This one is an article by Stan Veit, former editor-in-chief of Computer Shopper magazine who were one of the first retailers to deal with the ‘new in the business’ Apple Computer in the late 1970s. In their own words by the magazine:

Stan Veit, Editor in Chief Emeritus of Computer Shopper, was the Editor in Chief of Computer Shopper magazine from 1983 to 1988, and Editor in Chief/Publisher from 1988 to 1990. Well before that, he was intimately connected to the personal computer revolution, a pioneer in the computer retail business who dealt with many of the industry’s movers and shakers (as well as many now-forgotten luminaries). Here, in the first in a series, he relates his experiences with two Steves, founders of a certain well-known computer behemoth…

Read it here.

These are some screen-shots from the OS X Leopard in action on my Mac. Click each picture for a larger view.

Desktop - OS X Leopard

iTunes for music

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Now that I have made the switch to Mac OS X, I am updating my list of applications (previous post) that I use for technical as well as general purposes. When it comes to ‘getting the job done’, these applications are of great value.

• Operating System – OS X Leopard
• Integrated Development Environment - Xcode, Netbeans 6.5, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (on XP Pro using VMware Fusion), Adobe Dreamweaver, TextMate, Terminal
• Languages – VB.NET, Ruby, C, C++, C#, ASP.NET, HTML, Javascript
• Content Manegment System – Joomla
• FTP client – FileZilla
• Blog – WordPress
• Blog Publishing – Windows Live Writer (this one has really no substitute, its excellent, although i have to run it virtually)
• Backup – Time Machine, Mozy Home
• Browser – Safari, Firefox and IE7 (for testing only)
• Mail Client – Mail
• Antivirus – Don’t need it anymore, yippie
• Firewall – Doorstop X Firewall for Mac
• Graphics Program – Adobe Photoshop
• Photo Editor – Aperture
• Others – VMware Fusion ( I Use it to bootup XP Pro or Ubuntu 8.10 virtually), iWork, Office 2007 (virtually), Evernote (for the mac it’s an excellent alternate of OneNote), Adium (all chat clients signed at once)

An article from InfoWorld, not just blatant fanboyism but an analysis supported by solid ground. Read “Why developers prefer Macs“.

Its been two weeks now since I have been using OS X and I find it an extremely stable and interactive operating system to use.

One of my gripes while using it was that in Finder window, there was no displaying of the path from the root to the current folder or file, something I find useful sometimes.

Turns out, you have to write the following command in Terminal to activate the display of the path in the top of the Finder window:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

Press return after typing the above line, hold down the ‘option’ key and right click on the Finder in Dock and click relaunch. To undo the change just replace the YES with NO in the above line and do the whole procedure again.

X11 for Mac OS X is an implementation of the X Window System that makes it possible to run X11-based applications in Mac OS X, for eg. Open Office or GIMP. If you are not using any of such applications in your Mac then it’s better to uninstall X11 from your Leopard installation so as to save up on the disk space. If ever you feel like installing it again then you can use your Leopard DVD to do so.

But the standard (move to trash) uninstall won’t work here, so we have to uninstall it completely using the terminal in OS X.

Write or copy & paste the following command in your terminal:

sudo rm -rf /Applications/Utilities/X11.app /private/etc/X11 /usr/X11R6 /usr/bin/open-x11 /usr/lib/X11 /Library/Receipts/X11User.pkg

That is one single line. Be very careful as a small typo can cause problems and you may have to reinstall OS X. Therefore do this at your own risk.

It’s been quite some time that I have been wishing to buy a MacBook Pro, and I eagerly waited for the October 14 refresh of Apple’s top of the line notebooks.  As expected, the refresh happened on the scheduled date and Mr. Jobs, this time (for a change) along with few of his colleagues wowed us all once again with his expert presentation skills, launching a whole new product redesign.

So if everything went right then what’s up with this freaking title?

Actually even though I think that the new MacBook Pros are designed really well, there is not one but two really big problems.

• Super glossy screen
• Button-less trackpad

I had a chance to handle the new MacBook Pro and seriously I couldn’t deal with glare at all. I wear glasses and that much glare really gave me a headache after a long time in front of the screen. I already use a HP dv2519 which is really glossy, but (more…)

After months of my waiting finally it’s here. Yesterday Apple announced new Macbook Pro notebook and I have never been happier. The new graphics offering by Nvidia is a screamer and I am really excited about it. Also, I really wanted DDR3 RAM support on the Pros and Apple didn’t disappoint. Now I plan to buy it as soon as possible. I will give a detailed review covering all the features once I am the proud owner of one.

While browsing through some old backups yesterday, I found an illustrated report titled ‘A Report on Three Classic Personal Computers‘ which I had submitted under my “Small Computer Systems: Organization and Architecture” subject.

If you are curious about the ancestors of the machine you are reading this post on, then this report really makes an interesting read. The content requirement for the report was as under:

The classic systems must have been made within the years 1972 to 1990 and be non-IBM-PC compatible (i.e. not running MS-DOS). The systems must also be predominantly consumer products, not systems that were intended for use as dedicated computers for the military or business or terminals that connected to mainframes.

Structure of the Report:

• Summary
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Main Body
• Conclusion
• References

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Apple Developer Connection has this must read article, which is for everyone who is beginning to work with Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X Leopard.