shuffle May 2007 content

[Magnus]

Review: All in one server with iTools 8
by Magnus

iTools from Tenon Intersystems is an all in one server package for Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server. Tenon says it’s “web hosting control panel software”. In iTools you find everything from Apache web server, PHP, Perl, MySQL 5, PHP5, Tomcat, WordPress, and more, all accessible through a control panel like interface. There is so much I can’t list it all, but rest assured, that pretty much anything you would need for a web server is in iTools. We installed iTools 8 on a G4 Mac mini with 1GB RAM and it installed without problems. Since there is so much software and options, we focused on setting up some basic MySQL and PHP functionality. Getting that up and running was really easy, and configuration is a breeze too with everything available in a nice interface. You can download iTools and try it for free for 14 days which should be enough to find out if it’s a solution that fits you. The different system and applications in iTools are open source and freely available. Then you may ask “why should I pay money to Tenon?” I think the simple answer is to save you time and effort, and thereby money. What Tenon has done is put this selection of various applications together, made an interface for it all, and made it accessible. I could download all these applications individually and configure them individually. Undoubtedly that would give me more control but it would also take more time. I think there’s a definite niche for iTools, and in the price of iTools is included help and support from Tenon to get you up and going, but for some potential customers, the price is going to be too high. Tenon provided a temporary license for iTools for this review.

Price $349
From Tenon Intersystems
Distributor Tenon Intersystems
Web iTools 8 for Mac OS X & Mac OS X Server

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Review: Airport Extreme Base Station 802.11n
by Magnus

Arguably the most important news about the updated Airport Extreme Base Station is that it now supports 802.11n, making its top speed a lot faster than on the previous model. According to Apple, it boasts about five times the speed and double the range of the previous model. To get the better speed you obviously have to have an all-802.11n network. Even though it is 802.11n, it’s backward compatible with earlier Airport (802.11b) and Airport Extreme (802.11g). The look of the Airport Extreme has changed, and it’s now reminiscent of the Mac mini and Apple TV but with an all white plastic case. On the back we find the connection for the networking connection, and three 10/100MBPS Ethernet ports to which you can attach additional computers. There’s also a USB port which can be used to share an external hard drive or a printer, over a local network. The hard drive sharing is the easiest way yet from any manufacturer to share storage over a network, but it’s an all-or-nothing sharing. You cannot control the access to and sharing of individual folders. When it comes to security the new Airport Extreme supports WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) and WPA2 encryption methods, as well as older WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy). We recommend you stay away from WEP when at all possible. The 802.11n upgrade of the Airport Extreme Base Station is a very solid upgrade to what was already one of the best wifi access points on the market. With faster networking, disk sharing, and more, this is a highly recommended product. Yes, there are cheaper 802.11 base stations from other manufacturers, but Apple has the most stylish one, and arguably the easiest to set up and administer.

Price 899Dhs
From Apple Inc.
Distributor Apple IMC ME
Web IMC Middle East

[Magnus]

Experiences of a Apple Fan in Dubai Part 2
by Senthil

The first thing a Mac fan does when arriving in a new place is to map out the local Apple world. This means finding out where are the Apple stores, dealers, are there any user groups, and what is the virtual Apple world like. I too started the same way.

My first mission was to get to a Apple store in Dubai. Can you imagine the experience? First – The store is closed between 1 – 4 PM. Why in the world would you want to keep your store closed between 1 and 4PM if you are in the consumer business? Beats me. I would rather have tied up with Starbucks or other foodie joint to keep the crowd coming into the store. I finally managed to get back to the store at around 7PM, then as usual wait for a parking slot, park the car and enter the store. Finally nirvana. All the familiar stuff lying around excited me and I got tinkering around with the Macs and the other stuff there. With a somewhat indifferent staff hanging around, I could not help wonder how could these guys be so dis-passionate about Apple? I don’t know the reason but I have never found such a dispassionate group in any of the Mac stores around the world that I visited. I have been to Apple stores in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, India, Spain and Australia and am sure every Apple fan does this, going to Apple stores in the countries they visit. Yes, I do. For me, visiting Apple stores and railway stations is a must do in all the countries I visit. On a serious note, I thought these guys are giving someone a window of opportunity to start their own venture with Apple. For sure that is one of my long-term goals.

