Up for Grabs!
After watching the Cat in action and ingesting a gut-busting supper at
Swenson's, SMRT 61 was just the ride I was waiting for.
Walking towards the bus stop with
Otterman and Ladybug, I spied an earlier 61 speeding away. Eyeballing that bus as it sped off didn't raise any concerns with me as I had a hunch that another would be on its way shortly.
True enough, the minutes could not have ticked by any faster before that familiar number appeared over the bend. Another person, who turned out to be waiting for the same bus, had a smile on his face. Perhaps we'll both get home sooner after all.
Excuse me sir, you're on my seat!
There was no one on board. Absolutely no one at all. Even at this hour of the morning, there had been in the past, at least one, or two, or three passengers ghosting the circuit. Now it seemed as if this bus had materialized out of a dimensional warp minus the passengers. Yes, I could have made small talk with the driver to confirm the theory but what I really wanted was a cold shower and my cool bed.
But what of my fellow passenger? He proceeded to change seats three times during the course of my journey. As far as he was concerned, all the seats were up for grabs!
Paris at the Hilton
The cameras were clicking away. The atmosphere was tense with expectation. The crowd was exhaling in gasps.
Sleek lines and sexy moves were laid out for all to see as the cat came round the bend. The photographic firepower deployed that night was devastating! This was Paris at the Hilton.
"Over here, baby!"
"Oh yes...! Yes!"
"More! More! More!"
It was certainly worth the wait. As sagging bodies and limp hair-dos sank into their seats, the breath of excitement blew the
lethargy out of
every one's sails. Immediately leaping to action, mega-buck cameras were drawn and lens caps were uncorked.
The
celebrity was none other than Apple's new operating system ten dot five. Though this was a developers release, it turned tricks on a three year-old lamp-shade
iMac with 256MB of RAM. It wasn't that responsive but it worked, the hard drive scrambling to serve out virtual memory to a hungry beast.
"Hello boys! Is that a camera lens in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?"So much attention lavished on an object of plastic, metal and silicon running lines of code, the one remark from
Acroamatic said it all "Guys, it's just a computer."
The Great Singapore Dell Sale
They just keep coming. Marketing at its best. Straight forward, direct and to the point.
Everything but the toaster.
Ten
I woke up to this bomb shell. Apple's tenth update for the fourth version of its Operating System X, or Ten. Never in the history of software updates has Apple ever dropped a Ten.
Otterman says "Go Fetch!"
Installation is very simple. I download the combo update, all 295MBs worth, before running a permissions repair. Then I reboot into Safe Mode while holding down the Shift key. After applying the update, I reboot again before
Cocktailing my Mac. This way, all files that need updating are guaranteed while the ones that have gone bad through abuse or neglect, are replaced.
Judging by the cumulative size of every subsequent update, Apple is substituting large chunks of optimized x86 code into the Intel platform. Also it wasn't too long ago, when the first Intel Macs appeared with PowerPC applications, that Apple has been replacing with Universal Binary ones. The future ahead is going to get
better and more exciting.
In the meantime, an
eleven is on its way.
Plenty of Pulp
For a second year running,
The Economist gets my money again. Throwing up the standard subscription rate, plus an added 10 percent sweetener for auto-renewals, this weekly news magazine delivers beyond its price point.
So you've got a deal for me?
Any of these subscription plans will not only give full access to the web edition, a weekly print edition will find its way into your mailbox.
This is an alternative view to the Americanized outlook on world issues. In fact, The Economist also fields greater coverage on Africa, Central Asia and the near-East. However this is not to be mistaken with conservative Euro-centric writing as The Economist features progressive and pragmatic views and analysis.
The pages read with wit and jest, and with the print edition slightly smaller than an A4 print, your window to the world should never have to leave you even while you're waiting for the bus.
The Club 21 Sale
And not a day too late when this notice arrived.
By far, this is
the End of Season event when all fashion boutiques under the
Club 21 stable go on sale.
So never mind where I shop, cause I won't tell. But some friends have already guessed at how I feed by wardrope.
Twenty Four, Seven
A check of
BOINC yielded these results. After instituting a policy of never shutting down the PCs under my care, this is what I have to show for.
Get back to work!
