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Category: Blog News
News about me, my family and anything I comment on from the global news fronts.
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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 !
While I admit that I would like more memory and a faster CPU, I’m pretty sure that
- I don’t have time to play more games than the ones already on there
- most games for the foreseeable future will be compatible with the original iPad
- watching movies and surfing the web is what I do most
- the way things are going, end of this year or early next year we will have an iPad 3
So I’m waiting for iPad 3 or later. Depending on how strong my will is, actually.
I recently became interested again in programming in Flex after long abstaining from it when I found a tutorial on how easy it has become to consume a data service like Twitter, with the integrated wizard in Flash Builder. It looked to me like some nice tools could be made using that.
So I checked how much the upgrade would cost me : 277 Euros, vat included, to upgrade from Flex Builder 3 Pro to Flash Builder Premium.
This was a bit steep for me, just for trying out a new wizard. Further on, after reading a bit more I found out that Flash Builder Standard now contained all the charting elements that Flex Builder 3 standard had missed, and which was the reason I had bought Flex Builder Pro in the first place.
It also seems like I was stuck: I didn’t want or need the new “premium” features of Flash Builder 4, the standard would be fine for me, however the upgrade process always proposed me the Premium version of Flash Builder. Several other people on the internet are also complaining about this.
Really, they should have allowed people to purchase the standard edition, even if they came from the Flex Pro edition…
But then I remembered that I still had the original Flex Builder 3 standard edition – I had bought this originally, then bought the full suite. An upgrade from that to Flash Builder standard is only 99 Euros or so !
So I have bought the upgrade to Flash Builder standard and can now program in Flash again, for a very low price 🙂
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My Blackberry is not working…
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I’m neglecting my personal blog…
But then, I’m busy.
Actually my biggest peak is not shown, but somewhere early 2007 or so I had compiled a big list of tips and trick for a HTC windows Phone, and it became very popular. Once I switched to an Iphone I no longer added new content, and you can see that in the decline.
The uptick around march-may 2009 is more visitors because I wrote some articles about flex3 and how to use it (or at least how I used it).
At the end of 2009 I started up my other blog called DataConnect.be and it’s app, Twita. Most of my time is now focused on those sites trying to create an analysis program for twitter.