Macs

NATD Hogging CPU

2006-04-23T18:45:00.000+01:00

I've been plague for a couple of months now by my iMac G5 suddenly just slowing down and the fans powering up. Today I made the connection: internet sharing. Turning it off made my G5 Snappy(TM) again. Yay!

Blogger Dashboard Widget

2006-03-07T20:00:00.000Z

This is pretty cool! I can now post from Dashboard!

Not sure if thats better or worse that using Mail, but its definately more convienient than using the web app.

Well that was a stupid idea

2006-01-04T09:44:00.000Z

I'm not sure why, but for a few hours, just before Christmas, I was determined to get Ubuntu running off my iPod. I had gotten it into my head that running Ubuntu off a 40GB 1.8" drive was significantly superior than running it off a 10GB 3.5" driver spinning 3 times as fast, that and the thought of being able to umount the iPod, and bring my home desktop to work was pretty appealing.

There were of course several flaws to this plan. Firstly, Ubuntu doesn't boot very well from Firewire. Secondly, my 3rd gen iPod doesn't charge when connected via USB, and finally, my work computer is a dual Xeon and my home x86 is a PIII, but the academic challenge was pretty enticing, and I'd read some success stories of people building custom, generic kernels that could load from firewire. The initial install went pretty well. The install script found and identified the firewire iPod and let me create a couple of reiser partitions on it. In fact, it was all going so well that I was pretty sure I'd get the whole process completed in under an hour. That was right up until the first reboot. Then my iPod died - they are clearly allergic to Reiser.

The remainder of this post is an account of how to fix your 3rd Gen iPod when all it freezes on the Apple at reboot.

Charge your dead iPod.
Unplug it
Flick from hold button to on (red) then off (white)
Immediately press and hold Play and Menu buttons (This should restart your iPod)
When the Apple reappears press and hold the Prev and Next buttons (This will put your iPod into disk mode)
Reconnect your iPod
Run the apple restore software

This simple plan took several hours of research to find, so I figured I'd replicate it and post it here. Of course now I know about this secret "Disk Mode" I'm back onto the idea of booting Ubuntu from it... when will I learn?

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Because I could

2005-11-30T10:45:00.000Z

Slashdot heralded the release of the first fully working version of Jake2. This is a port of the Quake2 Engine for Java. Let me just say that again. This a Java port of Quake2!!!

I had to try it to see if it worked... and it does! Quake2 runs FAST on my iMac G5, really fast. According to their benchmarks they have got 95% of the speed of a pure C compilation, and my impirical tests show that to be correct. This is the same language that can't even get a user interface to run efficiently and here it is running Quake at breakneck speeds.

There are of course a few problems - garbage collection and JIT. The game has a tendancy to stutter, and this only happens when a new model is being used or when there are explosions, but as this is still a 0.9 release I guess there are still teething problems.

Quake2 sends me back to 1997, when my powerhorse was a PII 333MHz with 32MB RAM and Voodoo2. Which lead me to an obvious question... does it work on the beast?

Yes! I took exactly the same code, sftpd it to The Beast and started it from an SSH session on the iMac G5 and it bloody worked! It automagically scalled back the graphics to allow for the poor processor and memory, but it was a fully 3D rendered scene over SSH. I was gobsmacked.

This is a truely amazing peice of software and I think it could really open a few eyes in the gameing world. If you can run Quake2 in Java, why not Quake4? The advantages are obvious. Exceptionally easy multicore support, most memory issues can be forgotten, but most significantly write-once-run-anywhere. One coding effort can make your game available on everything from a PS1 through to a XBox 360. Porting would move from a coding exercise to a configuration tweeking exercise.

The barrier before was that performace was percieved as lousy. The Jake2 team have stood this on its head. Well done.

One thing its also got me thinking is... where is the Swing implemetation that uses 3D hardware?

Thanks for the memory

2005-11-29T14:03:00.000Z

I've just contributed to a Slashdot discussion that diverged into a discussion about what is a sensible setup for web browsing, email and a little bit of office work. As a reminder to myself, I thought I'd go over it again.

There was a lot of waxing lyrical about how we used to do all the basic tasks on a 486 and a bit of string, but my recent experience with The Beast definitely makes me see the holes in that theory. Back in the day, the best way to improve performance of a 486 system, was to get the hell off the 486 and get yourself a Pentium, that or over clock the hell out of it. Remember, these were systems that operated at 66Mhz! Sure they felt fast, but that was because you'd just upgraded from 8088 at 8Mhz. It's not just that either, the 640k barrier was a force to be reckoned with. Few programs used more than that, and even if they did they rarely expected you to have more than 4 or 8MB RAM. Yes, you could load and run Netscape, and Eudora mail, put they were tasks that involved a lot of patience (not least because you were working at 28kbs (if you were lucky)). You upgraded every year or so, not because you wanted too, but because if you didn't you would throw the system out of the window as you feared you'd waste the rest of life waiting for the hour glass to disappear or a progress bar to move. With slow processors, floppy disks and no RAM IT moved at a different pace in the 80s and 90s.

It's a different story today. Unless you are doing something processor intensive like compressing a movie, playing a game, compiling some code etc., your processor will rarely get fully utilised. The only time you are likely to notice a real slow down is when your system starts to use virtual memory. This happens when your OS realises that it's about to run out of RAM, and moves the least accessed data back onto the hard drive. Hard drives, at least compared to memory, are slow and the whole computer slows down whilst the contents are moved over to HDD (and back again to RAM). In the good 'ol days we were used to it. The reason Windows 98 used to crash when you had too many programs open was because it was lousy at virtual memory (and any process could access another's data, but that's a different issue) and you instinctively kept the open programs to a minimum. Also, the OS was designed to assume that there was very little RAM available, as such they had a very small RAM footprint. This assumption is definitely not carried through to modern OSs. I checked the RAM use on the G5 and was shocked to see that even with no user applications open, I only had 256MB free from 1GB!

