Tuesday, June 30. 2009
Firefox 3.5 Officially released
Firefox has officially released version 3.5 at last. I have been using the beta version of 3.5 for awhile now, so this is somewhat of an anti-climatic moment.  However, I have been pleased with the progress that the Mozilla team has been making in their nightly builds. The general browser stability has been up and the huge memory growths have generally been down.The one big wish list item that I still have is one from the GoogleChrome browser: the ability for each tab to run in it's own memory space - then if a tab crashes, it won't crash the browser (very handy if one is a heavy tab user). |  |
Friday, June 26. 2009
One week with the new iPhone 3GS!
| After a great deal of wrestling with AT&T (namely over the hardware upgrade timeline) and being able to find a buyer for my old iPhone 3G, I was able to get the cost of the new iPhone 3GS covered. After a week with it, I must say that the combined memory and CPU improvements made for a much more smoother user experience - faster application startup (and less application crashing) as well as faster Safari browsing. The hardware improvements: Faster CPU (600Mhz vs 450 Mhz) More RAM (256 vs 128) Larger SSD drive (32GB) OMD Coating (supposed to help eradicate fingerprints spots) Louder Speaker Improved camera Combined with the improvements of the iPhone 3.0 software, I am running out of wish list items.  Here are the more detailed specs (compliments of AnandTech) on the new iPhone. |  |
Wednesday, June 17. 2009
iPhone 3.0 Released
| Apple has released iPhone software update 3.0. Among the promised improvements are: Cut-n-Paste (at last!) Landscape keyboard in certain apps (Mail, Safari, Messages, Notes) MMS (not available yet - thanks AT&T  ) Tethering (not available yet - thanks AT&T ) Spotlight Search Voice Memos Of course, this doesn't take the sting out of not being able to get the new iPhone 3GS at the discounted price, but oh well. (minor note: AT&T has slightly revised their position on the eligibility for the upgrade at the discounted price.) Update (6/18/09): There are some pretty cool hidden features in the latest firmware update, detailed in this PC World Article. |  |
Tuesday, June 9. 2009
AT&T valued customer service?
Lovely snippet from AT&T:
No iPhone until December??? - Boo!! (makes me want to switch to Verizon )(A little bit more info on this nonsense) At this rate, it looks like I will have to pass on the 3GS altogether - makes much more sense to just wait another 6 months for the iPhone 4G, especially with a rumored multicore processor on the horizon. | |
Friday, April 17. 2009
Mac: SuperDuper to the Rescue
| Of late, my MacBookPro has been going slower and slower, to the point of being almost unusable due to severe and continual disk swapping (the ever-dreaded beachball effect). It seems (despite what various pundits say) that my disk was severely fragmented - despite having close to 30 GB free, my machine would often churn for minutes (sometimes up to 10 mins) at a time, due to the lack of contiguous free space (it should be noted that I do a lot of Photoshop editing with fairly large RAW files). I didn't want to necessarily do a fresh install, since I have some built from scratch applications (i.e. KDE window system among them) which would be a pain to rebuild again, so enter SuperDuper! Backup tool. I have written about the SuperDuper! Backup tool previously, but have never used it in a restore before . Of course, as long as one is going to do a backup and restore, you may as well restore to a bigger disk as well (so I purchased a Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Black with Free Fall Sensor SATA 7200 RPM). The only other hitch is that with the 17" Mac Book Pro, it seems that Apple tried to make it painful to swap out the drive, requiring 30 screws (?!) as well as a T-6 Torque wrench. Fortunately, there are a number of guides around the internet detailing the disassembly procedure (iFixIt and ExtremeTech to name a few).Also, luckily for me, I had the extremely nimble fingers of my co-worker as well.  Just to be on the safe side I made sure that I had backed up my Address Book, Little Snitch FW rules, Adium ChatLogs and 1Password entries (as it turns out below, it was a good thing that I did. The restore took approximately 4.5 hours (for 135GB of data) and the only hitches I ran into were: Permissions issue with Spotlight Verify that Backblaze had the new drive set for backup Had to restore Little Snitch rules from a recent backup (fortunately made one right before the disk swap ) Error in my Adium Chatlogs rsync script, but that is my issue Both the Backblaze and Little Snitch glitches were pretty straightforward to correct. The Spotlight one took slightly longer to track down (wasn't the usual issues with the prefs file that usually cause Spotlight to stop indexing). These were the permissions immediately after the restore: colleen-velos-computer-2:/ colleenvelo$ ls -ald /.Spotlight-V100 drw------- 8 root colleenv 272 Apr 17 17:32 /.Spotlight-V100 I corrected the permissions, and after a reboot, Spotlight started indexing again: colleen-velos-computer-2:/ colleenvelo$ ls -ald /.Spotlight-V100 drwx------ 8 root colleenv 272 Apr 17 17:32 /.Spotlight-V100 at any rate, after the above permissions correction, I could once again get a correct status on the Spotlight status (without getting an error): colleen-velos-computer-2:/Volumes colleenvelo$ sudo mdutil -s "Macintosh HD" Macintosh HD: Status: Indexing Enabled I suspect the above issue has something to do with SuperDuper! putting the Spotlight in read-only mode (probably to ensure db consistency, I suspect). (fyi: for those interested in the gory HFS file system details, there is handy command-line debug tool, hfsdebug, which shows interesting info regarding an HFS file system. Also, this is a nice article on usage). |  |
Thursday, April 9. 2009
Safari 4 Public Beta: Thoughts...
