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I’ve been thinking about buying a Mac for a while. Not making ‘the switch’ as many call it, just an interest purchase because I wanted to know if what I heard about them was legit – and because I need a Mac for a course I’m doing in September. I bought the cheapest Macbook that Futureshop had and began my journey into the world of a floating doc and closing buttons on the other side….. but enough with my crap. Time for the review.

The Apple Macbook starts at $999 in the US and $1149 in Canada. I got mine for $1099 through a back to school package with my local Futureshop.

2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor

2GB DDR2 Memory

160GB hard drive

NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics

Standard keyboard

White polycarbonate shell

So in general comparison to the rest of the laptop world right now, this laptop, like other Apple computers, is overpriced for its specs, but that’s something you expect when you buy Apple. Other than the price, its about an average laptop for any student that’s just going to be IM’ing, using Facebook, or email.

I’m a big Ubuntu fan, and I really enjoy Windows 7 but when I began using OSX I began to rethink how I felt about how a friendly operating system should look and feel. The application dock at the bottom of the screen is something that I have emulated on other machines, but always caused things to slow down – the dock in OSX was created with the operating system so it doesn’t have the same effect – it runs smoothly and has little effect on system resources. So is OSX all that its cracked up to be… well sort of. There are a few things that your average Windows user will become confused by, but nothing that would totally hinder their ability to use the computer. It’s very pretty and functional, so it gets the ‘thumbs up’ in this area.

The keyboard that comes built into this laptop has a very nice feel to it. The button travel is just the right distance and the spaced layout between the keys is pleasing both to the eyes as well as to the touch. But one thing that I have to comment on is the fact that everything is different!! As a Windows/Linux user I’m used to having a function (Fn) key for secondary key options, a Ctrl and Alt keys, as well as a Backspace and Delete keys. The functions performed by those keys are handy and I use them all the time when writing or developing software. The ‘Delete’ key on the laptop is actually a backspace, I find not having a delete key that does a forward delete very frustrating. I later found out that ‘Fn + Delete’ does a forward delete, but I shouldn’t have to go looking for key combinations to find out where standard functions lie. Many other functions are mapped to different keys and different key combinations, but they go against normal use of a computer and subsiquently get thumbs down here.

The white polycarbonate shell mentioned above, has a very nice look to it and is very much a contributer to the Apple sex appeal that so many people have lusted for, and I love it. There are unfortunately a few negatives about it. As a ‘shell’ it feels flimsy wherever two pieces meet – on the edges along the top sides of the computer. The edge of the plastic where your wrists rest as you type is very much a right angle, making it pointed and uncomfortable.

There are many other things I could say about this machine but I’ll answer the question many of you are reading this article to find out: is buying an Apple computer really worth it?

Yes.

I really enjoy OSX as an operating system and the newest revision of it, ‘Snow Leopard’, is launching very soon. I enjoy the keyboard, despite it scratching my wrists and enjoy how much care Apple has taken to make all of its i-Applicaitons compatible with eachother.

If your curious about Apple computers and don’t know if you want to take the plunge to pay $2000, this laptop is a great starting point.

One thing I feel obligated to mention is that I am extremly new to OSX and I am told that after 2GB of RAM it really opens up. I bought the model with 2GB of RAM, so perhaps if your buying one and can afford the upgrade, go for the 4GB of RAM and send me an email to tell me about it!

Many companies today are selling smaller and smaller laptops with all sorts of gadgets on them to make them popular and increase sales. But many people don’t realise that one of the gadgets they’ve taken out is one that’s most handy, an optical drive. Now before you bring that stamp sized laptop back, remember that the world is full of people who love to hack their ways around complicated issues. And this particular issue, is not overly complicated. Here’s a quick way that will get you around this issue, MOST of the time… (yes this article is longer than you’d hoped, but honestly, its not hard)

There are a number of different ways to get a compact disk onto a computer without an optical drive. You do need one in the beginning, there’s no psychic way to transfer the disk, but after that, you wont need one again until you have another disk you want to move over.

So here’s a list of what you’ll need to pull off this little hack.

- Your mini-laptop (the one without a cd-rom drive, duh!)
- Another computer (one with a cd-rom drive and some usb ports)
- A flash drive larger than 1gb (1 gb will work more often than not)
- Patience

To start, you need a program that will allow you to make what are called ‘disk images’,
these ‘images‘ are just that… a picture. To be exact its a copy of the information on the disk at a particular point in time, kinda like a real picture… except its data… and not people…. you get the picture.

