Wesley's Tool-Box - Tinkerings

Stubborn stuff slows server swap

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:55:00 +0900

The old (Mac mini) and the new (iMac)

With marriage, I moved into the new home. This meant moving everything out, including the servers. However, I was not sure of the quality of internet connection that the new place would provide, so I relocated the KT line (fiberoptic-to-ethernet 100Mbps line) first, and along with it, the Intel Mac mini which hosts XiGL.net on early April. Hanaro line (same quality as KT line) and its accompanying G4 Mac mini which hosts Tool-Box.info would be left behind for the time being.

It turns out that KT did not provide the 100Mbps connection at the new home, but only the traditional 30Mbps VDSL line. This persisted for several months and I did not see any sign of them upgrading to 100Mbps fiberoptic, all the while the competitors Hanaro and LG Powercomm were both providing 100Mbps line services of their own since at least May. My patience ran out, leading me to call Hanaro Telecom to relocate my connection. This would also mean that Tool-Box.info server would be moved to the new home as well.

Had I simply moved the old G4 box, the relocation would have been simple. But I decided to use this opportunity to replace the server hardware outright. That's when the trouble began.
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Optimus mini three + iRocks KR-6600

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 01:39:53 +0900

The keys to my Mac

I've been using an interesting combo of input devices lately. Namely, Art Lebedev Studio's Optimus mini three keyboard (left) and I-ROCKS' KR-6600 'nano slim' keyboard. The two keyboards are relatively unique in that the mini three is the first keyboard to implement OLED displays for the keys, and that the KR-6600 is probably the smallest 'full set' keyboard you'll find on the market. It's barely bigger than the Half Keyboard I used for my wearable computer back in the old days.
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Modifying Shinhan EzPlus for Mac for the better

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 22:26:00 +0900

Shinhan Bank, which recently completed integrating the recently acquired Cho Hung Bank's account database to its own, is also known for its commitment to Mac platform. So far, it is the only Korean bank that provides internet banking solution for Mac OS X. Most other Korean banks are locked to Windows platform when you want to do internet banking on your computer. With the aforementioned database integration, Shinhan Bank has updated their Mac banking solution, 'EzPlus for Mac', to accommodate the changes.
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VLC Player for Intel Macs play WMV3 files!

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 12:30:00 +0900

Well, no more jumping through the hoops now. Hot on the heels of the release of Flip4Mac WMV component 2.1, the first official universal binary version, the latest VLC Player nightly build for both PPC and Intel Macs have the ability to decode WMV3 video codec (a.k.a. Windows Media Video 9). Click on the picture above for the full look.
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Hangul for Mac: too little, too late?

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Thu, 04 May 2006 21:24:59 +0900

Apple Store / Experience Center in Samseong-dong, Seoul had just stocked boxes of Hangul Word Processor (HWP) 2006 for Mac today, which was announced a week ago. HWP is one of the most popular word processor in Korea (it used to be THE most popular, but Microsoft Word has made headways), and many companies and most government agencies / education institutes use it as the standard document format. But Mac users have largely been left out cold since the last HWP version came out in 1997. Since that version, OS X came out, and then there was a CPU platform shift from PPC to Intel. In other words, Macs haven't been able to 'natively' run the application for half a decade.
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Korea's first Intel Mac mini

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 22:08:07 +0900

En route to its new home

Here it is... Korea's first imported Mac mini based on Intel's Core Duo processor! Of course, its older brother, the one with Freescale G4, was also the first to land on Korean soil. My earlier experiment with running the website on a Pentium M system with Windows didn't go so well, so it's back to Mac mini's job again. I'll probably try Linux next time.

Hole in Mac video playback plugged

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 09:49:30 +0900

Something I've been waiting for.

While those of you who don't use a Mac or have large collection of video it may have gone unnoticed, there has been a weird and annoying hole in video playback compatibility in Mac platform. Specifically, AVI videos that use Windows Media Video 9 (a.k.a. WMV9 and also called WMV3) codec could not be played, let alone viewed with subtitles. Due to the availability of the 'WMV9 VCM' for Windows it has been possible to use that video codec in AVI container instead of the WMV container originally intended. However, in Macs playing this sort of file (and preferably with accompanying subtitle file) had following roadblocks until early this year.
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Phase 1 Success!

