Wesley's Tool-Box - Mac Fun

3G망 VoIP 통화 차단노력의 '불편한 진실'

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:29:49 +0900

"스마트폰 공짜통화 편법 판친다"
"KT 탈옥폰, 아이폰 음성 통화 막는다"

위의 제목으로 미디어다음에 뜬 기사에 댓글이 폭발적이죠. 미디어다음에서 리플 수 많은 기사는 주로...

- MB 관련 소식
- 기자가 이상한 소리를 적거나 전달한 것

아... 둘 다 이상한 소리이긴 하겠군요. 아무튼. 이번 기사도 후자에 속합니다.

VoIP통화, 즉 쉬운 말로 '인터넷 전화'를 3G망, 즉 휴대폰 데이터통신망에서 하는 것이 불법이다, 차단하겠다는 요지의 기사들입니다.

트위터에서 이미 적어놨지만, 통신사에서 3G망의 VoIP 통화를 편법이나 불법으로 간주하는 데 있어서 기본적으로 2가지를 제시합니다.

1. 3G망 사용량 폭증에 대한 우려
2. '음성통화 수익' 악화에 대한 불쾌감

그에 따라, SKT는 이미 스카이프를 차단하고 있고, 얼씨구나 KT도 차단하러 들어가겠다고 엄포 놓았습니다.

근데 둘 다 말이 안됩니다.
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Thoughts on Apple's iPad tablet

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:59:49 +0900

The newly announced Apple iPad (Image courtesy of Apple)

Everyone's talking about the much-rumoured, and now much-talked-about Apple tablet, the iPad. Let me have my take on the device, relating to how it'll play out in Korea.

1. The 3G-enabled version will cost you $30/month on AT&T's network

The deal includes free use of AT&T's WiFi hotspots as well. This means it could be used practically anywhere with persistent internet connection. Plus, the device is unlocked out of the box, and the deal does not need a contract. KT, which introduced iPhone to its cellphone network in Korea, should follow this model, and match or best the pricing, although the price range for unlimited data is strikingly similar to what KT already offers for its Wibro modems. Which leads to my next point...

2. Apple plans to roll out the 3G-enabled model internationally around or after June

KT had been rumoured to be in talks with Apple to bring out a new Apple device by June, and everyone speculated that it'd be iPhone 4G. Well, looking at this iPad's planned timeline, it seems that the device in question was really iPad, not iPhone. Talks about iPhone 4G should be taken over by how KT should roll out 3G-enabled iPad in Korea, namely what sort of data plan it should introduce.

3. Pricing and app compatibility shows that it's targeting the netbook market

The base model with WiFi and 16GB storage is tagged at $499, which is about how much a mid-range netbook runs for these days. Meanwhile, iPad chose to be compatible with iPod instead of Mac. Mac's presence in PC market is insignificant, but iPod/iPhone platform is the biggest player in PDA/smartphone application market, so it seems logical that Apple wanted to ride on that wave.

Netbooks rely on PC (mostly desktop Windows) apps, but because of the poor performance, they are mostly relegated to casual web browsing. But iPad will absorb the responsive and lightweight apps developed for iPod/iPhone, so the choice to forgo desktop apps will pay off well. If iPad was a tablet version of Macbook, they could never have made the price point, nor the battery life (iPad will run for 10 hours on single charge), making the device an odd man out, much like how the previous tablet PC attempts turned out to be.

Another thing I'm expecting iPad to be huge in Korea is this - with the introduction of iPhone, a flurry of internet banking, day trading, and online shopping apps are soon to come out for the platform. Due to the special nature of the 'Korean internet', those things have not been possible for the most part on Macs, and the platform was largely neglected. But iPad will ride on the back of the iPhone, realizing the dreams Korean Mac owners had for years.

4. iPad is touting a new form factor in portable game console market

This one is a bit ambiguous. iPhone has lots of games that make the platform a good competitor to Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. iPad can make use of those games, as well as new games targeted specifically for itself. But to play a game holding a tablet the size of an A5 sheet? I'm not completely sold on the idea yet. I hope the game developers will come up with some innovative ideas.

There you have it. Looks like I'll be getting one in half a year, after I sell my notebooks.

Snow Leopard's NTFS read/write support

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:25:00 +0900

I CAN HAS WRAIT SUPPORT?

There had been mentions of Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) pre-release builds supporting read/write support for NTFS (native file system for current Windows versions). Read-only NTFS support was available since Tiger (10.4) days, so this was an interesting development. Unfortunately, read/write support was apparently dropped in the final release build of SL.

It turns out the support is still there, but disabled by default. This post by Chrysaor at MacRumors shows how to modify fstab to force an NTFS partition to mount in read/write mode. The drawback of this trick is that you have to manually do it to every partition you want to mount, and you need to unmount and remount the partition after applying the trick to get it to work. Hardly elegant, mind you.

Luckily, there is a much simpler and elegant way. Click below to find out.
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Snow Leopard testing in progress

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:14:13 +0900

I've gotten Snow Leopard on the server a week ahead of schedule. Yes, this website is running on Snow Leopard right now. My wife is expecting the baby in a couple of weeks, so I decided to get on with any time-consuming stuff early. The website seems to be running okay, so far...

Snow Leopard is here, but...

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:51:54 +0900

Snow Leopard retail box. Growl...

Bringing newest development in the age-old war of the operating systems, Mac OS X 10.6, better known as Snow Leopard, came out last Friday, almost 2 months before Microsoft Windows 7 officially hits the shelves.

I've already gotten my hands on Windows 7 via TechNet+ subscription, and a copy has been happily running on the main laptop at home for about 2 weeks now. So it is natural that I would like to jump into Snow Leopard as soon as possible to see what improvements this release brings to my iMac. But since the iMac is a mission-critical system, I compiled a list of compatibility for the Mac software I have, using Snow Leopard Compatibility List at Wikidot as the primary source and then checking the developer's website to double-check.

Of the 100 software (the round number is purely coincidental):

Compatible - 54
In Progress - 6
Incompatible - 11
Unknown - 29

I'm expecting at least half of the 'unknown' ones to be compatible, so that's about 70% compatiblity right at the release time. The problem has to do with the 11 incompatible ones. Half of these software are being used daily, and I consider them to be rather important. So they need to be made compatible before I make the big move.

In conclusion, I'm holding off the transition for about two weeks until the dust is settled. Sigh...

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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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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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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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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