Next comes visiting Apple outlets at some of the malls and the experience was the same. People here are treating Apple products like they would treat any other IT products. I guess this could be one of the biggest reasons for Apple not picking up market share amongst the consumers in UAE. Finally I explored the virtual world and here was the biggest surprise. For one, I did not expect a Mac User Group in UAE and I was pleasantly surprised to see a Emirate Mac User Group. This was a Wow! experience for me. The difference between the real Mac world and the virtual Mac world is to put mildly like Chalk & Cheese. The real world though had the potential to be an exciting place turned out to be boring, whereas the virtual world of EMUG was a place with passionate and highly engaged Apple fans. I finally found a great place to hang around with real Apple fans in the virtual world. Though I would love to hang around the real world, I found solace in the fact that the virtual world of EMUG makes up for the loss of the real world. Here you come across individuals who know the Apple world and are willing to guide new comers to the real pleasures of using Macs and other Apple products.

One of my best experiences here was the EMUG meeting covering the Mac World Expo. There were eight crazy Apple fans that gathered at Crown Plaza to follow Steve’s Key Note address. I must say this was one of the best Mac fans gathering I have been part of, the excitement and anticipation of what new products Steve is going to announce was something one had to experience being part of the group. iPhone launch was what quite a few of us were expecting and when it was launched all those who had predicted the launch had that smug look of “I told you so”. The event was covered live at EmiratesMac.com and if I am not mistaken that day was the day when the Emirates Mac site had the maximum number of visitors.

What as Apple fan can one do to improve the situation here? I think the leaders at EmiratesMac are doing a wonderful job by ensuring that there is some event or other for the Apple fans here to look forward to. I have been following the meetings on the site through the postings and photos. In the past three months there have been monthly meetings, special events and MacNights.

I’d like to round out this article with some key action items if we as a group have to convert more users from the “evil” Wintel world and ensure the market share increases for Apple to come here directly

1. Apple IMC ME has to create an environment where people would like to walk in the store and explore. Create excitement during weekends at the stores. For example, they could get some experts (they don’t even have to spend for this, they can use the EMUG members to help them) to show off the creative potential of iLife, Create a movie of a family outing at the mall or even at the store and show off the movie before they proceed for their mall-ing. There are enough and more creative software for the family to be “Wow-ed” into thinking of buying the Mac. Show off the power of iLife.
2. Get the kids to create their own music album using Garageband.
3. Free iPod shuffle – create a contest to attract traffic to the store.
4. The magic of Apple display – Dazzle the walk-in traffic with stunning Apple displays showing off the latest things.
5. Create a web page for the family in an instant.

Someday when I get into my own Apple distribution business, I guess this is what I would like to do. Also engaging the EMUG is key to ensure the creative juices of this group is used to better the Apple world in UAE.

In the next part of this article series, I would like cover my experiences of Apple world in different parts of the world I have been to.

[Magnus]

First Apple Logo
by Magnus

You know Apple’s apple-logo very well. It’s changed some over the years, from having all kinds of colors in stripes across it, to today’s mono-colored apple. But did you know that the Apple’s first logo was something completely different? According to Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc) Ronald Wayne drew the first Apple logo that shows Isaac Newton sitting under a tree.

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Truly High Definition Video
by Giorgio Ungania

As an Emirates Diving Association (EDA) member, I was asked by long-time friend Ibrahim al Zu’bi , EDA’s Director of Environment & Research, to go on a trip to Malaysia with 19 other EDA members and produce a documentary about the mission. The biggest challenge was time. According to the schedule, the documentary had to be ready a week after our return to Dubai. As the documentary would have to be transferred to 35mm at a later stage, the temptation to go to High Definition Video (HDV) was irresistible. And as the deadline was so close, we had to come up with solutions to minimize the post-production time. Here is how we did it.