There are a number of programs that allow you to make these images.
PowerISO, DaemonTools, MagicISO, Alcohol%120, and many.. many more, in fact  the internet is filled with them, and chances are your computer came with one that was meant to burn the images to new disks.

Personally, I use PowerISO because its free version allows you to do practically everything you may want to do with a disk, and a little more, so it gets thumbs up from me.

This is where its going to get a little technical, but don’t worry, I’m going to hold your hand and explain everything in detail so that when you’re done you can have that merit badge of geekyness.

Ok, so at this point, you’ve got your spiffy “My Collection of Cool Games” disk handy and another computer, yes you do need another computer for this, unless you’ve got a external cd-rom drive handy… in which case stop reading now because….. your already done???

So first install PowerISO on both computers. Your going to use different program functionality for each different computer, so it must be on both computers. This is where the flash drive can come in handy, if you have the internet (and you do cause you’re reading this) you can download PowerISO on both computers at the same time… if you don’t have wireless or another way to download the program onto both computers, put it on that flash drive you’ve got there and transfer it over.

If that’s a task that boggles your mind, again, stop reading and consult your closest 12 year old. 

After installing PowerISO on both computers, your going to begin what we in the geek world call ‘making a disk image’… So stick your copy of ‘My Collection of Cool Games” into the computer with the cd-rom drive (as if that wasn’t blatantly obvious)… and open PowerISO (click the part that says use unregistered).

WARNING: What your about to do IS illegal in some places, Some people will tell you that copying disks is not illegal if you own a copy of it… but they’re wrong, it’s still illegal.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, towards the top of the program is a button that says “Copy”, its a picture of a disk with and arrow pointing to the generic windows logo for a hard drive. Click that button. It should open a menu that gives you a few options. Select the button that says “.iso file” and make sure you have the proper source drive selected in the top drop down menu. There is no particular reason I suggest you select .iso, I just have foud that it is accepted by the geek culture as a standard format for disk images. Click the “…” button when you’re ready and select the option for your desktop, or another folder of your choosing, this is where the program will save the image of the disk.

This is one area where things can go wrong…

If your disk contains any strict copy protection or any other things to prevent people from enjoying their media the way they want to, PowerISO may stop working and stop your fun there. There are other ways to get around the copy protection, but I will not be going into details on that here, as I believe that it would cause more trouble for me, than good for you.

After PowerISO is done with the disk, plug in your flash drive and copy the new disk image from where ever you saved it, on to the flash drive. Then plug the flash drive into your mini notebook, and copy it somewhere on to it, such as an “Images” folder off of your main C: drive, or another folder of your choosing.

And now, you shuold stop to enjoy a moment of accomplishment, you have just broken the law. The police have been notified and are on their way. Joke. You can also be assured that 25% of the complex computer stuff is behind you and that you only have 75% more to go (hehe).Back to work….

When you open PowerISO again, you’ll see all sorts of buttons along the top. But this time, we’re going to be paying attention to another one…

And this is where its going to get REALLY complicated.

PowerISO and many other disk mounting programs have different ways of ‘mounting’ (yes mounting, and no, we’re not going for a horse ride..) what your mounting is the disk image to a virtual drive. To de-complicate the overyly complicated, PowerISO tricks your computer into believing that there is a cd-rom drive, when there really isn’t. (Get it? We’re tricking your computer!!)

So to direct your attetion away from my clever writing and back to PowerISO, you’ll see that they’ve cleverly made a button that says “Mount”.. (click it).

This is going to bring up another menu and allow you to do all sorts of complicated auto-run settings and set how many drives it’s lying to your computer about. Make sure that in the number of drives is set to one. You can have a few if you’d like, but you only really need one.

Now in that same menu, you’ll see something like “Mount Image to Drive D: <no media>” or something like that. This is the virtual drive that you set up. So next we have to tell PowerISO what disk to use, so click that, and navigate your way around the innards of your computer to where ever you saved that disk image from before, select it, and click “Open”.

Thats it.

If your disk has an auto-run feature, wait a moment and it will likely start up, if not, dont be afraid to go into “My Computer” to figure it out.

To use another disk, do the same things all over again, you only need to mount the disk that you want to use at that time, so dont be afraid of the “Unmount Drive [D:]” part in the PowerISO “Mount” menu.

