I write this post to you from my MacBook Pro, in its restored state as of last night when I finished writing an important university assignment. This is important because without Leopard's Time Machine backup feature, I would have lost at least one or two full days getting my machine restored.

Presently, I am running a Developer's release of Mac OS X Leopard (9A557 build) in a production environment. This is particularly dangerous because you don't know if (or when) something is going to break. As I write this in Safari I remind myself to click 'save' because I can't write this again if Safari decides to crash. I paranoidly (is that even a word?) backup everything on my 250GB internal laptop's drive. This is not bad at all, something which everyone should do. And we all know everyone does their backups frequently right?

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I couldn't resist. It's Caturday.... every cat has his day...Oh and dis cheezburger iz mine, K?  (Click here for the full article...)

Just a quick tip. If your menubar crashes in OS X it can be restarted by typing a simple command in the Terminal.

killall SystemUIServer

You can also restart the Dock by typing:

killall Dock

or the Finder by typing:

killall Finder

All these commands are case-sensitive.

I also wrote a menubar application i call "iRestart" which performs all these functions and more. It is available at my portfolio site here.

Changing file permissions on the Mac is something you need to know how to do if you want to create your own non-home directory only shares on the Mac. Leopard implements folder sharing similarly to the way SharePoints does. I find myself needing to change permissions regularly because certain programs like to change file permissions on their own. The Terminal is generally better for changing permissions because it is much faster and also because you have more control. Sometimes you may need to do this is the file permissions get messed up in Leopard's File Sharing under System Preferences.

Here's how it works:

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Electronic Arts chief creative officer Bing Gordon at Apple's latest Developer conference stated that EA would be moving some of their most appealing titles to the Mac coming available in the next few months. The first games to become available for Mac will include Command and Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed Carbon, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This is certainly great news for Mac gamers and now it sounds like I should finally be able to decommission Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro's hard drive. However there is one issue that was conveniently skipped over at the keynote.

Although these games are coming to the Mac they aren't being ported, well not in the traditional sense anyway. TransGaming's Cider which acts as an interpreter between the game's original code and the Mac OS frameworks will be used as a wrapper to get the games to run under OS X. The problem lies in the fact that interpreting code uses much more resources rather than running pre-compiled code, which pretty much every game is.

If you have ever used Azureus, a java bittorrent client you will know that it is much slower than say Transmission. While Azureus does more than Transmission, it is significantly slower considering than all it really does is display text and download files. The same thing would in theory apply to gaming under Cider. Since most of these games already require all the hardware you can throw their way, it doesn't sound like Mac gamers are getting a fair deal.

Worldwide the Mac platform accounts for roughly 5% of the installed base of PCs. However since most Mac users aren't gamers, rather than designers, power users and technically challenged folk, etc. I can understand why EA would not go to the trouble of investing more money to properly port their games to Mac versions. The bright side is that EA may only be testing the waters with Cider and hopefully all new future releases from EA will be proper fully compiled Mac versions.

If the EA Cider titles run close to the performance of their Windows versions then I will probably run the Mac versions. In the end, this is only good news for Mac gaming.

I have started writing Java programs at uni and i'm required to add a Java package called B102.jar to the compiler.
Well, the university doesn't support anyting other than Windows so it was a pain trying to figure out how to use Xcode and use their 'B102.jar' package. Anyway to add a .jar package to Xcode for compilation, all you need to do is add your .jar package to:

/System/Library/Java/Extensions/

That's it. Now when you type import B102.*; for example, it will compile correctly.

Update: It's been a while since I've looked at this post but people are reporting that this still works in Leopard (10.5) and even Snow Leopard.

Safe Sleep is a kind of sleep mode similar to what Windows users have. It was integrated into the Mac OS X kernel a few years ago and can be enabled through the Terminal. Mac users use the sleep mode often, either letting their computers go into sleep mode after a preset time or manually sleeping the machine. Sleep is especially useful on portable Macs, such as the MacBook or MacBook Pro.

The problem with sleep mode on portable Macs is that is doesn't always work right. A few times I've put my MacBook Pro to sleep and come back later only to find the fans spinning really fast because it didn't go to sleep properly. It was very hot and I thought it might have damaged the hardware, luckily it was ok. Safe Sleep uses no power and so completely solves this problem because it powers off the computer rather than preserving the RAM state by using a low power state. It does take a little longer than normal sleep but it's worth it in my opinion:

Pros and Cons
+ Preserves complete system state using NO POWER
+ Restore is faster than doing a cold boot
+ Your laptop won't burst into flames from screaming fans whilst in a bag
- Takes longer to sleep than normal sleep mode

Safe Sleep mode in action on my MacBook Pro:

Enabling Safe sleep mode is relatively easy, however you need to take come caution, especially if you are using Secure Virtual Memory. Safe sleep doesn't appear to work if you are using secure virtual memory, but you should take caution if you attempt to enable it.

Safe Sleep can only be enabled under Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) or 10.4 (Tiger). You should make a copy of the instructions below or print them out, incase you have problems.

Step 1. Enable Safe Sleep
To enable safe sleep on your Mac, the Open Firmware needs execute some code at boot time.
Open the Terminal, enter each line while pressing enter at the end of each line:

sudo nvram nvramrc='" /" select-dev
" msh" encode-string " has-safe-sleep" property
unselect
'
sudo nvram "use-nvramrc?"=true

Restart the computer.

Step 2. Enable Hibernate Mode
To continue, you must have at least as much free disk space as RAM in your computer , plus 750MB.
Therefore if you have 2GB of RAM, you must have at least 2.75GB of free space on your hard disk.

To enable Safe Sleep, in the Terminal enter:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3

This should create the file /var/vm/sleepimage.

If (and only if) you have secure virtual memory enabled, enter 7 (rather than 3) to disable encrypted
hibernation. Encrypted Safe Sleep does not yet work.

Now when your Mac enters sleep, it will now enter the regular Sleep mode first (consuming minimal power). But will
only enter Safe-Sleep if the battery is very low on power, or is unplugged.
To use Safe Sleep mode instead (which takes a bit longer to sleep and wake-up) enter in the Terminal:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 1

Enter 5 (rather than 1) with secure virtual memory.
To disable Safe Sleep:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

You do not need to restart to set the changes for hibernate mode.
Happy notebook sleeping