Posted by Doug Tue, 20 Jun 2006 14:04:33 GMT
I just now noticed that SMARTReporter has gone Universal. This is a tool pretty much every one on a Mac should be running. It checks the Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology status of your hard disks and lets you know when something bad is about to happen.
When I switched to my Macbook Pro, it wasn’t available for Intel Macs. Now it is! Yay for Julian Mayer!
Posted by Doug Tue, 28 Mar 2006 13:35:17 GMT
Here’s an update on my mouse woes. I’ve given up on bluetooth mice. There’s some chance that the problem lies buried in my ~/Library/Preferences, but I can’t find it. Instead, I’ve followed the recommendation of neom and gotten a “normal” RF wireless mouse: the Logitech Mediaplay
The good news is that it takes standard AA batteries and has an on/off switch. Both of these mean easier travel. Unfortunately, since it’s not bluetooth I’ve got to carry a dongle around. Alas.
More good news is scads of buttons that all trigger roughly standard button events. It has horizontal scrolling, forward and backward, volume up and volume down, and next and previous along with two other buttons. Of course, Logitech’s mouse driver software, SetPoint, doesn’t work with the Mac. So sad. The good news is that USB Overdrive has been recently updated to work with Intel and it recognizes my mouse.
I was able to get most of the buttons doing what they should be doing. The exception is the media buttons that I’d like to control iTunes in a global context. I’d like the volume buttons to control iTunes’ volume and not the system volume. I’d like to get the play/pause button to control iTunes; same with next and previous.
Overall I like it. It’s the right size, right feel, tracks flawlessly, has a on/off switch and no wires.
Posted by Doug Thu, 23 Mar 2006 20:14:06 GMT
After wrestling extensively with my main Rails project, I finally got all tests passing again. Here’s the results of various systems I have access to for running the tests:
| system | time rake |
| 2.0 GHz Macbook Pro 2GB | 1:38 |
| 2.66Ghz Xeon 1GB server | 1:35 |
| 2.0 GHz G5 iMac | 2:08 |
| 1.33GHz G4 Powerbook 1.25GB | 3:45 |
| 866MHz G4 Powerbook 2GB | 6:45 |
Those times seems really precise, but they are just single runs of our tests (324 tests, 1343 assertions). What this means is that it’s as fast for me to do local development now as it was to ssh into the server and develop there. Also worth noting but not included above; When I used my PowerPC DarwinPorts binaries for Ruby, Mysql, and all my other libraries the test time was nearly 4 minutes.
My name is Doug Alcorn. I'm a 30-something husband, dad, Christian, and hacker living in Cincinnati, OH. When I'm not on my computer or being a dad, I'm usually shooting photos or out in the woods.
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