One other tip, if you are using PowerISO, chances are that it installed what are called shell-scripts when it installed. These scripts allow you to right click on any disk image and mount/unmount them anywhere. So if you want to mount a disk thats on your desktop, right click it, navigate to the PowerISO menu, and mount/umount to your hearts desire.

Hope this helped.

Just as an asside… not to encourage movie piracy or any other illegal activities, but this method works well for DVD’s too! (providing they aren’t copy protected)

Coles Notes Version:
1.Copy disk onto computer with optical drive using PowerISO
2.Copy new disk image to computer using flash drive
3. Mount using PowerISO, and enjoy.

If your like me, and your new to the whole ASP.NET environment, then going from IIS6 in XP to IIS7 in Vista, may cause you some problems. Here are a few things that may help you along.

IIS6 Management Console and Compatability.

This feature is added through your Windows features, like IIS, but is not added by default. This may solve some of your problems.

The NETWORK SERVICE user.

In XP it was ASPNET, in Vista, its NETWORK SERVICE, this may not be a huge problem for many people but I totally forgot about it. (give it full permissions if your only developing)

Last but not least…

The last thing that may cause you some trouble are the permissions (surprise) of certain folders like the TEMP folder on your C: drive. You may need to change permissions on that folder as well as change the system folders. This site explains about how to do two of the above things, one thing that they do that I do differently is I changed my path from %Systemroot% to just C:, because that’s where I want it to be. Yes, the system root is often C: anyway, but I also use multiple drives and my sometime change my root, so me making it C: now, will save me any headaches later.

Oh, one last thing…. don’t forget IISRESET!!

I have been a Final Fantasy fan for years now, playing more of them than I care to write down. When I got my iPod touch last Christmas, I was hoping to find some tactics game like the ones on the GBA and DS (and the original PS). Sadly, I found nothing.

Then there was Crystal Defenders, and to me, it was just another tower defence game on the iPod, a genre that was crowded then, and even more so now. But, my biased love for the Final Fantasy (FF) series made me fork over the hefty $7.99 (plus tax) for the download. The game was everything I hoped for, and of all the app’s on my iPod, I play it more than any other.

There are a number of similarities in all tower defence games, multiple unit types, different maps, and of course, the baddies. But there are a few unique’s that make this game great. First and foremost are the obvious Final Fantasy Tactics character models (for both you and the enemies), which are cute and friendly. Knowing the units from the previous games, made it feel like a classic FF game. The game also features the summonable monsters that we all know and love which allow you to deal massive damage to your foe’s, but at a cost.

There are 3 difficulties of game play, which are broken up into waves, each wave having 4 maps. Upon starting the game, you pick a wave and then you select a level to play. You then, like any other tower defence game, try to stop the baddies from getting through. The game features a unique scrolling system that reminds me of a joystick, and makes me believe that if other companies followed suit, we could see many classic games come the way of the iPod. There was also a recent update that added in play via landscape mode and changed the character models. The new models don’t quite look like the original Tactics models anymore(boo-urns!) but they are still pleasing and give the game a fresh look.

The price is a little steep, but I defiantly got my $8 worth out of this title. True to the Final Fantasy name, your going to get hours of enjoyment out of it, just try to get over 3000 points on every level before moving on to the next, and you’ll be challenged. This game truly is endless fun and I recommend it to anyone who loves their chocobo’s, or even just tower defence games.

While performing my morning routine this morning, I received a text message from a friend of mine asking me about some virus that was going to hit the whole world tomorrow (April 1st). My initial reactions were that it was foolish to even think this. But I did a quick Google search about the whole issue and, the name immediately hit me, and my hand subsequently hit me.

The conficker worm is nothing new people, its been on the go for at least six months, cause I’ve known about it for that long. The conficker worm is an old school spam worm, it needs not be poked or prodded to get around. I’ll explain it, like I did to my girlfriend.

Conficker is a worm like the flu. Its not going to take you down all together, but its going to slow you down. But also like the flu, you only need to go near someone who has it to become infected.

Now, I don’t mean, if you lay your laptop next to mine that I can catch the virus from yours, this virus, like most others are spread via the internet. So if one computer becomes infected, then the chances of other computers on the same network getting it go through the roof.

But how can I not get it? Was the question that entailed from my friends text message, and because this has been going around for a while now, I know that there are 2 ways to remove it yourself without the help of Norton, or McCaffee or any others….. The first being to keep your computer up to date with the latest Windows updates, which will run the second way to do it (so really there is only one free way to do it). The MRT (that’s it!).  MRT, the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool.  It runs when you do updates. Or if your worried about the attack tomorrow, you can run it yourself by holding down the windows key and pressing ‘R’, and then typing MRT. You’ll have to click a few times but it should get the job done (it has in the past).

