Upgrading RAM in a Intel Mac Mini

Just a very quick post (it's been too long!!!). I recently upgraded the RAM in my Mac Mini to 2gb thanks to the very reasonable pricing of RAM at crucial.com at the moment. They now have a cool little scanner app that shows you the exact memory for your machine and their prices are very reasonable (£30 for 2gb of RAM!!!!). With the ram in hand, i went to http://www.methodshop.net/gadgets/tutorials/macmini-ram/ which provides a comprehensive explanation of how to change the ram in the Intel Mac Mini (note that the process for changing RAM in the Power PC model is quite different...substancially easier in fact!)

After the intial insanity of taking the case apart (which is a truly terrifying task), the walkthru made the task fairly straight-forward. By the nature of the machine's size, it is fiddly work and not advised for a complete newbie but it isn't rocket science either - a moderately experienced hardware geek should have no trouble.

The difference in performance is immense. If you have the cash and the nerves to take this little beastie apart - i highly recommend it!

Parallels with Coherance

Just a quick post about the success I've had with the new Coherance technology built into the PC Emulation program, Parallels. When I heard about Coherance I thought it was a bit of a gimmick: Why do I really need to be able to treat Windows apps as native Mac progs? However, I have found that since I have started using it that it has made a big difference to the way I interact with Windows on my Mac. I have started working on a porject in the last couple of weeks that has required that I use TOAD and a couple of Orcale Forms apps that just don't work properly in Safari and Firefox on my Mac. With Coherance, I now have my Windows start bar fitting snuggly on top of my Dock bar and, while it is just an aesthetic change, I find myself using the Windows side of my Mac a lot more. While I'm not a huge Windows fan anymore I would say that Coherance has improved the convenience of the Windows-side of modern Mac life and that can only be a good thing.

Dreamweaver on the Mac: JavaScript problems

I encountered a problem with Dreamweaver today - when I started the program I was met with the following errors:

"...ColdFusion.htm has configuration information that is invalid"

"...DWScriptsExtData.js dwscripts is not defined"

After a moment of panic, I did some google searching and found that the problems can be due to a variety of things, as specified by the troubleshooting link (http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_19105#site_cache). For me, I was able to solve the problem by doing the following things:

1) Reinstalling Dreamweaver
2) Delete the filecache.dat file in Mac HD/Users//Library/Application Support/Macromedia/Dreamweaver 8/
3) Delete the MacFileCache-BFE7CE2E.dat (example) in Mac HD/Users//Library/Application Support/Macromedia/Dreamweaver 8/Configuration/

Taking screenshots on a Mac

Just a quick post about taking screenshots on a Mac. Other Windows switchers may lament the loss of their old 'print screen' button but fear not! There are 2 options to replace this Windows feature. The first in the following key combination: shift-command-3 - this will output a png image file to your desktop. The second is the 'Grab' feature, which in an Application sitting in the 'Utilities' folder. This little program offers you the capacity to grab single Windows and entire screenshots, depending on what you need.

Administering a MySQL database in OS X

Quick suggestion for those that might be new to MySQL databases. If you find administration of MySQL rather tedious from the command line, I throughly recommend you check out the official MySQL Administrator program provided free by the nice people at MySQL AB:

http://www.mysql.com/products/tools/administrator/

It is a truly wonderful tool and has opened up MySQL to me - if you are looking for the download page, it is here:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/administrator.html

Problems with code generated by Dreamweaver 8.0.2 and Postgres

A cautionary tale about updating to Dreamweaver 8.0.2 if you use Postgres. Yesterday I decided to upgrade my copy of Dreamweaver 8 to 8.0.2 because it kept on telling me there was an update available. I didn't expect any problems and, if anything, hoped that the process would help resolve some of the problems I have encountered when using Postgres against Dreamweaver. While you can generate code for Postgres in Dreamweaver, it tended to complain about not understanding what a 'serial' or 'int4' datatype is. However, I found that once I had updated my Dreamweaver, I could no longer generate code to update records in my Postgres database. Instead I got an error like this:

ERROR: column "status_id" is of type 'integer' but expression is of type 'character varying'

We compared the code generated before and after the Dreamweaver upgrade and noticed that the code generated by the upgraded Dreamweaver was attempting to push data into the database as a literal (so the string in my page was being pushed as a String into my number field). While there could be another explanation for all of this, the process of deduction has pointed the finger at this new Dreamweaver upgrade (the pages I made in Dreamweaver pre-upgrade worked fine). If you NEED something provided in the new upgrade then you need to investigate this problem further, if not, then I highly recommend sticking to your pre-upgraded version of Dreamweaver 8.

Apple's iPhone is tasting a bit sour

More and more details are coming out about the Apple iPhone and I'm afraid to say that the more I hear, the less I'm impressed :( David Pogue (of the New York Times) has been posting an interesting set of blogs about the iPhone's capabilities (see link above) and he has found some infromation that is making it less and less likely that I will be able to buy one of these guys:

The biggest gripe is that developers will not be allowed to make products on this phone - this hits me like a sack of Bricks - I'm going to have the most advanced phone in existance, which contains an streamlined copy of OS X and I'm limited to using it as an iPod of iPhoto viewer?!?!? I'm a geeky software developer/webmaster - I want to be using this puppy to VNC into things, open up X11 windows, telnet into my OS X Server, mess with my FTP site, check my MySQL database and other things that are useful when you are on the move and your boss is yelling at you. Sure, I could get out my MacBook to do these things but if I don't have a Wi-Fi connection it's useless. How about using my new iPhone to act as a Modem for my MacBook? No, according to Pogue's blog, that ain't going to be possible either.

No Java support and only the possibilty of Flash Support? What about YouTube? Jobs' answer is to make a deal with YouTube but that is a cheap way around the problem if you ask me. What about the rest of the net's websites that use either Java or Flash???

No Stylus support: Call me old fashioned but I can work a charm with a stylus and a proper keyboard (my HTC Wizard is close to perfection in that respect) - according to Pogue's report, the iPhone will ONLY respond to skin touch. I'm sorry but this bites - I don't want to be chained to this gimmick.

PIM support for Windows: I don't use Windows at work any more and I try to avoid it at home but Apple need to allow people to Sync their contacts on Windows machines - it is not enough to allow people to sync their iTunes - we need PIM access as well!

grrrrrrr. I'm annoyed. This is a very cool phone but I'm going to have trouble being able to justify buying it some of these issues aren't resolved (my chief one being locking developers out)