| I have been playing around with Safari 4 Public Beta for a little bit now and comparing it to the beta version of Firefox 3.45b4pre. Probably one of the biggest debates on the new Safari 4 Public Beta browser is the redesigned Tabs interface. Of course, Firefox still has a considerable edge in the Themes and Extensions category (I do miss my ScrollBarAnywhere and DuplicateTabs extensions), however, I would have to say that Safari 4 Public Beta seems to have the edge performance-wise so far. Running on my MacBookPro, it doesn't seem to have the tax on CPU resources that Firefox could sometimes have and does seem to render pages faster. Of course, there is the usual differences between web sites, where some will work better under one browser versus the other (i.e. ColorJack seems to work better under Firefox than under the new Safari 4. |  |
Wednesday, April 8. 2009
Serendipity 1.4.1 Released
Serendipity 1.4.1 was released on Jan 16th, 2009. Even though this is touted mainly as a bugfix release, it seems that the Administration interface has been jazzed a little bit between 1.3.1 and 1.4.1 (for the better ). Again, as always, upgrading was very pain-free.
). Again, as always, upgrading was very pain-free. Tuesday, April 7. 2009
iTunes 8.1.1 Released
iTunes 8.1.1 has been released. According to the official Apple Release: iTunes 8.1.1 adds support for renting HD movies and provides a number of bug fixes, including addressing issues with VoiceOver and syncing with iPhone or iPod touch. |  |
Sunday, March 22. 2009
iPhone update 3.0 rundown
| After Apple's March 17th preview of the upcoming iPhone 3.0 OS - here is a quick roundup of the promised features: MMS Tethering via USB ).Update (3/13/09): Ok, since more rumors are flying regarding the impending 3.0 firmware announcement, here is the latest list from the iPhoneBlog (ignore the fact that it sounds suspiciously like the current iPhone wishlist ): Cut-n-Paste New Springboard Push Notification (or Background Tasks) | |
Friday, March 13. 2009
iPhone update 3.0 coming?
| There are rumors that Apple is set to announce the June release iPhone update 3.0 on March 17th. Some of the promised features are: MMS Tethering via USB ).Update (3/13/09): Ok, since more rumors are flying regarding the impending 3.0 firmware announcement, here is the latest list from the iPhoneBlog (ignore the fact that it sounds suspiciously like the current iPhone wishlist ): Cut-n-Paste New Springboard Push Notification (or Background Tasks) | |
Thursday, March 12. 2009
iTunes 8.1 Released
iTunes 8.1 has been released as a 65MB update. According to the official Apple Release: iTunes 8.1 is now faster and more responsive. Noticeable improvements when working with large libraries, browsing the iTunes Store, preparing to sync with iPod or iPhone, and optimizing photos for syncing are also claimed. Small changes include: Allows friends to request songs for iTunes DJ.Adds Genius sidebar for your Movies and TV Shows.. Improves performance when downloading iTunes Plus songs. Provides AutoFill for manually managed iPods. Allows CDs to be imported at the same sound quality as iTunes Plus. Includes many accessibility improvements. Allows iTunes U and the iTunes Store to be disabled separately using Parental Controls. Another interesting note from the The Mac Security Blog is: This version includes a security fix for an issue where subscribing to a malicious podcast could lead to the disclosure of a users iTunes username and password. There is also a Windows-only fix for a potential denial of service issue. More information can be found here. | |
Twitter taking over..?
Monday, January 5. 2009
Happy New Year!!
Friday, December 19. 2008
Slow Blogging (again)
Thursday, December 4. 2008
Truest Signs yet that we are in a recession
| I am evidently late to the party on this one, but just found out that Google's SearchMash is a casualty of the recession and has been officially shutdown. |  |
