Posts from — February 2009

I know I shouldn’t, but I just can’t help but install new software as soon as it’s released. Not sure what it is but I can’t stand waiting. That being said, the second I saw Apple had Safari 4 BETA (ya even worse, it’s a beta) I downloaded it and installed it. So far so good – I’ve only had to deal with a few issues so far.

1. Broke my 1Password plugin.

2. Can’t add links to my wordpress pages (odd)

3. HATE the new tabs

4. MISS my blue progress bar

Fortunately, I found fixes for all of them except wordpress, which really isn’t that big of a deal – just have to use Firefox.

For 1Password, just search for updates and you’ll find a new version posted – yes, it’s also a BETA but I haven’t noticed any problems yet.

To revert to the old tabs, open terminal (found in Applications/Utilities) and enter the following command,

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

To bring back the blue progress bar, open terminal and enter these two commands (enter them one at a time pressing return after each)

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign -bool NO

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle -bool NO

That should do it! Note that the indicator bar will remove the reload button in the address bar and the old stop / reload button is no longer an option in the toolbar. If you need to stop and reload a page for any reason, just use the shortcut cmd-R. We’ll see what the final release brings but so far so good.

TB

It’s certainly not breaking news that Solid State Drives are becoming more and more popular in mainstream devices these days. SSD’s have been around for a while but until now were way too expensive to be worth the change. Back in November we received a couple of 80GB drives from Intel that retailed at almost $700.00 . . . ya, for 80GB. Are they fast, yes – but not real appealing when you can get a 1.5TB SATA drive for half the price. Still, we popped 3 of them into a Mac Pro, striped them together in a RAID 0 and installed Mac OS X on top of them. The result, a Mac Pro that booted in 8 seconds and sustained reads of over 700MB/s! Pretty impressive for an internal array.

So last week, some friends of ours over at Intel were kind enough to drop off a few 160GB SSD’s for some more tests. Torrey popped one into his MacBook Pro and ran a few tests . . . the results were pretty impressive. You can read it HERE.

We’re going to add these into a Mac Pro and run some more tests. I’ll post them when they’re complete but just to give you an idea of the potential these things have, I’ll relay something Intel told us during their visit. They did a proof of concept with a post house down in LA and were able to replace 96 SATA drives with just . . . are you ready for this . . . 8 SSD’s and matched performance. Is that incredible or what?! Imagine the savings of that for a moment . . . 96 SATA drives were probably broken up into six 3U chassis. That means at least an 18U rack full of storage. The SSD’s are only 2.5″ by 7mm. The standard SATA drive is 3.5″ by 1″ which means you could fit 3, almost 4 SSD’s into a single SATA drive. Space savings is only one aspect of the benefit – don’t forget about the fact that there are no moving parts so they have no cooling requirements and lower power consumption not to mention the fact that they are rated at over 2 Million Hours Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF). Very cool. The price is still a bit on the expensive side but this is definitely something that will greatly impact the computer world.

TB