So what's my point? If you have a PII or higher, max out the RAM before thinking about an upgrade. Yes, new computers are a lot more powerful, but you are not going to stretch the processor with basic office apps, but you will max out the RAM with just two or three browser sessions open. The Beast is an excellent case in point. If I open Firefox on it from my Mac it works more than adequately. In fact, you wouldn't know it wasn't native, until you open one too many tabs, or windows and you start to hear the hard drive thrashing. The other way of looking at the problem is if your not planning on using a new PC for games etc., don't waste time thinking about weather its worth getting a P4 2.6GHz, or a P4 3.2GHz, go for the 2.6 and spend the difference on RAM. Also, 256MB of isn't enough, if you plan on using any modern OS, i.e.. something that will actually use the full power of your new computer, you need 512MB minimum, and really you ought to buy 1GB.

This isn't vanity, or bad programming, this is people who are sick of waiting for their computers. You can have a hard disk that's too big (most people will struggle to fill 2/3GB of hard disk with office and web downloads). You can buy a processor that's too fast, unless you actually know that what your doing is processor intensive the chances are that it isn't. But you simply cannot have too much RAM. Most motherboards can only support 4GB of RAM anyway, and unless you have a research or development budget to burn you probably can't afford that much anyway, so get as much as you can!

The Beast is here to stay

2005-11-24T11:57:00.000Z

I've officially fallen for Debian in a big way. My initial issues with The Beast were cantered around not being able to complete the various web projects I had in mind, because I couldn't get JBoss to run. Pah! I've been doing more and more research into Enterprise Java, and really, EJBs aren't worth the resources they require. Instead I'm using Hibernate, PostgreSQL and Tomcat. I can do every thing I needed to do in EJBs without the container overheads. Sweet!

The other reasons are all packages. They are the most enabling technology I've seen for some time and I wish Mac OS X had it built in as standard. I was having trouble with LaTeX. I really wanted to use vector fonts rather than the default bitmap. I simply sshed into The Beast did a apt-cache search for times.sty and had the whole package installed and ready to go in under 5 minutes.

My only real issue with Debian from a server/developer point of view is Java. Now, I understand it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it fills a gap. I'm pretty fluent in Java and C++ and there is simply no arguing that it's easier to write safe, multithreaded programs in Java than C++. Sure, it has minor performance issues, and they really are minor nowadays, but in terms of an enabling technology it really is fantastic. I mean, if I wanted to teach somebody a new language, it would be Java. It's powerful enough to get what you need done, incredibly well supported and prevents you from doing any real damage to your development computer. It's also easier to pick up. I know people have issues with the having to write System.out.println instead of printf, or the hoops you have to jump through to get input from the CLI, but really, that's a minor penalty, especially when you consider that writing a GUI in Java is probably easier than a CLI app and that impresses the bejesus out of noobs when they see the window they created spring up on the monitor - way more than HelloWorld.

So why then isn't Java installed by default on Linux systems, and more importantly why isn't it part of the standard deb packages? It appears entirely political / religious. Java isn't a free platform, in that the source code isn't freely distributed and that all the JVMs are either written by Sun or under licence from Sun. This great for Java developers, up to a point, because it means that you can guarantee that your code will run anywhere, at least anywhere that Sun supports - and really that's just Linux, SunOS, Windows and Mac OS X (under licence). But it's lousy for BSD, who have to run it through the Linux emulation layer (although there is an effort to port it to BSD natively) and it also means that Debian et al. refuse to distribute it with the OS because its not completely open. The process gets even more ridiculous when you think what Linux is: a server OS. You have a few options when writing server software: PHP/MySQL, Tomcat/Java, Mono/Apache. The only one of those which is easy to install on Debian is PHP/MySQL. This is a pretty good solution, but my experience with it has always been that it's a bit fast and dirty. I like Mono (or at least I like .Net) but it doesn't have the same support as Java - although it is getting better. If you want to write serious Web Apps for Linux the real money is still on Java.

So here is what I want. I can understand that Debian shouldn't be installed with Java as default. I can even understand that it shouldn't be installed pointing to a Java repository by default, but why isn't installing Java a case of un-commenting the package repository, then running apt-get update? Why can't I then install tomcat, hibernate, tiger et el, just by running apt-get? If anything this motivates me to join the Debian developers group and get this up and running, although I can't believe that I'm the first to suggest it.

So thats how it works

2005-11-21T13:25:00.000Z

Just by accident I was dangling my iBuds over my PowerBook and I noticed that they were attracted to a spot about half way down the screen on the right hand side. Being an inquistative sort, it tried on the other otherside, and then tried on the corrensponding point on teh keyboard. The thing went to sleep!

I'd always assumed that the Hall field detector was near the latch, but its actually under the keyboard! Cool!

Stupid friggin word

2005-11-21T10:24:00.000Z

My darling Zoë has been reduced to a nervous wreck this weekend because of Word 2004 for Mac. She used to work as an administrator for her fathers company and nearly all her work was done on Word, on a Windows computer. She moved to the Mac about 3 months ago, although she had a pretty high exposure to Macs as that all I use, but it wasn't until this weekend that she really started to use Office in anger - and boy was it angry.

Her biggest issue was the change from using toolbars to the side panel. This change never really affected me as I use keyboard shortcuts almost exclusively, but she was constantly look for the button to make it bold, central etc. Also, I tend to use headings and document mark-up whilst I'm working, where she prefers to do all the formatting herself. The problem is that nowadays Word really, really doesn't like you doing that and tries to 'help' you by marking up the headings itself so when she changed one section heading, all the others changed, and to be honest it really did look like random changes.

The result is that she is, to some degree, regretting buying a Mac - because she associates the bad office application with the computer itself, which is fair. You can't expect people who aren't into computers to judge a platform by anything other than its applications. But I fear that the real issue here is that Word is so similar as to actually generate this frustration. Its so close to working exactly like Word on Windows that when something is done differently it completely knocks the confidence out of a new user. I have no doubt the changes are to make the Office feel more native and to fit into the metaphors that Apple decrees, but really, for switchers, its enough to drive them insane. The same thing has happened with my Mum. She uses her Mac, almost exclusively for Office and was so put off by the experience, because it wasn't quite the same as her system at work that she is going to sell her PowerBook.

I've never been a fan of Office, either on Windows or Mac. It's a horrible application suite that has some glaring holes that have made some simple projects come to a stand still. The biggest offender is the the most important app: Word. Images, tables, autocorrect, metadata are all handled abysmally, and they are features that are essential in all but the most rudimentary document. The most ridiculous thing is that Word is still the best GUI office suite on the market. I've tried Pages, and it looks promising, but it's not quite there yet, it needs a little more snappiness' and OOo is trying so hard to MS Office that its feels like it's beginning to adopt some of its design flaws. But what about non GUI?

