couple of months as that might actually tempt me.

If not, you never know with macs being so similar to wintels i might finally give in to my threats that i’ve been saying the past few years that i’d buy a wintel box and install linux on it! Having said that the other thing i’ve also been saying is the only thing that’s kept me a mac user is the OS, so maybe not!

Anyways, let me tell you a little bit about my current mac

Bought it, a 1st generation G4 Powermac 450MHz in September 2000. I actually got the 400MHz version a month previously not knowing that I couldn’t fit an internal CD burner despite being told I could do by the useless sales rep at PC World
I had it for one day all set up and took it back the next day on the premise that they could fit the second optical drive only to be told that not only was it not possible, but the sales rep who sold it to me wasn’t there that day (how convenient!).

At that point I’d had enough and returned the whole thing. A mate told me i should’ve locked out the DVD drive by putting in a region 1 and 2 disc repeatedly till it hardware locked the thing just to annoy them before returning it!
A month later I bought the next one up from a different shop (450MHz) knowing what I was getting into and it came with a zip drive which i thought might be useful and AGP which would be a huge benefit later.

Realising I had no way to copy files from my old mac to this one and also not having a floppy drive, I bought an external CD burner which used USB 1.1 and discovered a way to use the serial connectors through two modems to transfer files at 1k/s between the two macs. Neither were particularly good. In the end i bought an ethernet card for the old mac (much better) and the 2x/4x cd burner wasn’t brilliant.

I kept the original setup for a few years until i needed to buy OSX 10.2 which came with Quartz Extreme for which the ATI Rage Pro wasn’t supported. Living in my student house with windows users I realised there was a money saving way to upgrade the graphics card. I did my research and with this knowledge went to a computer fair and paid a very cheap £20 for a OEM Geforce 2 graphics card which was just good enough. We flashed the bios on a windows machine and it worked first time in OSX.

The next upgrade was the CaseMod which turned the machine into basically what it is now. It gave me what i wanted in the first place and relegated the external cd burner to the closet – anyone want a 4x matsushita cd burner which has been sat in a box for 3 years? Works perfectly well, it’s just very slow and worthless these days!

However, it now has two 120Gb internal hard drives and all the other good stuff. The zip drive it originally came with is sat on a shelf somewhere since no one else uses zip disks (esp 100Mb ones).

And if anyone’s after any replacement bits for their G4 case i’ve got one sat in the cupboard – i broke the logic board tray so i can’t use that but the rest is in perfectly good nick and not doing anything. Keep meaning to sell it off on ebay, but these days i can’t stand the place!

Well, there’s my rambling, I hope there’s good news at this summer’s WWDC August 7th-11th. And it will mean that I will be able to replace my long serving mac with something more modern, as it’s got to the point where I cannot upgrade the parts that I want to anymore as I found out when I tried to upgrade the graphics card. The conclusion I came to was that if I wanted to ebay was the only way to proceed.

Posted in Mac

Disaster Strikes & Keychain!

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I haven’t been updating my blog recently for various reasons.
Firstly, with my new job I haven’t had as much free time as I had before, there’s been a lot of cricket on (England v India, South Africa v Australia and Sri Lanka v Pakistan all at the same time), and then on Thursday evening a bit of a disaster happened.

I was making a copy of the Greatest Game (see last blog post) for a couple of mates, as Sky Sports had repeated the highlights and i’d recorded it on DVD-R, so with my DVD burner i was able to quickly make copies. I was just testing the disc had copied ok in Frontrow (which had a kind of hacked installation to make it work on my mac) when it got jammed on fast forward. I couldn’t stop it, force quit frontrow, switch applications or anything, leaving me with one choice: Force restart!

9 times out of 10 this would probably have been fine, but this time something went very wrong – instead of the lovely boot panel “Welcome to OSX”, what I got was this at startup:

I left it till Friday before doing anything as I had a far more important “executive meeting” at the pub and thought it should be a simple case of archive and reinstall OSX. However, on friday, i tried booting up from the install DVD and it wouldn’t even do that. My biggest fear… Hardware fault sprang to mind. Out came the toolkit to take things apart and find out where the fault was. To confuse things further, I was able to boot into OS9 and could see the hard drive there – this suggested something else was at work, and it wasn’t as simple as it seemed.

While taking things apart i narrowed the problem down to the OSX hard drive which for some reason, when it was on the ATA bus it wouldn’t boot into OSX regardless of the startup media. So, i needed to replace it and Saturday morning is the computer fair in Central London. With a wad of cash I went there to fix things up while not causing too much bank balance damage.

