Font Server Backups That goodness is built right
in!

post from Manage This on 28 January 2009 01:14:00 PM. © Manage This

Studies show that people who backup their font servers on a regular basis sleep better, smile more and possibly have less gray hair. Backing up your font server database is associated with a lower prevalence of screaming and more successful creative work[...]

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Studies Find High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contains
Mercury

post from Daring Fireball on 28 January 2009 01:13:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

I’m sure the HFCS industry will soon let us know that a little mercury never hurt anybody.

?

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Papermaster Can Begin Work, IBM Can Begin Looking
Over His Shoulder

post from TheAppleBlog on 28 January 2009 01:00:00 PM. © TheAppleBlog

appleibm

I touched on this development yesterday, but it merits closer attention. The name Papermaster, once associated with the guy in the army who was in charge of all the stationery (I assume), is now famous in the Apple and tech community for calling attention to the sensitive nature of switching jobs in Silicon Valley.

After announcing his leave from IBM, where he was a top executive working on IBM’s microprocessor technology, and his decision to accept a position with Apple as iPod chief Tony Faddel’s replacement, IBM decided to initiate legal proceedings to block the move, citing their non-compete agreement, and the potential threat to company IP the move represented.

The two heavyweight tech firms have finally reached a settlement, and Apple announced yesterday that as a result, Mark Papermaster will begin his job as Senior Vice President of Devices Hardware Engineering on April 24. Apple’s press release downplays the legal battle between themselves and IBM, focusing instead on Papermaster’s professional and educational background.

When the trouble was initially revealed, I suggested at the time that one of the possible motives of IBM in pursuing legal action, since it was my opinion that they probably couldn’t win in the long run, was to strong-arm Apple into some sort of settlement that allowed them early access to upcoming Apple innovations. That’s not necessarily what they got, but they could potentially, depending on what the court sees as infringement by Apple on IBM’s IP.

According to the terms of the settlement, Apple has to submit information to the court regarding Papermaster’s work once in July 2009, and again in October 2009, in order to make sure that nothing Apple is doing steps on IBM’s toes. It’s unclear whether it will be solely at the court’s discretion to decide if an infringement has occurred, but if IBM gets to have a look as well to make sure everything is on the up-and-up, they could potentially be privy to insider information on Apple tech in a way no one else is.

The settlement also prevents Papermaster from starting his new job any earlier than April 24, a date which marks six months since his departure from IBM. The delay doesn’t seem significant, and is probably only thrown in as a concession to the original one year term stipulated in Papermaster’s non-compete agreement.

After all this trouble, Apple, and Apple followers, are expecting big things from Papermaster, so let’s hope he can deliver. I’m hoping that the dispute and the distraction it caused is part of the reason for Apple’s lack of movement on the netbook front, and that we’ll see something in that area soon now that the new SVP has been cleared to get to work.

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ng-over-his-shoulder/

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MacVide releases FlashVideo Converter 2.3 -
Convert Flash files to Video

post from prMac on 28 January 2009 12:10:00 PM. © prMac

Macvide is proud to announce FlashVideo Converter 2.3, their Flash to video conversion utility for Mac OS X. With a focus on ease-of-use, FlashVideo Converter allows conversion of Adobe Flash files to video. It fully integrates the process into the Mac experience by allowing human interaction on the content during conversion. All of the most popular formats are supported, and helps bridge the gap between many video standards.

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RASONE's Blog - Aggiornamenti Leopard Vanilla-non
Vanilla

post from InsanelyMac Forum Community Blog List on 28 January 2009 11:52:38 AM. © InsanelyMac Forum Community Blog List

per chi non usa il vanilla kernel, può provare ad aggiornare così:

andare nella cartella situata in:

/libreria/preferences/systemconfiguration/ e copiare il file: com.apple.Boot.plist sulla scrivania;

scaricare il kernel voodoo dal sito http://code.google.com/p/xnu-dev/ aprire il .dmg e copiare dalla cartella files il file Mach_kernel.voodoo della root del vostro sistema; (praticamente cliccate due volte sul disco di leopard e incollatelo li)

dopodichè aprire con texedit il file com.apple.Boot.plist precedentemente posizionato nella scrivania;
sotto la voce <kernel> c'è la voce <mach_kernel>,

Sostituitelo con il nome del kernel voodoo appena scaricato ovvero da così <mach_kernel> a così <mach_kernel.voodoo>

Ora ritornate nella cartella /libreria/preferences/systemconfiguration/ e cancellate il file com.apple.Boot.plist, mettete la password quando lo chiede e date l'ok, adesso copiate il com.apple.Boot.plist editato sulla scrivania nella medesima cartella (/libreria/preferences/systemconfiguration/) autenticate, inserite la password e riparate i permessi;

