Yusuf Goolamabbas

Got this via Ali Ebrahim who recently purchased a Time Capsule but the information should be valid also when using an external USB disk connected to an Airport Extreme Base Station

Basically it is that for the AirDisk you have some options:

1. Entire disk password
2. User account based passwords

You’d generally want to do (2) and the gotcha is that you can’t switch between the two without wiping all data on the disk clean.

Another gotcha is that you can’t migrate your existing TM backup to an AirPort enabled AirDisk. Meaning that whatever history is stored in your existing TM backup would be lost.

I recently reinstalled my 20″ iMac (last 2006 model) from Tiger to Leopard. Today, whilst trying to print something on my HP PSC 1210 inkjet printer I found that it was not possible to print in black-and-white as I used to do in Tiger because the Quartz filter option was not available in Leopard

Here’s the workaround

1. Go to print the document. Use the item “Open PDF in Preview” item under the PDF Services drop down menu at the bottom left of the print
   window.
2. After the document appears in Preview, choose Save As… from the File menu.
3. Either change the name or use the Replace option when prompted. Select the output format as PDF and use the Quartz Filter to select “Black and White”. Click the save button

Not happy with Apple for making it so complicated to print in black and white. Going to send some feedback to them

I’m a big fan of NetNewsWire and love its synchronization ability with NewsGator Online. Imagine my suprise when I open up NNW today and come across NewsGator’s CTO Greg Reinacker’s post that all of NewsGator desktop clients are now free and will include synchronization

Thanks to the team at NewsGator for making this decision.

Off to check out FeedDemon on a Windows box

• Apple has made major changes to iCal in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, introducing integration with its own new WebDAV-based iCal Server included in Leopard Server. Here’s a comprehensive history of software-based calendar applications and a look at what’s new in iCal 3.0.
• Apple OS X Leopard: A beautiful upgrade
  Finally, a PC Unix that everyone can love. OS X Leopard is a triumph of customer-focused engineering

My current backup strategy is a hodge bodge mechanism of burning files to DVD, rsyncing files to shell accounts which I have at Dreamhost.com and cross copying files across various machines.

Recently, I decided to simplify all of this by storing data on Amazon S3 and use JungleDisk as the tool to do so.

I didn’t spend a lot of time working out if it would be financially better to run my own backup server versus relying on Amazon S3 inspite of them not offering any SLA so far. I figured that if Amazon ever decides to shutdown S3, there are quite a few people who might be inconvenienced.

Posting this via MarsEdit 2.0. Daniel Jalkut had a great upgrade price and I just jumped on it. A few hours after I purchased, I got a note from him mentioning there might be a problem with the serial number generated for me and asking if there were any issues. There were none.

Recently I started having some issues with my 20″ Core 2 Duo iMac. First, my mighty mouse would only scroll up but not scroll down. I cleaned it as best as I could looking up various pages on the Internet which went into considerable details on what one could do to extract dirt without opening up the mouse (it seems impossible to me)

Having failed to coax the mouse to scroll in both directions, I just replaced with a cheap Genius mouse. Borks the white look but hey I can work.

A few days earlier, I couldn’t use my audio line-in port. I’m a heavy user of Skype and nobody could hear me. I switched multiple headsets but nothing would work. The internal microphone worked but it picked up a lot of ambient noise.

So I called into AppleCare, I called a local Hong Kong number and from the accent of the person answering it would seem that it was answered in Singapore. I was quickly registered into Applecare and described both the above problems. I then asked for on-site service and was told that Apple Hong Kong would call me and it would probably be scheduled in a couple of days.

A few hours later, Apple HK called and said they could come an hour later to my house. I was at work at that time and told them to come in the morning the next day. Score one for an uber fast response.

Next day, a technician turns up and pokes around. He determines that he has to replace both the logic board and the mouse. Both of which strangely have to ship out from Singapore even though they are made in China. The technician said he would come again next week.

Overall, very pleased with the experience.

Hong Kong has a number of websites which I would term as “Flash centric”. Whether Flash is truly needed on those sites is something of a personal taste. On the desktop world, its undeniable how ubiquitous Flash is

However, with the recent launch of the iPhone which doesn’t support either Flash or Java. I would personally rethink this option. I know that the iPhone won’t be launched in Asia till 2008 (I’m assuming mid-to-late 2008) but as the recent launch has shown there will be a huge interest in it particularly when Apple gets more applications on to the iPhone via software updates and people learn more about its quirks.

