William Computer Blog

Following Dell’s recall of 4.1 million notebook batteries, Apple also recalled 1.8 million batteries used in PowerBook and iBook G4 notebooks. The rechargeable lithium-ion batteries — manufactured by Sony — are recalled because they can overheat and burst into flames.

You should check Apple’s website if you bought iBook G4, PowerBook G4 or separate batteries for these products. The page also include information how to find your computer serial number, battery model number and battery serial number.

Last month, Apple also recalled the batteries for 15-inch MacBook Pro notebooks sold between February 2006 through May 2006.

Lately, there’s been so many incident with notebook batteries. You should never leave your notebook on unattended. You should also consider removing the battery from the unit when connected to an electronic socket.

Yesterday, I found Desktop Linux Survey conducted by DesktopLinux.com. The survey asked users of linux desktops to identify what distribution they use, window environment, web browser, email clients, emulator/virtualization software they use. When I filled the browser part, I realized I’ve been using multiple browsers to browse the web. Today I’m going to share my browsing habit.

I use Camino as my main web browser. It is an open source web browser based on Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine. I installed CamiTools, CamiScript and Inquisitor to extend the functionality of Camino. I use Camino to browse sites that I frequently visit. Sites such as Gmail, Google, Sydney Morning Herald, Digg, etc. Out of all the browsers, I spend most of my time with Camino.

Flock is the browser I use to write a new blog entry. A built-in blog editor is included with Flock, allowing me to blog from within the browser without the need to install a 3rd party extension. One of my favorite feature of Flock is the ability to automatically generate HTML code I drag-and-drop a photo from my Flickr. When you drag and drop a photo from your hard disk to a textarea form, Flock will give you a choice to upload your photos to photo sharing service sites such as Flickr and Photobucket. Another reason to use Flock for blogging is it’s ability to store snippets of photos or text so you can use them later (by dragging and dropping it).

I use Safari with Saft plugin to read long documents/articles. Saft plugin gives Safari the ability to restore your browsing session when you quit Safari. Whenever I find an article that is too long (more than 10 pages) but I don’t have time to read it, I will open them in Safari and save the session so I could read them on the weekend.

Firefox is mainly used for web development. I installed different useful plugins such as FireBug, and Web Developer Plugin. Firefox is also installed on my secondary computers (Linux and Windows desktop computers).

Opera is installed on my computer for guests to use. When my friends or family wants to borrow access to my computer, I always let them use Opera to browse the web. The reason why I don’t want people to use my main browser is because I always have my gmail/Yahoo mail opened. I don’t want to logout from my mail account so other people can access their mail.

I also have access to IE6 and IE7 browser on my Windows desktop, however I rarely use them unless I have to. I use Internet Explorer 6 and 7 to test new sites and to run Microsoft Update.

Do you use multiple browsers or just one browser? Feel free to share your browsing habit!

You can now save your favorite videos from YouTube to your hard disk by using youtube-dl, a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube. It requires the Python interpreter 2.4 or later and it is platform independent (should work on linux, windows, mac, etc).

To install youtube-dl, you should put the python script under PATH, I recommend putting it inside /usr/local/bin. Once youtube-dl is inside your PATH, you should be able to access the script by typing youtube-dl.

To download video from youtube.com type:

youtube-dl http://youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg

The above command will download and save the video on your hard drive in flv format. Good luck!

Dave Watanabe, the developer of NewsFire is offering a good deal:

This weekend only, if you buy NewsFire, the most beautiful RSS newsreader on the Mac, you will get a free license for Inquisitor, the instant search extension for Safari that makes searching the web just like using Spotlight.

NewsFire is listed in the top 10 most beautiful OS X app. If you’re looking for a good RSS newsreader NewsFire is recommended.

Create your own web 2.0 style logo using this cool web 2.0 logo creator by Alex P. The logo creator will create a flickr style logo.

“Hello, I’m a Wii and I’m a Playstation 3”

Inspired by Apple’s Get a Mac campaign.

I’m planning to purchase a new large LCD display since the prices of large LCD displays have dropped. I plan to connect the LCD display to my MacBook Pro. Working on a 15-inch laptop display is not big enough for my computing needs.

