The Author – Bart Busschots
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Jun
30
Some of the Sights Around Maynooth
Filed Under Photography on June 30, 2007 | 2 Comments
Despite what we were promised by the weather man the weather was wonderful this afternoon so I went off for a cycle around Maynooth. I decided to take my camera with me and try to capture some of the sights I met along the way. In particular I stopped at Taghadoe Round Tower and Connolly’s Folly. You can see all the pics here.
[tags]Round Tower, Taghadoe Round Tower, Connolly’s Folly, Photography, Ireland, Maynooth[/tags]
Jun
27
At Last – A REAL iPhone Review
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 27, 2007 | 3 Comments
The amount of non-news and pure garbage that the iPhone has spawned is amazing. You have analysts predicting failure and success without ever even having TOUCHED an actual iPhone. I mean really, how low can journalistic standards go? Since when is guesswork (often un-educated guesswork) news? There have even been iPhone stories complaining about the amount of iPhone stories! But, at long last, amidst all the crap, we finally have real review from someone who’s actually GOT an iPhone! What’s better still is that it’s a real review rather than the fan-boy rubbish we are sure to see spewing forth from the blogosphere as soon as the infernal thing finally gets out. Anyhow, go read David Pogue’s review and get some real iPhone news for a change.
[tags]iPhone, Apple, David Pogue[/tags]
Jun
26
My Visit To Hosting365
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 26, 2007 | 14 Comments
As some of you may remember I was getting rather frustrated with Hosting365 a while ago. However, Hosting365 responded very positively to the frustrations I expressed and, at their invitation, I paid them a visit today. Firstly, it was nice to put faces to the names. The guys all seem dead sound and the big-wigs are all Mac users so they must be alright 😉
Anyhow, I didn’t trek over to Park West at rush hour just to attach faces to names and engage in some Mac nostalgia. I went down there to see for myself what kind of infra-structure I’m entrusting with the task of hosting my sites and my customer’s sites, and to see how Hosting365 are going to resolve their problems with domain registrations. Bottom-line, I’m happy with what I saw.
[tags]Hosting365, Hosting, Domain Registration[/tags]
Jun
24
James Webb Space Telescope in Dublin
Filed Under Science & Astronomy, Photography on June 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Ireland has been honored as the only country in Europe to get a visit from a full-size model of the James Webb Space Telescope (the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope). At the moment the model is in the grounds of the Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham in Dublin. It will be in Ireland for a few weeks yet but it may be moving around. For information on where and when you’ll be able to see the model contact the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. If you’re going to see it in Kilmainham my advice would be to park in Heuston Station from where it’s only about a five minute walk.
The museum itself is a beautiful building in beautiful grounds. Had the weather been better I could have happily spend a few hours there. As it was it was dull and raining on and off. Regardless of the rain I did take some pictures which you can see in my gallery.
[tags]Dublin, Museum of Modern Art, James Webb Space Telescope, JWST[/tags]
Jun
23
Namely – The End of a Long Quest
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on June 23, 2007 | 2 Comments
There are many people who like the dock and many who hate it. Me, I like the dock, but I know it has limits. It’s excellent for keeping those programs you use day-in-day-out at your fingertips. That’s what the dock is for after all, it’s not meant to be the place you keep ALL your apps, just your favorites. On OS X you’re expected to user the Finder to launch those apps that you don’t keep in the Dock. Apple tried to make it a little easier with a keyboard shortcut for going to your applications folder (command+shift+a) but that’s not all that great and it only works from within the Finder anyhow. So, that’s why I’ve been on a quest to find the perfect application launcher for the Mac for quite some time now.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Quicksilver, Spot Light, Himmel Bar, Namely, Application Launcher[/tags]
Jun
22
SMARTReporter – Automatically Monitor Your Mac for Iminent Disk Failures
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on June 22, 2007 | 1 Comment
