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Mac: How to find WiFi

April 30, 2008

I’m still in California visiting my parents, trying to help them get back on their feet after my Mom’s illness. They’re getting up in age and my brother and I are trying to figure out a better living arrangement for them. Man, getting old really sucks.

 

One of my challenges while out here is that my parents are completely computer illiterate. I bought them a Compaq desktop ages ago, loaded up with Windows 98. It still works, except now it’s only use is for rousing games of Solitaire. I also bought them an Epson inkjet printer, though my Mom determined that the paper feed in the top was better suited to hold her incoming snail mail and magazines. Oh well.

 

What this means is that they obviously don’t have any Internet connectivity, a serious shortcoming for me. I am trying to look up healthcare provider information and details on senior communities in their area. I’ve long since bailed out on any kind of dial-up service as a backup and I no longer have a phone that can become a data modem for me so I am at the whims of any WiFi I can get my hands on.

 

While it’s possible to use the AirPort icon to find open WiFi points you constantly have to pull down the menu to see them. Then I came across coconutWiFi 2.0, a simple menu bar utility that displays a counter of all the WiFi spots around you.

Though I was able to get WiFi at my brother’s home, I couldn’t see any at my parents. Equipped with coconutWiFi I wandered around in the backyard of my parents home and quickly found that several folks were kind enough to leave their Linksys routers wide open.

 

Of course I looked like a complete idiot walking around with a bright white MacBook held up at shoulder height trying to locate a signal, but at least I was able to get a connection! coconutWiFi is not perfect - it can’t actually make the connection - for that you have to switch back to the AirPort menu. It does however make finding a network much easier.

 

Written by David Alison · Filed Under Parallel Desktops 

Desktop Theatre, Sc. 5: This Ain’t No Fooling Around

April 30, 2008

 

Written by Bradley W. Lewis · Filed Under Desktop Theatre 

VMWare Fusion and Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition

April 29, 2008

I’m traveling right now and don’t have access to all of my normal development tools but since I do have my handy MacBook I figured I would try a little experiment. Here’s what I have set up right now:

 
Windows XP SP2, fully patched
 
I allocated 1GB of RAM to the VM for Windows XP and it worked great - plenty of headroom to run applications. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating since I know based on the comments that a few people that are Windows folks are considering trying out a Mac:
 
Windows runs really well, even on my lowly little MacBook. I did bump my memory up to 4GB, which I think is really important, but standard Windows applications (not games mind you - not even attempting that on a MacBook) work great.
 
To maximize screen real estate - really important on a MacBook - I run Windows XP in full screen mode. This still allows me to access spaces easily. 
 
I was able to get Visual Studio 2008 Express installed without any problems. Early in the setup VS08 rebuilds much of it’s library, so it’s a chance to see the impact it has while running full bore. On my machine during peak compile times the CPU ran a steady 50% utilization. I jumped into other Mac applications, including Safari while it was working and experienced no noticeable degradation in performance.
 
Once I had VS08 up and running it ran really smoothly. I didn’t stress it too much - just a couple of browser based applications - but it was able to load them up in IE and I could run through the debugger just fine. During these minimal tests the CPU barely broke a sweat.
 
To give you a sense of what’s possible to run on a little MacBook, here I am using Spaces to run NetNewsWire, iTunes, iChat, Safari and finally a full screen Windows XP (lower right) with Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition loaded and running.
 
What’s great about this is that I can rapidly switch between environments. Windows performance - even in a VM - is snappy. I notice a little window "tearing" when dragging windows quickly. I think that’s probably a function of the way graphics are handled on a MacBook - no dedicated video card. The MacBook Pro does have a dedicated video card so it may not have this issue.
 
One thing I have noticed with the MacBook is that I do take a pretty decent CPU hit when viewing flash based sites. It’s not nearly as bad with QuickTime video (interesting, huh?). When I speak to friends that have iMacs or Mac Pros they don’t see any CPU hit when watching Flash based stuff.
 
