June 7th, 2007 by Steven Haigh
It seems Apple has been lagging behind releasing a general update for Java for OSX Tiger. Rumour has it that Leopard will include java 1.6, however some people need it now. The good news is that it can be installed on Tiger now with the following steps.
1. Go to connect.apple.com, and register/log in. You will need an account to do this.
2. Go to the downloads section and select “Java” on the right hand side menu
3. Download “Java SE 6.0 Release 1 DP6 (Disk Image)”
4. Once downlaod is complete, and launch the installer
5. Complete the steps in the installer
6. Launch Terminal, and issue these commands:
# cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions
# sudo rm CurrentJDK
(enter your password)
# sudo ln -s 1.6 CurrentJDK
This will set Java 1.6 to be your default java installation.
January 28th, 2007 by Steven Haigh
After well over a year of research and trying to make Apple accountable for faulty firmware in some of their computers, I have finally given up. Apple still refuse to admit to any problem on these drives, and sadly I must devote time to other projects.
From the superdrive site:
Update 28/01/2007 02:47am (+11 GMT)
Well, it looks as though Apple won’t do anything about this problem. What I can advise however are a number of brands that do work accordingly – and why. It seems that Apple only support media created by the CMC factory. Discs made by this factory (and banded as other labels) seem to work fine in the drive. CMC make the Verbatim and possibly LG, SHINTARO, TDK and some DATACELL discs. This means in theory, any of these discs that happen to come from the CMC factory should work find. Anything else, and you’ll get 2x burns.
December 11th, 2006 by Steven Haigh
I gave in. I purchased a Mac Pro. Clocking in with 2 x Dual Core 2.66Ghz CPUs, 2Gb RAM and the 512Mb ATI X1900 video card, it’s one hell of a machine. The first boot it ever did took around 18 seconds – very quick. Of course, the first thing I had to do to it was throw in a second 160Gb SATA HDD and throw Windows XP on there (for those all important games). I must say that I’m quite impressed with bootcamp (which allows you to boot Windows on the Intel Macs). The one thing that does annoy me is that it doesn’t give me the menu so I can pick which OS I want to boot to on startup – something I miss from other boot loaders such as grub.
I do have some hassle with the Logitech LLC drivers causing the mac to hang on shutdown, and even making the mouse buttons not work (however I can still move the pointer), however these have been reported to Logitech and I’m sure will be fixed soon.
All in all, a grunty as hell machine, and very nice to play games on 
November 15th, 2006 by Steven Haigh
I’ve been looking at replacing my home desktop system with something a little newer. Gone are the days of AGP, DDR400 and HyperThreading. These days it’s all about the number of cores and PCI Express. The Mac Pros are a very tempting machine – being Intel based, you can still run Windows XP on there if required for all those important programs (such as Half Life and CounterStrike 
).
This is until you look under the hood a little. The majority of the hardware is fairly generic – until you get to the memory subsystem. Apple have chosen to go with FB-DIMM memory while the rest of the generic industry has gone with straight DDR RAM. This means that on average, the memory latency involved with the Mac Pro system can slow them down on CPU intensive things (like Half Life etc) by a whopping 10%. Add this to the expensive base price of the Mac Pro compared to generic hardware and things get a little dissapointing.
I am certainly hoping that Apple look at addressing this (no pun intended ) and looks at removing the FB-DIMM based RAM on the Mac Pro and instantly giving their lineup a 10%+ speed gain – bringing it inline with the rest of the industry. Something I doubt will happen however 
August 25th, 2006 by Steven Haigh
Well, as if things weren’t bad enough with all the Superdrive issues that I’ve had, it’s now a possibility that my Powerbooks battery pack may explode. If you haven’t heard already, Apple is recalling around 1.8 million batteries made by Sony and used in Powerbook and iBook laptops.
This means that currently, my 1 year old G4 powerbook has: 3 dead pixels, a faulty SuperDrive, and a battery that could explode. Way to go Apple. At least they’re fixing the battery!