I decided to try and use Zoë's science project as a test bed for LATEX - the UNIX page setting software. Wow.

The document it produced was beautiful. The typesetting was exquisite, and the print out looked extremely professional - but then that's what LATEX is for. What shocked me more was how easy it was to use: you just type. OK its not that simple, there are characters you need to escape, and a few command that you need to get you head around, but to be honest its really not that complicated. I guess it's just what your used to. WYSIWYG has many great advantages, but Word, more than any other application, proves when something goes wrong, if you can't see how the document is formatted you can't fix it.

My only criticism of Latex is that tables are still a sticking point. The actual mark-up itself is pretty easy to understand, but it's also very easy to make mistakes. Most of my compilation errors were due to missing, or adding ampersands in the wrong place in the table mark-up, that and forgetting to escape & and %. But the advantages are many, auto title page creation, auto content page creation, you don't have to think about layout AT ALL and the presentation of your work is without rival.

Writing Apps

2005-11-21T09:33:00.000Z

It started as a 5 minute exercise just to test my JavaFu. 2 weeks in and I'm gob smacked at how complicated this exercise has become. That exercise is ButtyMaster.

The Problem:

One of the guys I work with makes a butty order every Friday morning. It started as just a few people, but has grown to over 60. Each of these people ring him either on Thursday afternoon or Friday morning to request a butty. Most people have a 'usual' other people like to change their butty from week to week to week, the whole thing is stored in an excel spreadsheet that is printed off and faxed to Butty Shop. Not only is it taking over his Friday mornings, it's also costing him a lot of money, as the whole order comes in at over £100 which he then has to ring around to get back. He needs a system.

The analysis:

So what is the best way of dealing with this problem? Well, I'm a Java programmer, so my immediate reaction was to write a Java program, but what sort?

Do I write:

Distributed Swing program that talks to a central database?
A centralised web app with a database backend?

Lets face it, Swing is terrible. Its slow, convoluted to write, is difficult to upgrade once its out in the field and relies on people being able to run Java programs locally - definitely not a guaranteed. In fact, the only time I've seen any compelling reason to use Swing was Eclipse, but even then your left thinking - I wish this was written in something a little 'snappier'. So a web app it was, and that was when the work started:

What login system do you use?
Should I use a portal tool?
Should I use struts / JSF?
Should I use EJBs / Hibernate / DAO
Should I go for Weblogic / JBoss / Tomcat?
Which database should I use?
Should I use a database?
Where should I base it?
Should I design for easy maintainability or speed of development?
Should I use AJAX?
Should I use HTML / XML / XHTML?

In the scheme of things this is a very simple application. All people need to do is login, add/ change / request a butty and then logout. The average use case should take less than 5 minutes to complete, and yet its turning into a monster. I guess that's the problem with Java web apps. Java forces you to ask these questions as it makes no assumptions for you. The whole language is designed to make you think about the security and concurrency issues associated with an application, that even on this low level, requires the coordination of some many interacting parts.

And in that respect I'm probably using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. PHP would stop me from being able to make any of these decisions as I'd put all the code in the page. Of course, this is at the expense of ease if change later on in the process.

Perhaps I could create an Access front end to a PostgreSQL database and make that available on the company intranet. Certainly a strong contender, but that means that everyone needs to have Access and as I learnt on the Forklift project, Access makes a lot of things very easy, but other really important things almost impossible (it's also as reliable as a chocolate teapot).

So here I am with ButtyMaster the Java web app. I've designed the database, and now I'm looking to connect it to the app. Even this involves a lot of choices, the current one being do I use a pure JDBC 2.0 solution, or use SQL and JDBC 1.0, should I be building stored procedures, do I need to use DAO, if so should I use an interface? I keep telling myself that this is just a butty app, that really I don't need to worry about any of this, that premature optimization is the root of all evil: perhaps, the reality is, the problem is more complicated that I thought.

CVS

2005-11-13T15:07:00.000Z

I've been working on a silly little project to et me up to speed with
Java 5. Its the largest project I've tried to write in my spare time
and its pretty much a full J2EE application. I've got to say I'm
incredibly impressed with the additions for Java 5. The new foreach,
enums and type collections are absoutely invaluable. They have a few
nuances, but I was up and running with them in under an hour. The
daft thing is that there is nothing here that hasn't been in .Net for
years - next they'll be adding delegates!

The other thing that I've been really impressed with is CVS. I
installed it on The Beast just to see what all the fuss was about.
Wow. It has completely changed the way I store my source code. Using
CVS in Eclipse is so simple and effective as to make you wonder why
you would ever store your source conventional file again. If you do
any coding from HTML to assembler you have to check out CVS. Sayin g
that, I'm probably the last coder on the planet to figure this out ;)

I've got mail!

2005-11-09T21:30:00.000Z

This blog is becoming more about Linux than Macs, I assure you its
just new toy syndrome. I'm pretty enraptured with Debian. What I like
about it more than anything is that I have as much power over The
Beast from the middle of a park with my mobile phone as I do from the
office with a keyboard and mouse. In fact, I'm getting so confident
with it that I'm seriously considering taking the keyboard and mouse
back to Kay's.

Only this afternoon, I managed to install and configure a mail server
from work, where the only internet access I've got is my mobile. A
mail server! I can now send and receive mail for free via The Beast
from anywhere in the world. Now this isn't unique to Debian, or
Linux. I could probably have done the same thing using terminal
services and a windows box, but there was an art to the ease of doing
it with apt-get over a ssh connection and on such meagre hardware.

1 Week With 3G

2005-11-03T10:27:00.000Z

Wow! This is a good technology. It's not the fastest connection in the world, there is a certain amount of lag, especially when you've left the connection alone for a bit, but unlike GPRS it's actually usable. Web pages and email both work amazingly well. The handshaking is bearable (much, much faster than GPRS) the battery drain is tolerable, but what makes it really useful for me is SSH and being able to connect to the G5 and The Beast from anywhere in the country (well Telford Town Centre).

The last few entries where I've been talking about installing and configuring my OS, 70% of that has been done over SSH with 3G and my PowerBook. It's like the Holy Trinity of mobile computing. The one problem is price. At the moment I'm getting 1GB of data free a month. In three months time that gets reduced to 4MB. Seriously WTF are you supposed to do with 4MB?

