Posts Tagged Apple
Apple’s humour regarding Windows Network Icon on OS X
Posted by Craig_Strong in Miscellaneous, Technology / Hardware on February 15th, 2010
Unlike most of my posts this one is aimed to provide some pretty light hearted fun. I have been using OS X for a few years now and am pretty much on a network all the time. Well for all these years I have noticed that in the network panel, windows machines are represented by CRT’s and other *nix/Mac’s are represented by a pretty swish high definition Apple TFT’s. I have always chuckled at this slightly, but today this little observation sure did make myself and a colleague laugh.
I tend to keep my icons pretty small and standard. With a slight slip/ accidental pinch on a macbook pro whilst setting up a VPN connection I enlarged the icon used by OS X to represent the windows machines. It became so large, I was able to read the information on the CRT icon used to represent Windows machines. On reading this we sure did laugh! Low and behold Apple use a Windows system failure/crash notice to represent such machines on a network by default. Who said Apple don’t have a sense of humour.
I apologise to those who probably discovered this years ago, I just thought I would share this as it’s new to me.
Typical example of networked machines
Typical display of networked machines
The enlarged Mac machine icon (Default OS X Icon)
An enlarged Apple machine on the network
An enlarged Windows machine on the network (Default Windows Icon)
An enlarge Windows machine on the network
Why buy an iPad and where does it fit in to the market place ?
Posted by Craig_Strong in Product Reviews, Tech Headlines, Technology / Hardware on January 30th, 2010
Finally the long awaited iPad has has been released. For quite some time people had speculated what the device was going to be and what it would be capable of. This has been followed by some passionate underlying debates for what it should and needs to be for consumers. Well the device has been released, which has been met predictably by a mixed reception with continued debate. Following such debates, the key point of confusion standing out is people are unsure where an iPad fit’s into their lifestyle. This is the question I am trying answer from my own perspective and lifestyle, suggesting where an iPad would mainly suit me.
iPad doesn't replace PC's or smart phones
Being a Software Developer/IT Manager by profession I have pretty much access to a computer/device of some description most places I visit on a day to day basis. I currently use a ‘G1 Android phone’, have a ‘macbook’ for working on the move, iMac at home, and have a Vista machine at work, not to mention access to several remote linux servers holding my information. I also have an xbox360 which is linked to my media linked to the TV. With all these devices around me where would an iPad fit in and why would I want one?
To understand where an iPad would fit into my lifestyle, I have to look at my daily patterns and highlight where I waste time with a little ‘lean’ thinking. Pretty much most of the day I’m in front of a computer and I clearly don’t see and iPad as a suitable replacement/substitute for what I use these devices for. When relaxing in front of the TV, listening to music via the xbox360 and iMac, I don’t see and iPad offering anything against these devices. I certainly don’t want a 10 inch device to replace my mobile phone unless I was aiming to block out the sun. So what gap is leftwithin my daily lifestyle pattern?
Well looking at my daily patterns I quickly identified somewhere where I am wasting time which could be improved. As part of my day, I regular attend Scrum meetings, meetings with 3rd parties, and am often called for quick consultation from various parts of the business. Most of the time these can be quick meetings lasting no longer than 10-20 minutes. When called for any of these tasks, I find myself picking up my A4 notepad, rushing into a room and writing notes. Most of the time I then type up key points of the meeting on my PC. Sometimes however with interruptions I miss the odd one or two and end up being chased up by others where I have to then play catch up. For me, this is where I see an iPad fitting into my lifestyle.
If I could turn to the iPad rather than an A4 notepad this would mean I could take more information everywhere, makes notes once and most importantly of all for me is to free up my time. An iPad offers 10 hours of battery life and can stay on standby for a month! It is small, lightweight and quick to turn on and off which makes it a perfect fit to replace my A4 notepad replacement. I can make notes and pass it around the room with others to share information such as diagrams, images or notes, as easily as passing around sheets of paper. I have a macbook, but there is no way I could get it to fill this gap like an iPad could, otherwise believe me I would be already doing it. It’s overkill, less mobile, slower to turn on and involves launching full blown software packages. This is enough to say no and the A4 notepad has won every time. On the same note where I would use my macbook and smartphone, an iPad wouldn’t be a replacement for these. My macbook is good at being a macbook and provides me with the ability to have a mobile computer for developing code, running VM’s etc. My smartphone is too much of a compromise with such a small screen. Therefore I’m very glad Apple decided to make the iPad exactly what it is without a full OS trying to compete with the notebook/laptop devices. A purposeful and simple solution to fill an obvious gap in the market.
