How to sync Adium log to Dropbox

• Step 1: In your Dropbox folder, create a folder /Dropbox/AdiumIMHistory/Logs
• Step 2: In Terminal, enter "ln -s ~/Dropbox/AdiumIMHistory/Logs ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adium\ 2.0/Users/Default"

How to rotate video on VLC Player running on Mac

I found this article that provides some idea about how to rotate a video in VLC.  Unfortunately, the UI detail that is described by the article is just the Windows version of VLC.  For Mac version of VLC 1.0.5 32 bit, the steps are slightly differnt.

• Under menu [VLC][Perference....], select [Video] tab.  At the bottom, click "All" radio button.
• Under Video-Filters-Transformation, choose transformation type.  For instance, I choose "Rotate by 270 degrees for one of the video."
• Under menu [Windows][Extended Controls...], select "video Filter", and turn on the transformation check box.
• You should see the video get rotated.  If not, you might need to turn off and then trun on the transformaiton check box in order to make next setting to become effective.

I side note: I tried the 64 bit version of VLCPlayer, but didn't find the full screen performance particularly improved.

Media Center on Mac OSX ... well ....

I have this idea of using MacMini as my primary media center machine for quite some time, but finally have everything set up properly now that I have all the gears I need.  Among all, I have to say that the Apple wireless blue-tooth keyboard is a critical part of the equation.  Being able to navigate the Mac environment reliably anywhere in my room using this keyboard is amazing.  I just wish that they can release a version that also integrate the Apple Track-pad with it.  Then it will be super.

The problem, though, is that the software part doesn't seem to work as great as I expected.  I tried several Mac media center software and they all seem to have some problem one way or the other.

First thing first, they all have problem showing Chinese characters unless I do some sort of twist.  For XMBC and Boxee, that means I have to open the application package, find the font set location, and replace the build in font with the Arial Unicode font provide by OSX.  For Plex, it's slightly simpler.  All I need is turning on the default font to unicode font in the preference menu.  Sure the UI looks slightly fancier than the original, but at least I can see all the Chinese file names.

Then there's this strange hang up problem with Boxee.  It seems like leaving Boxee running while the machine went into power saving mode will have some odd side effect, as the app will hang up.  Still don't understand why the hack that can happen.

Then there's the Plex File Management problem.  I can't delete a library section.  In order to do it successfully, I have to delete the whole database, which is in "/Users/dkwan/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support".  Also Plex is not good at handling non mainstream movie and TV show files since it will tried to pull metadata from the net and they will be all wrong.

On the other hand, Plex works so well with mainstream movie and TV content.  I mapped them to the right folder and the experience was pretty awesome.  I am going to try it again with music and see if I got the same good experience, which honestly I am a bit hesitate because of the bad experience I had before.

Maybe I should use the MacMini but run it on the Windows 7 OS and see if I got better experience.

Freezed machine ... because of VMWare Fusion

Still find it a bit odd that when I have VMWare fusion running, after a night leaving the machine up and running, the machine would hang up, and all the VMWare fusion vm would be inaccessible.  I don't have concrete evidence to prove that VMWare Fusion has problem, but it's just too suspicious.

VMWare Fusion: awesome when it works but too fragile ...

I was very impressed by VMWare Fusion the first several days when I tried it.  But the more I use, the more I found that it's actually pretty fragile.  In the last several days, I already experienced some mysterious crash twice while using it in the middle of the process.  It also doesn't matter if I am in Single screen mode or the integration mode.  When it dies, it brings down the whole system, which is kind of lame to say the least.

Apple wireless keyboard and Trackpad with Windows 7 64 bit - not good

While pairing and using Apple wireless keyboard and Apple wirelss trackpad on Mac OSX 10.6 is simply, enjoyable and almost magic in some of the moments, using the same 2 devices on Windows 7 64 bit is a totally difference story.  In fact, I still can't get the trackpad working properly on Windows 7 64 bit.  Notice that they are both connect to the same device (MacMini late 2009 edition), so I am absolutely sure that it's not hardware issue.

In fact, I almost couldn't even get the keyboard working.  The bluetooth recognize the device, but the pairing process never get completed.  That was until someone point out the following steps:

1. Device Manager
2. Click on "Bluetooth Radios"
3. Double Click on "Generic Bluetooth Driver" (Note: your driver may be something else, it really makes no difference, just pick the top most one)
4. Click on Driver Tab
5. Click Update Driver
6. Click Browse my computer....
7. Click "Let me pick..." (near the bottom of the dialog box)
8. Uncheck the box "Show Compatible Hardware"
9. Under Manufacturer, select Apple
10. Under Model, select "Apple Broadcom Built-in Bluetooth" The other two apple drivers did not work for me. Only this one does.
11. Follow remaining instructions.