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 23:48:52 +0900

The new wearable computing project has now seen the first fruit of labour. The main system module, a completely functioning system that only needs power source, input device, and monitor, is now in working order with its own casing. As you can see, it is only as big as a novel, but houses a Pentium M 1.6GHz, 1GB of memory, 100GB hard disk, and a power supply that accepts 8V to 13.6V DC voltage.

Mac driver for Razer gaming mouse

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 14:21:00 +0900

I use a Diamondback 'Salamander Red' mouse from Razer. Yes, its something I won in AMD Mania Day 2004 AND 2005. The mouse is quite good, living up to its reputation. The problem is, I use it on my Mac mini. Razer's driver download page sadly tells me to "Download a third party Mac driver at USB Overdrive". I've used USB Overdrive a while back and I didn't quite like it. I've been in 'generic driver' mode since. However, that was about to be changed.
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The $14 MP3 Player disassembled

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 19:39:00 +0900

Guts open

(Continuation of "The $14 MP3 Player")

Curious to find out what made this cheap MP3 player tick, I had to take it apart... carefully, of course, because I wanted to keep using it. You unscrew two tiny metal bolts, then have to unhinge the two plastic hooks that stick the top and bottom pieces together. The plastic hooks were a bit hard to get around, since it looked kind of easy to break. I did manage to do it without breaking anything, and the device revealed its innards.
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The $14 MP3 Player

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 17:00:15 +0900

Package arrives...

While Apple iPod is dominant in most of the world's portable MP3 player market, there are always some niche products scattered around. One such class is the MP3 players that are very cheap because they lack any on-board storage. They use the flash memory cards you plug in for the storage instead. If you somehow end up with a flash memory card left over doing nothing useful, these MP3 players may attract you, despite common sense telling you it's money wasted. Here's my story.
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CMOS scan lag on phone camera

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 22:49:29 +0900

Warp!

This is one of the reasons why I can't take most of the cameras on the cellphones seriously yet. Especially the commonly used CMOS-based ones. The image sensor scanning the landscape has takes certain time, even with sufficient lighting, as this photo I took on a day inside a car travelling around 70km/h shows. The cellphone used was CP-X501.

The image is actually quite crisp, so the shutter speed was quite fast, but the sensor scanning couldn't keep up with the fast-moving objects, resulting in a humourously warped shape for the box and the tree. Normal digital cameras, which use CCD, don't exhibit this problem. To this day I carry a separate digital camera on the belt to take quick photos and videos; my cellphone is mostly used for what it's supposed to do: make/get calls.

Problem with limited MySQL user and s9y

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 11:12:00 +0900

MySQL documentation gives some examples of creating users in MySQL. Among the examples are creating users that only have access to a specific database, or 'tied-to-database', as I say. This is preferred from a security standpoint because you can avoid using root to access services like s9y and use this 'limited' user instead. Let's look at one of the examples in there.

GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,DROP ON bankaccount.* TO 'custom'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'obscure';

This is supposed to create a user called 'custom' on the 'localhost' domain that has the password of 'obsecure' and can only access 'bankaccount' database. Now this looks alright, but it poses a bit of problem with s9y.
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DVD creation footnote: a pet peeve

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 08:00:00 +0900

Here's a minor annoyance that didn't affect the DVD creation process but still merits a mention. If you look at the 'Status' of the DVD being created, the maximum DVD capacity will show up as 8.0GB for double-layer project and 4.0GB for single-layer project.

The unit 'GB' is calculated under 'kilo is 1000', which is used by the storage device manufacturers, not 'kilo is 1024', which the operating system generally uses. Now, the unit itself isn't really a problem since as long as I know exactly how much I'll be using, I'm fine with that. The annoyance arises from the fact that under this unit, a double-layer DVD holds 8.5GB and a single-layer DVD holes 4.7GB. This means that iDVD does not let me choose to add 500 or 700MB worth of more video onto the disc even though the space is available. That's a sad waste of space. The extra space could have been used to either put more footage, or if 4-hour (or 2-hour for single-layer) limit must be kept, used to increase bitrate and thus quality of video.

Long DVD creation woes on a Mac

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 11:00:00 +0900

Mac mini, as with any Macs you buy today, comes with great tools for creating and watching DVDs out of the box. You would edit the video on iMovie HD, then use iDVD to prepare the menus and burn the actual DVD. Later, the DVD can be watched using an application appropriately named 'DVD Player'. But I hit a couple of annoying snags while creating an extremely long DVD.
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