It was a successful day, and for £147 I came back with two new hard drives, and a Firewire 400/USB2.0 enclosure
For the internal, I replaced the faulty Maxtor 120Gb with a Seagate Barracuda 120Gb – I wasn’t particularly bothered about the brand
For the external, I purchased a Maxtor 300Gb with 16Mb Cache – this would serve two purposes: 1. To recover what I could off the faulty drive, and 2. To actually be a backup drive

Here’s what the enclosure looks like sat atop my mac (the white box behind with all the Green LEDs is my ethernet switch, and you can see part of my cannon scanner to the left of the picture):
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Apologies for the quality of the photo, I took it with my 1megapixel camera phone and transferred it by bluetooth, as i couldn’t be bothered to get all the cabling out for my proper digital camera!
I think the silver goes quite well (it was also available in black) and at £20 for the enclosure including Firewire and USB cables i thought it was a bargain.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, 2 1/2 days later (copying 100Gb worth of files several times), everything is nearly back to how it was and I recovered all my data. Just need to reinstall a couple of GUI tweaks, Dev tools and reinstall a few add-ons again.

I will decide later on in the week whether to try and fix the old Maxtor hard drive and use it as my second internal hard drive, as currently I have the original 20Gb drive there. The extra 100Gb would be very useful and allow me to free up a fair amount of space on the OSX drive. Plus 120+120=240Gb which is less than the 300Gb external drive, so I would still be able to back it all up.

Just before setting out for the computer fair a package arrived for me in the post from my good friend MacHeadCase
It was a very useful gift, and it is now on my keyring:
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It joins all the other junk I have on there like my Pentium Processor that I drilled a hole in
It’s not just a keyring of a lizard, it’s very cleverly shaped tail and foot act as a bottle opener. Given how much I like beer it will almost certainly be of great use for times at a party when there’s bottled beer about!

Explaining the Difference between MacOS and Windows

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I was pottering through google on my day off today trying to find the solution to a problem where the minimize button would disappear on my mac. I posted it on ResEx forums as i usually do, but thought i’d see if i could find anything on google

Anyway, as always happens when you’re opening links all over the place from google, you stumble on something else which interests you. It doesn’t actually help you with what you were looking for but has turned up because some of the words you’d put into google are on this page too and you are compelled to have a read.

What it was was a Mac Switcher who was asked to explain the difference between using a Mac and a PC after buying a MacMini.
Or as the author puts it:

I wrote this when someone in a reply to my journal asked me to tell them about the mac. I figured it was long and well-punctuated enough to merit usefulness to others. I’m too lazy to fidn the best place on the internet so I’ll put it in this forum and hope no one minds.

Before I get completely distracted again here’s the article Forum: For Those Considering A Mac

I’m always interested in how people would describe the differences, because I’ve been a Mac user for the best part of 15 years, but at the same time had a Windows computer in the house/work/school/uni. Growing up I learnt on BBC Micros learning to program in Basic and playing games as you do when you’re 7-10 years old! Then we got a Amstrad 1640 which apparently had a 68086 intel processor though i thought it was a 286 *shrugs* – it had DOS and something called GEM Desktop as opposed to one of the early versions of Windows. I got a Mac LC II a few years later having used a Mac at school, and my dad bought a Packard Bell 486DX2/66 to replace the Amstrad which nobody ever really liked. I got a Performa 6200 with a 603e processor, and the 486 got replaced with a Pentium 2 laptop. My brother needed a computer, so he got a HP desktop with an AMD Athlon on my recommendation of what he would find most useful. My last (and current) mac was a Powermac G4 450 which is coming to it’s last legs in terms of performance, but still running perfectly well. My mum got a Windows laptop from work, and every office i’ve worked in has had Windows computers. At Uni i used windows, but also DEC Alpha unix machines (which i used to use for transferring files to and from uni as they were essentially ftp servers and accessible off campus) and SGI’s running IRIX. I’ve also got a FreeBSD server at home which i don’t have nearly enough time to play with and took what seems like forever to install. It originally had a Smoothwall Firewall & NAT Gateway which we used in my old uni house to share our internet access – at the time it was cheaper to buy a cheap PC (2nd hand didn’t need to be good and only needed to last a year) and install Smoothwall (which was free) than buying a router.

Anyway, back on topic…
The author is very complimentary about Mac OS X, and is clearly using OS X 10.4 Tiger since he talks about Spotlight. I like the way he talks about things i wouldn’t think twice about like the close, minimize and zoom buttons:

Instead of Minimize Maximize Close buttons on top left, Mac OS X has Red (close) Yellow (minimize) Green (fit window to content, which is sometimes like maximize); and these circle buttons are on the top left.