I can understand why it so expensive. Checking you mail on the move is a luxury that many can do without, and early adopters always get screwed. What I don't understand is why they price it the way they do. 4MB is nothing. Seriously, I've downloaded 700k in the last 30 minutes, over a compressed ssh connection. Why not band it 10MB, 100MB, 200MB, 500MB, 1000MB? £10 pcm for 100MB is a fair price. £5 for 10MB is a fair price. £15 for 4MB is a rip-off. 4MB might have meant something back in the old days of GPRS, but at 3G speeds and with all the graphics and crud that comes with web sites these days its an insult.

Gentoo

2005-11-03T09:42:00.000Z

OK, OK. I know I said that I'd finished with this project. But I couldn't just stand by and see a perfectly good system go to waste, 64MB RAM or not, it has more than enough resources for the a few tasks, after 640k should be enough for anyone...right?

I set my sights on Gentoo. The way I figured it, I needed every ounce of performance to get The Beast to run adequately. Gentoo offers this by compiling every single line of code specifically for your machine, making it the tailored suit of distributions, but this comes at a price. You have to make every single choice yourself and compiling takes time: source takes longer to download than binaries, and compilation is itself a complicated task. This leads to an install time measured in days... no seriously.

To make a long story short, after two days my installation was slower than Ubuntu, but I learnt more in those two days about Linux than I have done in the last 5 years. Configuring a kernel? Pah, child's play. Resizing partitions, gcc optimization, where everything lives, how the kernel is pulled together, installing and configuring GRUB and LILO, how cron works, an easy way to get things started as services... the list is endless.

So where am I now? Well I had a think about it and decided that I didn't like Gentoo. As much as it had taught me, and as powerful and well supported as it is, the fact of the matter is I'm simply not man enough. I'm a bit too much of a Mac wuss to really want to spend all my time tinkering with the inner working of my computer. If I kept Gentoo, I would never be satisfied with The Beast. I would constantly try to fine tune the myriad of options, in a vain attempt to get a more responsive system - when what I really need is more RAM (a fact that is impossible to escape). So I'm going with Debian: the install was painless; I'm used to apt-get because of Ubuntu; its as stable as a rock and its pretty nippy. OK, so the kernel may be a bit behind the times, but I'm running on a legacy system, so I don't need all the bells and whistles that are required to eek the last cycle out of an AMD 64X2 - and anyway I'm a dab hand at kernel configuration now ;)

Why Debian? I like apt-get, emerge is really good, but apt-get works for me. Why not *BSD? Java. I know you can get Java working on the various BSD but they all run through the Linux compatibility layer which sounds like a lousy solution, you can apt-get JBoss on Debian which makes it a clear winner in my eyes.

Inconceivable

2005-11-01T10:28:00.000Z

OK, the hard drive problem was my fault. Don't mess with proprietary hardware and expect to win, or better, when somebody tells you to record the master password for a hard disk take them seriously. That's two days I'll never get back, and the only nugget of wisdom I acquired in the process is, no, you can't unlocked a HDD for free, which I read in the first few minutes of my investigation. Time to focus my energies on something easier, a RAM upgrade.

All I wanted to do was upgrade from 64MB to 312MB. I checked the pins, 168 of them, I checked the bus speed 133MHz, I even checked to see what the BIOS maximum memory size was, 512MB. So with all this information at my fingertips I went to PC World to make my frivolous purchase. The damn stuff didn't work.

Apparently there is PC133 SDRAM and then there is PC133 SDRAM. They look the same, the have the same number of pins, but they initialize slightly differently which means that only newer BIOSs work with it. I'm really loosing interest in this whole project.

In an effort to improve performance I've started using XFCE as my window manager, its gorgeous and very responsive, but the fact of the matter is that 64MB RAM just isn't even remotely enough. Firefox is enough to consume pretty much all of the user space memory and as soon as you get a complicated page it starts paging virtual memory like its going out of
fashion. Running Firefox and Evolution is an exercise of extreme patience, and JBoss takes hours to tell you that it doesn't have enough memory. Now I could increase the virtual memory, but that's not very wise, sure things will load but with a crappy 5400RPM 10GB hard disk getting anything done will be painful.

So what are the alternatives?

I could buy memory that I know will work from Crucial, for a premium: £51.69 + pp for a single 256MB DIMM, or £21.14 + pp for a single 128MB DIMM. To be honest I just don't think its worth it. 256MB will take the system from being ridiculously slow to quite slow. It will run JBoss, and I might be able to run Firefox and Evolution at the same time, but £50 is a lot of
money to invest in a system that isn't really mine. For ~£150 I can own a AMD Semperon system that makes The Beast look like the POS that it is, or I could just bite the bullet and do the development on G5. The original plan was to do the development on the Linux box because it would be easier, but that just hasn't been my experience. Java and Linux do work pretty well together, but on far more powerful machines, or maybe I'm just spoilt by the extreme power I have at my disposal in the G5. The Beast is going back to Kay's.

50GB down the drain

2005-10-28T10:21:00.000+01:00

A year ago I was quite into XBox modding, 64MB, a 733MHz PIII processor, 10/100 network and a TV out, it simply cries out to be turned into a personal video playback device but there are a few quirks with the XBox because they want you to use it for games only.

Firstly the bios will only boot if the hard drive is locked.

Secondly, XBox live will ban you if you lock your hard drive with a known password (TEAMASSEMBLY, XBOXSCENE)

But what did I care? I mean I actually wanted to use the XBox and XBox live so locking my 40GB harddive to the XBox didn't seem like a big deal - anyway, if anything went wrong I could just low-level format my HDD and use it something else right?

Well thats what I thought whilst I blithely ignored Smartxx's requests for me to record the master password, and that failure to do so may result in data loss - pah! Thats for people you don't know who to use fdisk!

Wrong. HDD security is not impossible to crack, but it requires that you have specialized hardware, which I do not. It is really, really clever and turns a password protected HDD into a brick if you don't have the right 32byte passwords. No really it does. Written into the ATA command set is a series of security commands that, once setup, stop all data access until a security unlock command is sent with the user password. If you have only the master password there is a chance that you may be able to get the drive back, at the expense of doing a security erase which destroys all data on the hard drive. But thats not a problem, I thought, surely you can just change, or flash the EEPROM. In a word... no.

