AOL sbarca in Italia….e lo fà alla grande
8:32 PM
Note: This post is mainly for my Italian friends, a more complete version of this post is available in italian, click on the Green-White-Red flag to read it.
Yesterday I read an article on Punto Informatico called AOL tenta lo sbarco in Italia: AOL opened its services to my beautiful country (Italy).
The most interesting service that AOL provides for me is a mail with IMAP support, thanks to this protocol I can keep multiple clients simultaneously connected to the same mailbox (My iBook and my i Mac).
With AOL you can also create a Photo Gallery with unlimited storage capacity (totally free).
Some useful links:
- Here there is the Italian main page.
- You can downlod related software at this page. (I use only AOL Pictures for Mac and AOL Connect).
- Here there are instructions to configure IMAP and smpt services.
I'm testing the email service, and if I don't find problems, I'll say goodbye to my gmail account! 
Update 2007 October 24: Now also GMail supports the IMAP protocol, and it seems even better... Then I'll continue to use the good old address! :-)
Growl 1.1 update
1:16 PM
Growl is a (but maybe is better to say "the") notification system for Mac OS X: it allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications.
It's one those projects that Apple should include into future releases OS X.
The last update 1.1 introduced a global positioning system (not the NAVSTAR GPS that you may think, this system allows you to decide the default starting position for notifications). I found this update very interesting, before the 1.1 release every notification (with the exceptions of bezel and Music Video ones) appeared on the top-right corner of the screen, and on a 12 inch monitor they were always over the search box of an application; I hated that while I was clicking in that position, a notification appeared, and the event associated with the click was executed every time against my will. Now I can put notification on the bottom-right so I find them less annoying.
This is the site of the project, and here you can find the change-log.
Download Growl here.
Yet Another Birthday Importer
1:15 PM
If you, like me, use Address Book of Mac OS X to store information about your contacts, specially birthdays and anniversary, you'll find this application very useful.
YABI creates a calendar for iCal containing all these events. You can add multiple alarms so, syncing the calendar with your phone, you'll never forget an occasion.
This program follows the KISS idea (Keep It Simple, Stupid) so it's very fast and easy to use.
This is the site of the project.
Download YABI here.
Color your Terminal
1:21 AM
This week I've searched some programs that could simplify the use of my Mac, one of them is already present in OS X, but its default settings are not enough comfortable. I've been using Linux since 1999 and the result of this passion is an unconditional love for a coloured terminal. The Shell is a powerful application essential on a UNIX system, I use it almost every day.
I decided to make this little How-To to remember me how to reset my favourite settings, but maybe it could be useful for someone else...
Step One: Find plan.
Step Two: Save World.
Step Three: Get out from my house!
Ups these are not the right instructions ^_^ ...wait a minute...here they are:
Step One: Open Terminal.
Step Two: Append to the file ".bash_profile" the following lines:[[ -f ~/.bashrc ]] << . ~/.bashrcYou can use your favourite editor (like nano), all these files are in the home directory, if they don't exists create them.
[[ -f ~/.colors ]] << . ~/.colors
Step Three: Into ".bashrc" add:
# /etc/skel/.bashrc:
if [[ $- != *i* ]] ; then
return
fi
if [ "$EUID" = "0" ] || [ "$USER" = "root" ] ; then
PS1='\[\033[01;31m\]\u@\h\[\033[01;34m\] \W \$\[\033[00m\] '
else
PS1='\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[01;34m\] \W \$\[\033[00m\] '
fi
Step Four: Create a file called: ".colors", it'll enable ls to use colors:
export CLICOLOR=1
LSCOLORS="cxfxcxdxbxegedabagacad"
export LSCOLORS
LS_COLORS='no=00:fi=00:di=00;32:ln=00;32:pi=40;33:so=01;'
LS_COLORS=LS_COLORS+'35:bd=40;33;01:cd=40;33;01:or=01;05;'
LS_COLORS=LS_COLORS+'37;41:mi=01;'
export LS_COLORS
Step Five: Open Terminal Inspector (Terminal -> Windows Settings...) change other colors and font. (courier 11 pt - with anti-aliasing is a good choice).
I use the same colors of my old favourite distro: Gentoo... but you can also change them, look at the following list for other codes:
\033[22;30m - black
\033[22;31m - red
\033[22;32m - green
\033[22;33m - brown
\033[22;34m - blue
\033[22;35m - magenta
\033[22;36m - cyan
\033[22;37m - gray
\033[01;30m - dark gray
\033[01;31m - light red
\033[01;32m - light green
\033[01;33m - yellow
\033[01;34m - light blue
\033[01;35m - light magenta
\033[01;36m - light cyan
\033[01;37m - white
Now you can have something like the screenshot above. 