After reading reviews of many different LCD displays, I decided to choose between the 23-inch Apple Cinema Display and Dell 2407WFP. I still haven’t make my final decision because it’s difficult to make a decision between two great products. Both monitors share similar technical specifications and each product have its pros and cons.

Specifications

Dell 2407WFP and 23-inch technical specification

	Dell 2407WFP	23-inch ACD
Price	A$ 1199	A$ 1599
Screen Size	24 inches	23 inches
Resolution	1920 x 1200	1920 x 1200
Contrast Ratio	1000:1	700:1
Response Time	16 ms	14 ms
Viewing Angle	178° vertical; 178° horizontal	178° vertical; 178° horizontal
Brightness	450 cd/m2	400 cd/m2
Interface	VGA DVI with HDCP S-Video Composite Component 4x USB 2.0	DVI 2x FireWire 400 2x USB 2.0
Warranty	3 Years	1 Year

Why I like Dell 2407WFP

By looking at the above specification, the Dell 2407WFP offer more video input options than the Apple Cinema Display. Since Dell offers more input than Apple, it allows me to connect the monitor to more than one devices. I can connect my old PC to the VGA port, connect my MacBook Pro to the DVI port, and connect my DVD player to the S-Video/Composite and connect an Xbox 360 to the Component port. The Dell 2407WFP also have called PIP (Picture in Picture) and PBP (Picture by Picture) technologies features.

The Dell 2407WFP DVI port supports HDCP, a form of digital rights management (DRM) to control digital audio and video content as it travels across the DVI connections. The HDCP support will allow me to watch the next generation high-definition content. Buying a monitor with HDCP support will future-proof the monitor as we enter HD-DVD and Blu-Ray era.

Dell monitor is also cheaper by $400 than 23-inch Cinema Display. Let’s move on to why I like the 23-inch cinema display.

Pros: Cheaper price, more video input options, HDCP support, Picture in Picture, Picture by Picture, Media card readers, More adjustable.

Cons: Design doesn’t match aluminium enclosure of MacBook Pro, Doesn’t look as good as Apple’s Cinema Display.

Why I like the Apple

I personally like the design of the Apple Cinema Display better. The Apple Cinema Display is designed to match the aluminium enclosure of my MacBook Pro. In a comparison test between the Apple Cinema Display and Dell LCD (30-inch) done by CNet, the Apple Cinema Display won by a slight margin.

According to the test, the Apple Cinema Display won in the DVD-playback test, displaying less digital noise, and more-realistic skin tones. It also won the more technical rounds providing a more-vivid colors and better grayscale differentiation.

Pros: Better design, match with aluminium enclosure of MacBook Pro, slightly faster response time, better video playback, more vivid-colors, and better grayscale differentiation.

Cons: A$ 400 more expensive, smaller screen size (by 1-inch), lack of video input, lower contrast ratio and brightness, no HDCP support and 1-year warranty.

I have the whole weekend to decide which display to get because orders placed on the weekend will be processed on the next business day. If you have any comment/suggestion feel free use the comment form.

The next server version of Mac OS X Server 10.5 Leopard is also available for people to take a peek. Some of the new features are iCal Server, Wiki Server, Spotlight Server, Podcast Producer, 64-bit support, iChat server, Apache 2, MySQL 5, Postfix, Cyrus, Ruby on Rails with Mongrel, QuickTime Streaming Server 6, and many more. The new server operating system is expected to ship at the same time as the client version of Leopard.

iCal Server

iCal Server is a calendar server for Mac OS X allowing organizations to share calendars, schedule meetings, and coordinate events. iCal Server uses open standard calendaring protocols called CalDAV. CalDAV is a protocol allowing calendar access via WebDAV and since it is an open standard protocol, iCal Server supports integration with other leading calendaring software such as iCal 3, Mozilla SunBird, Microsoft Outlook, and Chandler.

Apple also opens up the source code to iCal Server in order to encourage community participation. The source code to iCal Server is available under Apache 2.0 License. The project is called Darwin Calendar Server and the project is hosted on Mac OS Forge, a new community site hosted by Apple (something like sourceforge for mac projects).

For more information, preview iCal Server in Leopard ».

Wiki Server

Mac OS X Server 10.5 will include a Wiki server making it easy for you and your team members to share information. In addition, the Wiki provides access to a shared calendar, mailing list and blog for communication and podcasting.

