At the stroke of midnight tonight, I will have completed 3 full months of testing of a real-time web tracking solution that depends heavily on ThunderBolt technology. Though I continue to be plagued with drive issues, a single drive has been fast enough to deal with the current read/write requirements.

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Initial testing of the LaCie ThunderBolt drives on a MacMini Server looked pretty good… That is after I returned the fist MacMini Server that had a dead Thunderbolt port. More in the next day or so….

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I began testing Lacie’s Big Little Disk ThunderBolt drives this last week. Lacie makes some pretty big claims for these little guys and I am determined to find out if they measure up. I have several coding projects in the hopper that will definitely put them to the test. More soon.

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A month before the launch of Apple’s original iPad, I predicted that sports teams would replace their playbooks with the tablet computer, see Countdown to iPad – Playbook (Use Case 18). Recently the Tampa Bay Buccaneers bought iPads for their players to do just that, see Tampa Bay Buccaneers buy each player an iPad to [...]

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One way in which Apple has turned the Mac into the most powerful scripting/automation platform on the planet has been to provide a litany of scriptable languages as part of the standard install. Just some of the languages you will find in Mac OS X are JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and of course AppleScript. I refer [...]

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As there are no built-in routines for changing the case of characters in AppleScript, the coder is required to add their own handlers. The following script (See credits below) shows one way to use AppleScript to change the names of files in a folder from lowercase to uppercase & vise-versa. Begin Script… tell application “Finder” [...]

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As there is no built-in sort function in AppleScript you have to create your own. A common way of sorting lists is to use the repeat function… cycling through the list comparing items as you progress.  One of the more efficient approaches is a bubble sort. You can find an excellent example in Lesson 18, [...]

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On March 24, 2001 Apple introduced it’s ‘Unix’ based version of Mac OS, Mac OS X. Steve Jobs said, “Mac OS X is the most important software from Apple since the original Macintosh operating system in 1984 that revolutionized the entire industry.” See Mac OS X Hits Stores This Weekend. The following 10 years saw [...]

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I am a fan of most Apple products and usually do not hesitate recommending them. MobileMe has been a glaring exception. While I consider the overall value of MobileMe to be well worth the $99 per year, the iDisk service has been slow and buggy. Despite an extended marathon on the Apple Tech Support Line [...]

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I fly a lot and it seems as if the space between plane seats narrows a bit more every year. So much so, I gave up using a laptop to get any work done on most flights. When I got my iPad I gained back much of the work time I had lost, but it [...]

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