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In June 2011, I upgraded my macbook pro (MacBook Pro 13″/15″/17″ Unibody with Core 2 Duo “Penryn” and 9400M G chipset (Mid 2009): max, 8GB), with 8GB of RAM. I bought the Corsair RAM (CMSA8GX3M2A1066C7) from newegg.com

At first (running Snow Leopard OS X 10.6), it crashed every once in a while, but I figured that going to OS X Lion (10.7) would fix it. I was wrong. Lion seems to magnify all there is to these crashes. I would get the grey screen of death as well as applications randomly quitting. These issues seem to escalate as I kept updating from 10.7 to 10.7.2

As always, I thought it was the install of my Lion, as I had just updated on top of Snow Leopard, which on forums was said to be a bad practice.

Finally I got sick of my crashes and googled around and found this forum where they mentioned that it was Lion and its finicky-ness with bad memory. I had never thought that the memory would be the issue. here

So the forum member suggested running rember which is basically a os x wrapper over memtest

I started my system in single user boot mode and ran the test. Unfortunately the forum describes the wrong procedure to run the test, I’ve included it below:

  1. Download rember and put it on the root of your HD
  2. Start up in single user boot mode (hold down Command-S)
  3. Navigate to rember (/Rember.app/Contents/Resources)
  4. Execute memtest with default settings (./memtest)

After removing my 8GB RAM and reinstalling my 2GB standard RAM, it seems to become more stable.

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I have documented 3 basic functions: retrieve, browse, updates
In all cases, we assume the user is logged in, so we have access to his/her data

Retrieve – a user requests for a specific manga name/chapter
1. user sends a request for a specific manga name/chapter
2. service goes to the User table and finds the search order
3. based on the search order, checks the Chapter table to see if the manga chapter is available – return first source with chapter
a. if found, based on the Source, use the source strategies to determine correct urls
b. if not found, return not found

Browse – a user wants to see all available mangas
1. user sends request for mangas
2. service sends back current manga list
3. user selects a manga
4. service goes to User table and gets searchOrder, then goes and aggregates Chapter table
a. if not found, service makes a request through ALL source strategies to populate Chapter table
b. if found, return the aggregate chapters available

Updates – a user wants to know if there are any updates to his favorites
1. user sends a request for updates for all manga
2. service goes to User’s Favorites table
3. for every favorites, checks Chapter table for new Chapters
a. if found, return updates
b. if not found, return no updates

RSS Aggregator
1. Listens for updates on the rss feeds of the sources
a. if updates available – update the Chapter table

Source Strategies
These basically are java classes for determining image urls, for getting chapter lists, for analyzing rss feeds.

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I was originally going to wireframe the application in OmniGraffle, but I found the stencils to be inadequate, then I looked into Apple’s Interface Builder, but it seemed to not have support for iPad. so now I’m downloading the latest one. Till tomorrow.

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So in order to decide what features or the the reason why I’m building this product, it has to not exist or do something better. If you look at Google, they were a better search engine then the current existing search engines. In the same vein, I want to build a better Manga Management reader.

What do the other apps have? and what will mine have? see the table below.

The key here is updates – my app will be able to let the user know when updates are available for the favorites that they have selected. Some of the apps do have updates, but they seem counter intuitive and don’t work properly.

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I’m going to start a new series. I’m going to try to take a couple hours out of everyday to work on this new side project. I’m going to build an iOS application specifically for the iPad. This project will serve 3 purposes;
1. meet a need where the current manga applications on iPad don’t meet
2. to familiarize myself with iOS development
3. to keep my programming and technology fresh.

Purpose: Design and implement a iOS application that will allow a user to receive updates, download, and read Manga titles in a nice looking UI.

Target Audience: iPad only

Technology: Google App Engine (for backend), XCode (iOS development)

Now I’m kind of debating whether I should go with Sencha’s Touch framework, perhaps when I’m prototyping, I’ll use it to see some results.

High Level Flow

I’ve already got a basic architecture down. I’ll be creating a REST service on Google App Engine, which will do most of the heavy lifting. The iOS application will make calls to this service to receive updates about the manga the user is currently reading, if there are updates, and also how to grab the images for each chapter.

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I’ve been playing with this concept of circles and I think I’ve gotten a good handle of it.

The difference between facebook and google+ is that now you can decide who you want to see your sharing. This is awesome in the sense that if I had a drunken picture and I didnt want my family or work people to see, then I would only select my select group of friends.

The problem is that with such granularity, its not so simple as just posting, Now you have to decide what you are sharing. In most cases, you would want to share to everyone, and only some things you need to be more private about.

So here is one way to create your circles:

1. All Friends (create a new circle)
2. Work (create a new circle)
3. Family
4. Social group 1 (create a new circle, name it what you want)
5. Social group 2 (create a new circle, name it what you want)
6. Social group 3 (create a new circle, name it what you want)

etc…

Its easy to move a single friend down to a circle, but after I’ve separated them into granular groups, how do i create an All Friends circle?


1. Click on the target circle (lets say social group 1) – this will bring up a modal with a list of friends. from here you cannot drag into your All Friends circle, so you want to choose “View circle in tab”


2. Now the friends all display in the top portion of your screen and you are able to drag them to your circles. Now from the More actions > Select all – this will select all your friends.


3. Now you can drag all those friends into your All Friends circle. Google is smart enough to ignore the ones that are already in that circle.

With this concept, you can create “super” groups of the more granular groups, so you dont have to keep selecting multiple granular groups everytime you want to share to more people.

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Initially I had a lot of issues getting this jailbreak to work, but after I found some more info, it now works.

At first I was getting the issue:
Unable to find gBdevList
Unable to find fs_mount
Unable to find fs_unmount
Unable to find fs_load_file

but after following these directions, it works:

  1. Make sure you’re using Greenpois0n RC5_2 (RC5.2 works too)
  2. Make sure device is connected to your Mac
  3. Open Terminal
  4. Type “cd Desktop” without quotes and hit enter
  5. Type “open Greenpois0n.app/Contents/MacOS/greenpois0n” without quotes and hit enter. A second Terminal window will open and Greenpois0n will start
  6. Follow the instructions in Greenpois0n to enter DFU mode and it will jailbreak

if you need a place to download greenpois0n you can go here:
downloads.gregtam.com

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I’ve been messing with vms on the mac for the longest time. Ive always been disappointed with Parallels Desktop, it runs so slowly. I had a Win 7 VM, and it would literally take 10 minutes to start up on my Apple Macbook Pro 2.26 Core2Duo running OS X 10.6 and at the same time bring my computer to a grinding halt.

VMware Fusion 3.0.0, I just installed today and converted my Parallels Desktop 5 Win 7 vm to vmware, and now my computer still takes a while to load the vm, but it no longer kills my computer.

I definitely recommend VM over Parallels.

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Is your gmail getting cluttered? are you nearing the upper echelon of capacity?

Some tips on getting rid of email

  1. Select a message from a sender that you consider to be “spam”
  2. Click More Actions > Filter messages like these
  3. Gmail now creates a nice preview of what kind of messages you have filtered. make sure that these are the ones you want to delete and click next step
  4. then select the delete it check box
  5. Make sure to also select the Also apply to xxx messages
  6. Create the filter, it will then go through and delete all the useless emails
  7. Now delete the filter so you can still receive these emails in the future
  8. Click on trash, which is under the your labels dropdown on the left
  9. Click Empty trash. thats it!

you should now have more valuable email space to store all sorts of goodness.