Questa procedura, invece, funziona sia con kernel vanilla, sia con il voodoo kernel (logicamente dopo aver fatto tutta la procedura precedente):
Ora se volete una "simil retail" per fare gli aggiornamenti in quasi tranquillità (dico quasi perchè non tutti possono aggiornare da software update, in Hackintosh nulla è certo), scaricate PCefi v9 installer v2, aprite il dmg e installate il "Chameleon_v1012" che creerà la cartella Extra nella vostra root, se avete già installato l'efi9 createla voi la cartella Extra, dopodichè copiate la cartella "mkextMakeUpdate" sulla scrivania, apritela e dentro la cartella Efi/Extensions copiate i kext necessari per il funzionamento del vostro sistema, ovvero quei kext scelti durante l'installazione di Leopard, potete estrarli con pacifist dal cd di installazione; dopo aver messo i giusti kext nella cartella mkextMakeUpdate/Efi/Extensions, doppio clic nel file "mkextMakeUpdate2" inserite la password quando richiesto, e riavviate;
se tutto è andato bene dovreste poter aggiornare, a me così funziona tutto, anche l'audio senza patchare l'AppleHDA, e senza injector nella cartella /Extensions del sistema, spegnimento, riavvio, tranne lo sleep che in 10.5.6 non mi ha mai funzionato;
ricordatevi di inserire tra i kext anche: IntelCPUPMDisabler.kext o l'AppleRTC.kext patchato con il DSDT patcher, anche se io li ho messi entrambi, più o meno nella cartella "mkextMakeUpdate/Efi/Extensions" dovrebbero esserci i kext per il vostro chipset, per le PS2, l'IntelCPUPMDisabler.kext o l'AppleRTC.kext patchato con il DSDT, il dsmos.kext e i kext per sse2 che sinceramente non so, comunque basta usare i kext selezionati durante l'installazione, estrarli con pacifist nel desktop e copiarli nella cartella;

più o meno così, io ne ho messi alcuni che neanche mi servono:

riedito da quì il post con ulteriori info!

Per chi non usa vanilla evitate di aggiornare direttamente da software update, vale solo per gli aggiornamenti di sistema, le altre cose le potete aggiornare direttamente, tipo itunes, java ecc ecc

Al momento cosi, mi funzionano perfettamente 4 macchine: un AMD (che ho in firma), una P5K(che ho in firma), una Gigabyte GA-P31-DSL con core2Quad Q6600 Nvidia GF 9400GT, un vecchio Compaq EVO, con scheda madre intel e processore Pentium4 1,5Ghz Nvidia GF 6200.
L'ultima prova che ho fatto sul P4 è stato installare una vecchia versione di leo esattamente la "Toh RC2 10.5.0" ed aggiornarla con il Combo update da 600 e rotti mega, tutto perfettamente funzionante!

In bocca al lupo!

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Phanfare Photon 1.8 update

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 28 January 2009 11:50:00 AM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

Phanfare has released an update to its photo- and video-sharing application for the iPhone and iPod ...

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EU Rejects Intel Delay

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 28 January 2009 11:45:00 AM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

The European Union's Court of First Instance late Tuesday rejected requests by Intel to stall its in...

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On the Job 3.0 released

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 28 January 2009 11:25:00 AM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

Stunt Software has published the third edition of On the Job, an application dedicated to time track...

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First Look: iPhoto ‘09

post from TheAppleBlog on 28 January 2009 10:58:00 AM. © TheAppleBlog

I’ve spent several hours tinkering with Apple’s new iPhoto ‘09 — part of the newly updated iLife ‘09 suite of media applications — and I like what I’ve seen so far. The entire application is a strong step forward, and the exciting new features (facial recognition and geotagging) don’t disappoint. The following is a focused walkthrough of iPhoto ‘09 and the interesting new features it boasts.

Faces

The most interesting (to me at least) of iPhoto’s new tricks is facial recognition. Immediately after firing-up the application, your library will be updated, and then analysis of all captured faces begins. The nearly two thousand photos in my library took around 30+ minutes to process. Once it was done, I named the members of my family and began training it for accuracy. After confirming about 20 photos for each person, the results were pretty accurate. I’d get an awful lot of utility from this feature in Aperture — fingers crossed that it comes sooner than later.

