Macintosh

November 16, 2007

JDBC and Markdown

One of the disadvantages of upgrading any Operating System is that some applications may have to be updated. Most of these updates are likely paid updates. This isn’t good considering that I am short on cash right now.

As far as I know there’s three applications that I have, that should be releasing a paid update fairly soon:

1. Textmate
2. Interarchy
3. SQLGrinder

I am considering changing the SQLGrinder Application. As much as I like using it, it does seem to be missing lots of tools and doesn’t quiet feel like its an enterprise application. For example, its not easy to manage multiple databases like you can with Aqua Studio.

On a Macintosh, if your using JDBC connections for development, you are probably be using:

1. Aqua Data Studio
2. SQLGrinder
3. SQL4X Manager J

I am just learning Markdown with TextMate, and its a great way to do write blogs without having to use some complex tool. If your doing custom blogging tool and looking for an application to do clean HTML markups, I would suggest looking into implementing Markdown.

November 07, 2007

AirPort problems in Leopard

I was at a customer site earlier this week and was having problems connecting to their wireless network using a Powerbook G4 and Macintosh OS X 10.5 ( Leopard)

When I was trying to connect I was getting time out error almost instantly. As soon as I type in the WEP Password, which was a 128-bit encrypted password, I would get the timeout error.

The following message appeared in the console log:

November 6, 2007 11:18:38 AM SystemUIServer[204] Error joining SITE: Connection timeout (-6 timeout connecting)

I tried this several times and gave up. I check several Apple sites and it appears this is still a problem. I did an update to the Apple Keychain before I went to the customer site, which I think was supposed it fix the problem.

Guess what, it didn't. If your experiencing the same problem, don't bother to keep trying. There's several several postings on Apple Discussion Boards about this. I think the problem is how Apple handles 128-bit encrypt passwords.

I ended up having to connect via an Ethernet cable.

November 01, 2007

Macintosh Leopard

Last Saturday I updated my laptop to the latest version of Macintosh OS X (Leopard). The update took a long time to process, about 2 hours for my Powerbook G4 and it used up a lot of disk space.

My inital reaction of some of the new features have been mixed. Some of the new features are cool, while others I won't touch. The "Time Machine" feature is ok, but a laptop doesn't have that much disk space, so I don't think I'll be using it. (I think it would have been cool to name it "Back to the Future", after all the Movie did show a Macintosh in it.) The only cool feature that I was looking forward to seeing was Fan/Grid display of folders in the Dock. I am not very impress by it. It would be nice if that the Grid icons could be resize.

Also I am now experimenting putting the dock on the left instead of the bottom. I don't like the 3D look and I think the dock is taking up more space than it was before. Having it on the left is a little visual challenge since I am use to it being on the bottom for 4 years.

I do like the new Photo screen saver, it looks pretty cool. I was looking to see what new screen saver was in this build since Apple has done that in the previous OSX builds.

Is this a must have upgrade? I don't think so. I think most users can wait and upgrade when they can afford to or have it pre-installed on their next computer. Goto an Apple Store and play around with it, ask one of the sales people to show you some of the new features.

October 01, 2007

MonoDevelop

If you are a Macintosh developer and working in a development environment where some developers use dotNet, you should look at using the MonoDevelop. MonoDevelop is a free GNOME IDE primarily designed for C# and other .NET languages.

Keep in mind this is a complex toolset and will take some learning curve to get up and running. But I think if you are a serious developer, you can easily master the toolset over a weekend.

Using MonoDevelop will be significantly faster than Remote Desktop and in some cases using Parallel or Boot Camp. This is because you don't have to open up a separate OS enviroment to create C# or .NET code.

September 28, 2007

WebLog

Experiencing some problems with the Blogging tool. Will conduct some cleaning this weekend to get things back up and running.

I don't think its anything too serious!