News for Tuesday, 1 June 2004

There are some persons who are investing so much of their time for their passion, that they propose professional-oriented softwares for free!!!
On the following web site http://www.mesureware.net/ (only in french), Gérald Mesure is proposing softwares dedicated to medical environment:
- Gardian 3.5 allows you to generate duty list.
- Medocs 4.0 is managing drug prescriptions with network (intranet) capabilities.
- and the last one, Agenor 1.5, allows you to manage working time in a medical environment also with network capabilities.
Hereafter are few words from the developer:

This message is initially for Gardian and Medocs users to announce the release of a new application, Agenor, which will allow you to organize working time in a medical/hospital environment. I am sure that some of you we modify it to apply it for other jobs or applications. Agenor allows you to setup and print duty lists, as well as organization tables/team working time,... but it is mostly a powerful tool because you can publish those lists or tables, modify them and print them over the intranet of your medical institution. You will find all the details on the web site mentioned above. Agenor can import duty list generated with Gardian. Agenor is software which should be deployed at an institution level, as its main strength is its intranet tool, and I hope users will promote it to their institution IT since it is free software based on free network technologies, safe and validated coming Linux world (MySQL).

All softwares are available for MacOS9, MacOSX and Windows; and are free.
It might be one way to help our social security/Health system to save money...

Thanks to C.M. for this info.

While I was visiting the San Vincenzo Observatory at Stromboli (group of islands in the north of Sicilia, Italy), I have discovered almost as much Macs than PCs which were monitoring any sign of activity from the volcano. Macs (old iMac BondiBlue and eMac under OS9 with dedicated applications) were used to listen all sounds recorded via seismographs, as well as managing the video camera located around the crater, especially for the web. Unfortunately, since I was not speaking italian so fluently I could not get into the details of this system. For some pictures, look here: http://www.ct.ingv.it If you need info regarding the Stromboli volcano: http://www.educeth.ch/stromboli/

An extension named iCook allows you to overclock under MacOSX, via a software, all iBooks based on PPC750FX.
You will find this application on the following page:
http://www.swieskowski.net/icook/
Via this application, you can downclock the CPU of an iBook in order to increase battery half-life.
Warning: This extension is taking over Apple energy saving settings under MacOSX.
Please contact us if you have tried this extension, or if you have run test.

Thanks to TVZ for this news!

The recent OSX update 10.3.4 reveals that new PowerMac or iMac G5 are existing, ready or close to be launched. The previous update already included an unknown reference code: Power Mac 7,3. None of the current Apple computers owns such a reference code. Indeed, reference code of the current PowerMac G5 is Power Mac 7,2. For information, PowerMac G4 had as reference code Power Mac 3,x, Cube G4: Power Mac 5,1 and iMac TFT and eMac Power Mac 4,x and 6,x respectively. You can find the complete list here: http://www.theapplemuseum.com/index.php?id=tam&page=products&subpage=newworld Now if we look in details in the last MacOSX update, we can identify a new reference code: Power Mac 8,1, so it would mean that it is not an update of one of the current model, but a brand new model!! We can also find the reference code SMU_Neo2, which could mean that Neo2 would be a new version of the current processor. If it is clear that the new processor will be derived from the current one, it is not clear if it will be a light version (such as the 970fx in the Xserve) or a boosted version (!!!)! If you want to know more, look inside the last update 10.3.4, open this file: /System/Library/Extensions/AppleMacRISC4PE.kext/ Contents/info.plist and search for "8,1". Knowing that the PowerMac G5 and the iMac have not been updated recently since a long time, then you can conclude...what you want... ;-) I let you dream... (for me, my personal feeling, the PowerMac 8,1 is an iMac G5 with a new design, available at the end of June, whereas the PowerMac 7,3 will be the revision of the current PowerMac G5, available at the same time)

-The Gathering told us of a new browser:

[...]a new browser named shiira (http://hmdt-web.net/shiira/index-e.html) which looks lilke Safari in a few ways. You could almost say it's Safari's little brother because it is very easy to configure, integrates well with the OS and makes it easy to automatically import Safari's bookmarks. It is just a matter of going into the properties and select which bookmark to use. The interface is customizable and looks terrific. It is still in the beta stages, but offers many promises over Safari namely buttons customization, which is I think impossible to do in Apple's browser. It looks like a great project to watch out for, even if for now it can't handle all the fonts properly. It's just a matter of time.

[Upd] This browser can't seem to handle https, that's not very convenient.
[Upd2] It only works in Panther
[kurisu adds : Shiira is built on webkit, the Safari engine]

Thank you Grégory for this tip which could very well be useful to some of us:

Hi, I had a problem on my new AluBook. Neither of my FW400 or FW800 disks, or disk images (.dmg or .img) would mount. After a few searches on various forums (don't really remember which one though) I found the cause of the problem. In the NetInfo database, I had to delete and then recreate the user "unknown" whose uid is 99. After a reboot, it works... Maybe this problem is also linked to the frame dropping issues certain people have been experiencing ?! The steps are (be careful not to screw this up) : Launch NetInfo (in /Applications/Utilities) Click on the padlock and enter your admin password. browse your way through "/", "users" make a copy of a user account "nobody" for instance. and change its values as per the following : uid : 99 gid : 99 name : unknown realname : Unknown User _writers_passwd : unknown Save the changes and then reboot. When OS X mounts a disk, it does so under this user's account. (don't ask me why although I have my idea on the subject). It turns out that if this user account is somehow messed up, disks won't mount. I didn't have any problem with this user but deleting it and recreating it fixed my problem. I hope this will be of help to a few people, avoiding needless OS re-installs.

Thank you Willy for this great hack :

It is possible to fit a radeon 9800 pro mac in a Cube. This hack is made possible by using the Powercube enclosure from Powerlogix (http://powerlogix.com/products/enclosure/index.html). It is just necessary to sand approximately 1mm off of the internal upper shield of the cube. I also use an additional external PSU to give enough juice to the card. I placed that 2nd PSU on the floor so that it doesn't look ugly next to the Cube. All the details of this mod can be found here: http://www.cubeowner.com/forums//index.php?showtopic=7081 All the pics give a fairly straightforward "howto". The page also features a few benchmarks, the graphic tests give great results !

Denis just got his Powerbook G4 12" 1,33 GHz.
He performed a quick test on our forums, comparing his new machine with his old iBook 600. Here's an excerpt :

Here are a few performance tests of the PBook 12 (the values between brackets are the ones of my old iBook 600) Cold startup : 48s (77s) Launching Eclipse + neoOffice + iPhoto : 69s (157s) Compile tests under Eclipse : 15s (39s) Integer calculation test : 39s (96s) AAC encoding with iTunes (160kbps) : x13 (x3.7) There, everything goes roughly 2.5 to 3 times faster...

The complete test can be found in our forums (in French):
http://forum.macbidouille.com/