Spotlight Server

Spotlight server allows you to search for and find content on servers within your network. To protect your secrets from appearing in search results, Spotlight Server provide file access controls and permissions so users will only see results that they are allowed to see.

Podcast Producer

Leopard Server allows you to record high-quality video and audio from FireWire cameras, USB Microphones, and iSight. To create a podcast, simply log into Podcast Producer and start recording and Podcast Producer will automatically upload your file encoded.

iChat Server 2

iChat Server 2 adds instant XMPP Federation allowing your users to chat with users on other XMPP instant messaging networks. Examples of instant messaging networks that uses the XMPP standards are Google Talk, Gizmo Project and Jabber.

Quicktime Streaming Server 6

Quicktime Streaming Server 6 in Leopard Server supports 3GPP Release 6 mobile phone technology.

Web Server

Also included in Mac OS X Leopard is Apache 1.3/Apache 2.2 with PHP, JBoss 4 and Tomcat 5 for hosting EJB 3.0 and J2EE 1.4-compliant enterprise applications and Ruby on Rails with Mongrel. MySQL 5 is included for database backend.

According to Ruby on Rails weblog, Ruby on Rails will ship with both server and client version of Mac OS X Leopard. It will include Rails 1.2 along with SQlite bindings and many more.

Related Links

• Leopard Sneak Peek

In just a few hours, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco will begin. Apple CEO, Steve Jobs is expected to demonstrate the next generation of Apple’s operating system, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

What else will be announced during the WWDC? A new iPod? A new Cinema Display? A new desktop computer? Will the MacBook Pro get a processor update (Intel Core 2 Duo)? Stay tuned for the latest update on WWDC 2006.

VMware, the virtualization software company, intends to show off it’s virtualization software for Intel Macs at the WWDC today. You can also pre-register to try the beta.

VMware for Mac

VMware will compete with Parallels Inc in virtualization software for Mac OS X. I hope VMware will release a free version of VMware under Mac OS X. The free version will allow people to run virtual machines but cannot create any new virtual machines. Hopefully it can also provide features that aren’t available in Parallels workstation such as support for FireWire, and the ability to install windows vista onto a virtual machine.

Update 1 - 1 Hour 30 minutes left to the keynote

There are several sites covering the WWDC keynote live. Here are some of them: Macrumors, MacNN, and Engadget. I have all of the sites opened even though most of them probably provide the same information.

Update 2 - 30 minutes left until the keynote

Apple Online Stores are down with the usual “We are busy updating the store for you and will be back within the hour” message. The online store always go down with the same message everytime Apple made product announcement.

Update 3 - Say Good bye to PowerMac Say Hello to Mac Pro

Just as predicted, Apple released a new desktop tower computer called Mac Pro. It will use the current design external case powered by The brand new Mac Pro will be based on Intel’s Xeon chips, also known as Woodcrest. These chips are 64-bits processors and every Mac Pro will have two of them.

Update 4 - New Xserve

New Xserve released with similar spec to Mac Pro. That completed the migration to Intel for Apple. All Apple’s computer are now using Intel processors.

Update 5 — Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Preview

This is only a preview of Leopard and there are some other top secrets. 10 of the many new features in Leopard:

1. Support for 64-bit applications top to bottom
2. Time Machine: backup & recovery feature
3. BootCamp included in Leopard
4. Spaces — Virtual Desktop
5. Spotlight improvement
6. Core Animation
7. Universal Acceess improvement
8. Mail.app improvement: stationary, notes and to-dos
9. DashBoard - Dashcode allowing developers to create widget easily - WebClip allowing users to create a live widget of a section of a web page
10. iChat with tabs and many more improvements

Apple also updated the price of Cinema Display making it cheaper by about AUD $400. If you’ve been waiting to buy a cinema display then it’s time to buy now.

The Preview version of Shiira 2.0 has been released. For those who don’t know, Shiira is a Mac web browser based on WebKit and written in Cocoa. WebKit is an application framework used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail.app, and many other Mac OS X application.

The most drastic changes to Shiira 2.0 is the user interface of the application. Shiira 2.0 also require Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) because it leveraged many 10.4’s features (i.e. Core Data). Unfortunately, I cannot find much information about Shiira 2.0 because I can’t find any changelog of the project.