An unexpected side effect of Faces was an answer to the question my wife and I ask each other often — which one of us do our kids look like? It was interesting to see my oldest showing up, mingled amongst images of me, and our middle mixed in with photos of my wife — we always considered it the other way around. I’m no expert on how the face-matching algorithm works, but its accuracy is enough that I trust its take on the question.

From the high level corkboard view of all the Faces you’ve identified, you can add extra information about each individual. Specifically, their full name and email address. A peek at Help, and I discovered that the email address comes in handy when using the Facebook upload feature, but details on this below.

A small niggle comes when updating the keyphoto (or identifying photo for a grouping of photos) for an individual. When reviewing the info for a person, you can scrub through their pictures and click on one to change the keyphoto. The keyphoto doesn’t change until you exit the info screen. Lack of instant gratification led me to believe it hadn’t worked. I would suspect this behavior to change in a later update.

iPhoto Faces Corkboard View

iPhoto '09 Picture Info Bezel

Places

Thanks to my GPS location tagging on my iPhone, Places immediately had some points of interest for me to review. The rest of my photos lack geographical EXIF data, so it was on me to mark them accordingly. Thankfully, the Events grouping makes it relatively easy to grab all images from a specific place and mark them at the map in one fell swoop. My preference is to geotag the trips we’ve taken — places that aren’t home, because home is the obvious place for the majority of our family photos.

The map displays pins, in typical Google Maps style, where your photos were shot, and hovering over the pin displays the name of the location and an arrow to view the related images. It’s simple and effective. The Smart Album button below the map makes it easy to create an album of all the photos from the location of the selected pin — nice if you want to group all of your ski photos for instance.

If you decide to email off some of your photos, you can choose to include location information. When I tested this however, I couldn’t find the location in EXIF, or captioned beneath the photo in the email. It’s quite likely I didn’t look in the right place, but from my experience, it didn’t seem to work. (Feel free to point me in the right direction in comments, if you’ve found it to work properly!)

The Places feature is nice, though for my family who doesn’t travel too terribly much, it’s not all that interesting. Though it does have me thinking much more about grabbing one of those slick Eye-Fi Explore memory cards which will handle the geotagging for me.

iPhoto '09 Places Map

iPhoto '09 Places Assignment

The combination of these different grouping options (Events, Faces, Places) is ridiculously powerful, with little user input. Suddenly we can find any photo or group of photos in a variety of different ways, cross-checking them by parameters in what might be described as different dimensions. This is very cool and I’m excited to see how my photo management evolves because of it.

Facebook & Flickr Upload

Prior to iPhoto ‘09 you could upload your photos to these two popular services, but through third party plugins. Now however, it’s baked right in (along with Mobile Me, if you like that sort of thing). The process is simple and streamlined, and when the upload is complete, iPhoto displays a clickable URL to go directly to the photos in your favorite browser. Very handy!

The Facebook integration has a couple of extra features that are nifty in an understated sort of way. At upload time, you can choose (directly within the iPhoto interface) the security level of your photos — who can actually view them. The other comes from the Faces feature, when you add the email address to an identified face in your library. That email address, when an associated picture is uploaded to Facebook, is matched to your Facebook friends and alerts them that a photo of them has been uploaded. This is quite nifty indeed!

iPhoto '09 Facebook Upload Link

Slideshows

If you’ve ever used the Flash gallery plugin SlideShowPro, it feels like much of iPhoto ’09’s slideshow layout and functionality came from there. This isn’t a bad thing mind you, it just has a very familiar feel to it, and it works.

The slideshow setup options are a bit more intuitive than they were in earlier versions of iPhoto, and get out of your way for full screen play as soon as you’ve selected your desired settings. Of the settings, there are 6 themes to choose from for presenting the photos. These themes give a fresh feel to the slideshows that were once ‘wowing,’ and as of late, getting a bit stale.

iPhoto '09 Slideshow Launch

Export

While you can use the Share menu in iPhoto to export your photos to iWeb, there’s a simpler option hidden under Export in the File menu. Webpage gives you some simple options for generating a barebones web gallery page with navigation. It’s nothing elaborate like iWeb, just a quick and dirty HTML generated gallery for when you need to throw some pictures up quickly (temporarily?).

There’s no doubt that iPhoto ‘09 is a wonderful update. The highlight features seem to work very well, and haven’t disappointed. I haven’t had time to play with the other iLife apps yet, as I’ve been working on this article. But if the rest of the updates are on par with iPhoto, the suite as a whole is certainly (as always seems to be the case) a steal at only $79.

Read The Full Article:
http://theappleblog.com/2009/01/28/first-look-iphoto-09/

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Cox Throttling Traffic

Cable Internet provider Cox today said it would start trialing a new congestion management scheme on...

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