lifecoder

OO 3 beta is ready for MacOS X

webmaster — Mon, 12 May 2008 06:40:23 +0000

This is great news, Open Office 3 beta is ready for MacOS X, uh I mean no X11 needed. This is just in time where Microsoft said to drop support VBA in Office for Macs. I don’t use Office apps frequently but it has been de facto format for office documents, I’m in minority here.

OO 3.0 beta

via TUAW

Cool guy play DS

webmaster — Mon, 12 May 2008 06:36:25 +0000

Don’t hesitate to play your DS in public, whatever age your are you’re going to be the coolest man out there.

While waiting long queue in bank I usually open up my DS to play my favorite puzzle game, Picross. I don’t know what people think about me, but having solved 2 puzzles make me feel rejoiced. No more stress.

picture via DSFanboy (shot by superlocal)

Anxiety to manage your daily task

webmaster — Mon, 12 May 2008 06:34:32 +0000

I just tested Anxiety, a small free to-do application. Its main feature is the integration with Calendar�??s to-do items. Anxiety normally run in HUD mode which is transparent and would stays on top whatever application you are working on. It�??s small enough so I could put it on my desktop corners. The question is, will it be an effective application to boost my productivity?

Currently I use Anxiety to list my today�??s to-do. I think it feels right for the job. At the start of day I would list up what need to do during the day, and I estimate by the end of the day the list would be empty. If you use multiple calendars, like separating schedule for “at home” and “at office” activities, Anxiety could switch between them. But for me I better stick with single calendar and only enlist to-dos for my computer-related works. Enlisting mixed-up-digital and non-digital to-dos (such as errands etc.) seems doesn�??t work for me.

Whether you need this small application or not, I guess you should try it first and see if it can suit to your working style. If it doesn�??t get in your way, Anxiety could become your best simple application for Mac.

Anxiety Website

Subdomain blog is no longer valid

webmaster — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:34:03 +0000

All of web content in lifecoder site from now on will be on main domain lifecoder.com. People coming from blog.lifecoder will be automatically forwarded by wordpress to lifecoder.com. This would easier maintenance and let us focus on just writing stuff

Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time

webmaster — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:52:34 +0000

It’s undoubted that Mario has become one of the successful game franchise ever released. Starting as platformer genre at the arcade, Nintendo has developed this franchise into many genres over many Nintendo platforms (console systems) for the past two decades. RPG is one of genres that Nintendo ever put efforts into. Although not as many as its adventure counterpart, Mario RPG managed to get on Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Nintendo GameBoy Advance (GBA), Nintendo GameCube, and lastly Nintendo Dual Screen (NDS). It’s unknown if this genre will reach Nintendo Wii. This post will review the one released on NDS under the title of Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time. This game was released on 2006. It’s just get in my now-playing list
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How to learn kanji with Tadashii Kanji Kakitori-kun

webmaster — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:33:00 +0000

Playing Nintendo DS (NDS) is so much fun, but it isn�??t just about game. In japan there are lot of NDS software that are not fall into game category, and some of them made it to US shore, like Brain Age series. Well most of them did not, because they were targeting niche market of japanese culture. NDS has become a little computer that adults in Japan using it not only for fun, but also for learning. Japanese learner should love Nintendo DS, because it has many titles that are designed for learning Japanese. Of course it was designed for Japanese thus basic knowledge of Japanese will be required, if you can read hiragana then you’re good to go. As you develop your japanese skills, there are lot more challenging softwares that will sharpen your skills. I have fun learning japanese with NDS and I would like to review all as post series, my first review today is Kageyama Method, Tadashii Kanji Kakitori-kun, there�??s a little pun there because kakitori means dictation but it �??tori�?? also means chicken which become the logo of this software.
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Learn Japanese with Leopard

webmaster — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 16:22:28 +0000

Within hundreds of new feature that Leopard offers, this is the one that makes me hesitate to turn back into Tiger. Dictionary in Leopard is just fantastic, I love it more and more! In addition to already adorable yet simple and easy to use ever dictionary application, Apple adds more new juicy features in Leopard, and that would be, well of course, what else but 3 sets of luxurious Japanese Dictionary !!

I shouldn�??t be surprised though, because Apple products are soaring in Japan now, more than ever. Lucky me, since I�??m an apprentice in learning japanese language. This makes reading japanese website is easier within Safari, thanks to non obtrusive dictionary panel. If I�??m not mistaken this little panel has been there since Tiger, and I think this what makes Dictionary different with other dictionary application. This simple feature eliminate copy-paste of text that I want to look up and no need to open new page, thus user are not disturbed on the reading. To tell you the truth it has improves my english reading skill a lot. Reading english website become more enjoyable, and now with new dictionary sets, reading japanese feels less tougher.
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My PB 1.67Ghz now runs Leopard, yay!

webmaster — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 05:03:55 +0000

My upgrading from Tiger to Leopard on my PB 1.67GHz went smoothly. I chosed the clean install and checked to Archive home folder and setting. For years I’ve been doing Windows upgrade and nothing compared to this in term of migration easiness. I got clean system with all my application and home folder still preserved, even my Tiger bundled application could run flawlessly. What I’m afraid of is the speed of Leopard itself, I thought it would be slow since it comes with features which are designed for multiple core processor like Core Duo. Apparently that wasn’t true. After using it for a while, I found the speed still acceptable. But I had to remind myself not to run application which uses core animation framework, such as Photo Booth. Well I don’t need that kind of application anyway (yet). I also can’t help to wonder what is exactly the new Leopard 300+ new feature? Leopard does have many user interface enhancements, but for overall usage it shares similar experience with Tiger or any old MacOSX system. Nothing revolutionary happened, but it just keep better. As usual MacOS is not designed to fully backward compatible with old major releases. Sooner or later we either need to upgrade the OS, or at most the whole hardware. Two years of major release cycle is just too fast for me, where the price never gets any cheaper here
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The non-intuitive way to eject disc

webmaster — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 01:14:25 +0000

This just proves how little I know about the system I use. In the past, I looked for such commands, but failed googling it, until yesterday I just happened to find it. With these commands I can list mounted drive, and eject it from Terminal application. This generally useful when you use mac mini with non apple standard keyboard, which has no eject button. But personally the main reason was to eject disc when I remotely access any mac system using SSH.

Here is a list of useful commands that I copied into my notebook:

drutil list
drutil info
drutil tray open
drutil tray close
drutil tray eject
disktool -e disk2

Testing Cocoa-Ruby Project on Tiger

webmaster — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:08:57 +0000

Maybe you’ve already seen Cocoa-Ruby screencast on Xcode 3.0 by fhisa, it’s pretty cool showing the joy of ruby programming in shiny new Xcode interface, sadly the video is blurry (due to youtube downscaling quality maybe). The blog is written in Japanese, but if you know how Xcode works, all you need is to copy the sample code written there, and for the rest of the part are pretty trivial Xcode tasks.

What surprised me, when I tried to create new project in my Xcode 2.4.1 (run on Tiger) later, there I found a create new “Cocoa-Ruby” project feature, just like the one I saw in screencast. I thought the fun part belongs only on Leopard side but apparently I was wrong, I quickly jumped in and tried to follow the screencast.

To my disappointment it didn’t work on mine. After further digging on fhisa blog, I found out that RubyCocoa bundled with Leopard is version 0.12, while the one in my mac is one whose version dated back 5 years ago, what a shame.