Steve's Blog » Apple

Installing Java 1.6 on OSX

Steven Haigh — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 03:22:12 +0000

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.

Last Apple Superdrive Post.

Steven Haigh — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 16:21:45 +0000

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.

Impressions of the Mac Pro

Steven Haigh — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 09:25:24 +0000

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

Thoughts on the Mac Pros

Steven Haigh — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 05:40:16 +0000

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

How to blow up a G4.

Steven Haigh — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 18:40:31 +0000

As a lot of you guys know, I’ve had a lot of issues with Apple over my macs. Imagine how good I felt when I saw this

Superdrive Firmware testing

Steven Haigh — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 16:42:34 +0000

I’ve been sent numerous test results of people trying the new firmware (as reported earlier) on their UJ-835 or similar model drives. Here is a quick summary of media vs detected speeds.

Verbatim 16X DVD+R = 2x detected
Ritek 8x DVD-R = 8x detected (previously 2x)
Imation 8x DVD-R = 8x detected (previously 2x)
Sony 1x-8x DVD+R = 2x detected
Princo 4x DVD-R = 2x detected

While it looks like some media compatability has improved, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

If you can add your media tests to the comments, that would help.

Apple releases SuperDrive firmware update.

Steven Haigh — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 02:29:52 +0000

Multiple people have contacted me regarding Apple releasing a firmware update for superdrives on the affected machines. Here are the links to the Mac Daily News article and the official Apple page for the firmware update. If people are able to test this and get back to me with their experiances, I’ll update this page accordingly.

Update: It seems there are mixed results – which seems to indicate a partial improvement, however I personally haven’t noticed any improvements. Princo 4x DVD-R discs still come up as 2x discs, and another unknown brand still came up as 2x. Please keep your experiances coming. If you can include media type, that would be great!

Apple snobs SuperDrive problems

Steven Haigh — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 00:53:35 +0000

Yesterday I got a call from Janine Beach (Executive Relations, Apple Asia/Pac) to state that Apple regards that the problem with the SuperDrives (as reported here, here, and here) is a correctly functioning SuperDrive. Apple’s official line is that there is no problem burning on 8x Apple media so the drive is fine – even if it fails to recognise any other brand or speed of media. This means you can ONLY use Apple media in the drive – as even 16x TDK discs do not work correctly. There was no notification of the fact that Apple SuperDrives would only burn as advertised on Apple media – and when I stressed this point, I was told by Janine that the drive works as it should, and Apple would not be doing anything about it. After telling Janine that this was unacceptable, I was basically stonewalled.

For this reason, I am asking anyone who has experiance in lodging official complaints with the ACCC or starting class action law suits to contact me to discuss the best approach in making Apple accountable for thier faulty equipment.

Updated 10/4: I understand that Apple Australia employee email accounts are the first letter of their first name, then their last name @asia.apple.com – so Joe Smith would be jsmith@asia.apple.com if people want to contact someone within Apple about their SuperDrive issues as well…..

Apple SuperDrive tests by Apple.

Steven Haigh — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 01:38:07 +0000

If you haven’t been following the SuperDrive Petition then you might have missed that Apple have taken in my 12″ Powerbook for testing. Apple Sydney sent 2 DVD discs down to my AppleStore that I’ve been dealing with on this to test if the drive is indeed faulty. I thought I’d expand this test and also provided 4 blank DVDs to test. The results are very interesting:

Ritek 8x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x. 26 mins to burn 4Gb.
Princo 4x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x. 29 mins to burn 4Gb
Yoshi 8x DVD+R. Available Speeds: 2x. 25 mins to burn 4Gb
Datacell 4x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x. 29 mins to burn 4Gb
Apple 8x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x. 12 mins to burn 4Gb
TDK 16x DVD-R. Available SPeeds: 1x, 2x. 29 mins to burn 4Gb

In summary, only ONE of the discs worked as expected (Apple supplied the last two). These results have been sent to Apple, and I’m awaiting their reply with great interest.