That worked for me.  The wireless keyboard was being recognized AFTER the reboot. 

Honestly I can care less whether the Magic Trackpad works with the Windows 7 side since there was NO extra multitouch feature provided by the trackpad on the Windows 7 at all.  So I will just stick with the wireless mouse.

Chinese handwriting and trackpad

I still find using the iAcces the best Chinese handwriting experience, although it's pretty neat that I can do the handwriting on the Trackpad too.  By the way, remember to install the "Magic Trackpad and Multi-Touch Trackpad Update 1.0" or otherwise the Chinese handwriting won't work.

Got Outlook 2010 for Mac working with my work network but ,,,,

....  the Communicator 2010 for Mac still doesn't work with the company network.  Well I guess nothing is perfect after all.

After spending time setting up Subversion server, it seems like hosting in on Windows 7 is better

Once again, it's time to reinstall subversion on OSX.  But after spending sometime walk thru all the steps, I realized that the best way to run the subversion service is actually running it on the VM.  And that's what I will do from now on.



I also the following steps, and they seemed to be non-critical now that I look back.

Among all this link it the most useful:
http://www.devdaily.com/blog/post/mac-os-x/installing-subversion-svn-server-on-mac-os-x

- Go to "http://www.open.collab.net/downloads/community/" and get "Universal Subversion 1.6.15 Binaries for Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6)
"
- Run the installation application
- that seems to install subversion in /opt/subversion/bin , but it doesn't seem like subversion is already running ….. odd …


- Go to "http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/svnx.html"  and get svnX to configure subversion.

- Go thru this to install flunk:
http://www.finkproject.org/download/srcdist.php
(takes quite some time)
(basically I went there all the steps in section "OS 10.6 and earlier"

VMWare Fusion takes VMWare Server VM directly

I just found out that VMWare Fusion 3.1.2 (Build 332101) can directly read and utilize the Windows 7 Ultimate edition VM I created using VMWare Server 2.x .  Pretty awesome.

Using remote iTune

Have multiple machine running at home and constantly changing their configuration means I will have hardtime have a simple solution to consolidate every music and podcast media in one place.  After try and try and try, I settled with leaving everything running on the iTune on my file server (the machine Z).  So far things seem working fine, as long as I configure it so that:

• no media file is copy over to the itune folder, and instead leaving them as where they are in my Z Drive file structure
• set it to share all all media

I also found out that maintaining song and podcast is simple.  I just once in a while copy over the whole song and podcast directory on the Z Drive, and iTune will put display stuff in the right place WITHOUT redundant listing. 

The iTune UI on accessing remote content has much to improve, but at least I can work around the problem by first using sort to pinpoint to particular album or podcast I want to listen, and then use sort to find the exact item I want.  Not perfect, but a workable workaround, and sure is way better than maintaining multiple iTune library everywhere on the network.

Windows 7 on MacMini

I continue spending my sick time setting up Windows 7 on Mac Mini.   So far I got the bluetooth mouse working AGAIN (it was not in the last windows installation), need to turn the sleep mode off since sleep mode still have problem on Windows side.  Also the font display problem seems to be gone too.  I will continue using this environment for a while and make sure everything is working nice as I expected.

On MacMini, the best way to backup a Windows partition is not using TrueImage

It took me a few days to figure out the best strategy to back up a Windows 7 Ultimate BootCamp OS partition, and the result was not what I expected in the beginning.


I started looking into the issue when slightly before my Windows 7 boot camp partition died.  It was just 2 weeks ago.  I got the MacOSX partition all set up, figure out how to back the partitions up using Disk Utility, and even figure out how to reliably create a partition image file (by using the OSX installation disc to boot up and then run Disk Director).  I even learned a few shortcuts during the process.

And then I then I realized something kind of shocking to me: the Linux based boot CD created by TrueImage was NOT working on MacMini.  It seems like only the WinPE version of Disk Director 11.0 can work on  MacMini.  For TrueImage boot up disc, all I got is the bootup screen and none of the keystroke and mouse movement was being sensed.  From there, I kept trying and trying all versions of TrueImage, and none of them create WinPE disc properly.  At the end, I found out that the supposed-to-be latest version TrueImage 2011 actually generate a bootup disc that MacMini and read.  But when I booted it up, TrueImage 2011 couldn't access the MacMini internal harddisk.