I didn't realise this, but the EEPROM on the hard disk (the bit that converts the ATA signals into something the HDD understands) isn't kept completely on the EEPROM chip, its also on a hidden cylinder on the hard drive (the bit only the hard drive itself can access). So when you power up, even if you change or flash the EEPROM, the bit that you are trying to kill is loaded back from the platters, leaving the HDD in the same, brick-like state.

The internet is filled with software that lets you try and circumvent these measures, but all of them involve you knowing at least one of the two passwords. Which means I can kiss goodbye to my spare 10GB and 40GB HDDs.

Accept for one thing. There is a company (http://www.hdd-tools.com/products/rss/) that sells HDD recovery using their software for $49.50. The only way that can work is by using secret ATA codes that the manufactures have left in for just such a circumstance. $49.50 is more than my drives are worth, but it can only be a matter of time before somebody cracks them and I can get my poor little drives back. In the mean time, the 10GB that was in Kay's old PC is more than adequate.

Mmm 3G goodness

2005-10-27T15:46:00.000+01:00

Well I finally joined the 3G revolution with the purchase of a lovely new Orange Nokia 6630. This device worked perfectly with Address Book, iSync and Salling Clicker with little or no fuss, but it was a little more difficult to get it working with the modem and search on t'internet didn't provide any easy answers, so here goes.

Use the bluetooth setup assistant to setup the phone and make sure that you select use the internet connection:

There is no username or password
GPRS CID String: *99#
Modem Script: Nokia Infrared

That was it... ok it wasn't that difficult. The only hard bit was finding the CID string. This works for all the Symbian 60 phones that I've tried it with.

What is it about PCs?

2005-10-25T09:55:00.000+01:00

OK, my project at the moment is still Kay's old PC. There is just something about old computers that compels me to modify them. Last night I was supposed to relax. I had spent the day staring at my console just wishing the day away. I wanted to go home, have a bath and snuggle on the sofa with Beany. Instead, at 21:00 I found myself re-wiring the PSU on Kay's computer to have a silent fan (it was a bit noisy) that glows green (it was the cheapest in the store, honest). Seriously, its like an illness. I also bumped the hard drive up to a 7200rpm 40GB hard drive that I found under the coffee table. The really sick thing? It relaxed me more than any bath.

The only real problem now is that I want to spend money on it. I've already bought it a network card, but that was only a fiver. It really needs another 256MB, or preferably 512MB of RAM. So next paycheque I'll be going on eBay looking for a new DIMM. But you see that's the slippery slope. I know that I could upgrade the processor for around £10. I know that I should have bought a gigabit network card and switch. I could water cool it. The list is literally endless. The point? I'm not sure. I know that at 64MB RAM the relatively nippy PIII is starved. I can hear the hard drive swapping like nobodies business. I know that giving it more ram will mean that it can actually do what I want it to... run JBoss and a decent database, but I also know that its noisy.

I'm used to having a silent office, and I've got to say that I like it that way. Even the noise of my firewire hard drive annoys me. I can definitely see myself turning the stupid thing into a glorified SAN and running a network cable (or worse wireless) into the basement - in fact I'll be surprised if I haven't done that by this evening.

Next there is the question of which OS to run. As I've already mentioned I'm more than a little obsessed with Ubuntu at the moment, but that's really a desktop Linux. Gentoo, or FreeBSD look like they should be my OS of choice, which means that even when I've got the hardware all pretty, I'm going to spend weeks messing with various distributions.

More than anything else, this experience has reminded me why I went Mac. I'm not saying I don't accessorise my Mac, I'm sure Beany would agree that my phone is little more than a glorified remote control for the thing, but getting the phone working with the Mac took 5 minutes, just as it should. Same with networking, software installation and day to day work. If I didn't have a Mac, I would spend all my time taking my computer to pieces and making it 'faster' rather than working with it and for that I'm eternally grateful.

Ubuntu - part 2

2005-10-14T09:58:00.000+01:00

I was so impressed by my little foray into the world of Live CD Ubuntu that I dug out an old PC to play on it 'for real'. The beast is a PIII 533, with a whopping 64MB RAM, a DVD drive and a 10GB hard disk! There was a time, lets call it the mid 90's, when I would have ripped somebody's arm off just to look at this machine, now its just a white box that can run Windows 98 pretty well. Perhaps, what is most surprising is that this computer was still in service just 6 months ago, as the email / web browser for Beany's mom!

A quick play in Windows 98 revealed that this computer was in perfect working order, but I'd forgotten how slow computing was back in the 90s. I seem to remember that the computer I was using when Windows 98 came out was a PII 333, with 32 MB RAM and at the time I thought that was a speed demon. But, really it was slow, even for the silly little things like email, web browsing and logging on, everything took a lot longer. In short, I was eager to see what a modern OS could to to this Windows addled PC.

Installation was less than a breeze and couldn't have been completed by anyone who had less than a good to fair working knowledge of MS-DOS. For some reason Ubuntu partitioner crashed. The only way I could get Ubuntu to install was use fdisk to complete clear the partition table and then restart the installation... that's a bit scary for a novice to attempt, and would probably be enough to put most people off. However, once I'd got past that, the rest of the install went fine, and the process completed in a little under an hour.

Now one thing was abundantly clear from the default installation on a 5 year old computer... it was slow. Everything worked flawlessly, it didn't even blip, but the hard drive was paging like its life depended on it. Ubuntu, with GNOME/KDE needs RAM and lots of it. 64MB is not even close to enough, but once the paging had stopped and the current application was encased nicely in some good ol'fashioned 133MHz SD-RAM it actually performed pretty well, so I figured I'd run a stripped down install, and use icewm instead of GNOME - still slow, well as slow as Windows 98.

Modern OSs are really clever, secure, user friendly, but they come at a price RAM. The beast's CPU was definitely good enough, but it really needs at least 256MB to stand a chance against a modern OS. With a new iPod and PowerBook batteries much higher on my list of priorities it may be a little while before I fire up the beast again.

