Maclord's Blog

I just bought a 15″ Retina MacBook Pro and solely for the purpose of development for IBM Websphere suite of products, especially IBM BPM and ODM (aka Websphere Operational Decision Management). IBM BPM consisting of heavy-weight components based on a process server built on top of Websphere Application Server 8, requires very powerful hardware to work with efficiently. But all these products require Windows, Linux or UNIX operation systems, so I needed to setup Bootcamp on my new Mac to install and run Windows 7 for these tasks. (This is another story I will be sharing on my IT blog soon.)

Since the new Macs no longer ship with any software installation discs, everything is downloaded from the Internet inlcluding OS X software as well as Bootcamp support (Windows driver software for Mac hardware). As a loyal Mac OS X Snow Leopard user who has been resisting to upgrade to (Mountain) Lion for a long time, with my new Retina MacBook Pro, I had no choice, but to get used to working on Mountain Lion. This includes the Bootcamp utility Mountain Lion edition (as I call it) which requires to download the Bootcamp (Windows support) drivers online (and on the fly) while setting up Bootcamp on the Mac.

In my experience, downloading the Bootcamp drivers from some Apple server took more than half a day. In order to avoid such a time loss (or any possible new Apple madness) next time  I’d set up Bootcamp, I backed up the downloaded the Bootcamp drivers, and then I decided I’d share the near-1-GB folder zipped in a single file with the rest of the world for download via my web site which is hosted on reasonably fast servers with high bandwidth (courtesy of Ozar.net).

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You got your new iPhone or new iPad, then a time came when you wanted to have some extra-ordinary file on your PC or your android device to be opened up on your other device and it turned out that iTunes will not sync it or you just don’t wanna bother transferring the file first to iTunes and then whatever.

Dropbox comes to the rescue. Thanks to Dropbox, once you put any file in it whether you are on your computer, or your mobile device, it will store them in the cloud and sync it to all of your devices such as your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch even devices running on Android, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry and  Linux. What’s more, you can use Dropbox not only for personal synchronization needs, but also for sharing files with others and collaboration in real-time. Dropbox offers both free and paid services.

Why DropBox?

There are dozens of other applications either as SaaS or PaaS and all claiming to get the same job done. Among all, Dropbox was and still the best and painless (even Apple attempted to buy Dropbox before their iCloud venture – an argument for another post) I’ve ever used. It’s fast, easy-to-use, practical – the only downside of it is on mobile devices where it doesn’t push the content unlike iCloud, you need to be connected to Internet to access all your files except for the one or two which once you access it on your mobile device is/are cached for offline viewing.

Dropbox replaces

• Emailing file attachments to yourself and other people
• Using USB drives to move files between computers
• Renaming files to keep a history of previous versions
• Complicated backup software and hardware

How Dropbox works

Here’s a short video explaining how it works:

How do I get Dropbox for free?

For a starter you can sign up for a free 2 GB account (if you use my referral code, you will get an additional 250 MB)

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If you’re a heavy user of Apple Mail.app, you may find that over time the program takes longer and longer to open, and operates more and more sluggishly.

There’s a trick to making things faster, one that never fails to work. Open Terminal and run the following command:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum

This command basically cleans old and discarded crud out of the database that Mail
uses to keep track of messages. When old messages are deleted, Mail unfortunately
keeps some information about them around, and that’s what you’re nuking from orbit.
Here’s an example on my machine that shows the before and after

$ cd ~/Library/Mail
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 maclord staff 61M Feb 15 23:14 Envelope Index
$ sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 maclord staff 33M Feb 16 18:35 Envelope Index

If you would run it often on the Terminal, make an alias for it, either in .bashrc or
.bash_aliases

alias vacuummail=‘sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum’

If you’re really feeling ambitious, you could create an Automator action that would shut
down Mail, run the command, and start Mail back up. You could even make it an iCal Alarm and set it to
run once a week, and you will guarantee that Mail runs lean and mean. Or, if you don’t
like Automator, use a tool like Lingon to run the command for you at a set time.

P.S. These methods have been tested with Mac OS X (10.6) Snow Leopard – untested with Lion (OS X 10.7)

One of my favorite things on the Mac was having a recent version of Java and a Java Development Kit (JDK) pre-installed on Mac OS X until the release of version 10.7 Lion. On Snow Leopard, the 64-bit version of Java 6 came already installed.

With MacOS X Lion, however, Java does not come out-of-the-box and you have to download and install it manually (or via the Apple Software Update) – except in rare cases where you upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion.

The first package of Java 6 for Mac OS X Lion for download & manual installation can be found on the following link: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1421
The download size is about 62.5 MB and gets you Java SE version 1.6.0_26 (64-bit of course). Although this one is not be the most up-to-date version, once you have it on your system, you would be prompted to upgrade automatically next time Apple Software Update is run.

