Category Archives: Software

Snow Leopard Is Considered Fast?

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I was reading the New York Time’s technology section this morning on my iPod Touch (ironically) and ran across something I found quite humorous in an article about Apple’s latest version of their operating system, Snow Leopard:

In any case, Snow Leopard truly is an optimized version of Leopard. It starts up faster (72 seconds on a MacBook Air, versus 100 seconds in Leopard).

72 seconds? Really? I don’t know if it’s just me or what, but I find that very slow. I realize that is on a laptop so the CPU probably isn’t great, but comon.

For comparison, I just did a cold boot of my computer and timed it with my iPod’s stopwatch app. It’s specs are nothing amazing (it’s over 18 months old) and I’m running Windows 7 RC1 (build 7100).

  • 0 sec — power button is pressed
  • 10 sec — BIOS screen pops up
  • 25 sec — Windows logo appears (i.e. Windows starts loading)
  • 50 sec — login screen appears (25 seconds after Windows started loading)

After I typed in my password, it only took about 5 seconds (10 max) for my desktop, start bar, start menu, etc. to show up. That’s nearly 15 seconds faster than Leopard, 40 seconds faster if you ignore the 25 seconds that it took my computer to run through it’s pre-OS checks.

I admit it took another 30 seconds or so before everything else was loaded, but in Windows 7’s defense I have about two dozen programs set to auto-start (IRC, BitTorrent, twhirl, etc. etc.). When the install was fresh, it loaded the desktop in an instant.

Or is my reverse Apple fanboism clouding my judgment?

Automatically Keep Your SVN Checkouts Up To Date In Windows – Rev. 2

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This is an improvement upon my earlier post on how to keep SVN checkouts automatically up to date.

DD32 used his awesome Googling skills to find this page in the TortoiseSVN docs that talks about automation. Turns out you can launch TortoiseSVN via the command line, have it update the folder(s), and then close when done. So here’s an updated guide.

These instructions are for Vista, but they are likely similar for XP.

  1. If you don’t already have TortoiseSVN installed, download and install it.
  2. If you don’t already have a copy of WordPress checked out to a folder, do it. WordPress’ in-development SVN URL is http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/
  3. Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Task Scheduler
  4. On the right, click on “Create Task” (not the basic one)
  5. Fill out as follows. Paths will likely be different! Click for bigger versions.

Done!

To test it to make sure it’s working properly, delete a few non-custom files from your SVN’ed folder. wp-trackback.php, xmlrpc.php, etc. are good test files. Then click on “Task Scheduler Library” in Task Scheduler (it’s on the left), click once on your new task, and then click “Run” on the right-hand side. If it’s working properly, the files your deleted will be restored.

Man I Hate iTunes

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More fun experiences with iTunes today. Trying to upgrade my iPod Touch’s firmware after manually downloading iTunes 8.0 (automatic update kept failing) only to find I need to upgrade to iTunes 8.0 from 8.0 in order to upgrade my firmware.

Clicking on “Download iTunes” does nothing. Awesome.

Translate Any Webpage In One Click

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Thought I’d share a little bit of code I use to easily translate any webpage I’m viewing into English in one click.

Open your Bookmarks and add a new Bookmark to the “Bookmarks Toolbar” folder in Firefox (sorry IE users, you’re on your own). Name it anything (I did “Translate”) and for the location, enter this:

javascript:void(location.href='http://translate.google.com/translate?tl=en&u='+location.href)

That should make a new button show up in your toolbar and when you click it, it will take you to Google and translate the website into English.

Firefox 3 Is Out

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Firefox 3 came out today. It is entirely awesome and I really suggest you give it a try. I’ve been using the betas for a week or two and I love it to death.

Oh, and before you complain about the “awesome bar” (aka the new address bar), give it a few days to learn your browsing habits. It’s sorting order will greatly improve as you surf the web.

I Hate iTunes

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I officially hate iTunes and that I am forced to use it to manage my iPod Touch. Okay, so I can tick the manual box and just drag and drop any songs I want to be on it, but the fact that it refuses to fetch album artwork for all my CDs drives me nuts. A huge part of the thing is displaying the album artwork (you can fly through it, it displays while playing, etc.). Worst of all, even if Winamp has already snagged the album artwork and saved it as a JPEG in the album’s folder, iTunes won’t notice it and I’d have to manually add it to my bazillion albums. Why oh why…

SuperGenPass

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SuperGenPass

Back in the day, I used to just use the same password (well, a couple really, but still) on all sites I had to register on. This made it easy to remember, but the problem is that if one of my accounts was compromised, that password could be used to get into all of my other accounts.

So, for a while, I used a random password generator extension for Firefox, but it was slow and relied on Firefox remembering all my passwords (what happens if my hard drive died?).

Enter the ingenious SuperGenPass. It combines the two solutions I used previously. From the FAQ:

A bookmarklet is a chunk of JavaScript code stored in your Web browser as a bookmark or favorite. There’s no software to install, so you can use SuperGenPass across all platforms and in any modern Web browser. It also makes it easy to use on public computers where access rights may be restricted.

How it works

SuperGenPass uses your master password and the domain name of the Web site you are visiting as the “seed” for a one-way hash algorithm. The output of this algorithm is your generated password. If either your master password or the domain name of the Web site changes, even by one character, the generated password will be drastically different.

For example, let’s say that your master password is “cornflakes”. If you use SuperGenPass at yahoo.com, your generated password will be “r9AQeOhBgU”. If you use SuperGenPass at amazon.com, your generated password will be “zcbEm1t32B”. SuperGenPass doesn’t need to remember this or store it anywhere, because it’s just a (very complex) math problem: the result is the same every time. And because SuperGenPass uses a one-way hash function, no one will be able to reverse-engineer your master password from your generated passwords.

Simply put, you come up with one password and SuperGenPass will generate a unique, re-creatable password for any domain name you visit. It even fills in the password fields for you. I’ve dragged it up onto my top toolbar in Firefox, so I just click it and bam, I’m done.

No more having to remember more than one password or worry about your password being stolen and used on multiple sites.