I did get to have a better play with Ubuntu whilst all this was going on, and I'm still very impressed. Synaptic is very cool, and means that I might let my dad try and install applications with it, but its still too complicated for Beany's mom. The problem with it is that its still a linux installation tool. You can still see the nuts and bolts. It would be much better if it seperated GUI apps away from CLI, libraries and drivers so that people wouldn't be scared away. Other than that I would have no fear in setting up a box for email, web and OOo providing it had the RAM in the first place... Linux has really come along way in a very short time.

Beany gets a new iBook

2005-08-30T11:03:00.000+01:00

I've been to the Apple Store in the Bullring a couple of times before, but yesterday was the first time I'd actually used any of the facilities (except goggling at the dual 42" displays - I have absolutely no need for so much desk space, but boy do I want one!). First I used the Genius bar. It grieves me to admit that I need help with anything computer related, but I really feared the worst with my Airport.

A couple of months ago we had a really bad thunderstorm that hit the house we were in at the time. Once the power came back everything worked fine, except the Airport. A change of fuse refused to fix the problem, and as the airport takes an unusual 5V and 2.5A of DC to power it I was out of options. The guy behind the genius bar was a polite as he was quick. Within 5 minutes he had salvaged a spare power supply, and too my relief the 3 white LEDs on Airport sprung into life. He didn't charge for his time. He didn't force me to buy anything, and actually recommend Maplin for an alternative PSU. I couldn't have been happier (except if he'd given me the part for free ;) ).

For anyone that is interested, Maplin do stock a 5V, 2.A DC supply for £20, but it doesn't fit the Airport. I fixed this by splicing the old PSUs plug to the new ones. It took all of 5 minutes and works like a charm (and was significantly cheaper than a new Airport).

The other thing we did was buy a new iBook 12". The whole process took 5 minutes. I guess it helped that we knew what we wanted, but I have never had such a pleasant purchasing experience for a computer. Why other stores think its necessary to turn the whole process into something more complicated that buy a (very expensive) loaf of bread is beyond me.

Pirates ahoy

2005-06-13T09:50:00.000+01:00

As I've been trying (and probably failing) to express in my other blog, copyright is in a weird place at the moment and Apples move to Intel only seems to emphasise that further. Leaks of Tiger on x86 have shown that it will run on non-Apple hardware, and its hard to believe that this is a mistake. There was nothing stopping Apple from requiring a certain graphics chip, or checking the serial number on the processor, or deliberately leaving a dead block in main memory... you name it, they could to it, and yet they haven't. Perhaps this isn't surprising.

Apple has been suffering when it comes to getting people to 'switch' to the Mac platform. As a switcher myself I can understand the reasons. There is no try before you buy with Macs. Sure you can walk in to an Apple store and play with a G5 for 5 minutes, but it probably won't have the apps you want, and you'll be playing with it, not using it in anger. Taking a 5 minute play and translating that in to £700 investment is a big leap of faith. So for Apple's three main switching markets (made up entirely by myself) it might be worth exploring why piracy may be the best marketing strategy.

Casual Switchers (mini, ibook, iMac)

In my own experience, this has been the group of computer users who are the easiest to switch. They don't use a computer very often, and use it mainly for surfing the web, email, the odd family news letter, or Church fayre flyer. Macs offer them some huge advantages:

No Spyware
No Viruses
Ease of use

but as they often don't see the value of these advantages until after the purchase has been made all they can see are:

More expensive
Doesn't play games very well
Can't 'borrow' my mates copy of Office or use old software

and that is enough to put them off as it takes them well and truly out of their comfort zone. Moving to x86 could make this switch a lot easier for this market. If they can 'borrow' a copy of OS X before they buy, and still 'dual boot' into Windows they can experience first hand the true advantages. So how do Apple make a sale? That's easy, product design. Provided Apple can continue to make their products the most attractive computers on the market and put them in the affordable luxury market they've created with the iPod Apple could really start to see a massive improvement in they're market share. Will they make a killing? Nope. This market simply doesn't have the disposable income to spend on computers. Its not that they don't have the cash, its just that they don't want to spend it on computers. If Apple can get 1% of the 'borrowers' to buy Apple hardware, and the iWork suite they'll still make a killing, and Apple will start to look like a real contender to software developers.

Small Business Switchers (iBook, iMac, PowerBook)

This is the core market that Apple has got to convince to buy Macs. For one reason or another, these are people that use computers to make money, but have no interest in computers except as a tool to generate money. The main difference between this demographic and the casual switchers is that they have the funds to buy what Apple really wants to sell - software (read high profit). The advantages Macs offer are:

Greater productivity
Lower TCO

Why aren't these people switching? Cost. Although they have money to spend on computers, the cost of switching to Apple represents a significantly larger sum of money when it comes to buying a new computer. It's not that this market doesn't upgrade Office/Photoshop every 18 months, its just that they don't do it in the same month they buy the hardware. Piracy opens up the doors for at least of a few of these users to try without any risk and at a much lower initial cost of ownership. And the fact is that it doesn't matter how many people tell you its cheaper to run Macs in terms of total cost of ownership until you can see you start to fill in your tax return and see that your hardware / electricity / maintenance bills are lower that you start to believe them.

So how does Apple make any money? Honesty. If they have a product that is as superior as I believe, then people will have to buy. Anyone that chooses to run their business on 100% pirated software is going to run into problems at some point in the future. It simply isn't worth the risk of getting caught - and that means buying Mac hardware.

Power Switchers (PowerBook, PowerMac)

If these guys were going to switch, they would have done it all ready - or would they. The problems that affect casual users and small businesses simply aren't a problem for power users. Spyware, malware and TCO aren't an issue if you know what your doing on Windows. I work in an office of over 300 power users, so far I've only met 2 other Mac users, the rest didn't even know they were a viable option. Linux on the other hand they are all over - they don't like it much, but they know what it is, and quite a few have it installed on a dusty partition for bragging rights.

This is not surprising as Macs are so inaccessible and inflexible from an outside view. Until now, you had to buy the 'expensive' hardware before you could try the OS out. Now, this is a market that builds its own computers, or at least knows its way around the inside of cheap Dell enough to know how to replace the processor, RAM and video card without breaking a sweat - so yes the hardware is expensive. They also aren't worried about aesthetics - and if they are they whip out the dremmel and whack a few LEDs in to the case. In short this market is unlikely to ever buy Apple hardware, apart from the laptops - and then only for extended battery life and instant sleep.