Based on the results I’ve had I think I’m going to try loading up VS05 with my current product build into a VM and see what the performance is like. My project has gotten pretty large and uses some aftermarket controls for UI, so it will be a good test. I also am debugging my application using SQL Server Compact Edition so it’s a pretty tall order.
 
On my Windows XP development box - a beast of a machine with an EVGA 680i mobo, Intel QX6700 processor, EVGA 8800GTX video and matched Corsair memory I take a significant CPU hit when VS05 decides to refactor my code while using certain design surfaces. 
 
I have no doubt the MacBook will also strain under that burden but it will be interesting to see if it is still useable when that happens

Written by David Alison · Filed Under Parallel Desktops 

There is a storm coming on the web…

April 28, 2008

 … and Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software and the author of the blog Joel on Software has summed it up in a brilliant post on his blog. It’s a little long but if you are a web developer or are even mildly interested in what is happening with web standards you really should read Martian Headsets. Be patient and read through his analogy because in the second half of the article he gets to the root of the problem.

This issue is important to Mac users because like it or not many sites continue to use IE as the standard for building their web sites. If you want to create a web site - or more importantly web application - that includes more advanced features like menu systems, JavaScript driven controls, etc. then the coming release of IE 8 could have a dramatic impact on how you construct your site. Joel gives a great background to the whole issue.
 
 
As I am currently in the process of building a web based application for public use it has a huge impact on me. Should I compromise the application’s UI because I can’t get the flexible data presentation grid that works everywhere? 
 
DIV based windows within a web application can dramatically improve the quality of the user experience, but if they look like crap or don’t even appear they are going to kill the user experience anyway. JavaScript event handlers are critical to improving the reaction time for the application but will suck it if they don’t work as intended.
 
I could build a Flash based interface but there are a large number of browsers in corporate environments that block Flash and it doesn’t appear Flash will be an option on the iPhone any time soon. That’s a market that I would like my application to be able to run in.
 
 
I know I’m going to support IE7, Firefox and Safari - which in itself is a huge amount of work, but is IE8 going to throw a wrench in that plan? The appeal to building web based applications over client based applications is that users don’t have to download anything and you can build them to work on virtually any OS that has a good web browser. The definition of a "good web browser" is already suspect - with IE8 it may be nearly impossible.

Written by David Alison · Filed Under Parallel Desktops 

Mac: Time for a spare battery

April 28, 2008

Though I live on the East coast and my parents live in Southern California we are very close and speak at least once a week. When my Mom was hospitalized over Easter weekend I figured now was a good time to cash in some frequent flyer miles and spend some time with my parents and brother.

 
There are some serious advantages to being self employed and picking up the tent at a moment’s notice and moving to a new campsite is one of them.
 

The flight to California is a little over 5 hours from my local airport and while I have had excellent battery life from my MacBook so far, I decided at the last minute to run over to the Apple store and grab a spare. It took a few hours to charge but it was ready prior to leaving at oh-dark-thirty on Saturday morning.
 
Since I left so early I actually snoozed for the first 2 hours of the flight. I then decided that I really needed to get some of my work done and fired up the MacBook, jumping between a couple of different tasks. I had read that someone got significantly better battery life by turning the brightness of the screen down as low as they could, so I tried that.
 
Turns out I probably didn’t need the spare battery because by the time I was told to put the MacBook away for landing I still had 48% left on my battery. Most of my work had been in text editors and iStat Menus always showed very low CPU utilization and disk activity so that contributed greatly. Adding to that the fact that I had the AirPort service turned off the MacBook just didn’t burn up that much energy.
 
If you have a MacBook you may have noticed that there is a little button on the bottom of the battery that, when pressed, lights up to indicate the charge left in the battery. What I learned was that this also works when the battery is out of the machine. Nice feature.
 
I have read many stories about the poor quality of the batteries for the MacBook, quite a few directly from the feedback listed in the Apple Store. Most of them appear to be for the last generation of the MacBook so I hope I’m not just lucky with my MacBook’s battery life and that perhaps Apple has resolved what appeared to be a serious problem. So far I have had excellent performance from mine.
 