Unconventional crew
Having to plan and produce the documentary in such a short amount of time, I could not direct it myself so I called in Natascia Radice, a London-based director, who I knew from previous projects. We started designing our production strategy via email 10 days before the actual departure to Malaysia. Apart from Natascia and I, there was nobody else involved directly in the production. And as it was a non-profit project, there was no budget to hire cameramen or other crew members so we had to rely completely on ourselves and on the other divers. Fortunately, we had experienced underwater videographers on board. This meant that we could focus on out-of-water shooting while leaving underwater footage to them. Living in a truly digital age, we also knew that pretty much everybody nowadays owns a DV camcorder or a digital camera. So we asked all the participating divers to bring their own technology to Malaysia. We thought that if two eyes are better than one, then 15 cameras are definitely better than two.

Lots and lots of pre-production
Pre-production planning was the key to the success of the documentary. We had no other choice but to carry with us a mobile editing station so that we could physically edit each day’s material overnight. As Natascia and I are two truly devoted Apple fans, and as the documentary was to be shot in HDV, the choice of editing software was natural: Final Cut Studio. Apart from being HDV, native Final Cut Studio comes with very handy applications such as LiveType and Motion, which we used intensely for the opening and end sequences and for the subtitling. Also, as we both edit with this application, if one of us falls asleep in front of the monitor, the other can keep on editing. The main editing station was a PowerBook 17-inch equipped with 2GB of RAM and an external 300GB FireWire hard drive. The whole mini-studio was really light to carry and it took us literally two minutes to set it up in all the various hotel rooms and locations we travelled to during the 10 days of the trip. To optimize the timings, I had the opening sequence already created in Motion. The only thing we had to do was replace the dummy stills and clips with the ones recorded on site.

Shooting
Regarding the soundtrack, we researched and chose the songs and music beds we wanted to use prior to departure as we wanted to use our iPods in a new and experimental way. Music editing and sound design are stages typical of the post-production process. Wanting to minimize time spent in post-production, we decided to equip whoever was shooting with an iPod playing the track that would be used on that particular scene; it was kind of like shooting a live event somehow. Natascia and I knew in advance what kind of feeling we wanted to add to the footage so having the music playing in our headphones helped us synergise our camera movements. Of course, until Apple comes out with a waterproof version of the iPod, we will have to limit its usage to dry land.

The digital hut
The majority of the scenes were shot in Mabul and Sipadan, two deep-water oceanic islands known worldwide for their underwater wonders. Other scenes took place in Kuala Lumpur during a Christmas Open House event hosted by The King and Queen of Malaysia together with the deputy Prime Minister. Mabul island played host to our Smart Resort headquarters. Here, we stayed in very comfortable, basic wooden huts that were well-equipped with electrical sockets. To Natascia and I, that was even more important than having hot running water. One hut was reserved for the mobile editing station and immediately was labeled “the digital hut“. Here, we had all the computers and an incredible amount of chargers for all the batteries and adaptors and so on. At the end of each day, we digitized all the tapes to hard disk and transferred the hundreds of digital photographs to the iBook for photo retouching. To gain time, we decided not to log and capture each tape but to download the whole content and do the logging at a later stage. The Sony HDR camera works perfectly in tune with Final Cut, as each time you paused the recording on the camera, an individual clip appears in your bin in Final Cut. After the downloading, we made time for dinner before immediately getting started on logging and editing the footage. We used headphones, of course, so as not to disturb the well-deserved rest of our fellow divers.