Update: If you are very lazy you can also use my files, copy them into home folder and remember to add a "." before each name:
- .bash_profile
- .bashrc
- .aliases
- .colors
- com.apple.Terminal.plist put this into ~/Library/Preferences
The rEFIt Project
3:01 PM
rEFIt is a boot menu and maintenance toolkit for EFI-based machines like the Intel Macs. You can use it to boot multiple operating systems easily, including triple-boot setups with Boot Camp. It also provides an easy way to enter and explore the EFI pre-boot environment.
I find this project very nice, I use this software (it's also compatible with my new Santa Rosa iMac) because I need a simple, fast and nice method to select the startup OS. I set the timeout to 5 seconds in /efi/refit/refit.conf to have a faster boot (default is 20 seconds), in this file you can also set a custom title banner instead of the rEFIt icon and name, and change other options.
The installation is really simple, does not effects the partition table, and it's completely reversible.
Visit the rEFIt project's site for other informations.
Download it here.
USB Flash Disk Odyssey - Part 2
1:00 PM
After the useless post that I made yesterday (I confess: I made it only to use Numbers and its beautiful interface 
) I want to indicate a couple of useful software that I found. They are both freeware, I was not searching for shareware, even if there are interesting applications of this type, like Data Rescue II).
First utility: Corsair Drive Tools BETA (Win/Mac OS X)
This application allows you to keep in sync a folder between an external drive and one or more computers, I use it to keep in sync my Documents' folder on the pen drive.
It is a BETA release but it runs very well. The only limitation is the sync system: if you delete a file on the external drive this file will be restored when the application will be lunched, if you want to delete something you must delete it with your hands for each copy that you have made.
When you download this software it comes in two version: the Windows one, and the Mac OS X one, they have the same interface. To run it, you must copy the program on the flash drive.
Download Corsair Drive Tools BETA here.
USB Flash Disk Odyssey - Part 1
5:21 PM
Preface: I bought a 2GB USB Flash Pen Drive (manufacturer: Philips).
In the past days I was trying to discover the best way to make the most from this article. To analyze the performance of the pen I used the first benchmarking software that I found: Xbench and the iMac as a test machine.
First step:
Which file system was better?
I took this three FS into account: FAT16 - FAT32 - HFS+.
- FAT16 is the default productor's choice; Mac Os X could not format natively drive with this FS, so I used a Linux liveCD (GParted) under VMware to perform this task. The performance are fairly good, but the free space on the pen after the backup of my Documents' folder is only 388.3 MB.
- FAT32 is slower than FAT16 but saves more space.
- HFS+ is the default FS chosen with Mac OS X, it assures good performance, and auto-defragmentation for small files, the only problem is a lack of support for this FS in Windows (and in many Linux distros).
On the table above I reported only two parameters for the comparison, all the other scores that Xbench could provide are very similar for each FSs.
Update: I added an "average" speed parameter, this is very meaningful, I calculated this with the needed time to copy my Document's Folder onto the drive. The results were unbelievable 
, to be sure I repeated the test twice...but my pen seems very very very slow with FAT. Obviously I discovered that Xbench isn't very useful for this type of test.
I asked myself a question "And now....what fs could I use?" 
I didn't want to use HFS+ on a pen drive because it's not "universal", I tested it only to satisfy my curiosity. I didn't test any other file systems for the reason above: Only FAT is an FS that can be read from every OS.
Even if FAT16 is faster than FAT32, I preferred to use this last because it saves more space on my drive (For thechnical explanation see Mauro's comments). But FAT is damned slow...I cannot explain these results (On the contrary....see the update 
).
The choice: FAT32 ...uff
I chose the filesystem to use, now I must find some applications that could improve my experience with this slow drive.
P.s. The speed of the drive is approximately 1.95 MB/s for big files (ex: iso)
Update 2007-09-04:
The low transfer rate is caused by the creation of resource forks (prefix: ._) needed to maintain the properties of the original files stored on a HFS+ volume. FAT does not support forks, so many other files must be crated to store special properties.
Super Resize!
7:51 PM
From Punto Informatico (An Italian online magazine about technology) I discovered an interesting application under research. This software can perform smart resizing of an image.
The underneath video is better than hundreds of words:
Here there is a bigger version (Quicktime), and here a PDF file on the research.
I think this is a great project, with a lot of potential.
Source article at this page.
Google Flight Simulator
1:58 PM
Do you know that every Google employee could spend up to 20% of his work time in a personal project?
Ok...someone in Google must love Airplanes. If you press Command+Option+A (on a Mac) or Ctrl+Alt+A (on a WinPc) when you are in Google Earth version 4.2.0 you can enable a Flight Simulator.
Commands are available at this page.
Update 2007-09-06:
Here's a video showing what you can do with the simulator.
Have fun!