iphoting's Sink

My encounter with Apple’s latest Mac OS X 10.5 has been more than pleasant. The upgrade was smoother than any UNIX upgrade I’ve ever seen. My past experiences with UNIX upgrades has always been one filled with dependency hells after the installation, where binaries suddenly throw up ‘Segmentation Fault’ errors which cannot be easily fixed. Primary reason that caused such an error from my understanding was due to linked libraries being modified, resulting in binaries writing to memory locations which aren’t pre-allocated.

Apart from the smooth upgrade, the new features certainly are a great enhancement to productivity, without any impact on system stability nor performance. In fact, possibly psychologically, the operating system feels snappier and less prone to lags due to I/O blocking with its multi-threading improvements in various system components.

Live preview in the icons and quick look is indeed a rather impressive yet small enhancement. Quick look opens and closes at the speed of the tap of the spacebar, providing really quick and almost instant preview of any file you have selected. Certainly, Cover Flow can be used for that, but in my opinion, it takes up too much Finder space.

Time machine is another marvellous engineering. Although the ground concepts are nothing new, the tying up of the various system mechanisms, bundling it into a system level, easy to use, and highly automated backup application is brilliant. It simply trashes any backup mechanism I’ve tried. As Steve Jobs implied, the restore-backup interface, Time Machine, is both a visually appeasing interface and a revolutionary metaphor. Really, user-interface planners and designers should get all the kudos for such an intuitive interface.

Safari is now much more robust under heavy JavaScript and Flash Player loads. Memory usage too has slightly improved.

Although it is pointless mentioning 300 over new features to you as you can read them up from the Apple Mac OS X website, I find it important to highlight some important points worth noting before you upgrade to Leopard from Tiger.

Users of The Application Enhancer are highly recommended to upgrade to version 2.0.3 to prevent system freeze upon Leopard boot-up. Version 2.0.3 automatically disables itself when loaded in Leopard; a new updated compatibility release will arrive in a couple of days. However, do note the implication of having Application Enhancer disabled during this interim period.

Good news about InputManagers for Safari is that the components need to be owned by root and placed in the ‘/Library/InputManager/’ folder for it to function. I found Inquisitor to be working fine. Sogudi, unfortunately, isn’t.

Adobe has announced minor compatibility updates required for selected products; refer to AppleInsider article for more details.

Microsoft Office 2004 Mac functions normally, with no reported compatibility issues. Crossover Mac 6.2 works fine. Leopard requires Little Snitch version 2 beta; version 1 will not work and might freeze the OS.

In all, Leopard is an extremely worthy upgrade, bring greater speed and usability to its users, while being lean on memory.

As a side note, here’s an article on how to install Mac OS X from an external harddisk starting with a disk image file. You might find it profitable to ‘restore’ an Installation disk image onto your Time Machine backup drive so that you have your system cloned and a bootable installer image ready.

Edited: Note on Crossover Mac and Little Snitch.

I found a bunch of cool quotes and decided to paste it here without attribution.

MURPHY’S TECHNOLOGY LAWS:

Einstein’s Rule:

-- Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Principle of Design Inertia

-- Any change looks terrible at first.

Cahn’s Axiom

-- When all else fails, read the instructions.

Clarke’s Third Law

-- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Belinda’s Law

-- The chance of a computer crash is directly proportional to the importance of the document

that you are working on.

Holten’s Download Principle

-- The likelihood of receiving an error message during download increases the closer

you come to finishing.

Putt’s Law:

-- Technology is dominated by two types of people -- those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.

While express blog surfing, I came across this extremely funny and amusing poem posted. It’s written by someone on deviantart and might possibly be offensive. Stop reading if you cannot appreciate art or literature. It’s titled Teenage Sex, by Janesays701.

I sit on her bed

He sits on my bed

I don’t know what to say

He looks so nervous

She looks hot

I hope he knows what hes doing

Tonight I get laid

Tonight I make love to him

I look in her eyes

I look in his eyes

I lean in for a kiss

I close my eyes

She presses her lips on mine

He’s kissing me

What do I do next?

