Author: alex
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Dropbox and iCloud : adverseries ?
I just read the announcement on macrumors.com on the upcoming iCloud beta that Apple will soon be launching.
Here is the pricing that Apple will set :
- 5 GB free, 10 additionnal GB is 20 dollars / euros a year.
- Bought books, music, apps etc are not counted into this.
Compare that to Dropbox, where I currently have 2,5 GB free storage (thanks to jumping through all the hoops that they wanted me to, default you have less).
The next step up is 50GB for 9.99 $ a month, which works out to about 120 dollars, which is too much for me, both in size and price.
On iCloud I would pay for the same amount (actually more than 50GB, the original 5 GB is also there) 100 dollars yearly, so substantially less.
Maybe Apple will only offer iCloud to Apple Mac users, in which case Dropbox still has a large amount of windows users that it can keep, but I doubt it.
My guess is that Dropbox will either lower the prices or give more GB for the same buck, and perhaps even dramatically so in order to stay competitive.
Update : seems that my calculations are a bit off. A deeper look with more nuance about dropbox and the different pricing can be found here via macstories.net.
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Discovering Magento
I’ve been looking at setting up a jewelry shop and Magento seems to fit the bill as an opensource solution for me.
I have to admit, that the learning curve is a bit steep, and installing it locally for a test drive is a hellish ordeal, where you need to configure your localhost file so that your computer has a dns name (at least for version 1.5.1 this was the case) with barely some explanation why this or that is not working.
Blogs aplenty with explications, each with slightly different errors and/or solutions, so while there is information, it’s not always clear if it is relevant.
Anyway, I got it up and running, hosted, and it works fine ! Oodles and oodles of config options, but there’s a logic in there (sometimes twisted logic, but still !)
Here are some sites / blog posts / magento modules I find useful:
My Father-In-Law passed away on June 14 this year. A man of few words, he loved his grandchildren dearly.
He taught me a lot on how to do things correctly as a handyman. I couldn’t even drill a hole in the wall when I met him.
The secret is preparation :
- use the tools best suited for the job
- prepare, measure and remeasure
- be precise
He will be sorely missed by all his friends.
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Third Economic Revolution
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How to format an NTFS drive on a Mac
As long as Apple doesn’t activate the NTFS driver that is supposed to be hidden in Snow Leopard, here is a quick way to format a drive (say, an external usb drive) to NTFS.
1/ Install the free MacFuse, which is a base for installing additional third party file systems on the mac
2/ Install the free open source driver NTFS-3G written by Tuxera (if you need this mucho times, you might want to think about buying the commercial driver which is more advanced, is only 25€ and comes with a lifelong upgrade). Otherwise the open-source driver works just fine.
3/ In the Mac’s Disk Utility, choose the drive and format it to NTFS-3G (an option which is only shown after installing the above).
4/ Done !
Nice !
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Using Parallels 6 on my Mac : wow !
I recently upgraded from Parallels Desktop 4 to 6, after doubting for a long time that it would do anything special, but I have to say that the difference is enormous between version 4 and version 6 !
Using Parallels 6 on my Macbook Pro and with 8GB of RAM both Windows XP and OS X run admirably well side by side. Cutover between one and the other (XP is running in a window) is instantaneous.
I even went so far to play Modern Warfare 2 (via Steam on XP) and it ran, although I couldn’t crank up to the maximum resolution and it ran a bit stuttery when going through a large combat scene. But still, it was playable and it impressed me enormously.
One game I’ve always wanted to play but never got to decently start is The Witcher, and I’ve installed it, and it runs beautifully, with no apparent slowdowns.
Nice !
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It gets better…
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Why Squareup won’t work in Europe.
I’ve been reading about Square, the latest new invention by Jack Dorsey, the co-creator of Twitter. You attach a little doohickey to your iphone, install an app and you can start swiping cards. It works by transforming the info into an audio signal that is decrypted by the app and sent to the square servers to do the actual payment.
Great idea, but in Europe (and more particularly, in Belgium) the banks are actively discouraging the swiping of creditcards – you need to notify your bank before leaving for a vacation outside of the european union so you can actually use your card in a foreign country, plus only a terminal that can read the chip and not the strip.
The magnetic stripe on your creditcard is easely duplicated, and as such seen as ‘too easy to defraud’. The chip is more secure.
So my guess is that the doohickey will either need to be adapted to read the chip and not the magnetic stripe, or else it will have a hard time landing in Europe. And I’m not the only one to think this.
For a PHP library with all the bells and whistles on it I usually install the php5 library from Marc at Entropy software. The php5 version that Apple supplies with Apache does not have everything that for example, Magento, needs.
Seems that the version currently available for download on his site does not work with Mac OS X 10.6.x.
However, another user has rebuilt the php library for 10.6 (using the instructions that Marc supplied to ‘roll your own’) and you can download the binary installer from his site.
Thanks Tarique !