There are other obvious uses where the iPad would be a benefit and that is on the commute. I used to travel to work by train carrying at least one magazine, a book and a macbook every day. An iPad would have meant I could just carry a macbook with it, reducing the weight and giving me the ability to carry much more reading material. I don’t see the point spending on an ebook reader now when and iPad is just a bit more money for a lot more value in return. I could just pull out at any time to fill the short, but sometimes very long gaps between train journeys. If the train is 10-15 minutes late, I’m not going to boot up a macbook and find a place to sit on a very over crowded platform.
iPad replaces notebooks and ebook readers
Obviously my viewpoint above is selfish to my lifestyle. Who else could use an iPad ? Well looking at my circle of friends and family, unlike me most of them are not tech people. However, they all have computers and laptops and I know this as usually I’m contacted at some point if they run into problems. Looking at their use it tends to be mostly shopping online, social networking, emails and sharing photos. Most of them also seem to be intimidated and frustrated with their computers to various degrees. They look boring and a computer probably reminds them of the office they just left in the day. For these users an iPad could be a good option as it’s cheap ‘ish’, simple, secure and most of all friendly. It’s a device that can sit on the coffee table and be picked up and used anytime just like a magazine. For less tech savvy users this is far more inviting to use and therefore likely to get more use. This is why I’m glad they made it more like an iPhone than a notebook. It makes much more sense for this device to be app based and would be much more attractive to already proficient iPhone users.
I’m sure it won’t be long before we see Google responding with a slate device offering Android, not ChromeOS.
Installing PHP5 on Leopard with pdo_mysql & iconv() support
Posted by Craig_Strong in Development on April 3rd, 2009
I recently took the plunge a level further into the Mac world and purchased an iMac running Leopard. Although I have been running a Macbook for years, I decided that my main machine which I develop on was going to be something I have to spend less time configuring than my previous Linux machines (Although my servers will remain Linux). My main goal was to get a slick dev environment running PHP, MySQL and Apache.
Being naïve, I expected Leopard to provide me with a suitable stable release of these technologies straight out of the box, after all Leopard comes with Apache, MySQL and PHP right? Well this maybe true, but this is not exactly what I expected. Soon after building my little world of development I realised that the distribution was insufficient. Disappointingly I learnt that the PHP distribution was missing ‘pdo_mysql’! How could they have missed this I asked myself? The extent of use of ‘pdo_mysql’ usage should have made this a fundamental module, even Zend Framework, one of the worlds largest PHP Frameworks uses this as a standard. Anyway this is the crossroads, do I recompile the distributed version and risk the Apple support or do I download and compile my own version. Well I thought, lets install it via macports, that will save me a bit of hassle. This also meant that I could maintain a separate series of installs to what came with leopard.
After downloading and installing macports I installed the following:
sudo port install php5 +apache2 +mysql5 +pear
port install jpeg
port install libpng
port install freetypeport
port install libmcrypt
After updating my apache configuration located ‘/opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf/’ to suit my needs including pointing the my sites directory located in ‘Users/craigstrong/Sites’ I thought I’d give it a whirl on my web apps.
sudo apachectl restart
Everything seemed to work fine. I loaded up a few static pages from one of my Zend Framework projects, then I thought I’d try my login script. Boom! Guess what, no ‘pdo_mysql’ module installed. Arrggghhh!
Well off I went to get PHP 5.2.9 as this was the most stable recent release at the time. I convinced myself this is the solution I should had tried first. I downloaded this version and strapped myself in for a bit of compiling.
Within my extracted directory ~craigstrong/Programs/PHP-5.2.9 :
./configure \
–prefix=/Users/craigstrong/Programs/php-5.2.9/ \
–with-apxs2=/opt/local/apache2/bin/apxs \
–with-xsl=/usr’ \
–enable-mbstring \
–with-gd’ \
–with-jpeg-dir=/opt/local \
–with-png-dir=/opt/local \
–with-zlib-dir \
–with-curl=/usr \
–enable-sockets \
–enable-exif \
–with-mcrypt=/opt/local \
–enable-soap
–with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
–with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config \
–with-mysql-sock=/tmp/mysql.sock \
–with-freetype-dir=/opt/local \
–with-openssl=/opt/local \
–enable-cli
The configuration went well, so I thought lets start compiling and run the following:
make
Followed by :
sudo make install
sudo mv /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php.distro
sudo ln -s /Users/craigstrong/Programs/php-5.2.9/bin/php /usr/bin/php
All seemed to go well, and I went through my application again. This time when I go to the login form I was greeted with a new problem saying that the application could not find the function iconv(). Absolutely great I thought, another obstacle! After a bit of reading around this problem I found this link confirming my problem was real and what actually was attributed to a problem in the configure script on Leopard (http://www.mail-archive.com/php-bugs@lists.php.net/msg120323.html). I made sure to add the following 2 lines to the configure script pointing at my macports location.
