Macbook Air

I think its interesting that apple decreased the price of the least spec Macbook Air rather than increase the specs. I wonder if this was because of the later introduction of the rumored 12 inch retina Macbook Air. Or is the 11/13 inch Macbook Air so perfect that there is no way to improve on it without increasing the price drastically.

I recently bought a 15 inch dell laptop with a touch screen. The only thing new and exciting in the machine was the touch screen. Turns out on a traditional laptop a touch screen isn't that useful or exciting. I barely use the touch screen, or touch features of Windows 8.1. Usage patterns might be different on a 2-in-1 laptop though. Since the Macbook Air is a traditional laptop, I don't see why Apple would add a touch screen.

Even a 2011 Macbook Air is fast and capable enough these days for most tasks. With that in mind, I guess I'm glad that Apple hasn't made any changes to the machine, and has left it perfect as it is. 

Developing websites for retina display

Don't use Javascript libraries for retinafying

I'm not sure if this is a good idea. What about those people (currently in the majority) who have normal displays and limited bandwidth or data cap. As it is web pages are so bloated, what happens when you add web content that is made for retina displays. Suddenly these bloated pages are now an order of magnitude larger in size. 

Revisiting OS X

Started using OS X again (Lion), and was a little happy to see that despite all the changes, dmesg still works.

This post is a good pointer to get write capabilities for ntfs on Lion.

Guide: Enable native NTFS Read/Write in Snow Leopard - Mac Forums

Guide: Enable native NTFS Read/Write in Snow Leopard - Mac Forums:

"I am sure many of you heard that Snow Leopard was supposed to have native read/write for NTFS partitions. Apple supported NTFS R/W in older SL builds but I guess decided to not to go with it for some reason, however support is still present.
For this, you need to modify your /etc/fstab file to mount NTFS partitions for read and write.

First, uninstall NTFS-3G/Paragon if installed.
Open Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
Type 'diskutil info /Volumes/volume_name' and copy the Volume UUID (bunch of numbers).
Backup /etc/fstab if you have it, shouldn't be there in a default install.
Type 'sudo nano /etc/fstab'.
Type in 'UUID=paste_the_uuid_here none ntfs rw' or 'LABEL=volume_name none ntfs rw' (if you don't have UUID for the disk).
Repeat for other NTFS partitions.
Save the file (ctrl-x then y) and restart your system.

After reboot, NTFS partitions should natively have read and write support. This works in both 32 and 64-bit kernels. Support is quite good and fast, it even recognizes file attributes such as hidden files."

This worked for me.

Cocoahead videos

 

Debugging with Xcode

Two cool videos from cocoahead. Debugging with Xcode embedded above, and UI Design Essentials which can be downloaded from Scott Stevenson's site.

via theocacao.com

First Virus

I was confused to read this:

A reporter just called me and wanted to talk about my virus, Elk Cloner, that I wrote back in 1982, when I was in the 9th grade.

I had the distinct impression that the first computer virus was the Brain virus, and I was pretty proud of the fact. It was written by a Pakistani, and I'm a Pakistani! Or at least a variant of it was.

After digging around a little, I found this entry by Bruce Schneier which explained that Brain might have been the first PC virus. But the Elk Cloner was written for the Apple II, hence, its the first computer virus. Cool, I'm fine with Brain being the first PC virus! :)

The strange thing is that Bruce Schneier's entry celebrates 20 years of the ElkCloner Virus, and the entry is from last year! Hmmm...