The weird thing is that it will be these guys that make the biggest difference as they are the group the other demographics listen too (and get their pirated software from). Hopefully, they will dust off an old Linux partition and try out Mac OS X. Even if they can't see an advantage for themselves (unlikely) they will undoubtedly see the advantage for the other groups and disseminate the information - viral marketing. The other thing that could happen is that they will start to play with XCode - I believe core data alone could be enough to re-ignite the passion of the casual coder and as a result see the Mac platform get a surge of new software. There is of course the hope that they will fall in love with the platform and simply buy whatever Apple throws at them.

I think the benefits of piracy for Apple are clear - and a major reason for the switch to Intel (as crazy as it may seem). The fact is, what really matters is market share, pirated or not, and Apple could do with at least 30% - if only to make the big corporations give them a second look when they roll in with the highest bid and but the only legal way of getting the OS its workers desire. I predict that by the time Longhorn is released the official market share of Apple will have risen maybe 1% at best, but 50% of the power users I work with will have tried it, 30% will like it and continue to use it, and 5% will have bought a Mac - that would have never happened on PPC, and I wonder weather it will be enough to make the release after Leopard, the biggest release in Apples history.

H.264 - A first practical look

2005-06-10T13:39:00.000+01:00

I bought some DVDs at the weekend with the intention of watching them at work in my lunch hour. I could have gone the simple way of just taking the DVDs into work with me, but I thought this would be as a good a time as any to try out the H.264 to compress the video so I can store it on my hard disk.

I used two pieces of software: DVDBackup to rip the entire contents of the DVD to my hard disk and remove that pesky CSS stuff, and HandBrake to rip and encode these files to H.264/MP4. I had originally planned to use the H.264 encoder built into QT7. Traditionally I've always found the QuickTime codecs to be optimized better for Apple hardware than their FOSS alternatives, but Apple seem to have gone out of their way to make H.264 as difficult to use for this purpose has humanly possible. I would have add to added an additional step of 'demuxing' the audio and encoding it separately. I did try this, but the H.264 codec built into QT was actually a lot slower
than the x264 codec built into handbrake, with no noticeable gain in quality - way to waste £20 (at least I can watch it back in full screen).

The whole process felt like going back in time to 1998 - when I started backing up my music collection to MP3. You had to use a myriad of programs to do what is essentially one task, and the whole process was slow. I remember ripping a CD was measured in hours, not seconds like it is today. The same is true of ripping DVDs now. Between copying and encoding the whole
process took nearly 20 hours per DVD. During that time my poor iMac G5 thought it was running a marathon, with processor usage at around 75%. This left it useful for apps like web surfing and word processing, but severely lacking when I wanted to use Blender (really starting to love that app).

I decided to encode at 1MB per second, giving me a file size of about 1GB for 2 hours of film, reducing the size of the film by 75%, not bad. The quality is always going to be difficult to quantify. DVDs are already compressed, and although the quality is good you're still starting with a lossy source, and if anyone has tried re-encoding audio, they'll know that can often lead to some strange artefacts in the final product. Having said that I was impressed with the way H.264 handled the video. There was some loss in quality, but not enough to care about and it was significantly better than DivX at the same bit rate.

On to actual use. As I'd encoded it on my G5 I needed a way to get it to my laptop. 1GB is a funny size by modern standards as it illustrates an impasse in data transfers. Its too big to burn to a CD and its too slow to be transferred by 10/100 or airport networks (5-10 minutes is a long time). The most obvious answer was FireWire, which I figured would take around 2 mins,
but connecting my PowerBook directly to the G5 via FireWire would have meant setting up target disk mode, and that's too slow too. So I decided to use the iPod.

Everything in place, I fired up the movie. It took the poor G4 a little time to page everything in to virtual memory, but once it had enough memory the playback was rock solid! Had portable movies finally arrived? Well... no. My G4 is 18 months old now and the battery is waning. I can normally watch an hour or so of DVD before the battery gives out, I got about 20 minutes of
H.264. H.264 eats battery. Unless you are near a power supply it simply isn't an option on the move - at least not at DVD quality. I guess we're at a bit of an impasse. We need extra compression to get the content onto the laptops, but we need extra grunt to decompress it, and that costs battery life. As ever, we're waiting for battery technology to catch up. The only
way round this is to have H.264 hardware on board to reduce the processor load.

So will I continue to backup my DVD collection? Probably not. I've got around 100 DVDs, not the largest collection by any stretch of the imagination. I learnt the hard way that only a fool keeps their library in a single place with my music collection, at the moment that is covered by my iPod, and as a last resort I've still got all my old CDs somewhere. I estimate that I will need 300GB of storage just for the DVDs I've got at the moment (probably as two external hard drives) that will cost me around £250. Then there is the time it would take to backup in the first place, if I started now I'd probably be finished by September (backing up shouldn't be
measured in months). H.264 is clearly a superior standard to MPEG2 - it really is as good, if not
better because of the reduced jaggies, at 25% of the size. Unless something clever happens with the way the codec is implemented, I simply can't see a situation where I would routinely put myself through 20 hours of encoding, even at 1 hour TV program would take 10 hours to compress (not exactly real time) so its not even useful for PVR duties. The fact is that general
purpose CPUs just aren't the right tool for the job, until hardware codec's are available for £20 my DVDs are staying where the movie industry wants them... on DVDs.

Maybe I've over-reacted

2005-06-08T08:36:00.000+01:00

I think I get it. I think I know why they're making the move and I think I can get my head around it.

I'm an ex-PC user and full time geek. Things like processor architecture, harddrive protocols and system design are my bread and butter. I read technical manuals for fun... no really, ask my girlfriend. The ideological change between RISC and CISC, big-endian and little-endian are almost a religious subject to me. Then I remembered that I use Macs now. Part of the Mac platform is that you give up your hold on the hardware. Sure you can swap in the odd bit of memory or a new harddisk, but motherboards, processors and video cards are decided for you and your pretty much stuck with them. You have to buy into the 'it just works' mentality and get on with the job in hand, using your computer, not fixing your computer.

The ONLY thing I should be worrying about when I make my next Mac purchase is does my new Mac work better than my old Mac. With the quad core Pentiums that Intel have in the pipeline and the already higher clock speeds then they probably will. I don't want to even think about having to worry about software working - I've bought into the 'it just works' - so it should just work - and if the key note presentation is anything to go buy, it should.

