Just got to Asda and the little one was asleep so I volunteered to stay in the nice warm car watching Frozen Planet on the BBC iPlayer.
They’ve now updated it so that you can watch using 3G instead of just wifi which is great because I don’t have to go out in the cold, wind and rain but can just watch polar bears instead
I’ve got Skype on my iPhone bur haven’t used it much – which is probably a good thing.
I just tried a video call while lying on the bed and the slight floor is that while I can see the other person, all they can see is my feet because of the camera position.
Oh well.
Apple announced towards the end of last year that it was dropping the Xserve – it’s rack mounted server that runs OS X Server. Although Apple hasn’t given a specific reason, a lot of people are saying it’s because the Mac Pro and Mac Mini are quite capable alternatives to the Xserve. And this sounds very sensible to me.
Rack mount servers are used in large organisations where you need a lot of server power and need to save space. But in this kind of environment you would be unlikely to find every user on the network to be using a Mac – they’re likely to be on Windows and if not, more likely to be on Linux than all on Macs. So if most users are on Windows or Linux, the rack mount servers are likely to be running either Windows or Linux (or Unix). I can’t see anyone wanting to pay the extra for an Xserve to use in a mixed network.
So the Xserve is only likely to be used in an environment where most of the machines on the network are Macs and they want a central server for file sharing and other services that can be easily set up and used. There are a few problems with this as well though. Firstly, in this environment – most likely creative studios – there’s only likely to be ten or twenty client machines so the only piece of equipment that would be rack mountable would be the Xserve. Secondly, it’s not likely that a network of this size would require the hardware provided by an Xserve to meet their needs. That’s why most people are saying that the effectiveness of the Mac Pro or Mac Mini as server hardware when the server software is available for these (and other) hardware configurations, is a sensible way to go. It saves on hardware costs, fits in with their office network setups and in some cases the Mac in question can be used as someones desktop machine – we used our old Mac Mini running Server as a way of showing clients websites on the board room TV!
I like that Apple hasn’t tried to push the Xserve onto existing customers but let in die in favour of letting us use what we want to use. This fits with the way I’ve set up networks in the past (confession time). I’m actually relatively new to the Mac world – I’ve been using them since I started working here about 8 months ago. Before that it was Windows and Linux. In most of the past networks I’ve been in charge of I’ve opted for using Linux on a relatively cheap and low spec PC to provide network services instead of getting expensive dedicated hardware. At the last place I was at we had an ex-display Campaq desktop from Dixons bought for £70 and it’s been running Linux and doing it’s job for about 6 years.
So good bye Xserve – I am slightly gutted I never convinced any of my managers to let me have one but that’s OK. Next week I’ll be getting one of our old iMacs that isn’t useful any more and installing Snow Leopard Server on it.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before but like many I’ve got a bit of an Angry Birds addition. I probably haven’t mentioned it because I was busy playing Angry Birds. I’ve finshed every version released on my iPhone meaning that the thing never has any charge in it.
Since I’ve been so busy lately with finishing the Helping Hands website and promoting the Chantry Court website I completely missed the fact that they’ve released a version of Angry Birds for the Mac until someone in the office told me.
Only problem, you need OS X 10.6.6 to ply the damn thing and I was still on Leopard. After digging around I managed to find our upgrade discs for Snow Leopard which got me up to 10.6.3 and then a quick Software Update got me to where I needed to be.
So I’ve just spent a few hours playing it on my MacBook and it’s…. well it’s like holding your iPhone really close to your face. Let’s see how big those piggys are on my 21″ iMac tomorrow.
I’ve been getting to grips with Drupal this month (phew, need sleep) and am now creating my own module to display a multi-step form. It’s essentially some PHP functions within a file with a .module extension and reading it black and white code view is not nice!
Here’s how to get .module, .info, .inc and other file extensions colour coded the same as .php files. These instructions are for Macs but if you look in the Program Files > Adobe > Dreamweaver directory (or whatever it’s called) you should be able to do it on Windows too. Open FInder and head to Applications > Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 > configuration.
First, find Extensions.txt, open with a text editor and after PHP5 near the top, add your file extensions, seperated by commas. Further down the file find the line that ends “PHP Files” and add the extensions in the as well.
