Another appropriate title for this post would be: Torx Screws Are Evil
A second line for that other appropriate title would be: Especially if you don’t have a really tiny torx screwdriver.
What do you do when you get a brand new MacBook, with user-replaceable hard disk only to find out that once said user-replaceable drive has been removed, it’s freaking impossible to get the drive sled off due to torx screws? Improvise!
After attempting to remove the TamperResistant⢠Torx screws for about 30 minutes using everything but the right size torx screwdriver, since I don’t have one, and since Apple’s replacement guide mentions nothing about needing one to replace the drive (here), I decided to take matters into another realm within the toolchest: pliers.
And guess what, after about 5 minutes, I had the thing off and on the new drive with minor additional strippage (certainly less than what was done by the hex wrenches). This begs the question: if this is a user replaceable part, and Apple has gone out of its way to make it possible to replace it with ease, why use freaking torx screws? Honestly, how many of you have a Torx set including T8 T6 or whatever particular size these screws were? Those of you with Apple certification for repairing hardware can also put your hands down. Really, what were they thinking?!
As of late I’ve been looking for an optimal solution for running MATLAB on my brand new MacBook. I’ve tried running things natively under Windows & Linux as well as in Parallels for both, and the concept of rebooting ad-nauseum or working in a rooted (ie, having an operating system with a root window running) environment for either one doesn’t sound great unless one has an attached external display. With Windows this even allows for seamless mouse movement between environments. But either way, you’re sucking up a whole bunch of non-resizable (changing resolutions is a little too slow) screen realestate sucking windows either minimized or consuming one’s desktop. What solution is there for this without having to emulate MATLAB under Rosetta?
I’m glad you asked. While The MathWorks doesn’t support running MATLAB remotely through X11 forwarding or anything else, it actually works quite well so long as things are set up properly. The 3D performance will never be fantastic since GLX doesn’t work with forwarding, at least with Apple’s X11 (though perhaps it doesn’t do this at all considering in most cases the bandwidth usage would be prohibitive), however, everything else works great. I’ve been using a similar solution to access MATLAB graphically (no desktop) on a linux box using Windows & Mac clients, and it works perfectly.
So, I thought to myself, why not make a minimal linux setup under parallels that can boot an run matlab, and then use SSH & Apple’s X11 to access this environment locally. In the end you get individual plot windows, edit windows, etc.. that are just like other apps on your Mac, except that it’s running through a local virtual environment.
I’m going to work on a guide for getting things set up in this manner, though I need to work on tweaking the setup a bit to minimize the size of the linux install, and get the networking working properly (I’ve been having troubles as of late when switching between VPN, wireless & hardwired connections.). I will however give a quick rundown of what’s necessary to get this working.
- Parallels (here)
- Use Host-only networking, with internet sharing enabled, or not.
Linux (I’m using Ubuntu, but I’m going to see if I can pare things down a bit using, perhaps Slackware, Gentoo, or another Distro)
- Make sure you have X installed, and have an SSH daemon running
- MATLAB can be installed from loopback devices or actual CDs
MATLAB
SSH in with ssh -Y 192.168.2.X (where X is the class D portion of the IP for your environment, get the IP of your linux environment using ifconfig)
- Make sure you first “export DISPLAY=:0.0″ & Start Apple X11
- The -Y is necessary, though less secure, to enable trusted status for X connections coming over SSH.. if you do not enable this, sometimes windows won’t be sized properly, and other X apps may die very horrible deaths due to other issues, which I don’t know the technical origins of (pptpconfig is one such app)
Start up matlab! Personally I’m using “matlab -nodesktop” since I prefer running things from terminal. You still get Java plots and whatnot.
After a little more playing around with things I may post a parallels image with a minimal linux distro or something along those lines (if anyone is interested), along with brief instructions on installation.
Notes:
- This is still ugly since a fixed amount of RAM needs to be allocated for the whole environment.
- 3D stuff is damned slow
- I still consider this to be a nice holdover while waiting for TMW to release an intel compatible Mac release (or beta).
So, I’d written off the whole whining issue that everyone’s been talking about on Apple’s new portables, since I’ve now had a MacBook 13″ for about a week and had heard nothing along the lines of what people had been complaining about emanating from my new white bundle of joy. Well, the same still holds true, with one minor exception: my power brick is a whiner.
That’s right, it whines. Or at least it whines as of now while my MacBook is charging. It’s not nearly as bad as some people say, but it’s there.
Now, that said, there’s a bit of fun to be had with the whine. If you go and grab SystemLoad here: http://www.bresink.de/osx/SystemLoad.html you can get your machine to whine in scales. Not sure if it grates any less, but it adds an element of entertainment to it.
I’ve done a brief recording here: http://fanplastic.org/media/mb_whine.mov
So, someone decided to use XMLHttpRequest to implement a server-side blink tag. Fully standards compliant. The future is yesterday.
Here’s one I’m not sure I entirely get, though I’m sure it had to do with some sort of financial compensation:
Amazon is dumping Google in powering search results for A9 in favor of Live.com (operated by Microsoft).
I would assume that this has something to do with Microsoft offering some sort of financial deal to Amazon that it really liked, but I have to say that I don’t really get why Amazon would do this. I don’t think anyone would argue, at least at this point that live.com offers up better search results than Google, although perhaps I’m just not doing the same sorts of searches Live.com offers up great results for. Now, this wouldn’t bug me that much, if, say, Amazon simply switched to Live, and made Google a second class citizen, but they’ve gone a step further and made Google no longer even an option from A9. This type of change, to me, just reeks of some kind of corporate power play. To me, these sorts of activities are just dumb.
Amazon, if you’ve learned anything in your retail business it should be that choice is what brings customers to your store, suggestions or no. Removing options just turns people off if they actually notice. Maybe that’s what you’re counting on? Maybe people are too oblivious to notice? Even in a day and age where “google” is almost synonymous with search, and when even the vast majority of Microsoft employees choose Google over MSN/Live?
Extremely awesome little hack here. I think this officially makes Google Calendar a “killer app” for me. Basically what it lets you do is bring up a little box with a keystroke and type in things like “Running with John at 8am monday” hit return and have an event “Running with John” added to your Google Calendar at the appropriate time on the appropriate day. One doesn’t even need to be at the Google Calendar page to bring this up (although it works from there as well).
It’s the simple little elegant hacks that are the best :-)
