September 30th, 2006
Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) had an minor update (version 10.4.8) not long ago and while the changelog seemed pretty uninteresting on the most part, there was one unannounced feature that’s pretty cool - Zoom Using Scroll Wheel. If you’ve already updated to 10.4.8, you can try it out for yourself now by holding the Ctrl key and scrolling up the mousewheel. Cool, yeah? You can still do whatever you want in the magnified view (I took a screenshot) so it’s not simply a cheap static magnification (just as Expose windows aren’t static screen captures of your open windows).
September 30th, 2006
When my dad asked me to duplicate a video CD, I decided I’d try to get it done on my new Mac (to, you know, get wow-ed by how easy it is on a Mac compared to the old way I used to do things on Windows). As it turns out, I was rather disappointed by the default Mac OS X burning functionality provided via Finder and Disk Utility, though I’d say it’s still way ahead of the default disc burning in Windows XP. Burn folders? Dig them. Creating and customizing .dmg files (disk images) and then burning them? Love the UNIX toolbox-y goodness of how all this is done in Disk Utility.app. Duplicating CDs or DVDs? Not that great.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I couldn’t get the “create image from CD, then burn the image” method to work with Disk Utility - it created a .dmg file without my files in it and I didn’t burn it because I didn’t want to risk getting a coaster.
I asked a couple of Mac users and they didn’t know how to duplicate CDs easily as well (one of them copied the files to disc and then burn them onto the blank disc). Some Googling turned up this thread which, while rather old, seems to show that there’s no easy way to duplicate a disc with Mac OS X.
Hmm, this just feels wrong to me, or more likely, Apple decided to intentionally leave disc duplication out (probably for digital rights issues or the like). I’m really missing the functionaliy that Nero provides with an easy “Duplicate disc” function. Does anyone know how to easily duplicate a disc in Mac OS X or can recommend a good application that does so?
September 22nd, 2006
No I didn’t “die” again… Here’s what’s been happening lately:
- I got a MacBook Pro. I’ve been rather blown away by the whole Mac OS X experience. Yes, I do have some gripes, but it’s one hell of a nice OS. I hope to write up on my whole “Switch” experience sometime soon.
- I threw up a quick redesign of the blog… As you can tell (unless you’re reading the RSS feed) it’s been “in progress” for over a week - this coincides with the purchase of my MacBook Pro (*wink*). In any case, I wanted to get Windows running on the MacBook so I could test the site in Internet Explorer - to that end, I’ve setup Parallels (see Lifehacker article on Parallels) but it’s way too slow on 512MB of RAM. Hopefully the 2GB RAM upgrade that’s been out of stock happens soon.
- I’ve also been working on a Rails project with Jon Tirsen and Michael Lee (who happen to work at ThoughtWorks). Jon has been busy lately (doing some really exciting stuff!), so I’ve only had the pleasure of working closely with Mike.
August 10th, 2006
After being plagued with performance issues running Typo (the blog software on which this blog currently runs) on Dreamhost, I decided it was time to give in and get a VPS once again. I was previously with Linode.com (they have a great control panel where you can drop in the distro you want - still have screenshots somewhere for an unpublished post), and then JVDS (good hosting, usually quick replies to my support tickets, but slow to push out a VPS control panel they’ve been promising), running Gentoo on both VPSs. Right now, I’m on a shared hosting plan with Dreamhost.
Well, Dreamhost has been good to me - I got so many referral credits from them that they paid for my subscription many times over after I posted about their $0.77/month offer. Unfortunately, Typo seems to be quite a monster (compared to Wordpress), and database access is purportedly (and observably) slow on Dreamhost. Still, Dreamhost is a great host for shared hosting, I’m sticking with them for delivering more static content. A VPS just makes sense now that I’ve been tinkering more with Ruby on Rails, plus which geek wouldn’t admit it just feels more right to be in full control of your server (well, it’s root on a virtual machine, but still root).
This time around, I chose Rimuhosting, a New Zealand-based hosting company (servers are US-based, of course), and here’s why (I did some research once again on WebHostingTalk and asked some people their experiences with their webhosts):
Pros:
- Fairly affordable prices - I got their cheapest MiroVPS1 plan, which goes for $19.95/month and get 30GB of transfer and 96MB of RAM (which could be a problem, but upgrading seems easy enough anyway from what they say on their site). Comparing to several other VPS hosts like unixshell, Tektonic.net, ServerAxis, their plans are somewhat mid-range.
- Their reputation is great. Yup, I’ve heard and read only good things about them, something that’s quite hard to find in the world of web hosting. We use them at work to setup servers sometimes too.
- Seems to be run by competent people - they have a bliki (blog + wiki) with some nice posts. The one that really caught my eye is the one on their Ruby on Rails hosting stack. Not that I’d use it since I’m on Ubuntu, but it shows that the folks at Rimuhosting are up-to-date.
- They run Xen, which Deepak, among others, tells me is the most efficient server virtualization software. Yeah, whatever, score one for statistics (and lies).
- Support is reasonably fast - got replies to my pre-sales queries reasonably fast (more than a few hours, but it wasn’t during working hours anyway). Of course, I’ll have to see how it goes now that I’m a real customer.
- A simple web-based control panel where I can reboot the VPS. It’s no Virtuozzo Power Panels, but it’s enough. JVDS didn’t have one and it started to get old sending support tickets to do a reboot.
Cons:
- They don’t support Gentoo, my Linux distro of choice. Only RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora Core are supported. I went with Ubuntu, not having much experience with it (excluding a brief affair with Debian). I was wary of this at first, but my fears of bungling around with an unfamiliar distro have vanished after I saw how easy it is to install stuff with apt-get, and things are not placed in weird places in the filesystem hierarchy. I think I could get used to it, this “not compiling everything that moves” idea ;).
- ServerAxis supports Gentoo, and offers much better “value for money”, except that their lowest priced plan is much higher ($30). But you get 512MB RAM, 200GB RAM, and 5 IP addresses… Too bad I’d rather pay out of my PayPal funds.
Well, less blogging, more server migration. Actually the application installs are mostly done. I’ve never had apt-get play so nice back when I was experimenting with Debian - just
apt-get install [package] and things are installed quite cleanly (keyword: “cleanly”). I think this may grow on me (yeah yeah laugh and point at the Ubuntu noob) - perhaps you don’t need to compile everything (gasp, I said it!).
December 21st, 2005
SitePoint has just released another book, Run Your Own Web Server Using Linux & Apache, which is looking to be quite a winner for those of you who want a complete guide to setting up your development environment for LAMP development. As an Advisor over at SitePoint Forums, I am getting this book for free (yay SitePoint!), though to be honest I have been neglecting my duties over there.
Anyway, just a little publicity for SitePoint’s new book (disclaimer: I have no obligation to SitePoint to promote the book) - I really think it looks promising for those of you looking to run your own LAMP setup or even budding system administrators, as it seems to cover a whole lot and SitePoint’s books have been known for being immediately of practical use. It costs USD39.95 and comes with a Fedora Core 4 DVD, Linux Quick Reference Poster and a collectible SitePoint-branded bookmark(!).
Enough said though, because the book hasn’t arrived yet. If I do have time to read it (though it isn’t very relevant to me now), I may give it a once-over review (no promises).
Native magnification in Mac OS X
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