I put my hand on his face

Should I touch her chest?

I want him to touch me

I put my hand on her chest

Wow thats good

Our kiss gets more hot

I feel a connection

Should i get on top of her?

I want it to be special

I’m glad I brought a condom

I break the kiss and lay back on the bed

She wants me

“Do you have a condom?”

Oh yeah “yes I do”

“Lets do it”

I crawl on top of her

I take off my shirt

Holy shit she took off her shirt

“Take yours off”

Wow this is really happening

I take off my skirt

Oh my god shes half naked

Damn I hope this doesn’t hurt

I take off my pants and boxers

There goes my bra and thong

Holy shit I’m hard

Holy shit he’s hard

“Are you sure?”

“Hell yes” I’m naked aren’t I?

I put the condom on

This is going way too fast

“Ready?”

I nod

I crawl on top of her

I spread my legs

I kiss her

Wow this is it

I enter her

Fuck that hurts

“You ok?”

“mmhmm” obviously not!

Damn this is alot better then doing it myself

Um ow jackass

She looks like shes in pain

He looks nervous again

“Wanna continue”

“Yes” Oh god get this over with

It’ll be funny to have a commentary on the piece above.

Today was rather eventful. Firstly, Mac OS X Leopard Gold Master got leaked and secondly, Gmail announces support for IMAP. As such, I’ve moved my whole mail system onto Google Apps as all limitations that were holding me back has been more or less eased or removed.

In other news, I found this cool projection application, ProPresenter. It can do lots of stuff that I’d been looking for for a long time.

Lately, there’s been this loud commotion spilled over to the forum section of the TODAY newspapers. Naturally, I avoid the straits times but this time, I managed to spot an article on the ‘difficulty’ of the PSLE mathematics paper.

I have to admit, I’m rusty with model diagrams and mental/finger arithmetic, but still, these questions are extremely manageable within 10 minutes, even with the methods employed by students in the primary level.

The problem I see is that those crying students have difficulty thinking on their feet or to reinterpret slightly (only slightly) unorthodox questions. Formula doesn’t always work. Brute-force is not possible without a calculator, so what do you do? Think, obviously!

The first question is certainly a no-brainer. Simple model question which shouldn’t need more explanation than a line: 3 units = 156 - 72, leading to the final answer, 44 kg.

The second question is still a simple model question, just differently worded. It shouldn’t even need a line but for the sake of solving this, 7 units - 6 units = 112 chairs. 14 units = 112 ⨉ 14 = 1568 chairs.

The third question is equally simple. It just required thinking! I solved it by finding the initial volume of tank A. Since the breadths of the tanks are identical, why not just push them together and assume them to be one tank? So, the height can be derived by dividing the volume by the area [(50 cm + 70 cm) ⨉ 40 cm]. Cancel things off and you get easy to manage small numbers, with 25 cm as the height.

And, I have no comments for the retired teacher.

Still, to the students who ended up crying, please learn to take failures in stride.

There’s this piece by Annie Johnson Flint that never fails to make me smile.

What God Has Promised

God has not promised:-

Skies always blue,

Flower-strewn pathways

All our lives thro’;

God has not promised

Sun without rain,

Joy without sorrow,

Peace without pain.

God has not promised:-

We shall not know

Toil and temptation,

Trouble and woe;

He has not told us

We shall not bear

Many a burden,

Many a care.

But God has promised:-

Strength for the day,

Rest for the laborer,

Light for the way,

Grace for the trials,

Help from above,

Unfailing sympathy,

Undying love.

Some time back, I chanced upon this page which depicted pictures which affected the world in some way. Of the lot, there is one image that stands out particularly to me and I shall reproduce it below, sourced from Wikipedia.

The Tank Man scene from The Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989, with a related documentary, Tank Man by PBS.

Really thought provoking. I’ll write something about this soon.

What do you do when you’re bored?