–with-iconv=/opt/local
–with-openssl=/opt/local
As soon as I got to the ‘make’ command I was greeted with the following output:
Undefined symbols:
\\”_iconv_close\\”, referenced from:
_php_iconv_string in iconv.o
__php_iconv_strlen in iconv.o
__php_iconv_strpos in iconv.o
__php_iconv_mime_decode in iconv.o
__php_iconv_mime_decode in iconv.o
__php_iconv_mime_decode in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_substr in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_substr in iconv.o
_php_iconv_stream_filter_dtor in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_mime_encode in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_mime_encode in iconv.o
\\”_iconv_open\\”, referenced from:
_php_iconv_string in iconv.o
__php_iconv_strlen in iconv.o
__php_iconv_strpos in iconv.o
__php_iconv_mime_decode in iconv.o
__php_iconv_mime_decode in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_substr in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_substr in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_mime_encode in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_mime_encode in iconv.o
_php_iconv_stream_filter_factory_create in iconv.o
ld: symbol(s) not found
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [sapi/cli/php] Error 1
Well at this point I was getting more annoyed and again started cursing Apple for not sorting this out with the distribution of Leopard. Have to blame some one I thought.
Anyway after a long think a good time reading around the web I convinced myself to download php5.3 and go through the process again. I went through the same process of downloading, configuring and compiling it using exactly the same configuration script as above. I wasn’t expecting a high chance of success with the previous events. However to my amazement it worked. I went through my site and I finally achieved my goal of having PHP with ‘pdo_mysql’ and ‘iconv’ support! Although frustrating following the process, it was satisfying getting a result.
As I use Zend_Framework the only thing that needed to be resolved is that my date() function was throwing an error saying something on the lines of ‘best not trust the systems timezone’. I then added the following function to the bootstrap date_default_timezone_set(’GTM’) and my problem was solved. I now have a development environment I can enjoy.
Useful Links Relating to this post :
Apple’s Safari 4 beta. Is it as good as they claim?
Posted by Craig_Strong in Web Browsers on February 26th, 2009
With my recent launch of this blog I wanted my first official post to be something of substance. After pondering for a while, I was handed a golden nugget with the recent release of Safari 4 Beta. With Apple claiming that Safari 4 has 150 new features, I thought I would investigate further. Was this going to be a compiled list of over stated achievements which so many before them have claimed to have solved?
I downloaded the Safari 4 Beta version on both Mac OSX and MS Vista to give them a run through. Almost from the first moment I started using the browser I was impressed. The clear and concise interface being unobtrusive, gave way to a well thought out structure which allows a user to get on with what’s most important, surfing the web. It didn’t stop there though, after being gently seduced by Apple’s obvious attention to detail with their efforts combine style and functionality which include such features as the new ‘Top Sites’ 3D menu and the iTunes style “Cover Flow” history browser. Although impressed at this point I was impressed at the interface level, I thought and hoped that this wasn’t a mask to hide a lack of improvements under the hood.
Innovative way to view browsing history
Scrolling through the list of 150 improvements and new features within Safari 4 beta, it’s without doubt that Apple are planning for Safari 4 to raise the bar. Some of these features are quite impressive including ARIA support, improved CSS effects, HTML 5 Offline Support, improved international/cultural compatibility as well as feature rich development tools to name just a few. However amongst all these new features there was one that I had to test straight away for myself and that was that Safari 4 was ACID 3 compliant. Could this be true? With so many other browsers stepping up to the plate and failing after making this claim, I wondered if Safari 4 was going to be the next victim of false claim. Well any doubts I had were instantly quashed when I seen for my very own eyes, Safari 4 has indeed passed the ACID 3 test.