And that was four years ago. Since then, the computing power of central processing units has grown exponentially. Many
globally distributed computing projects have sprung up like mushrooms under the unified BOINC architecture. All of them tweaked, or re-tweaked, for greater workloads given the heft in recent processing power.
For comparison, a 400MHz G4 Titanium PowerBook with 1 GB of RAM, took an average of 12 hours to complete an
Einstein work unit three years ago.
More than you can chew?
Today it takes a whopping 107 hours! Such is the scale of progress and demand. So you can bet 24/7 that with the next generation of Intel multi-core CPUs being rolled out like hot chips, these distributed work units will get bigger and more complex.
Soggy Trek
Trekking through
Mount Tamborine Nature Reserve in the middle of a Gold Coast winter seemed like a thing to do on a lazy Sunday. It had rained earlier and the weather was so damp, you could see the moisture droplets floating in the wind.
This doesn't look right somehow...
It was just Jon, Kim and myself that day. We had just finished breakfast and had taken the car up the winding road to find a deserted carpark. Looks like we had the place all to ourselves.
However that was a year ago. Trudging through the rain at Macritchie Reservoir with a group of participants this morning brought back memories. Fortunately, there were no water-laden trees flattening people or bolts of lightning frying the remainder. Only the sound of rain drops on my cap, shuffling feet and the near absence of the usual Sunday crowd.
Organized by the
Briskwalkers Club, who meet every alternate Sunday, this was the last of two organized
public walks to introduce the diverse ecology from Macritchie Reservoir to the summit of Bukit Timah Hill. You could sense the satisfaction from everyone who had made it to the summit. Having walked the route so many times in the past, I've even run the entire distance, no one in the group will ever settle for anything less than an assault on the summit should they make another effort.
Everybody now, say "cheese... prata!"
So here we are this morning, soggy but satisfied, before heading off to a hearty breakfast and lively conversation.
I'd do Anything for Sushi!
This notice of Bebe the Missing Cat, was seen on one of the blocks in my estate.
Where's my sushi?
It has been more than a week since 6th June and the poster is still on the wall. Presumably no one has seen or heard from Bebe.
On the other hand, Bebe may have dropped by your house for some sushi and has decided to stay.
Vintage and Omegamania
Horologer
Harry Tan has put out the call!
The Heirloom Gallery will see Dr. Bernard Cheong will give the low down on vintage mechanical timepieces!
Organized on Friday 29th June, The Heirloom Gallery is a natural choice for the event given its preference for all machanicals Omega.
Once one of the leading watch houses of Switzerland, Omega had suffered the same near-death experience during the quartz crises of the 1970s. After being brought under the Swatch Group, it has seen a revival in its fortunes and gathered renewed interest with success of the
Omegamania Antiquorom auction in 2006.
I have never paid vintage watches much attention, given my preference for the contemporary. However with the ever astronomical prices commanded by established brands, collectors have been looking at vintage through different eyes. In addition, advances in technology and restoration techniques have pushed the appeal of vintages timepieces from mildly tolerable to highly desirable. So how to judge a golden egg from a lemon?
The Sarotech Hardbox
Storage Studio at Sim Lim Square was my immediate destination. Research by
AnandTech had found the Hitachi 500GB SATA drive with 16MB cache to be the best performer in the drive shoot-out against
Seagate and Western Digital.
This time I needed an external case to house the thing. It wasn't too long ago when I used to smirk when my disadvantaged MacUsing buddies will scratch their heads pondering external drive cases. They were either chained to laptops or burdened with non-expandable desktops. Yes, it wasn't too long ago that my G4 MDD desktop could house anything and everything I wanted. But it's time to move on with technology and my choices don't look too promising.
My iMac only has provisions for USB 2.0 and Firewire 400. This is shameful as these two data interfaces do not allow the drive to fulfill its true potential. Even though Apple has been on the SATA bandwagon since the G5, SATA ports have yet to make an appearance on the iMacs, MacBook Pros and Mac Pros.
In the age of speed, it is baffling that Apple would leave out the fastest data interface short of the Ultra RAID SCSI. A first generation SATA interface can pump out 1.5 gigabits of data per second. That's twice what Firewire 800 can do. Second generation SATA, named SATA2, doubles that to 3 gigabits.