Finally I gave up using TrueImage to backup a partition.  Instead, I was using Mac Disk Utility to back the Windows 7 partition as a image file.  I haven't tried recovered it yet, but seriously I don't see why that will fail.

SketchBook and iOS 3.1.3

Somehow I had problem installing SketchBook on my iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.3.  Odd.

Backing up and restore Mac OS partition: trickier than I expected

After the disaster I had today, I learned the lesson and start taking more time to backup and double check the Mac OSX partition before doing anything crazy. 

Here's a few lesson I learned:

- Don't create a image of your partition while you are running on that partition.  Interestingly enough, Disk Utility actually allows you to do so, but when you run a check on that image, it will fail like hell eventually.  So just make sure that you create and restore Image by booting up the OS installation disc, and then use the Disk Utility.

- I tried to restore a boot partition, but got an error saying "Restore Failure: Could not restore - Cannot allocate memory" at the VERY END of the restore process.   And then I realized that in my setting I am copy data from ONE harddisk in a dual slot harddisk bay to ANOTHER harddik in another slot of the harddisk bay.  So I thought, maybe that's the problem.  So I tried restoring the first partition from the image file in the second partition of the same harddisk.

- Sometime booting back to MacOS from Windows can be tricky.  I experineced a few times when the Mac Mini kept booting to Windows 7 even though I explictly select boot to Mac OS.  Solution?  Well, I shutdown the external hardisk, shutdown the machine, start up again, in Win7 go to BootCamp utiltiy, set start to MacOSX, and work again.  Odd.

- I know that remove drive letter from HFS drives should NOT cause any problem, but I did experience something odd that the partition used to work on Mac suddenly failed.  So I better do some backup before doing such an action.  (Well, honestly, I think I probably made other mistakes that cause problem instead of just take away drive letter).

- Remember to REMOVE dropbox on the BASE OSX (on the MacMini internal harddisk).  Otherwise it may confuse dropbox when switching between the BASE OSX and the daily use one in the external harddisk.

Canoscan hell on Mac OSX

With a clean OSX on hand, I need to reinstall most of the hardware driver, including the driver for my old school Canon Sacnner N670U.  However, I found out the the lastet driver for CanoScan LIde25 DOES not work well with my scanner.  Errr actully, may be it's just the Canoscan toolbox that was failing. 

Here's what I know for sure, that Canoscan toolbox 4.9.3.47 DOES NOT work.  The Canoscan 4.1.3.0 works great though, which I think it the "CanoScan Toolbox Inst Carbon E" file.  And then for the driver it needs to be ScanGear CS 7.0x.  So maybe I'll give "lide25osx11031en.dmg" a try first, and if failed I can try "lide20lide30n670un676un1240uosx7011aen.dmg".  Based on the file name, I found the later one sounded more promising.

Target an older iOS device

After I blew up my previous MacOSX environment, I went ahead rebuild everything, and reinstalled the XCode. I then found out that I need to regenerate the certificate, request a new one. (Seems like this is Apple's way to make sure that at any given moment only one machine is being used associate with one development account. Things started working after then.

But then I got an error deploying the application to my iPod Touch which runs iOS 3.1.3. No problem, though, since all I need to do is set the "Target OS" back to 3.1.3. I got the hint form this link.

Windows 7 64 bit on Mac Mini ... not all happy joy joy

Since my MacMini has 8Gb of memory now, I thought it didn't make sense to continue using 32 bit Windows.  So I went ahead and install Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit on the Windows partition in Mac Mini.  Trouble started since then.

First I found that the Canoscan driver and Canoscan software failed on Win7 64 bit even though the driver and app was installed properly and being recognized.  And then I found that the bluetooth mouse was not being recognized, even though the hardware itself was working great, and had no problem on the Mac side.

And then more shit happened.  After I installed VMWare Server 2.x, Wacom tablet stopped functioning.  That totally pissed me off.  UNinstalled VMWare Server and things seemed to get back to normal.

That's not the end.  I also found out that the Mac Paritions on my 1.5Gb harddisk was GONE after being touched by the Windows 7 disk manager.  Well, if I didn't make a stupid mistake, I may still be able to restall that parition since after I switch back to the Windows side, I can see the partition.  Too bad I made one dumb more and now everything is gone and I have to start from scratch.