I would just say the buttons you’re used to in windows on your PC are on the left of the window instead of the right on a mac, a slightly different order and largely do the same thing.

I like the analogy of saying that the taskbar in OSX is at the top of the screen as i know that when i’ve wanted windows to look more like a mac i move the taskbar to the top. I think the description of Windows’ “My Documents” folder is spot on:

There is a My Documents like area of the hard drive and it functions much the same way as in Windows (except that Mac OS X will always let you go up a folder and end up where you should, unlike Windows’ My Documents which sometimes seems located in two places)

For those who don’t use Windows much My Documents appears as both a folder/alias/shortcut/something alien. Because it has an icon on the desktop that is created automatically which is not a windows shortcut file, and displays as such in the location bar. But what it is actually showing you is the contents of
C:\Documents and Settings\Username\My Documents\
If you choose to go up a level when viewing it from this icon on the desktop it takes you to the desktop
If you go up a level when viewing from the actual location it takes you to C:\Documents and Settings\Username\ which is very confusing, and if like me you forget this you want to tear the thing to pieces.

The other comment that is spot on and really well expressed is on installed apps where windows chucks stuff all over the place, but Mac OS X is different:

the entirety of most programs is all packed into one seemingly indivisible icon of beauty – un-installation requires only that you drag the icon to the trash bin (recycle bin). You can of course choose to explore inside the program’s icon and get to the nitty gritty if you feel the urge

I like that expression a lot!

The other thing I like is the comments on constant state of refresh:

Mac OS X is in a constant state of seamless refresh. Whereas in Windows you may need to exit a folder and come back to see a change, or refresh the desktop for some reason, Mac OS X has no need for such things. Something happens, you see the results everywhere, instantly – how it should be.

I only really became aware of this when i had internet access on a windows computer. The reason i noticed it then is because every version of the Mac OS right the way back to System 7 has had the feature described above and I found it very odd when downloading files on windows. In the Mac OS, the instant you start downloading a file it creates it and you can see it in the download location. Windows doesn’t do that, it downloads the file to the temporary internet files and doesn’t show it to you until it’s finished and then moves it to the download location.

I’m surprised the article doesn’t say anything about icons lining up on the right instead of the left because that’s the first thing that hits me when i switch between the two, and has quite an effect on desktop pictures. Also surprised there’s no mention of Exposé yet he talks about X11! I still play with Exposé while waiting for saft to load all my saved browser windows up in Safari, and i’ve had 10.4 for nearly a year – still can’t get over how amazing it is. Dashboard isn’t as much fun to play with as it’s not as quick as playing with the windows!

I’m a big fan of understanding things from doing them, so i would find it very difficult to explain to someone why I prefer the Mac OS without actually showing it to them. But anyway, i think i’ve quoted enough of the article and you won’t read the actual one if i quote any more.

Completely unrelated, MacHeadCase told me about a thread on TechSurvivors’ forum talking about an anonymous surfing add on called Tor – link is to the OSX instructions but it also works on Windows, and various Linux & BSD distros. It uses something called Privoxy but all packaged in a nice friendly installation.
I installed it, set it up, and it’s far too slow to be acceptable so i switched it off – will probably keep it installed in case i have a need for it but I wouldn’t recommend it
It’s a clever idea, and it’s all explained on the Tor: Overview site, and allocated me an IP address somewhere on a virtual server in Amsterdam. Mighty impressive, but the speed hit outweighs the benefits of having that anonymity when i go to sites.

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* Edited to fix one of the links – missed out a quotation mark!

Weekend

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Am going to be away for a couple of days till Sunday afternoon to celebrate my birthday which is today
Going out with my mates down to West Sussex – have loaded the car with booze and with a bit of luck should be a good trip

Have spent today pottering around on the internet, and stumbled on a couple of interesting links
The first is a site Apple must be annoyed they didn’t register the domain for:
macosx.com
Looks like quite an interesting site, particularly their HowTo section which has the quick way to sleep your mac and hidden dashboard features

I also stumbled on this homepage for yet another OSX maintenance app called mac help mate. It looks nice but it only works on OS X 10.4.x Tiger and is still in beta testing – haven’t tried it yet

Oh, and those who are more observant may have noticed that I’ve added a weather plugin to the sidebar. For a day or so it was showing the weather for somewhere ridiculous because i hadn’t realised that it draws the location from multiple places