So what am I to choose? The future-proof buyer in me went for the only option available. I was shown the Sarotech HardBox with three interfaces: USB 2.0, Firewire 400 and SATA2. This box would have been perfect if it had offered a fourth interface: Firewire 800.
Look, it even comes with a soft carrying case!I'm hedging that Apple will eventually see the light and offer SATA ports. Their current 24"
iMacs already sport Firewire 800. Data transfer junkies will be watching future iterations of the beastly
MacPros. If those beasts come with SATA ports, then there's be a chance that Apple will filter them down the line to the iMacs.
C'mon, Apple! Open up that mouth of yours!
Two Lane Highway
The
Federal Express agent handed the box over as I initialed my signature. It had taken OWC just three days to ship the
RAM for Snow White, who had been hungry for that most basic and cost-effective of upgrades. Random Access Memory.
Highway expansion tools.
The current generation of iMacs are powered the 64-bit Intel
Core 2 Duo "Merom" CPU slotted on the
Mobile 945GM Express 'Napa' chipset. One of the main features of this chipset is the asynchronous 667MHz bus that addresses all available system RAM as a contiguous array. Apple states that when two pieces of RAM of the same capacity are installed, the interleaving function improves performance.
All that Memory Interleaving Goodness!
Why is this significant? By having the interleaving function enabled, applications that require a lot of memory access will perform faster. However the liability of the "Napa" chipset is that it will only recognize a maximum capacity of 3.3GB of RAM. Apple has taken the high road of limiting it to 3GBs. MacUsers who pursue the option of installing two 2GB matched pairs of RAM will see 4GBs of RAM listed. However, only 3GBs will be accessed by the system, leaving 1GB unused.
The good news is that Intel's up-coming
Mobile 965 Express Chipset will give MacUsers the full benefit of the 4GB RAM headroom on their MacBooks, MacBook Pros and iMacs.
Snow White spinning Beach Balls
After more than a decade, a day was all it took to transition me from yesterday's landfill to tomorrow's inevitable landfill. My trusty
Dual 1.25GHz G4 MDD had been sold. This cleared the way forward to Apple's Intel platform.
As I unpacked my 20" iMac from its box, I mused at one of the computing industry's short-lived comedies, the G5. Apple had been goading
IBM to flog the living lights out of the
PowerPC 970 platform, to deliver that illusive 3GHz G5 to its loyal users.
However there was no time to waste. My iMac had been sighted on
Apple Singapore's refurbished offerings. A couple of clicks and a day later...
Is that a mouse in your pocket? Or are you happy to see me?Being a refurbished product, I was prepared to accept cosmetic imperfections like dents and scratches. However Snow White smelled brand new out of the box. Even the coating of the LCD screen was free of any blemishes.
Ain't she sexy?
Putting Snow White through the usual initiation of a clean OS and application installation, my initial reaction was that the process went smoothly and fast. And so it should be, given that everything is faster. There are no spinning beach balls.
CoconutID told me that Snow White was assembled in March this year. Looking at the 'DOA' sticker on the box, I wondered what may have been the problem with this machine. Was it the logic board, power supply or LCD screen?
A Great Leap Forward?
Refurbished hardware would have had to suffer a significant malfunction, prompting Apple to perform an immediate unit exchange with the buyer. Thus this marks a paradigm shift in the way I view computers.
In all my previous purchases of Macintosh hardware, I was an advocate of super expandable desktops. Partly due to the promise of the advancement in technology, bits could be added and portions could be changed later to extend the life after the initial expense. The other consideration was the fact that Apple had always been slow to adopt the latest technologies in the computing world.
All that changed with Apple's transition to Intel. Now the future of Apple's hardware is more secure and hence, predictable. Tons of information can be had from
Intel's website. Once you've gotten the overview of where Intel is headed, you can be sure that Apple will be right in step with them.
No, it wasn't stolen.
However the most significant was the decision to purchase a refurbished Macintosh. I had gathered promising feedback from friends and fellow MacUsers who had gone the similar route. So the extra money saved, has gone into beefing up system memory and purchasing an external hard drive.
As I type this, I can see my father gleefully preparing for his infamous stress tests...