See my references below for more information.

You may or may not have a LinkedIn profile, but if you don’t, and you’ve come to this page the chances are that you could benefit from having one.

LinkedIn is a social website for anyone and everyone who is interested in getting a new job, looking for employees, or if you want, a professional presence on the net.

It allows users to connect to people they know to build a professional associate base and use that database to their advantage (if needed). It’s almost like an online resume except that there are discussions, contact lists, user groups and much more that I don’t even know about. Which is why I attended a webbinar about it.

For more I for Information about how linked in can help you.

Go to www.clearrisk.com/linkedin

If you’ve never used javascript, then the bit coming may set you back a bit… It certianly took me a few minutes, and alot of google’ing to figure it out. Thickbox is a JQuery add on that is quick and easy, it really is. If you dont have the javascript and the css set up or if you dont know how to do that stuff, try some W3 schools tutorials, they’ll get you up to speed.

 In terms of ASP.NET and C#, its very similar to basic html, add the files to the section that imports your other CSS and Javascript. For me, it was quite simple. Here’s where I started.

The Thickbox Code

 First I made a simple html page that you can use for the pop up.

Next, the Button with the thickbox anchor around it.

<a id=”thickboxLinkForButton” runat=”server” href=”thickbox.htm?width=270&height=50&modal=true” class=”thickbox” visible=”false”>
        <asp:Button visible=”false” class=”clickMeButton” id=”aButton”
                 Text=”Click Me” runat=”server”
                 OnClick=”confirmRemoveAllTasksBtnClick”
                 UseSubmitBehavior=”false”/>

</a>

When you click that button, your thick box will pull the previos html code from the page, and use the width and height thats specified in the link to draw your thickbox. The last part about UseSubmitBehavior tells the ASP not to rely on the HTML submit but to use the ASP(javascript) to do the submitting.

If your thickbox is supposed to be a modal confirmation box or you want to remove the text that says ‘press Esc’, stick ‘&modal=true’ on the end of the thickbox url.

Closing the Thickbox

Now when I implemented the box, I had intended it to be used as a pop up for when I do a rather large server call. The call I was using required about 10 secconds of server time, so I couldn’t very well use a timer, or something like that, its too tacky, and in my case not reliable. So I needed a way for the box to turn itself off.

This part was easier than I thought…the thickbox js has a tb_remove() function that allows us to remove it. Its that simple. The hard part was figuring out a way for the server to tell the box its ready. I use the ASP.NET SYS functions to allow it to happen.

If only we could grab the page manager and keep track of it some how we could quickly and effectivly know when its ready. But how do we do that?????

Well… Microsoft actually did something right here, with the ‘Sys’ functions in ASP.NET AJAX we can do exactly that.

Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance()

This will allow us to get it and after that, we just add a function onto its endRequest to close the thickbox.

var PageRequestManager = Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance();

PageRequestManager.add_endRequest(
   function()
  {
      tb_remove();
   }
);

I know its alot to grab all at once, but we’re ALMOST there……

The Reload

If you stick the thickbox on a page that is going to refresh theres more to do. Javascript does some weird stuff when you do a post back. Because HTML is stateless, when you do a partial postback of an element, if that element has javascript added to it on load, then after the postback, its not going to have the previous methods on it anymore because of the partial reload of the page. This brings us to our final problem.

This final problem was my biggest one. Figuring out how to re-add a method without reloading the whole page. I can’t take the credit for this one, I found it on another blog, similar to this one. I cant remember where I found it, someone knows where it came from, please send me a message so that I can cite my source.

What it does is again, quite elegant. It adds a pageload method into the page load method. As weird as that sounds, its true. It adds in an isAsyncPostback method to the page so that if a postback is called, it re-add’s the method to the methods that used the thickbox.

function pageLoad()
{
     var isAsyncPostback = Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance().get_isInAsyncPostBack();
     if (isAsyncPostback)
     {
            tb_init(‘a.thickbox, area.thickbox, input.thickbox’);
     }
}

In Close

After all that, we have a nice modal box that tells our user that when it pops up, closes on its own after the server has completed all its work.

It was alot more work than I originally thought it would be, but in the end, it was SO worth it.