This opens up a really interesting future for Apple. Not being tied into a hardware platform is a new sort of freedom. The message I'm getting is that Apple have designed OS X to be the best. If to be the best it needs to run on Intel x86 processors then that is what it will do. So I guess that if in 2008, they decided that the Cell is going to be the next big thing they'll start making Macs that run on those too, and if this new Rosetta technology is any good as they say, we won't even notice.

The end is nigh

2005-06-07T13:35:00.000+01:00

I've just found out that Apple are moving to Intel x86 processors in 2007.
This saddens me in ways that only other geeks can understand. I know that
x86 processors are currently faster than PowerPC, but that has to change
doesn't it? x86 is a fantastic platform for single processor machines, like
the current crop of desktop computers, but that has to change in the short
term. Intel have plans to role out multi-core x86 chips, but they're already
being beaten at their own game by AMD.

PowerPC is the architecture for the future when it comes to multi-core
processors - look at the new crop of games console - even they know that the
future of performance processing is multi-core PPC - x86 has always been a
dogs dinner in comparison.

The Spyware Problem

2005-05-26T09:25:00.000+01:00

Spyware is a huge problem. It seems that if you own a windows computer, you own your fair share of spyware. Spyware is software that is designed to grab your data and send it back to the company that wrote it. This information can range from your browsing habits, to passwords and credit card companies. Another function of spyware is to turn your computer into a drone, a computer that can be used remotely to hide the nefarious doings of dark side of the internet. There are remedies, and they are free, but the problem is that their not easy.

The first is to change your browser. Using the web means using Internet Explorer, right? Wrong. Get off Internet Explorer as fast as you can. It is specifically targeted by all but a handful of spyware programs because of its market share and its security holes. Changing to another free browser like www.getfirefox.com will be a good place to start. You may experience some problems. Firefox is may not be supported by your bank, or tax office and some pages may look strange. This is a problem with Internet Explorer not Firefox. The internet is comprised of standard which dictate how pages and security should be handled. Internet Explorer flaunts them all, but because of its market share, most web designers try to make their pages work with IE. Another problem is start up time. Internet Explorer is inexplicitly linked directly to the core of windows. This massively improves its start up time , but makes it a huge security nightmare.

The next thing to do is change your browsing habits. The internet is not a safe place for the uninitiated, just like cities are not a safe place. You have to think before you click. Pressing just one OK, when you should have pressed Cancel can mean that your internet connection is sent via a premium rate number, or that a piece of spyware is installed. Read every message, and ask yourself if it sounds safe. In general anything that asks you to make that page your homepage, asks you to vote, or offers to fix your computer is going to break your computer. In general, click cancel not OK, it probably safer.

Find a surfing buddy. Because of the security problems, you have to learn how to surf the net and if you have no interest in becoming a geek, the best thing to do is find one who will get you through your first few sessions. This will probably save you a fortune in the long run, both in time and maintenance.

Finally get yourself some anti-spyware software. This is the last line of defence, similar in operation to anti-virus software (you do have anti-virus software don't you). This goes against my previous statement, you have to download and install some software. Consider this the exception to the rule. www.safer-networking.org is the home of Spybot. It might not be the best, but it does work and it is free.

But why am I writing this on a Mac page? If you've got this far you probably have a spyware problem and are looking for a fix. The best fix for spyware, that means you don't have to worry about any of these problems is to buy a Mac, or get Linux. In fact get anything but Windows. The chances are that if you are thinking about using Linux you probably know all of this already. If this was new to you, get a Mac.

Two macs and one iPod

2005-05-25T17:42:00.000+01:00

I'm in the fortunate position of owning two macs, a PowerBook G4 and a iMac G5. When I bought my G5 i used the migration assistant to sync my two macs. This was great except for a few things:

I couldn't remove the Airport Express signal strength bar

I couldn't remove the battery level indicator

My iPod was constantly being synced with both macs.

The first two were remedied by upgrading the OS to Tiger (I think just running a reinstall would have done it). The last one annoyed me. I didn't realise it was happening until I wiped all of my music from my PowerBook to save hard disk space. The problem was that iPods are linked to specific iTunes libraries. Using the migration wizard had meant that both Macs had the same id for the libraries, so the iPod tried to sync with both. I didn't want to remove iTunes, I still keep a few songs on here, and more often than not, I'll rip CDs to my PowerBook the minute I buy them.

I remedied the situation by closing iTunes, deleting the entire iTunes folder in my Music folder and restarting iTunes. This forced iTunes to rebuild its library and generate a new library id.

My Mac Post

2005-05-23T11:17:00.000+01:00

I had my first Mac experience in 1998 whilst working for a BT Shop in London. I'd just completed the first (and last) year of my Chemistry and Molecular Physics Degree and was trying working and Living in London. As the new geek, and a fair sales pedigree behind me it was my job to sell Apple... I failed miserably. It wasn't just my fault, nobody in the store knew anything about Macs and I only really had PC experience. All I could see was a pretty box that didn't run any of the programs that I owned and had a user interface that I couldn't see any advantage of. This combined with a difficult finance package made selling Macs twice as hard as a PC.

About a year later (after changing my major, to Computer Science) I was reintroduced to the Mac platform when I sat a class that included watching a keynote by Steve Jobs. I was awestruck. I had no idea how much extra functionality a Mac provided then I looked at the price tag and was immediately put off it again. But that was enough to get me interested enough to continue following the Macs development.

I bought my first Mac, a 12", 1Ghz, PowerBook in October 2003. I was in the market for a laptop and although it wasn't the cheapest, or the most powerful laptop on the market it was one of the smallest - a big factor. I'm not going to say that separating myself from the £2000 (as I had to buy all the software again) was an easy step. In fact is was down right irresponsible, but I'd become increasingly aware that I was spending more
time working on my x86 hardware than on the work I actually got paid for - it was time to find out if the 'it just works' marketing line was true. It was, and 2 years down the line the only way you'd get me to leave the platform is by prying my PowerBook from my cold, dead hands.

This blog will focus on all my adventures as a Mac owner, from getting my iPod to work with two Macs, coding in Core Data, to musings on whether Apple should release a new video iPod... to name but a few things that are already on my mind.

Hope you enjoy