Archive

My Macbook Pro Battery is dying

Published on December 28, 2007 in Mac. 2 Comments

I bought a 1st gen Macbook Pro 15″ last December, 16th to be exact.

I don’t usually use this laptop at work because I have another so it’s pretty much my home machine, and the 34 cycle count on my battery reflects that.

I took it with me on this mini Christmas vacations, and first noticed the battery problem when I booted Windows to play. Just after unplugging the power cord I saw 0:58 remaining battery time. No… Windows is playing tricks on me. Well, OS X must be a joker as well, because I got around the same time.

CoconutBattery 35%

This was taken from the CoconutBattery widget. CoconutBattery assumes my battery has 5550 mAh Full Charge capacity and says I only have 35% of that. Well, that was taken at 3pm this afternoon. It’s now 6:45pm and the value has gone down to 32%. iStat Pro reports the same.

Looking at System Profiler to confirm the current Charge Capacity value:

System Profiler Battery 32%

Well, 1814 mAh is way bellow 5550 mAh. Apple suggests 80% charge capacity is normal after 300 cycle counts, I’m at 34 cycles just after a year with a 32% charge capacity :S

Called Apple’s new Support Line here in Portugal, a nice Brazilian lady asked me the necessary questions but will have to call Support again to talk to someone from the “Tech team” in order to get my replacement battery approved. More on this next week.

Comment of the day

Published on December 13, 2007 in Funny. 0 Comments
“Windows and IIS…rock solid and secure”
Is that a new tickbox?

in Jeff Alexander’s blog.

 Microsoft’s track record on security is improving, but the comment still cracked me up :D

Ocean’s Twelve Laser Song

Published on December 4, 2007 in Music. 2 Comments

Following on Vitor’s post about ringtones from movie soundtracks I was interested in one in particular: Ocean’s Twelve Laser Song aka “Thé à la menthe” by La Caution.

I was looking for more info on the song and found out that the music is available to download here local backup :D

Not only the music (this version) is great but the dance as well.

PrintScreen: I’ve been aggregated :-)

Published on December 1, 2007 in blog. 2 Comments

This blog is now being aggregated by the PrintScreen Planet :-)

On to blogging then…

Inside Google: High Availability through Load Balancing

Published on October 13, 2007 in Google. 0 Comments

Today was the first day of the Open Source event “I Fórum Software Livre” here in Portugal.

The session I was most eager to attend was Fernanda Weiden’s about Load Balancing.

She’s Brazilian by birth but works at Google in Switzerland where she’s responsible for the Load Balancing solution.

I had the chance to ask her some questions at the session and some more after and not only she’s very technical savy she’s also very pretty and friendly.

Too bad she brought her boyfriend with her :>

Honestly I was expecting some in house bred solution, but apparently Google uses standard and available open source apps for their Load Balancing solution.

I’m hoping the session slides that have specific details will be available soon so I’ll update when that happens.

links for 2007-09-07

Published on September 7, 2007 in del.icio.us. 0 Comments

BitTorrent client for the Mac: Transmission

Published on September 6, 2007 in Mac. 0 Comments

My favorite client on Windows was Azureus and when I bought the Mac I continued using it. The thing is, Azureus has many nice features mas it is fat and recently was turned into something I definitely do not want. I just want to download some files on ocasion and want the process to be fast and light.

Then I found Transmission. It’s small, light and works like a charm. Perfect!

Here’s some screenshots (you can find more on the project’s homepage):

The main window:

transmission-main-window.png

The torrent inspector window:

transmission-torrent-inspector.png

With the download in the screenshot in progress the application used 26MB of memory :)

Transmission is now part of my Essential Apps.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Published on September 6, 2007 in Linux. 0 Comments

LWN broke the news about AMD announcing the decision to enable the development of open source drivers by making specifications available for all its graphics processors starting from the R500.

A few more details came up on Christopher Blizzard’s blog and I can only say kudos to AMD!

Intel started it all, AMD goes one step further and nVidia gets left alone.

Speaking of nVidia, a quick browse of the comments on this news and you can often find something like “I was going to buy nVidia but now…”

I hope companies finally start seeing their lack of support for opensource as something that hurts them: Look, that’s your money running.

New job

Published on September 2, 2007 in Jobs. 1 Comment

VerticalOne logo

I can now speak of this: Friday, 31 of August was my last day working for Agap2 at IBM. Starting tomorrow I’m starting a new project at VerticalOne as a Senior Consultant in Open Source technologies.

Who says work can’t be fun :D

FreeBSD: DTrace is still a possibility

Published on August 27, 2007 in FreeBSD. 0 Comments

FreeBSD with DTrace

After failing to convince Sun to solve the license problems that have been preventing the DTrace hooks from being added to the FreeBSD kernel, John Birrel says he’s changing his approach and is starting the port from scratch.

Can’t wait to see DTrace working on FreeBSD :)