David Pitkin

My MacBook Pro has the SUPER annoying processor whine. First I ran PhotoBooth to keep it quiet but then each time I tried to use the iSight for something legitimate I would have to go quick PhotoBooth, and there was the battery usage from running the program and iSight 100% of the time.

Next I learned of Apple’s CHUD. This would let me turn off one CPU in the System Preferences but I quickly found out that after going to sleep the second CPU would be re-enabled.

Okay I am running Tiger so Automator should be the solution but that very quickly was ruled out. Next try was Proxi which could be what Automator should have been a friend said. I then had to find out if there was an AppleScript event for “wakeup”. Now we were getting somewhere. I found SleepWatcher but it is a PowerPC binary, okay but we have the source so we can compile it to be Universal. I followed the Apple instructions but they missed a critical step. Success so far. 1. Install SleepWatcher, replace /opt/bin/sleepwatcher with a Universal binary 2. Add "hwprefs cpu_disable 2" to your /etc/rc.wakeup file I killed SleepWatcher with the Activity Monitor and restarted it with ‘sudo /opt/local/sbin/sleepwatcher -d’

Silence is golden, I hope this works!!

My Nokia 6682 phone has been great. Today in class I found a really nice feature, when the phone is ringing the right soft button is “Send Msg”. When I pressed it a new text message to the caller is composed with the body “I will call you later” and you can send it right to the caller. Now that we can reliably send text messages between carriers it’s cool. Now if only we could text to a land line phone like in Europe. Oh well.

I thought I would share a list of the programs and preferences that I loaded on my new intel MacBook laptop over the past week. This list is always changing as I try out new programs but here’s what I immediately needed. All are universal binaries except where noted:

Applications

• MarsEdit – blog posting application
• NetNewsWire – my favorite RSS/news reader
• Notational Velocity – PPC – a free form database of snippets or stickies
• PCalc – a scientific RPN calculator
• QuickSilver – software launcher on steroids, I tried Butler but came right back
• TextMate – What BBEdit used to be, a text editor PC users should dream of
• CoverFlow – PPC – an awesome music browsing program for iTunes
• Camino – slimmed down version of Firefox that is fast and small
• Firefox/DeerPark – Universal Binary build of the full Firefox
• Delicious Library – a personal package for keeping track of your books and DVDs
• DivX – so I can watch Top Gear
• iTerm – Open Source terminal application with bookmarks and tabs like Safari
• Microsoft Office 2004 – PPC – Excel and Word
• CandyBar – to change the system icons to just something different

Preferences

• Growl – nice Music Video style notifications
• MenuMeters – to see what is going on with my CPUs, and network traffic
• Textpander – auto keyword expansion of frequently typed text and images
• Witch – On a Mac if you press command-tab it will cycle through the open applications but not the open windows. Coming from a windows world I miss being able to tab between a specific browser window and an open application. Witch lets me do that.

The Windows software that I miss the most is Beyond Compare I hope I find something that is similar soon.

I am having some trouble with textile markup and MarsEdit

This morning I upgraded my blog to version r925 of typo . The first new feature I found is a new sidebar that shows my AIM presence. All I had to do was signup with AOL for the service and I got an HTML snippet I could paste anywhere and a key to load in programs that already knew how to consume the presence information. I had played around with the Skype presence before but their buttons were ugly.

For my new gig I was able to buy any laptop that I wanted. I jumped at the chance to get a new Intel MacBook Pro. It had everything I could want, a big display, great keyboard, and finally for an Apple speed.

I do suffer from a terrible whine from the computer but worst case I can always get it repaired from an Apple store. I did appreciate that Apple fans are typically fanatical, in the whine problem thread on the user to user forum there are defenders of the company when someone said they were going to write a bad review of their laptop, this is in a huge thread where almost everyone has gotten a clearly defective two thousand dollar computer.

This is an edited post.

Okay dangerous site ahead you have been warned, it will suck your attention: http://www.gamesforthebrain.com/

Every game so far is great, What did I search for is a cool new game I had never seen. It displays a Google results page with one word blanked out, you have to guess that word. WikiTriva is a similar one where you pick a category and a wikipedia result is shown with one word hidden and you have to guess that.

Enjoy.

My friend Travis who is thinking about switching to a Macintosh was amazed at how cool the Apple iCal application is. Windows Vista seems to have a very similar calendar feature. I have a few iCalendar subscriptions from upcoming.org and backpack but had never given it much thought.

The Calendar idea sparked up again with the launch of 30boxes I started to use it and was able to subscribe to some of my calendar feeds right in the web application. I completed the calendaring circle buy installing the open source RemoteCalendars .Net application to integrate my iCalendar feeds into Outlook 2003.

I dropped the spliced in del.icio.us links to my RSS feed. My infrequrent posting means that if you subscribed you would get mostly links and very few articles. If you are still curious as to what I am linking to you can subscribe to the direct feed.

I broke the RSS feed that FeedBurner uses so if you missed a few articles I am sorry. I wish they had emailed me when I moved the link and broke it.

Edit: Of course the FeedBurner people have an RSS feed with the health of your feed! It is a service called FeedMedic and had reported my problem already.

Wednsday night when I turned on my laptop a Growl reminder from Backpack popped up about the Microsoft Launch Event I had registered for in October. I was interested in the new SQL Server and I had not been to the new Boston Convention and Exposistion Center so off I went.

In the keynote Microsoft seemed to be trying to compete with BEA and J2EE for enterprise application development along with Oracle for your database dollars. They are doing this by creating tools for everyone in development teams to work together and adding lots of features to the server side applications. The sessions were substantive and technical, which is exactly what I wanted. I do have notes if anyone is interested.

They really get credit for writing tools that allow you to use the same .NET assemblies and use them programatically everywhere. When I say everywhere it can be in your web application and business logic, it can be in the BizTalk server for pumping data between applications or right in your SQL database.

All and all I thought it was a good piece of marketing for Microsoft. Oh and SQL Server 2005 looks like a good upgrade.