Post-production
Once back in Dubai, we had a few days to finalize the documentary as it had to be shown to the public in a week’s time. We recorded some links with Ibrahim in his EDA office in order to enhance the continuity of the documentary and to better explain the connections between the scenes of the various locations. Most of the editing was already done on site. What was left was some color correction, which was performed using a Dual G5 with Final Cut Pro; we could have used the G4 PowerBook also for color correction but we needed extra processing power to cut down the rendering time. As we wanted to integrate some very interesting clips shot in DV, we used the same G5 to convert the foot-age into HDV format, which we imported into the timeline of our main Final Cut Studio project. The very last stage was the recording of the voice over, performed by Siobhan Leyden, and the final mix and sound design on a Pro tools HD station. An HD DVD was burnt using DVD studio Pro. As the projection was due to shown on an amazing Sony KDE50 plasma screen, I personally tested some samples of the final renders on the monitor to check the colour matches. The result was really impressive.

Conclusions
Final Cut Pro has been the perfect platform because it never crashes the host computer, even when it is a G4 processor handling a huge amount of HD material. In addition, its HDV native feature saved us a lot of time as we could play the clips in real time immediately after importing them on our timeline. On the next project, I would like to install Pro Tools LE on the traveling laptop so that I will literally be able to finalize the product before catching the flight back home to Dubai. Truly amazing.

SIDEBAR
Emirates Diving Association teams up with Tourism Malaysia on an environmental mission on the paradise island of Sipadan. Georgio Ungania and Natascia Radice discover Malaysia through High-Definition Video (HDV) and Final Cut Studio editing software.

[Magnus]

Interview: Sweet & Sour Swede with MacBook
by Magnus

EmiratesMac had the opportunity to interview Henrik Friberg, a a DJ and Visual Effects Designer in Dubai, about him and the UAE, his career, and about Apple and Macs.

EM: Tell us about yourself! Like where do you come from, how did you
come to live in Dubai? What do you do for a living?
HF: I moved to from Sweden to Dubai three years ago to further my career as a DS Nitris Artist and Visual Effects Designer, which basically means I’m working with editing and effects for TV commercials. I wasn’t really looking for work here, and I knew very little about Dubai. Actually the only things I had briefly heard about were The Palm and Burj Al Arab, and I thought that everybody who lived here would be middle aged golf players hehe (which might not be that far from the truth). But when Filmworks called me asking me to come come over for work, I thought that it might be worth a shot, and obviously it has been good enough to stay for three years, and now I plan to stay here for a long time. Apart from my work in the advertising industry, I’ve been a “bedroom DJ” for about eight years, just doing it for fun basically. I recently started making mixes for a local online dance music radio station (lushdxb.com), and I’ve also started up a club called Sweet & Sour which plays the latest and greatest eclectic dance music.

EM: What’s the origin of the name “Sweet & Sour”?
HF: When I was a poor student in Sweden many moons ago, I was making lasagna one night and realized I was out of tomatoes for the sauce. But I had a jar of Uncle Ben’s Sweet & Sour Stir Fry sauce, which I figured could work ok as a replacement. To my surprise I had discovered the tastiest lasagna in the world. Then it became “a thing” , something that I would joke about among friends, that you could have sweet and sour sauce with anything. Then a couple of years later when I was about to start freelancing in Sweden, it dawned on me that Sweet & Sour is also a brilliant idea for a company name. So I registered the domain, and started working under that name, and it has sort of stuck ever since.

EM: I believe you bought a MacBook last year, what do you think of it so far?
HF: Up until a month ago I thought it was the best machine ever. A small and light, blazingly fast Mac, and I could also have Windows XP on it for my mixing. But about eight months after the purchase I got the well known problem (but not yet acknowledged by Apple) of the X:ed out battery. So it currently only runs with the AC plugged in, which unfortunately doesn’t really make it a proper notebook anymore. Two weeks later the light on the AC died. And one week later I had my first random shutdown, which is also a well known problem Apple has not acknowledged, i.e. the MacBook just shuts down without any apparent reason. Having these problems on a machine that’s less than a year old is just not acceptable. I have ordered a new battery, but I have moderate expectations, because according to user stories on the internet, simply changing the battery does not help most of the time, the problems come back shortly after. All this annoys me a lot, and I never had such problems with a Mac before in my life, and I’ve been a user since the early 90’s.