For the last 3 days I have been running almost exclusively off battery power and the amount of time I get from the battery has been outstanding. Much better than what I have gotten on the Dells or HPs that I have owned.
 

Written by David Alison · Filed Under Parallel Desktops 

Find Your Passion…

April 27, 2008

Being artists, we tend to be more passionate about things than those using the other side of their brains. Of course I am not saying you can’t be passionate about numbers, but I have a feeling my accountant gets his kicks away from his nine to five. We are blessed in that Art can truly bring out the passionate side in a person who can see it for what it is.

What is passion exactly? Read more

Written by Wendy Arnold · Filed Under Commerce, Digital Lifestyles, Editor's Choice 

The Tao of I. T. Al # 13

April 25, 2008

 

 

 

The Tao of I. T. Al # 13

 

Written by Aikido Al · Filed Under The Tao of I. T. Al 

Mac: Have you tried using the Option key?

April 25, 2008

 


I’m not sure that everyone reads the comments in this blog but for those that don’t sgt-phail mentioned something that I think is worth putting a quick post in about: using the Option key while performing actions with menus. It opens up a lot of different options for the same menu items in most of the native OS X apps. Try it in Finder, Safari, etc.

What I like is that it’s very dynamic. I can pull down (or pop up) a menu and while it’s displayed hit the Option key and the menu immediately changes. I don’t have to be holding down Option initially to see the variations.
 
 
One of the reasons I really like the OS X UI is that it does a wonderful job of providing features in a progressive disclosure model that works for me. While I was just starting out on my Mac nearly everything I needed was right there. Once I needed to do something off the beaten path I just had to dig a little bit and the next layer of options became available to me.
 
I realize that this kind of capability has been on Mac for decades but for the great majority of people that have just adopted Mac as their new platform it’s pretty cool stuff.

Written by David Alison · Filed Under Parallel Desktops 

Exposure and Lighting for Digital Photographers Only

April 25, 2008

I recently encountered a relatively new book by Michael Meadhra and Charlotte K. Lowrie entitled Exposure and Lighting for Digital Photographers Only published by Wiley Press in 2007.  Read more

Written by Dr. Michael N. Roach · Filed Under Books, Digital Lifestyles, Featured Stories, Photography, Workflow 

Changing the default PDF viewer

April 24, 2008

 

Last week a friend sent me a PDF that had some rich content embedded in it; a small  video that Mac Preview would not let me see. I really like Preview but figured I might as well grab the free Acrobat Reader so that I could view the more advanced PDFs people were creating.

 
 Adobe Acrobat Reader is a pretty big install but after doing so I was able to see the PDF file - and its embedded video - just fine. There was a catch though; Acrobat is slower than Preview and now it was my default PDF viewer.
 
 
For the life of me I could not figure out how to make Preview my default viewer again. I right clicked on a PDF file and from the pop-up menu selected Open With - the sub menu that appeared allowed me to open it in Preview but not set that as the default.
 

 
At this point I did what I always do - Google up the problem and look for a solution. One of the first solutions I found was to use RCDefaultApp - a preferences pane add-in that allows you to see and set the default applications for file types, MIME types, etc. It worked great but I kept thinking that it was silly that I would need an add-on in order to do this. I am going to keep RCDefaultApp around though - it’s pretty handy.
 
Finally, the way to do it in OS X
 
I finally managed to find it with a little more Google work. Right click on a file, select Get Info and, at the bottom of the Get Info window was an "Open With" area. From there I could see and set the default viewer and also click the Change All button to change it for everything.
 
Not long after I put this up Jerome put in a comment that you can hold down the Option key while right clicking and the menu selection changes to Always Open With - no need to even go into the Get Info window. Thanks Jerome!
 
Now I can see my PDFs quickly in the native Preview application and use Acrobat Reader when I need the extra features it affords

Written by David Alison · Filed Under Parallel Desktops 

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