Friday, August 19, 2005

iMovie rocks! I really need to get the external USB hard drive working. Video editing can consume an insane amount of space.
MacOS X offers a great Java Development platform. It comes bundled and works pretty much the way it should. Installing the eclipse IDE is a simple download and drag n' drop affair.

The default comes with Java 1.4.2 with Java 5.0 downloadable via Apple's developer site. Performance on the 1.33ghz ppc is comparable to my previous Centrino 1.6ghz x86 machine. The difference tho is the somewhat distinct creativity inducing allure generated by the general combination of slick hardware and drop dead gorgeous software. Truly inspiring.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Darn! hit the first snag. My GL811USB based external Hard Disk enclosure could not be detected by Tiger. Something Linux, FreeBSD and Windows could happily detect and use with relative ease, out of the box. Formatting the drive to HSF or FAT32 doesn't help a bit.

Monday, August 15, 2005

EZ does it on MRT and Buses -- Pinoy Tech Blog - The Philippine%u2019s Premier Technology Blog another informative article by ka edong.

My how time flies. When I was in Singapore a couple of eons back this was still new. At that time they were using the same type of card that we use today at the MRT. The one which you need to insert into a card reading machine. But the infrastructure was already there. The same card can already be used on taxi's and buses. It was even used on devices mounted on cars which are automatically "transacted" on roads that require a toll fee (look ma no toll booths!). Currently in the Philippines, aside from the MRT's and LRT's, only a few Parking Lots are using this kind of technology.

Been using WiFi for the past 2 years and it seems scp never gets passed 650kbps (with access point two 3 feet away). Tethered on the otherhand can reach up to 7-8mbps. Maybe what I need is a WiFi Speed Spray.


At last. I finally found the /etc/rc.d/ or /usr/local/etc/rc.d (that would be /etc/init.d for linux users) equivalent of MacOS X. Tada! its:

/Library/StartupItems/

My gulay... So babaw, aking kaligayahan.
Downloads - Mono. There is a MacOS X port. Hmmnn. It does have cocoa bindings. Wonder how hard would it be to port Tomboy to the Mac?

Or maybe I should learn Sacha's PlannerMode for emacs. Since emacs works out of the box on a mac. The trouble is, am still too attached to old school Vi.

Which reminds me. While Mac has Fink for getting most OSS apps. I can't find a tool that lets me view all the packages that comes with OS X. While the GUI ones just require dragging the thing to the Trash can, I couln't find a CLI equivalent. Heck, I don't even know yet the list of userland stuff that comes with it.
beatnikblog ? Blog Archive ? Note of the Day plugin: Pretty neat plugin. This is the app that I seem to be missing on OS X. It has a bundled app called stickies, but is nowhere near as useful as Tomboy.

Sunday, August 14, 2005

A good friend, Jessie seems to be doing well with his business: TechTribe Systems. Ok yan. Payt sana!
Fortunately I have a bluetooth enabled Sony Ericsson T630, that pairs quite well with bookah's builtin bluetooth. I can use this feature out of the box -> O'Reilly Network: Use Bluetooth for SMS.

Sweet justice.

Also, using the phone as a temporary dialup modem worked like a charm. Although since GPRS is just ridiculously expensive, I need to refresh my ultra rusty ipfw skills to filter just the right traffic for a given task (e.g. Only allow ssh traffic for emergency server interventions). I haven't found yet an email client that allows partial downloading of emails. Like, say limit the size to 5kb per email, or just download the email subject. So email via GPRS is a big no-no on bookah, unless of course I want my wallet to scream.

Good news! To support my GSM modem addiction, the kind folks at itegno emailed me a copy of their Mac OS X drivers. Next step is to find a javacomm API implementation for the Mac. Which inspite of its FreeBSD lineage (Mac OS X uses FreeBSD for its userland implementation), doesn't support the javacomm API out of the box.