Rubenerd

After much anticipation my copy of Snow Leopard I pre-ordered back on Monday arrived in our mailbox early this morning. Of course Murphy's Law was in full force: I had classes, a ton of assignments and work, I tagged along with my sister to the airport for her flight to Canberra and I set our toaster oven on fire when I tried to make a slice of toast and forgot about it. Imagine the damage if it had been a grilled cheese sandwich.

Well here we are at 23:30 and I finally have some time to install this here Snow Leopard. Problem is I absolutely loathe upgrades, I much prefer starting a new install of an operating system from scratch so there's the lowest chance of something going wrong and it also forces me to do a thorough system clean out and to check the few files I don't have backed up daily.

There probably won't be many blog posts today while I frantically work on this here Snow Leopard install preparation, so you can take five. Speak of the devil, I'm listening to that now. Genius.

Oh bummer, one of my external hard drives is almost full already. This is going to be a long evening!

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

How to Write Doc Comments for the Javadoc Tool

"This document describes the style guide, tag and image conventions we use in documentation comments for Java programs written at Java Software, Sun Microsystems"

(categories: javadoc java programming reference documentation howto sun)

There are plenty of more thorough lists online, but I thought I'd keep my own too. So far I've been using this software without problems:

• Adobe Air 1.5.2
• Simone’s Gimp 2.6.7
• iMovie HD 6 from iLife 06
• MacPorts 1.8.0 Snow Leopard release (guess that goes without saying!)
• Mozilla Firefox 3.0.13
• Mozilla Firefox 3.5.2
• OpenOffice.org 3.1.1
• TextMate 1.5.8
• TweetDeck 0.26.6

Software I've been having problems with:

• Skype 2.8.0.659 works as long as you do not thin the universal binary with ditto as I described in December 2007.

• QuickTime 10 with Perian currently doesn’t support the MKV media container because of a registration incompatibility problem.

• The Intel build of VLC 1.0 works, but for some reason takes upwards of 30 seconds on my machine to load and start playing MKV files. This wasn’t an issue on regular Leopard on the same machine.

• XQuartz 2.4.0 returns an error saying "This update is designed for OSX Leopard Only.".

I've been able to compile the following ports from MacPorts without problems:

• lame 3.98.2_1
• ncurses 5.7_0
• ncursesw 5.7_0

With the introduction of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing. Fortunately, there is a workaround!

Previously on Leopard

In Leopard and earlier versions of Mac OS X, if you opened System Preferences and chose Appearance, you could choose the level of font smoothing on your monitor with a handy drop down box.

On Snow Leopard…

For some reason, Apple decided in Snow Leopard to to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing aside from a single checkbox, instead relying on LCDs to report what settings should be used. The problem is, support for this is spotty and sometimes the results look terrible.

The solution!

Fortunately you can still adjust this manually. Open the Terminal in your Utilities folder, then enter the following code on one line. Replace the "2" with a number between 1 and 4, depending on how much smoothing you want.

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

The changes will only take effect on newly opened applications. The easiest way I've found is just to log out and log in again.

Heaven knows why Apple user interface designers decided to remove access to this feature.

My premininary experience with Snow Leopard after getting around to installing has been amazing. It's most probably also to do with the fact I did a clean install which always helps, but all the applications load instantly or with only one dock bounce even on this 2006 era first generation MacBook Pro! Obviously compiling huge projects or editing video won't be much faster, but if the machine is feeling this much more responsive I might be able to keep using it for even longer which my wallet will love.

There are also lots of tiny little non-performance related things. When you click the hide toolbar button in the Finder it does a quick animation, and the toolbar itself is spaced out more neatly. When I have my external monitor attached the open windows on it are easier to resize to fit the full height without going over. When you open folders in the Finder using column view they show an open icon. The Homebrew theme in the Terminal uses blue as a selection colour. I'm sure I'll find more such things.