As for JDK 7 for Mac, it will be available directly from Oracle, maybe even through the App Store – no official announcement on the latter, though, so far, but stay tuned for good news!

If you are a Java developer who wants to do Java development on Mac OS X 10.7, here are a few not-so-tricky steps to follow to get going:
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Advanced-level Mail.app users of Mac OS X must have noticed that as of Mac OS X Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) the feature of “bouncing messages back to sender” is gone!

There are ongoing debates whether this feature was useful (so as to help fight spam) or not – even totally unnecessary (since many spammers do not use real or valid e-mail addresses, there’s no address to bounce back the junk mail) – the latter probably being Apple’s motive to remove the feature.

For those of you, who need to restore this functionality, there’s good news for intermediate to advanced Mac OS X users who can manage to create an Automator service that will feature an AppleScript to run — at least by following a short simple series of instructions. (See also the screen recording video tutorial below)

Here are the step by step instructions to do so:

1. Launch Automator from your Applications folder
2. Create a new service.
3. At the top of the editing (workflow) pane, select “no input” pull-down menu item just following the label “Service receives”, and select “Mail.app” from the second pull-down menu. The setting should appear like “Service receives no input in Mail.app”
4. Locate “Get Selected Mail items” from the actions list on the left, and then drag it to the editing pane (that is the Workflow)
5. Locate “Run AppleScript” from the actions, and drag it to the workflow.
6. Edit the script so as to look as the following:
   on run {input, parameters}
   tell application "Mail"
      repeat with eachMessage in input
         bounce eachMessage
         delete eachMessage
      end repeat
   end tell
end run
7.  Save your Automator workflow with a name like “Bounce Mail”
8. In Mail(.app) select the message(s) you want to bounce, then under the “Mail” application menu, select “Services > Bounce Mail (or whatever you named when saving the service) menu item

Although a beta version of the new, popular, long-awaited web browser Google Chrome for the Mac has already been released, the download page file has been removed from Google’s own search results.

Luckily I had downloaded a beta version and already using it. You can download it here for your own hands-on experience on Google Chrome on your Mac.

Download Google Chrome for Mac (latest beta) (396) for Mac OS X (supposedly for Intel only)

Google Chrome is made possible by the Chromium open source project and some other open source software.

You may also want to look into

Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard

One of the most annoying and frustrating thing especially for the so-called Windows-converts (i.e. people who “switch to the Mac” from Windows) on Mac OS X is that the maximize button (the small round green button with a ‘+’ sign on the upper-left corner of every window) acts differently on Mac than Windows in most cases. In fact, the maximize button behavior varies from application to application on the Mac, and unlike on Windows, it does not necesseraly maximize the window, but just change its dimensions. (See below and the rest of the article for details and for a couple work-around solutions to making windows full-screen on web browsers such as Safari).

On windows , the maximize button – where the term “maximize” is inherent from Windows operating system anyway - simply enlarges a window to almost full screen except that the window’s title bar, menu bar and the task bar remains visible and the remaining space is allocated to the window and its contents. On the Mac, however, this may not exactly be the case – especially when using Safari.
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What is VNC?

VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing, and it is a desktop sharing system with a graphic user interface which allows you to connect and control a remote computer over a network or the Internet. Thanks to the RFB (Remote Frame Buffer) protocol it’s using, VNC applications send the keyboard and mouse events to a remote computer on the network (or the Internet) who’s screen is being shared, and it relays back the updates.

RFB (Remote FrameBuffer) is a simple protocol and since operates at the framebuffer level, it can be used on all operating systems with a GUI including Windows, Macintosh (Mac OS X) and Linux. Although RFB started as a very simple protocol used by VNC and its derivatives, it has been improved so as to support file sharing, advanced compression and security techniques in its development cycle.

Why VNC is used and How

With VNC you can display the screen of a remote computer on your own computer in a window or in full screen mode, and using your own keyboard and mouse on this screen, you can control that remote computer as if you are sitting in front of it. All actions taken on the view of the remote desktop on your computer are performed actually on the remote computer itself.

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It looks like NVIDIA supports the Mac hardware more and more than ever:

According to Engadget(.com) GeForce GTX 285 graphics accelerator card will be available for Macs the beginning of this summer (expected to be shipping June 2009).

The GeForce GTX 285 takes DirectX 10 to gaming beyond HD with a top of 2560×1600 resolution.

Steve Jobs is one of the most impressive keynote address makers that I’ve ever known with his wonderful wits.

While browsing through some videos of the WWDC on YouTube, I ran into the intro of Apple’s WWDC in 2002 which started with a special mourning session for the death of Mac OS 9, and I’d like to share this special video here which is way fun: