Copying files to boot camp windows drive

I discovered that by default I can only view the files availabe on the Windows boot camp drive when I'm in Mac OS X. I needed to put some files on my Windows drive before booting Windows 7 for a while. After a quick google I discovered an article which mentions NTFS-3g that will allow you to write to any NTFS drive. Apparently it uses MacFUSE underneath.

Preparing to install Windows 7 RC on macbook

Before I try installing Windows 7, I decided to make a backup of my macbook using Time Macine. I tried using iTimeMachine to backup over the network. This small app will simply enable TM to be able to use some network shared folder on my Windows macine. After using this small utility I found out that you could easily do a command in the Terminal as will be shown in the link below.

I came across 2 problems when trying to use my Windows machine as a sort of Time Capsule. The first was that I needed to create a sparce bundle myself using Disk Utility and copying it over to the remote folder. That wasn't difficult to do as such as higlighted in the above link

However the second problem wasted me a lot of time. When TM was starting to do the intial backup it would stop complaining about a problem with the network username or password. This didn't make sense at all as I could browse the folder with Finder using the same exact password. Apparently the solution was to reboot my mac and remove all keys to my windows machine (not just the Time Machine System key). Not sure about the reboot whether that helped or not. Right now I'm waiting for TM to finish so I can start installing Windows 7 RC.

Mac - I'm Lovin' it

It's been slightly over a month with my second hand MacBook. I'm simply lovin' it. I'm still migrating from windows. I'm only using my windows machine through remote desktop. In fact I unplugged the monitor, keyboard and mouse and hooked them to the laptop :)

Still getting used to XCode, Objective-C and OpenGl but it's fun.

The MacBook came pre-installed with MS Office 2008, but I wasn't impressed with it. I must admit that MS Office is better on the Windows platform, more responsive.

The other complaint I got is when minimizing a window, won't get restored when you switch back to the application. It makes sense when you think that the Macs are application oriented and not window oriented, but still is frustrating having to get hold of the mouse to go over the dock and restore it. The work around using Command-H to hide the window instead.

But besides these minor details, I still think that a mac is better than windows. We'll see how I'll feel in a couple of months down the line.

Changing Process Priority on Mac OS X

On Windows I used to bring up the Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and quickly change the priority of a process, e.g. to a lower priority so that some process doesn't make the machine feel slow when some CPU intensive task takes over.

On Mac OS X I thought I would fire up the Activity Monitor and right click to change the priority. Apparently it's not that easy. I fired up google and found out that I need to get the PID from Activity Monitor and then launch a terminal and use the renice command.

E.g. sudo renice +1 -p 3692

A process can have a priority between +20 (lowest priority) and -20 (highest priority). 0 is the default priority. The above will make the the process with PID 3692 with a slightly lower priority.

Migrating Shortcuts from Windows to Mac

Copy Pasting
Instead of Control use the Command Key (⌘). So Ctrl-C becomes ⌘-C on the Mac.
First of all, if you plugged in a Windows keyboard, the Start button acts as the ⌘ key.

Undo Redo
The Undo shortcut is similar, ⌘-Z however the Redo you need to hold the shift key while doing ⌘-Z.

The hash/pound # key
To type the hash / pound # key, you need to press the Alt together with the 3. I got stuck on this when I wanted to do a #import :)

Navigating Text
In Windows Ctrl-arrow keys would navigate the text word by word. On the Mac you need to use the Alt instead of the Ctrl. (Luckily on XCode, the Ctrl shortcut does the same thing). The End and Home keys will take you the very end and start position of the whole text. Very annoying since on Windows we are used to be related with the current line being edited. To go to the end or start of the line you need to press Ctrl together with an arrow key.

Quick Dark Scheme
In Windows I use WindowBlinds and my Dark Aqua scheme, (inspired from the Mac). There are some skinning applications on the Mac, but I haven't found what I'm looking for to be able to switch completely to a black skin. However there's a quick native shortcut which will invert the colors, and so if you feel that your eyes are getting strained during those late night coding hours, you can easily switch to a black scheme by hitting Ctrl-Alt-⌘-8.

Killing processes
You can either launch Activity Monitor to replace Task Manager. Or you can launch the Force quit menu by pressing Alt-⌘-Esc.

Fell in Love with the Mac

This is going to be a brain dump of the last two weeks using the MacBook.

I have been a Windows user from the beginning. I didn't like Macs a lot ("where's the right mouse button?"), until I saw the release of Mac OS X. And finally I got my own MacBook. It felt like an alien dropped by and gave me his laptop. Every shortcut I knew in Windows needs to be rewired in my brain.

Very nice machine. Besides being impressed by the hardware and OS, I was mostly impressed by getting started to develop for the mac and iphone/ipod touch.

I love the fact that I can drop into a terminal window and have unix commands at my fingertips. I have done some remote unix server admin, although I still need to learn a lot in this area.

Installing applications is dead easy...dragging into the Applications folder. You want to uninstall? You just remove it from the Applications folder! Hah. Although I have found a small application called AppDelete which will make sure to remove any config files, etc which won't be used any more.

Why oh why didn't I switch to a Mac ages ago? Money is always the problem.

I got the Macbook for development. So I got a second hand Macbook and I want to plug it to a keyboard and monitor (considering KVM switch until I put my Windows machine down). I also got a Mini-DVI to DVI connector, so now I'm using SGI 1600sw as the primary monitor and the Macbook as the secondary monitor. The SGI is quite old now but IMHO it is still a very good monitor :D. I like this dual monitor setup... on the macbook I keep the documentation and on the SGI I keep XCode windows.

Which reminds me about XCode and Objective-C. Currently I'm learning about Objective-C which apparently was released in the same year as C++, but I didn't hear about it before this year. It has some interesting concepts like categories, and I missed the fact of passing functions as parameters. I have used Java to much now. Got me lazy with that garbage collector :) Finding it annoying now to have to use reference counting to properly release variables. Got a lot to learn...

I started an OpenGL ES application for the IPhone. That just only means that I let XCode generate the template :) I'm still looking at tutorials. First stumbling block was drawing text. There are two ways how to do that. You either create a texture for the text you want to show, but that leads to a problem if you are changing the text every frame plus its memory inefficient. The second approach is creating a single texture containing all the characters and keep track of each characters kerning and spacing. Ughhh I had done the latter ages ago on Windows. Guess someday I will need to reimplement it unless I find some ready made class (which I have found yet). For now I will create a texture for each string :(.

Getting a macbook!

It's been a while. Have been busy working with a game company last year, and this year I'm working as a lecturer. Teaching students takes a lot of my time, but hopefully during the summer time I will have some time to do some small game project.

I'm hoping of developing something small on the iphone and try my luck publishing on the app store. It's not for the money, it's for the fun of it. The iphone is a pretty cool device and I've hear good things about its APIs. I've already got a quick prototype in Flash, but now I will need to port it to iphone SDK.

First things first... I need some mac machine. So I just bought a second hand macbook through ebay. Waiting for it to arrive on this island! Let the iphone adventure begin...