Whilst looking at two websites of fast-food chains today, KFC and Pizza Hut I realised that they were entirely in Flash so if an iPhone user wanted to visit these sites via an available Wi-Fi hotspot they are out of luck. Readers are reminded that the Hong Kong plans to provide free Wi-Fi access in all government facilities including libraries, public enquiry service centres, community halls/centres, parks and Government buildings plus they are lot of free/paid Wi-Fi operators already setup.

Website creators and design houses need to rethink the Flash-only landing page model. The iPhone represents one device which prevents its users from interacting with the property leading to a potential loss of a sale.

I came across PixelMator via TUAW today. For the price of US$ 59. It seems to be a very slick tool for someone who is looking for some sophisticated image editing tools without paying for the cost of Photoshop. As TUAW says

The demo showcases some impressive Pixelmator features, including working with multiple layers and objects, opening Photoshop files and moving layers from one image to another, taking a picture with an iSight camera and embedding it into the current working image, and even some slick blending modes.

Another low cost application is Lineform which at US$ 79 is a steal for its features and its UI design. It’s the winner of the 2006 Apple Design awards

I have been using MacOSX for some time and of the things I have found unique to this operating system is that their is some awesome software available at low cost available for it. A piece of software in particular I would like to mention is ArtRage which is not exclusively MacOSX, it’s also available for Windows but as the image on the right shows, with the right creative talent one can create stunning masterpieces. The artwork is by Karachi based painter Waheed Nasir who was the featured artist in December 2006 on Wacom’s Community site. Artrage is available for US$ 19.95 and it has a free edition too. Feature comparision between the free and paid version is available here

I also like the OmniGroups OmniGraffle application

For instant messaging, my choice is AdiumX

Watching this wordless demo was definitely a jaw-dropping experience for me

Is this part of the secret features of MacOSX Leopard

My RSS newsreader of choice is NetNewsWire. I had purchased it a few months before Brent Simmons sold his company to NewsGator and as a result of that purchase, I was able to obtain a premium NewsGator Online subscription for 2 years which allowed for synchronization of my desktop Mac with the web-based reader.

The web-based reader NewsGator Online whilst functional was not known for its performance, an area touched upon by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch in a recent post which analysed market share of various online readers

Newsgator online, a feature fantastic service long plagued with deal-breaking performance problems, is trailing in third place with a mere %3 of views. The company’s desktop feed readers, NetNewsWire and FeedDemon, probably have a much larger percentage of views as they are older, more stable products.

After reading an editorial on ajaxian wrt newsgator perceived slowness, I wrote to a few newsgator employees and investors about some ideas I thought which might improve performance

I had discussed these in my community blog a while back

• Cache-Friendly headers
• Compressed Responses
• Reverse proxy fronting an application server

Brian Kellner (GM consumer) wrote back to me that they were going to launch an ajax version of their online reader which would reduce page refreshes and was optimized for client side caching. Today, I received instructions on how to access the beta site. The email from Brian indicated that it was okay to blog about it (yeah, no NDA unlike the Joost invite I got)

I fired up Fiddler and tried to analyse the network traffic. As someone who lives in a different continent to NewsGator servers in a city with tremendous local connectivity, web traffic analysis via a sniffer is a regular excercise

Some early disappointments

Looking at the traffic sent out by Newsgator Online beta via Fiddler , I see that there is a lot of request/response for content with type image/gif and image/jpeg coming from www.newsgator.com without any cache-friendly headers (Expires, Cache-Control)

Some Suggestions for performance improvement

Always send images with a Cache-Friendly header

Move the images to either a separate domain or a new sub-domain. Currently because the images are sent from newsgator.com, there is an unnecessary Cookie: header sent from the browser for all images. It should be easy for newsgator to buy a new domain and use that exclusively for image/static content serving.

An example of a request for http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/reader/img/folderopen.gif generates a request of size 1025 bytes (dominated by the Cookie: header) for a response of 677 bytes which is further divided into an actual payload (image size) of 353 bytes and 324 bytes for the header. Remove the Cookie header and the request becomes only 334 bytes. One could tune the image server a bit and reduce the bytes used by the response header

Also, one would expect all html/javascript to be sent via Content-Encoding: gzip for all responses of those Content-type but there are quite a number of responses of those content type sent without being gzipped.