So far the only bad things I've come across is hard drives aren't shown by default on the Desktop but a quick visit to the Finder Preferences screen can fix that. Also, for some reason the fonts look dreadful and the Appearance preference pane no longer has a drop down menu to select the degree of font smoothing. A visit to the Terminal will fix this, but it's weird they'd do that.

Now it's time to put the Dock back on the side and install my applications. Speaking of which I need a cup of coffee. Why doesn't Snow Leopard do THAT for me still I ask?

This check-in was imported to the Annexe from Brightkite, one of the first geolocation social networks.

Checked into Adelaide Airport SA (Adelaide Airport SA, Australia).

• Location URL
• Checkin URL
• View Larger Map

This check-in was imported to the Annexe from Brightkite, one of the first geolocation social networks.

Checked into Mawson Lakes Railway Station (Australia).

• Location URL
• Checkin URL
• View Larger Map

Location checkin history

This was the only location that the Wayback Machine had a page for. It lists the following checkin history:

rubenerd checked in @ Mawson Lakes Railway Station (Australia) - 9 days ago - here
Comments (0) (Public)

brodhe checked in @ Mawson Lakes Railway Station (Australia) - about 1 month ago - here
Comments (0) (Public)

brodhe checked in @ Mawson Lakes Railway Station (Australia) - about 1 month ago - here
Comments (0) (Public)

brodhe checked in @ Mawson Lakes Railway Station (Australia) - 2 months ago - here
Comments (0) (Public)

brodhe checked in @ Mawson Lakes Railway Station (Australia) - 2 months ago - here
Comments (0) (Public)

brodhe's listed website also no longer exists.

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

Ota desho? ota desu! · Otaku blog based in Melbourne, Australia ~ otadesho.com

(categories: anime blogs games figures)

6 Simple Ways To Give Older Blog Posts Additional Exposure – BloggerDesign.com

"As blogs grow, and new content gets created, old blog posts can quickly get lost in the archives. As much as bloggers try to keep everything organized, it’s hard to ensure that all posts get the exposure they deserve. However, there are ways to help ensure that older posts get additional exposure."

(categories: blogs howto wordpress)

Debian-News

"Debian-news is about one simple thing – news about Debian GNU/Linux and the top free distributions based on Debian GNU/Linux."

(categories: debian linux news blogs)

Well there you go, apparently I'm an otaku! Can you pick what it is? In other news, Kyon wants us to stop all this nonsense!

It seems with all the economic problems facing the developed world nowhere has had such spectacularly slow growth as Japan in the last decade or so. Neoshinka quotes a FinanceAsia article that suggests people obsessed with Japanese pop culture buck the trend, even if they don't have much money:

“Forget the usual business jargon about the four Ps (positioning, price, etc). Here it’s about the three Cs, namely community, collection and creativity. Despite all the economic bad news, shops are still opening in Akihabara and people are still spending, even if they are not very well off,” says Fong.

I guess even when the going gets tough we all have our own escapes. In this regard I probably spend more money on good coffee than anything else.

Messing around with some basic data files here using RandomAccessFile instead of reading in and writing data files sequentially.

import java.io.*;
public class TestRandomAccess {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    try {
      RandomAccessFile raf = new RandomAccessFile("raf","rw");
      raf.writeInt(127);
      raf.writeDouble(2.718281828459045);
      raf.writeChars("Bird Bird Bird, the Bird is the Word");
      System.out.println(raf.length());
      raf.seek(4);
      System.out.println(raf.readDouble());
      System.out.println(raf.getFilePointer());
    }
    catch (Exception e) { System.err.println(e); }
  }
}

What's really cool is exporting a seemingly innocuous double (double length floating point number in Java) then reading back as an integer!

import java.io.*;
public class TestRandomAccess {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    try {
      RandomAccessFile raf = new RandomAccessFile("raf","rw");
      raf.writeDouble(10.0);
      System.out.println(raf.readInt());
    }
    catch (Exception e) { System.err.println(e); }
  }
}

The result: 1076101120. Spiffy!