Tag Archive for '6.2'

Just arrived: Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X

Published on June 20, 2008 in Apple. 1 Comment

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X - Cover

I bought what seems to be the most recommended book in the area: Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X - Third Edition, by Aaron Hillegass.
Although I’m not a programmer by profession I started coding in C when I was 12 and C++ some years later so I’m hoping Objective-C won’t be a showstopper.
I already have 2 projects in mind, more on that later.

I expect to have a review of the book in a few days.

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.

Judge rules Novell as the rightfull owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights

Published on August 12, 2007 in Linux. 0 Comments

Everyone knows by now but here are my 2 cents on this subject:

This last Friday was a good day to Novell and Linux.

Federal Court Judge Dave Kimball issued a ruling stating among other things but most importantly “that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights”.

This pretty much eliminates SCO’s threat on it’s allegations of copyright infringement of Unix by the Linux community.

Additionally, the Court decided that SCO owes Novell some money made for the licensing deals with Sun and Microsoft. There goes SCO’s cash reserves.

Last but not least, Judge Kimball states this ruling “significantly impacts the claims and counterclaims asserted” in the SCO vs IBM case.

I’m eagerly awaiting on how this one ends ;-)

SCO is expected to appeal nonetheless, but a dead end appeal I’m afraid. Well, I’m not, really hopping to hear the fat lady singing :-D

Now, what happens to SCO’s Unix licensees? According to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols Sun should be running to a telephone and callling Novell trying to make a deal. Humm, I don’t see things that bad for Sun. Sure, Sun is a direct competitor on Novell’s Linux with Solaris and OpenSolaris, not on licenses per se but on support contracts. But Sun is gaining momentum in the marketplace with it’s Open Source initiative and I think Novell pretty much knows what the Open Source Community feels and does when Open Source is attacked in any way, that must be really clear and fresh before thinking on enforcing it’s IP against Sun.

Microsoft on the other hand has been close with Novell recently so there too I don’t see anything really happening. Still, now there’s more leverage on Linux’s side against those alleged claims of Linux infrigment of Microsoft’s Intellectual property.

On a side note, I’m wondering if Apple’s decision to go with BSD as base to Mac OSX was just technical. What do you think?

Image from Bill Stearns’ web site.