Theme

Shiira 2 uses the smooth metal theme (first seen in Tiger) instead of the old aqua theme.

Screenshot of Shiira 1.0 Toolbar:

Screenshot of Shiira 2.0 Toolbar:

PageDock - Tab thumbnails

PageDock is Shiira 2.0 implementation of tab browsing. Instead of using tab bar, pagedock works by displaying a panel/dock at the bottom of the browser window containing thumbnails. The thumbnails are images of the page loaded in the tab.

Using thumbnails make it easy for you to identify several tabs instead of identifying a page by looking at the title. However, the PageDock is taking too much space and although it can be resized I still think it’s too big and annoying.

Fortunately, you can still use traditional tab bar by changing the tab browsing preferences. When you enable tab bar in the preferences the PageDock will be disabled. It would be better if Shiira 2.0 could use both Pagedock and tab bar options. Hopefully, both can be enabled by the time Shiira 2.0 is released.

HUD Panels

Shiira 1.2 used drawer window called Sidebar to manage users bookmarks, history, download, page holders and rss. A drawer is a child window that slides out from a parent window and that the user can open or close (show or hide) while the parent window is open. See the screenshot of sidebar.

The Sidebar is gone in Shiira 2.0 and have been replaced with HUD Panels. You can find HUD panels on Apple’s application such as iPhoto, Motion, or Aperture. A HUD interface is a dark transparent windows floating above the rest of the application window.

The bookmarks, history, and downloads are now displayed as a HUD Panels. I prefer the use of HUD Panels rather than using a drawer window. However, I still prefer to access my bookmarks from the bookmarks menu rather than a drawer window. Another reason to dislike the HUD panel is you cannot close it with a keyboard shortcut (cmd-w), you have to close it by clicking on the “x” button on the HUD.

Full Screen Mode

Shiira 2 now support Full Screen mode, when full screen mode is activated it will hide toolbar/menu bar/bookmark bar/status bar and will render the page you are currently viewing. The menubar will appear if you move your mouse to the top of the screen. You can also access the PageDock from the menubar or by pressing the keyboard shortcut for PageDock (cmd-alt-f).

In my opinion, Shiira’s full screen mode works so much better than using Safari’s Saft plugin fullscreen mode. Saft’s full screen mode require all pages to be refresh when you enter/exit full screen mode.

RSS Reader

Shiira’s built-in RSS reader has also been revamped. In Shiira v1, you can only read all the rss items on one page with the entry’s excerpt. In Shiira 2, you can read rss the traditional way or you can switch to a two-pane view.

Two pane view will allow you to read your rss items like most email clients. The top pane is used to display all the rss items while the bottom pane is used as the reading pane. See the screenshot of Shiira version 1 and version 2 to get an idea.

Shelf

Beside using a separate HUD panels, you can also manage your history, download, bookmark, and search engine using Shelf. Shelf works like Camino’s bookmark manager, which allows you to manage your collection of URLs.

Preferences

Shiira 2.0 featured a new preferences pane. The preferences pane is designed like Mac OS X system preferences. Rather than using icons placed on a toolbar, Shiira 2.0’s preferences pane place icons on a window. The back and forward button is not yet functional on this preview release.

Final Thought

I cannot recommend anyone to use Shiira 2.0 Beta as a main browser because the software is still a mess right now. A lot of features are not yet implemented in the preview version and it is still buggy (You cannot add a page to Shiira’s Bookmark at this version). However, Shiira 2.0 provide a lot of improvements from Shiira 1.0 and I personally think the user interface looks better now.

Shiira 2.0 preview is only recommended to testers, curious users, or bloggers wanting to try a new browser.

• View more Shiira screenshot images from my Flickr.
• Shiira Project

Dr. Monica Whitty from Queen’s University Belfast School of Psychology is studying how individuals in different countries use their work computers and/or laptop computers. It also asks how they protect their work computers and/or laptops from security risks.

You can help her research by answering her survey which can be found online at http://tinyurl.com/m2rml. She’s looking for individuals 18 years or over and currently live and work (full time/part time or casually) in Australia, the Netherlands, Singapore, the UK, or USA, you are invited to fill out this survey. Only people who use a computer and/or laptop at work are invited to complete this survey (although you don’t need to use one regularly).

Any help would be appreciated ;)