Modern hard disks have a built-in system called SMART for monitoring themselves. SMART makes information on the health of the drive available to the OS. It’s far from perfect, SMART errors don’t always means your drive will die, and not all drive deaths are predicted by SMART but it’s still a good indicator all the same. Now, it’s great having all this SMART data there but it’s no good if no one reads it! OS X CAN read it but it doesn’t do so on an on-going basis. In fact, the only time a default OS X install will read the SMART data is when the Disk Utility app is opened. That’s where SMARTReporter comes in. It polls your SMART data at a given interval (default is once an hour) and lets you know if there’ any problems. It can do this in three ways: it can change the color of an icon in your menu bar, it can pop up a message, and it can send an email. You can choose to have it do all, none, or some of these things. The menu bar icon is perhaps over-kill but some people may find it re-assuring to see a nice health green hard disk icon indicating that SMARTReporter is running and that it has found no errors on any of your drives. As soon as it finds a problem this icon will turn an ominous red color. I’d suggest everyone run this app on their macs but just turn off the menu bar icon. That way it runs totally in the background and totally out-of-sight until there is a problem, which will hopefully never happen! I should also mention that because of limitations with the USB to ATA bridge this will not work with USB hard drives. It will also not work with FireWire drives because Apple’s drivers for FireWire don’t pass on the SMART data. This limits this app to internal ATA(IDE) and SATA drives, i.e. regular internal hard drives. Finally, this app is both free and open source being released under the MIT license.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Hard Disks[/tags]
Jun
22
ByteController – Turn Any Keyboard into a Multimedia Keyboard on OS X
Filed Under Computers & Tech on | Leave a Comment
On all my desktop machines I have nice ergonomic multimedia keyboards from Logitech so I can always shut-up iTunes with the stroke of a key when the phone rings or someone comes in to talk to me or something. This is something I really miss on my MacBook Pro. Today I found a free and simple solution, ByteController which you can download from bytetastic.com.
This program does two things, it gives you iTunes controls in your menu bar, and it lets you define your own hot-keys for controlling iTunes. The default look of the menu bar controls is very minimalist and looks like something Apple would do but you can customize the look at lot. You can go from the totally understated default up by flashy and on to downright gaudy. I’ve opted for something in between as you can see from the screen shot below. This program does have one limitation though, it’s only for controlling iTunes. It does let you set hot keys for controlling volume, but this is iTunes volume, not the system volume. However, if, like me, you use iTunes as your media player this app is a real God-send. It’s yet another small simple app that does one this very well.
[tags]ByteController, ByteTastic, iTunes, OS X, Apple[/tags]
Jun
17
Bwana – Easier to Read Man Pages on OS X
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on June 17, 2007 | 1 Comment
Bwana is a very simple app that allows Safari to render Unix Manual Pages (man pages). The man pages are rendered as HTML making them easier to read with the addition of some simple text formating and allowing easy linking to other related man pages. Installation is also trivial, just download, expand, and drag and drop into the Applications->Utilities folder. Then, by some OS X black magic URLs of the form man:[command] (e.g. the man page for the ls command will be found at the URL man:ls) will start working in Safari. It really is that simple! To make things even sweeter this app is free and open source (released under the MIT License). There really isn’t anything more to say about this app, it’s yet another example of a small, simple, OS X app that does one thing perfectly.
[tags]man pages, OS X, Open Source, Freeware, Safari[/tags]
Jun
15
Hosting365 – I Think I’ve Finally Had Enough
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 15, 2007 | 32 Comments
Another day and another Hosting365 disaster. You can read the ongoing saga on their outages blog. No one can deny that Hosting365 are expensive. You pay above the odds for them but previously my rational for doing so was:
- They are local – so fast from within Ireland
- They are local – so tech support during MY business hours not American business hours
- Good customer care
- It’s nice to support Irish companies
However, there is only so long that you can put up with ever poorer customer support and a sub-standard service before you start loosing customers and your hair! I am now actively looking for a new hosting provider.
[tags]Web Hosting, Hosting365[/tags]
Jun
13
WWDC 2007 – Bit of Damp Squib Really
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 13, 2007 | 2 Comments
Some of the Leopard stuff was cool, but much of it was old news, and the iPhone bit was down-right insulting. Not really a WWDC that will stand out as one of the greats. In fact, things even went backwards on one front, ZFS does not appear to be in Leopard at all, not even as an option, despite having been in some of the earlier betas! However, at least one of my predictions came true, Leopard has a new look. Just not sure that’s all good news, that transparent menu bar looks terrible!
[tags]Apple, Steve Jobs, WWDC, Leopard, iPhone[/tags]