I can understand some reluctance with gzipping Javascript since there are quirks with IE (though if I remember correctly, IE6 SP2/IE 7 handles this correctly). Even use of jsmin would give around 25-30% reduction in size

On the bright side, page refreshes are reduced a lot in the beta.

Technorati Tags : newsgator performance server

David Pogue of the Missing Manual fame has compiled a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) about the Apple iPhone

FAQ is available at David’s blog

As someone who regularly follows the RDF (Reality Distortion Field) emanating from his Steveness, I was looking forward to yesterday’s keynote with particular interest on what would be announced for Leopard (MacOSX 10.5) and iWork (whether a spreadsheet app would show up or not)

Though I was personally disappointed with the keynote (only the AppleTV and iPhone) was announced (I thought the one more thing would a Quad Core iMac
I can see why Steve Jobs decided to keep the entire focus on the iPhone. I don’t know how the impact of having the phone exclusive to Cingular would be and the phone is arriving in Asia only in 2008. The lack of 3G of the phone might also hurt its chances in Asia.

What I think is going to be very intersting is that the phone is stated to run MacOSX, now it’s not clear if this means that standard MacOSX programs will run on it. If it does then its a major thing.

But this does mean that developers will have to seriously ramp up Safari/Webkit testing since this browser/rending engine is getting some serious uptake.

MacOSX + Parallels/Vmware Fusion is the way to go for software development/QA. I had already purchased Parallel’s last December when they were offering the one-year upgrade protection plan. Haven’t decided whether to go for an iMac or a Mac Book Pro. I am inclined for the 20″ iMac with 2GB RAM.

However, this post is being edited with Windows Live Writer beta

My review of HoudahSpot as seen on MacZOT.com

One of the coolest features I liked about HoudahSpot was it’s use of Query By Example. Basically, one has to drag a file to a criteria and it will reflect the file’s property. I seem to have a found a bug in HoudahSpot with this though, dragging a file when the criteria is “Kind” wouldn’t switch the criteria over to the appropiate file type. e.g, dragging a PDF file over to Kind would just keep Kind as “Any” and not switch it to PDF as I would have expected

NOTE: If you’re seeing this on June 16, 2006 head over to MacZOT, you might be able to get a Free copy of HoudahSpot

Search easily in Tiger, Mac OS X, with HoudahSpot

Technorati Tags:
HoudahSpot, MacZot

I came across this very interesting viral marketing campaign run by MacZot (think of it as the Woot for Mac users) for SubEthaEdit from Coding Monkeys (the collaborative text editor)

MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software

This is how they are doing it

BlogZOT 2.0 on MacZot

BlogZOT! uses the power of blogs to create value for all Mac users. In today’s example: Each qualified blog entry reduces the price of SubEthaEdit from $30.00 to $0.00 by $0.05 per entry. For each entry, that’s $166+ given back to the Mac community.

BlogZOT instructions. Please READ them as we won’t have time to answer emails about BlogZOT until after it’s over.

1. You can purchase SubEthaEdit on MacZOT.com at anytime today using the Buy button above at the current price.
2. If you’d rather pay less, you can help by getting bloggers to post a comment about SubEthaEdit being the BlogZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com
3. BlogZOT 2.0 will run until the end of the day 11:59 pm in California or until 3,000 copies of SubEthaEdit have been awarded to BlogZOT participants.
4. Bloggers who participate and enter a working email will receive a SubEthaEdit registration if the goal of reducing the price to $0.00 is accomplished.

I’ve been using SubEthaEdit 2.2 on and off. This is the last version which was free for non-commercial use. It’s a nice text editor but I really haven’t had the chance to play with the collaborative side of things. I think this viral marketing campaign will go a long way in improving SubEthaEdit’s reach

Brent Simmons has posted beta builds of the latest NetNewsWire beta. I wasn’t one of the really early worms but I snagged myself 2.1b7. So far, it’s very spiffy and snappy.

Love the NewsGator syncing. I’m really looking forward to the 2-yr subscription of NewsGator online I get for being a NNW customer. Posting to blogs via MarsEdit rocks also.

There have been lots of blog posts about the new Intel Core Duo based iMac and MacBook Pro released at Macworld San Francisco yesterday. Personally I think that iLife ‘06 is a very significant upgrade and people might be underestimating how many users will finally get to effectively use their digital cameras, digital video cameras. I’ve ordered my copy and look forward to playing with it

Technorati Tags:
MacWorld, iLife