Zac Garrett

In a true Apple move they decided to axe the use of Boot Camp on OS X Tiger after the release of Leopard. This means that anyone who depends on the application for their day to day operations will be forced to upgrade.

I do not know how many people actually use boot camp as it is painful rebooting to switch Oss. It is just the fact that they will no longer support the current version of the OS when the next one comes out that bothers me. How can they possibly think that ditching this product is any good for them? The people who use boot camp on a regular basis will be cut off without paying the money to switch to an unproven OS.

The longer I watch Apple as a company the worse of a feeling I get about them. They seem to lock people down to one specific setup and are forcing upgrades. The end user should be able to choose whether or not they want to upgrade or not. There might be some software that just does not work on this version of the OS. The issue is we know for a fact it works as many have been running it for months if not years.

The real solution to this problem would be to not use this piece of software. There are two very good virtual machine; Parallels and VMWare Fusion. Both work great on OS X as long as you have enough RAM. Boot Camp is faster, but these other products are great as they run the other OS on top of OS X.

When I first got a Mac I quickly found out that the normal file browser, finder, is somewhat lacking. By somewhat lacking I mean it is so crippled that I thought about switching back to Linux for this one application. I had got used to Thunar which is an extremely powerful file browser for Linux. Going from that power to the Finder in OS X is just painful. Continue Reading »

As a followup to yesterdays post on quotation marks in Pages.app I felt the need to find the same setting in Office 2007 to disable “smart quotes”.

As I now knew what I was looking for the answer was quite simple, a search for “Word 2007 smart quotes” brought up the online Office help.

1. Click the Microsoft Office Button , and then click Word Options.

2. Click Proofing, and then click AutoCorrect Options.

3. In the AutoCorrect dialog box, do the following:

Click the AutoFormat As You Type tab, and under Replace as you type, select or clear the “Straight quotes” with “smart quotes” check box.

Click the AutoFormat tab, and under Replace, select or clear the “Straight quotes” with “smart quotes” check box.

I’ve been trying to use an actual word processor for writing posts for a while now. My problem has been a really simple one; quotation marks. In both MS Word and Pages.app the default setting is for “smart quotes”, these are quotation marks which open and close depending on their location in the document. This is just fine if you are writing a normal paper, but if you plan on publishing it to the web and are working with HTML it will break things. Continue Reading »

Several years ago if you wanted to created a dynamic site with PHP the only logical choice one could make was to use MySQL as the database server. There were other database servers on the market, but they were either not free or there wasn’t enough support to warrant it. Continue Reading »

Over the last few months I’ve started to hear rumblings about people blocking Firefox. The main source of issue comes from a site whyfirefoxisblocked.com. The site explains how to block Firefox and tries to give some valid reason for doing so.

The main reason the site offers to block Firefox is due to one extension, adblock. This extension allows you to block any content on the site that you wish, mainly ads. You can block just about any embedded object that you wish. It can be a image, an externally loaded javascript file, or flash file. Continue Reading »

For the last five or so years I have thought of Microsoft as being the source of all things evil. It all started around the same time Windows XP was released and it was exploited so quickly with many different virii (plural of virus, spelling from my tenth grade biology teacher). When it was nearly impossible to run Windows without being infected by some sort of virus a geek tends to get a bad taste in their mouth. Continue Reading »

When you live in a digital world and your entire life is saved on a hard drive it would be a horrible thing if that drive were to die. For that reason everyone needs to back up their data on a regular basis. For most people this is where the problem lies, how do you go about backing all of your data up? <!--more-->

The first step in backing up your data is to verify that system restore is enabled if you are running Windows XP. This does not backup your personal data nor save you from a hard drive failure, It does help with driver issues that I have come across. This is not really a backup solution, more of a simple way to save yourself some time in the future when working on your computer.

Next we need to take a look at the different backup solutions out there. The main solutions in my eyes for home users; external hard drive, network attached storage (NAS), and off site storage.

The simplest and probably the cheapest way to backup your data is just to buy a large external USB or firewire hard drive. This will allow you to manually save files to your external drive for future use.

Another solution that is adopted from the businesses is network attached storage or NAS for short. Simply put, this is an external hard drive that uses network interface rather than USB or firewire. If you have multiple computers this is a more ideal solutions as you can use a single drive to easily backup multiple computers.

With a NAS you can spend almost the same amount as a normal external hard drive and have it function very similarly. The other option is to spend quite a bit more and get something truly wonderful, such as a raid array. This will take your data and spread it between multiple hard drives so that if one fails the data is not lost. When a drive dies all you need to do is replace it and the system will automatically recover the data.

The final option is to use a service to store the data on someone else’s servers. This will allow you to store all of your data you want backed up on their server for a minimal fee. I will point to two services, Mozy and Amazon S3. Mozy is made for backing up your files and is all setup to do just that. Amazon S3 is just a pure file server that you could manually setup to backup your files. The only reason I point out Amazon S3 is that it is quite a bit cheaper than going with Mozy, just not nearly as user friendly for backups.

There is no valid reason not to backup your data, accept if you do not mind if you lose everything. Backing up is one of the most common things people forget about doing until it is too late. Save yourself the hassle in the future and backup today.

I’ve wanted to learn Ruby for quite a while now, but never taken the time to read much about it. My reason for wanting to learn the language is not for web design like most, but for security. One of the best security tools out there is based in Ruby and to do much with it you need to know the language. Continue Reading »

I have been using OS X for a few months now and still am unable to understand the reasoning behind the OS X dashboard. To access the widgets you have to hide all other processes. This defeats the purpose in my eyes of having a tool to monitor your system or anything else for that matter. Continue Reading »