Now go into the DocumentTypes folder and open MMDocumentTypes.xml with a text editor or Dreamweaver if you wish. Go down to about line 75 and add your extensions to winfileextension and macfileextension. Save, Close and then restart Dreamweaver.
Simples
At one of my client they have a simple server doing file and print sharing. The server is running Linux and never has a problem however one of the printers it’s attached to prints on certificate paper out of a second draw and be wise it’s not used much it doesn’t get topped up, runs out of paper and no one notices for two weeks. In this time the Linux box marks that printer as unavailable and it goes offline. When they finally wonder why nothing is printing and put paper in they email me (even though I left detailed instructions on what to do).
To save me going into the office for stuff like this I set a port on the firewall to forward Remote Desktop to one of the admin PCs where I can use a browser to put it back online again.
Well tonight I was lying on the bed when I read the email and couldn’t be bothered to get my laptop so I got out my iPhone and a quick browse of the app store came up with a free remote desktop app. It’s called Mocha something and is surprisingly easy to use.
Mac OS, Linux and Windows working in harmony.
Plus since I wrote this using the WordPress App I now never have to leave my bed.
So apparently when looking for the answer to this problem everybody says “trash is trash” and that you should just empty the trash and anything you wanted to keep in there shouldn’t be in the trash in the first place. Yeah, fine but sometimes there’s something that is in there that you might want to delete and keep everything else in there just in case. Maybe it’s a huge file and your running low on space.
Next most popular solution apart from “you can’t” is to create a folder on the Desktop, drag everything from the trash into there – apart from the file you want to remove and then empty the trash. You then drag everything back into the trash. It works but seems a bit of a pain.
Here’s the best solution. Open terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and also open Trash. Don’t be put off by using terminal – this really isn’t technical at all. Now type “rm ” into the Terminal. Then drag and drop the file you want to permanently delete into the Terminal window. The path of the file will appear. Press enter and the Terminal will just go to the next line. You should see that the file has been removed form the Trash. In case you’re curious, “rm” is the Unix / Linux / Mac OS X command for remove – i.e. it deletes files instead of moving them to the trash. This also works for any file anywhere on your hard drive.
Simples
I’ve gone completely Apple native – iPhone, Macbook Pro from work so I can do stuff at home, iMac at work and now I’m trying to any of our clients I meet that their business would be somehow better if I had an iPad. The only thing I miss from the world of Windows is the ability to hibernate the PC.
The Macbook is vastly impressive when it comes to power management – you close the lid and it goes into sleep mode – open the lid and it wakes up nearly instantly. The best bit is that it also goes into what Apple calls Safe Sleep. I can just about go an entire weekend where I may not use my Macbook and so on Monday morning when I go to work it it’s just got enough juice to wake up. The best bit is if it’s run out of juice. While it goes into sleep mode (low power with everything stores in RAM) it also copies everything onto the hard drive so if the battery dies, when you power up it still has everything the way you left it – i.e. Hibernate.
What I wanted though was the same functionality on my iMac since if I have some Flash to do at the weekend I’ll occasionally take my iMac home and having to close everything down and start it all up again is a pain. Well turns out that there’s a dashboard widget that does the job called Deep Sleep which puts a picture of the moon on your dashboard and when clicked, copies everything to disk and shuts it down.
Just be warned that a iMac does not have a battery – make sure it’s finished copying everything and turned off before you pull the plug!
So everyone has got words in the iPhone dictionary that get autocorrected to something you use more regularly. Mine has now started replacing “in” with “i’n” which is annoying because firstly I don’t know how that got in there and secondly, I use the word in quite a lot.
Yeah, I can click the cross and change it back to in but I’d prefer to get rid of the entry. You can go into Settings > General > Reset > Reset Keyboard Dictionary and get rid of all your personal additions but that’s a bit extreme.
The correct way of doing it is start a text, type the word in and when the cross comes up, press it. Do this about five times and it will be removed from the dictionary.
Simples.
OK, so I got given an Excel workbook with contact details for an email campaign I’m doing for a client with four fields: title, first name, last name, email. The email software I use is set up for using one name only so I thought I’d join it up into two fields, name and email and import that into the software.
Since I’m a programmer I typed this into the formula bar of Excel thinking It’d be similar to JS:
=A1+” “+B1+” “+C1+” “
Unfortunately this just threw up an error. Turns out the correct version is:
=A1&” “&B1&” “&C1&” “
Simples