Safari 4 Beta Passed ACID 3 Test
I then proceeded onto start reading about the ‘Blazing Performance‘ benchmarks. These claims display information suggesting that Safari 4 is much quicker that the incredibly fast ‘WebKit‘ based cousin Chrome 1.0 at rendering HTML and Javascript, not to mention a white wash on performance over Internet Explorer 7 & 8 as well as my beloved Firefox 3 browser. Now as I was using Safari 4, I had noticed that the browser was rendering pages extremely quick. Without proper benchmarking techniques involving stable, fair testing environments how could I satisfy my curiosity to test Apple’s Safari 4 speed claims. Now this is when it struck me, I could use the ‘slickspeed‘ test aimed at testing the response times of various well known javascript frameworks. Although this is by no means an accurate benchmarking suite, I presume that although the figures maybe out somewhat, the patterns of results should be relative to the browsers javascript engine speed. So with this new arsenal I set out one by one to prove or disprove that Safari 4 could be faster than the competition.
To carry out this test I minimised the amount applications running on my computer and tested each browser one by one to get the following results.
(Mac OSX - 2 Ghz Dual Core, MacBook, 2GB Ram)
| MooTools 1.2 | JQuery 1.2.6 | Prototype 1.6.0.2 | YUI 2.5.2 Selector beta | Dojo 1.1.1 | Total (ms) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Safari 4 beta | 73 | 52 | 251 | 189 | 19 | 584 |
| Opera 9.63 | 222 | 198 | 278 | 526 | 128 | 1352 |
| Firefox 3.06 | 231 | 230 | 274 | 516 | 162 | 1413 |
| Total | 526 | 480 | 803 | 1231 | 309 | - |
(Windows Vista Business - AMD Athalon 64 X2 Dual Core 4000+ 2.11GHz 4GB Ram)
| MooTools 1.2 | JQuery 1.2.6 | Prototype 1.6.0.2 | YUI 2.5.2 Selector beta | Dojo 1.1.1 | Total (ms) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Safari 4 beta | 58 | 52 | 210 | 185 | 6 | 511 |
| Opera 10 Alpha | 125 | 104 | 199 | 337 | 45 | 810 |
| Chrome 1.0.154.48 | 78 | 70 | 374 | 306 | 82 | 910 |
| FF3 3.0.6 | 137 | 153 | 269 | 360 | 104 | 1023 |
| Opera 9.51 | 182 | 147 | 187 | 419 | 94 | 1029 |
| IE8 6001.18372 | 529 | 336 | 1763 | 1062 | 77 | 3767 |
| IE 7.0.6001.18000 | 599 | 417 | 2083 | 1417 | 690 | 5206 |
| Total | 1708 | 1279 | 5085 | 4086 | 1098 | - |
The test I used can be found at http://mootools.net/slickspeed/.
Wow! These results are impressive. Not only is Safari 4 showing it’s speed, but Dojo really stood out as well. I must point out however IE8, reported a great deal of errors when accessing Dojo elements and seemed to be the only browser to do so. Now before getting too carried away my firefox does contain some additional plugins which no doubt could have slowed the engine down a little, although I had made efforts to keep it slim. However even with that in mind, there is a clear pattern from these results that Safari 4 is pretty damn fast! In the name of “who is the fastest browser in the west”, Safari 4 certainly is proving to be a threat. With the immense speed claims from Apple regarding Safari 4 as well as the convincing evidence, what else appeals to me that is included in Safari 4 Beta?
Being a native Firefox user for many years and with all the effort I have taken configuring firefox to provide a development haven which include such plugins as firebug, firephp, developer tools, urlparams and so on, could Safari development tools offer me anything I haven’t already got? Well interestingly the answer was Yes! Not only do the development tools offer a very graphical representation of load times and file sizes ‘Resources’, but the development tools now include a javascript debugger which is something I often use in firebug. Not only this but Safari 4 includes ‘tools for managing offline databases’. Now I haven’t used the database feature as of yet, but this sounds very interesting and something I am definitely going to investigate.
After looking through the immense list of features and claims the big question is, can Safari 4 do to me what no browser has done to me in the past few years and entice me away from Firefox? Well I actually think Yes and No. My development environment in Firefox is setup so well, where I use Zend_Debug to log to firephp and I am quite used to several small, but useful plugins making life easier and more productive such as ‘urlparams ‘. I can’t see a complete alternative yet fully within Safari 4. However if I manage to figure out a way in which I can throw log messages to the error console in Safari 4 which might already be possible, Safari 4 could win me over. In cases where I simply wish to browse the web I do actually think I might start using Safari 4 and see how it holds up, where I shall keep Firefox for development. All in all though, Safari 4 beta looks promising and Apple have certainly raised the bar in the main stream browser market. If I were one of the competition I would certainly be paying close attention to this release.
Please note this is by no means an official test or official comparison and should not be considered a stable foundation for browser quality or representation. This is simply a self test carried out for personal interest and is no way a reflection of the quality or performance of any of the selected software’s integrity.
