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Posts Tagged ‘Mac’

Whither Microsoft?

The ThinkPad received an OS upgrade this weekend. Not to Windows Vista, but to a brand new installation of Ubuntu instead. XP, while quite nice and serviceable, was simply running too slow, even after a fresh install back in October, and I really didn’t feel like re-installing again or worse, upgrading to Vista.
It was a [...]

Why Is Mac (kinda) Happy?

Because it hasn’t crashed since I upgraded to Parallels 4.0 in November. Very nice.
However, I now have a green, 1-pixel wide, vertical line running up the right side of the LCD that appeared out of nowhere one day. That I can actually live with; the random reboots, I cannot.
Still, I have a 3-year warranty on [...]

Mac Crash

It’s Parallels again.
I had just launched Visual C# when Mac froze for a moment, Parallels crashed, and the screen wiped gray with this lovely dialog box in the center:

Upon restart, Mac mocked me further:

As if I needed to be reminded.
Parallels is useful, but it sure blows sometimes.

[receiver message]

These are a series of notes I compiled while learning Mac OS X programming, typically from the books I’ve read and any observations I noted.
Objective-C & Cocoa Notes

Instance variables that are pointers to other objects are called outlets (IBOutlet). Methods that can be triggered by user interface objects are called actions (IBAction).
Objective-C has no visibility [...]

Programming In Objective-C

I just finished reading Stephen Kochan’s Programming In Objective-C. Since I’ve been wanting to do some Mac and iPhone development, I figured this was a good place to start.
Overall, I thought it was a good effort, but certainly not the best. On the negative side, I found a surprisingly large number of grammatical and spelling [...]

Random Mac

Mac has been running great since I had the hard drive replaced a few months ago. No more lengthy pinwheel spinning and not a single flashing question mark folder in all those days.
However, Mac did perform a random reboot tonight, which when it happens is a bit startling. Thinking back, I believe it’s done it [...]

Leafpile Update 2

I’m about 50% complete with the Java implementation of Leafpile but have decided to put development on the back-burner while I focus on learning to write Mac applications. In fact, why not simply port what I have now over to a Cocoa application. Mac is back in service again, and I’ve really been itching to [...]

Sad Mac

Arrg. My upgrade to Leopard didn’t go well last night.
I commented back in January about my Mac issues, and they reared their ugly head again. I’ve continued to have problems restarting my Mac, half of the time it can’t find the hard drive and I get the Question Mark folder. I know I’m in the [...]

Mac In The Office

Does the future lie in application development for the Mac?
The current issue of BusinessWeek has an article on the growing demand of Macs in the office. Sales are up an astonishing 51% over last year and more and more employees are requesting them.
With the growing popularity of the iPod, iPhone, web apps and VM software [...]

iMac Issues

I love my Mac, but I do have issues with it from time to time.
A few times a week, it’ll hang on the spinning pinwheel for minutes at a time. Could be a caching problem or having a hard time accessing the hard drive? It’ll recover, but it sure is annoying.
On other occasions, if I [...]

Error 1064

I’m doing some text classification stuff related to spam and needed to install MySQL (5.0.41) on my iMac running Tiger (10.4.9). However, when attempting to create a table with MySQL Administrator I get the following error:

An example showing MySQL error 1064
For the life of me, I have no idea why it’s giving me this error, [...]

Microsoft Is Dead

What killed them? Google, Ajax, broadband, and OS X, in Paul Graham’s eyes at least.
And, I totally agree with him. Looking at his list, I’m already quite entrenched with 3 of the 4 items, and if it weren’t for my PC at the office, I’d have dumped Microsoft long ago, since everything I do now [...]