EM: What do you use your MacBook for?
HF: Mostly for day to day things such as e-mailing, surfing, editing photos, listening to music, watching movies, etc. I also installed Windows XP with BootCamp, but I only ever use it to run a DJ mixing software called MixMeister, which unfortunately is PC-only. I know there are pure Mac DJ mixing programs out here, and I’ve tried most of them, but MixMeister is so much better in my opinion, despite the tacky product name.

EM: What do you like most about your MacBook?
HF: It’s fast, stable and the OS is intuitive. In short, I like it because it’s a Mac.

EM: What do you like the least about your MacBook?
HF: All the hardware issues I’ve started having after less than a year.

EM: When you look at a computer next time, do you think you’ll
consider a Mac again?
HF: It depends. I will absolutely not go out and by a Rev A Mac again. I would wait until Apple had sorted out all the problems with the model and then go and buy.

EM: If you could give one piece of advice to Apple for future Mac models, what would it be?
HF: If you want to keep the profile of a perhaps slightly more expensive, but also a slightly better personal computer maker, don’t ever hold back on the quality.

EM: As a Mac user in the Emirates, is there anything in particular you would like to see happen in the marketplace, to better support Mac users?
HF: Well, I’d love to see “proper” Apple Stores, with Genius bars and so on. Right now, if you go inside and ask anything that is remotely advanced, don’t expect an answer that is better than anything you could find out after one minute of Googling. I’d also like to see the stores here having a better supply of replacement parts so one does not have to wait so long for the parts to be shipped (the battery I ordered would take 3-4 weeks to ship). And I’d like to see the prices drop. The UAE is not any longer the place to go for cheap electronics. Actually it was cheaper for me to buy my MacBook in Sweden when I went there on holiday, rather than doing the purchase here in Dubai. The rumour about Dubai having cheap electronics is still alive in Europe, but more and more people who come here on holiday are quite disappointed when they find out that the mobile they wanted to buy is actually slightly cheaper in their local store back home in Europe.

EM: Any final words to other Apple users in the Emirates?
HF: Regardless of my personal recent issues with my MacBook, I am convinced that the future looks bright, and if Apple just keeps on rolling out brilliant products they can’t go wrong in the long run. So keep on supporting Mac.

SIDEBAR
Henrik Friberg is a Swedish DS Nitris and Visual Effects Designer, working in Dubai’s advertising industry. Apart from that he is a local DJ, known as PreRoll, and a long-time Mac user. You can contact him on either MySpace (myspace.com/djpreroll) or email (preroll@sweetandsour.nu). He also runs a blog in Swedish about his expatriate life (sweetandsour.nu/blog).

[Magnus]

Cooking with Apples
by Crystal

This is a warm hearty soup, with a spicy and a sweet side, with the apples. Mulligatawny Soup is much more than a soup, it is a meal, that you can make to your taste, as in just how spicy you want it to be. So, enjoy this Indian-inspired dish.

Mulligatawny Soup

Ingredients
1/2 cup chopped onion
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 carrot, diced
1/4 cup butter
1 1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder
4 cups chicken broth
1/2 apple, cored and chopped
1/4 cup white rice
1 skinless, boneless chicken breast half - cut into cubes
salt to taste
ground black pepper to taste
1 pinch dried thyme
1/2 cup heavy cream, heated

Directions
Saute onions, celery, carrot, and butter in a large soup pot. Add flour and curry, and cook 5 more minutes. Add chicken stock, mix well, and bring to a boil. Simmer about 1/2 hour.
Add apple, rice, chicken, salt, pepper, and thyme. Simmer 15-20 minutes, or until rice is done.
When serving, add hot cream.

