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Kernel Switcher for Mac OS X Snow Leopard

shazron — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:47:47 +0000

There are various command line ways to determine whether your machine running Snow Leopard is running the 64 or 32 bit kernel, and also the ability for you to switch kernels. I have gathered all those ways into this GUI utility that will show you what kernel you are currently running, and it will allow you to set what kernel you want to load at the next restart.

If your machine is not EFI64 capable, this utility will not work (it will check at startup). Even if your machine is EFI64 capable (some Mac Minis and MacBooks), the 64-bit kernel will not boot anyway (Apple restriction, apparently).

[UPDATE: Possible hack to get your non-sanctioned EFI64 capable machine to load K64, would be a good extension for my utility]

The utility will ask for admin privileges when you save your settings so it can set the boot arguments. To avoid any saving / admin prompts and to just close the window, just click on the red Close button on the window controls).

Download KernelSwitcher here. The full source is on Github with a MIT license.

Screenshot:

Open, edit and save Microsoft Open XML formats (docx, xlsx, pptx) in Office 2003 or Mac Office 2004

shazron — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 08:25:33 +0000

So you have Office 2003 installed in a zillion computers and you need to open those new .docx/.xlsx/.pptx files? No need to buy Office 2007…

Microsoft has given you an “upgrade” path, for free:

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats

For Mac Office 2004:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=155820

Technorati Tags: open docx xlsx pptx for free

git merge problems

shazron — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 08:15:52 +0000

When merging, ever get the error message: Error: Entry ‘foo’ is notuptodate. Cannot merge. Two possibilities:

You may have local changes that are not committed (so commit them!) or undo those changes.
You may have a file that has been modified, but the contents have not been changed. ie somehow the file was ‘touch’ed. Thus git thinks that the file has been modified because its modification date has changed, but then its hash is still the same because the content hasn’t changed, so I guess it gets confused. Doing this command below updates the file stats for your repo index to flush out this second possibility:

git update-index --refresh

Technorati Tags: git merge conflict

Adobe AIR 1.5 released, what changed?

shazron — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 05:18:37 +0000

Adobe AIR 1.5 has been released today for Mac OS X and Windows. Linux is still at version 1.1.

So what’s changed that I can see so far? I couldn’t find any release notes (yet). For one thing, Flash Player 10 is now included. For the Mac, its at version 10,0,12,36. For Windows (XP), it’s at version 10,0,12,37. It does not however, update the Flash plugins for your other browsers.

I also did some Javascript benchmarks using the SunSpider Javascript benchmark, to see if perhaps AIR 1.5 includes the new Squirrelfish rendering engine for WebKit.

All tests were done on Mac OS X 10.5.5 (the smaller number the better, of course):

Safari 3.2 (5525.26.12) — 6530.0 ms, result

FireFox 3.03 — 3211.6 ms, result

Adobe AIR 1.5 WebKit — 2523.6 ms, result

According to my results, Adobe AIR 1.5 WebKit’s Javascript is approximately 2.59x faster than Safari 3.2, and approximately 1.27x faster than Firefox 3.03. So is it Squirrelfish? Likely. Extreme? Maybe.

According to the Surfin Safari Blog (for WebKit), Squirrelfish Extreme in the nightly builds is about 3.38x faster than Safari 3.1. But since I have Safari 3.2, I guess that’s close enough? It can’t be Squirrelfish (plain) because Squirrelfish non-extreme is only 1.59x as fast as WebKit 3.1. But then it can be just general Javascript improvements as detailed in a blog post by John Gruber on Daring Fireball, so who knows?!

Here’s the user-agent for Adobe AIR 1.5 WebKit (Mac):
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.21

All the version numbers in the AIR 1.5 user-agent are older than Safari 3.2 (Mac) though, which is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_5; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.26.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2 Safari/525.26.12

So the evidence is inconclusive for Squirrelfish. Still no SVG support in Adobe AIR 1.5 WebKit though, no surprise there

(UPDATE): According to this new Adobe blog post, Adobe AIR 1.5 includes Squirrelfish, but does not mention the Extreme variant.

Technorati Tags: Adobe AIR 1.5, changes, squirrelfish

Quicktime on Safari – Question Mark

shazron — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:57:40 +0000

Ok, I don’t know what it is with my OS X install lately after installing OS update 10.5.4 but things seem to be broken left and right. Besides the trash issue in a previous post, Quicktime movies will not play in Safari – but they do play in Firefox. I updated to the latest Quicktime (7.5) and still no go after a restart. After trawling through numerous support forums, this is what worked for me:

Navigate to the “/Library/Internet Plug-Ins” folder
Delete the “QuickTime Plugin.webplugin” file
Restart Safari

Go to http://www.apple.com/trailers to test.

Technorati Tags: quicktime question mark, safari

Mac OS X – Files won’t go in the Trash

shazron — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 06:31:37 +0000

Most likely your Trash folder is not owned by you anymore. To fix:

Open Terminal.app, and type in the next 3 commands:
sudo chown :staff ~/.Trash
sudo chmod 700 ~/.Trash
killall Finder

Technorati Tags: empty trash immediately, mac os x

Stressful blogging

shazron — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:28:53 +0000

The New York Times has an article about prominent bloggers being stressed out. Hey, just like a “real” job (not that theirs is not real of course). In their pay-per-click world, I don’t know if it will ever get less stressful. Just like any other business. I’m sure if they quit, some other blogger will fill the void.

Technorati Tags: blogging

VNC to OS X Leopard from Windows

shazron — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:50:23 +0000

Here are the steps:

Download RealVNC
Launch it
Select the “Options…” button
Select the “Full Colour (all available colours)” radio button in the “Colour and Encoding” tab

Selecting any other colour level will make RealVNC close abruptly after connection.

Technorati Tags: vnc, leopard, os x, xp, vista, windows

Leaving Atimi

shazron — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:36:51 +0000

I have left Atimi Software Inc. after three years being there, for personal reasons. I loved developing for the Mac, and now is an exciting time especially with the iPhone and its SDK — but it is back to the Windows world for me. I still will develop Mac stuff as a hobby, for sure. An opportunity presented itself to get in on the ground level with a web startup that I couldn’t pass up, I will blog more about it when it is appropriate.

Technorati Tags: atimi

Linus Torvalds on Git, at Google

shazron — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 05:46:44 +0000

Linus Torvald’s talk at Google, about Git, a distributed version control system. I screen-captured his slides, and they are available for download or for view. I’ve been playing with git a bit in my personal projects. My workplace still uses Perforce though.

When on the road, I have the whole repo with me and can check-in my changes, revert, etc. When I get home, I can push my changes to my server and that can act as my “backup”. Although with Xcode 3.0 and its “snapshot” feature, I can sort of simulate this, but I would use that as a last resort though.

Technorati Tags: Linus Torvalds, git, distributed version control, Google