Recipe from allrecipes.com/Recipe/Mulligatawny-Soup-I/Detail.aspx

[Magnus]

Curl the download manager
by Magnus

Mac OS X comes with a very useful little utility called Curl. If you want the latest version you can get that online (curl.haxx.se). I think it’s fair to say that some Mac users have issues with downloading large files even with broadband connections. Sometimes a download goes half way and then dies, for whatever reason, and it’s highly annoying to say the least. There are download managers with nice graphical interfaces but Curl is already on your Mac and it’s pretty powerful. The curl.haxx.se web site says about curl: “curl is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, FILE and LDAP. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos...), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks.” Curl is a command-line program and has a multitude of options and I’m not going to go through them here. It’s probably safe to say that you're never going to have to use them all. Let’s say you want to download NeoOffice, which weighs in at around 140MB. You may have tried different browser but the download never finishes. What you do is open a Terminal (Applications > Utilities) window, type curl -O and drag or paste the URL into the Terminal window. The file should download and Curl will show you the progress. The neat thing now is if it happens that the transfer is interrupted, you can later resume the download and you don’t have to start completely over. That’s nice if you’ve managed to get 120MB of the 140MB in NeoOffice, for example. Combine Curl with a little shell scripting and you have a powerful download tool that is hard to beat in terms of versatility and power.

[Magnus]

Hint: Expand open-save dialogs in Mac OS X
by Magnus

You know when you save or open a file in Mac OS X you see a standard dialog box. It’s like a small window and it looks the same in (almost) all applications. The standard behavior in Mac OS X is to show a minimized version (see the “Before” screenshot) of the full version (see the “After” screenshot). At least for myself, if I see that window, I almost always click on the down-arrow to expand it the full version. If you also do that a lot you can set the standard behavior to be that it always shows the full version. For that you have to open the Terminal (Applications>Utilities) and type in the following command:

defaults write -g NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode -bool TRUE

Then press enter, and from then on the full version should always be shown, saving you a mouse click from time to time. If you would want to go back to the standard setting, just enter the same command in the Terminal, but change “TRUE” to “FALSE”.

[Magnus]

Hint: Safari Activity Window
by Magnus

The Activity Window in Apple’s web browser Safari may not be that well known by most users but it has some really interesting and useful functionality. You find the Activity Windows by selecting Window > Activity or by pressing Command+Option+A. As the name gives away, by looking in the Activity Window you can see what’s going on with Safari. You see a list of the sites you’re connecting to and if you click the little triangle next to the site’s name, you see all the things that Safari is trying to download for that particular page. This includes HTML files, pictures, Flash (SWF) files, movies, stylesheets (CSS), and more. It shows the size of the files that have been downloaded, or the status which can help you figure out what the problem is if something is not working. For example, Safari may have problems downloading one particular file and that’s why you experience issues with your web browsing. What’s of most help to web developers, and others who want to really know what’s going on with a web site, is the ability to download any file that is used on a web site. If you double-click on any file in the Activity Window list, Safari will attempt to open just that file in a new browser window. If you hold down the Option-key while double-clicking on a file, Safari will download that file. This is a terrific way to download a Flash animation, for example. If you select a number of files, or even all of them with Command+A, then copy them (Command+C), switch to the Downloads Window (Command+Option+L), and paste (Command+V), all those files will start downloading. Finally, you can bookmark a set of pages with the help of the Activity Window. Open the sites you want to bookmark each in its own tab. Then make sure you only see each site’s URL in the Activity Window, not all the files too, select all (Command+A), copy (Command+C), open the Bookmarks Manager (Command+Option+B), navigate to where you want the bookmarks, create a folder if you like, then paste (Command+V). Now you should have a bookmark for each of those sites. There you go, now you can use the Activity Window in Safari to make your browsing experience more enjoyable and productive.