Apple today announced Mac OS X Mountain Lion, the next major update to its desktop operating system. As 9to5Mac first learned back in October, Mountain Lion sports a bunch of major new features, including new apps iMessage and Notification Center – plus the AirPlay mirroring feature. According to the people Apple invited to a private briefing a few day ago, Mountain Lion is all about putting even more iOS into the bowels of Mac OS X. iOS-ification of Mac OS X continues in Mountain Lion with

With over a hundred million iCloud accounts now in use, Mountain Lion’s setup assistant will ask you to set up an iCloud account for the Documents in the Cloud feature. You will also be able to access your iCloud storage in Finder and drag and drop documents for manual syncing between iOS apps that support Documents in the Cloud and their desktop counterparts.

Mountain Lion Beta is available to Mac Developer Program members starting today whilst end-users will be able to upgrade to Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store in late summer 2012. The company also pledged to update Mac OS X once a year from now on. Check out past the fold for full release, more features and two additional press shots.

Apple Releases OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview with Over 100 New Features

CUPERTINO, California—February 16, 2012—Apple today released a developer preview of OS X Mountain Lion, the ninth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system, which brings popular apps and features from iPad to the Mac and accelerates the pace of OS X innovation. Mountain Lion introduces Messages, Notes, Reminders and Game Center to the Mac, as well as Notification Center, Share Sheets, Twitter integration and AirPlay Mirroring. Mountain Lion is the first OS X release built with iCloud in mind for easy setup and integration with apps. The developer preview of Mountain Lion also introduces Gatekeeper, a revolutionary security feature that helps keep you safe from malicious software by giving you complete control over what apps are installed on your Mac. The preview release of Mountain Lion is available to Mac Developer Program members starting today. Mac users will be able to upgrade to Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store™ in late summer 2012.

“The Mac is on a roll, growing faster than the PC for 23 straight quarters, and with Mountain Lion things get even better,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “The developer preview of Mountain Lion comes just seven months after the incredibly successful release of Lion and sets a rapid pace of development for the world’s most advanced personal computer operating system.”

The developer preview of Mountain Lion features the all new Messages app which replaces iChat and allows you to send unlimited messages, high-quality photos and videos directly from your Mac to another Mac or iOS device. Messages will continue to support AIM, Jabber, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. Starting today Lion users can download a beta of Messages from www.apple.com, and the final version will be available with Mountain Lion. Reminders and Notes help you create and track your to-dos across all your devices. Game Center lets you personalize your Mac gaming experience, find new games and challenge friends to play live multiplayer games, whether they’re on a Mac, iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

Mountain Lion presents notifications in an elegant new way, and Notification Center provides easy access to alerts from Mail, Calendar, Messages, Reminders, system updates and third party apps. System-wide Share Sheets make it easy to share links, photos and videos directly from Apple and third party apps. Twitter is integrated throughout Mountain Lion so you can sign on once and tweet directly from Safari, Quick Look, Photo Booth, Preview and third party apps. Mountain Lion also introduces AirPlay Mirroring, an easy way to wirelessly send a secure 720p video stream of what’s on your Mac to an HDTV using Apple TV.

More than 100 million users have iCloud accounts, and Mountain Lion makes it easier than ever to set up iCloud and access documents across your devices. Mountain Lion uses your Apple ID to automatically set up Contacts, Mail, Calendar, Messages, FaceTime and Find My Mac. The new iCloud Documents pushes any changes to all your devices so documents are always up to date, and a new API helps developers make document-based apps work with iCloud.

Gatekeeper is a revolutionary new security feature that gives you control over which apps can be downloaded and installed on your Mac. You can choose to install apps from any source, just as you do on a Mac today, or you can use the safer default setting to install apps from the Mac App Store, along with apps from developers that have a unique Developer ID from Apple. For maximum security, you can set Gatekeeper to only allow apps from the Mac App Store to be downloaded and installed.

Mountain Lion also has features specifically designed to support Chinese users, including significant enhancements to the Chinese input method and the option to select Baidu search in Safari. Mountain Lion makes it easy to set up Contacts, Mail and Calendar with top email service providers QQ, 126 and 163. Chinese users can also upload video via Share Sheets directly to leading video websites Youku and Tudou, and system-wide support for Sina weibo makes microblogging easy.

Hundreds of new APIs give developers access to new core technologies and enhanced features within OS X. The Game Kit APIs tap into the same services as Game Center on iOS, making it possible to create multiplayer games that work across Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. A new graphics infrastructure underpins OpenGL and OpenCL and implements GLKit, first introduced in iOS 5, to make it easier to create OpenGL apps. Using Core Animation in Cocoa apps is easier than ever, and new video APIs deliver modern 64-bit replacements for low-level QuickTime APIs. Enhanced Multi-Touch™ APIs give developers double-tap zoom support and access to the system-wide lookup gesture. Kernel ASLR improves security through enhanced mitigation against buffer overflow attacks.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

• libtorrent 0.13.0
• rTorrent 0.9
• ruTorrent Web UI (3.0)

This guide has been tested with Debian 6 (x86_64) and Ubuntu 11.04 (x86_64).

To start, access your VPS via SSH (as the root user) and do the following to update your platform and install some required dependencies:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install subversion build-essential automake libtool libcppunit-dev libcurl3-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev unzip unrar-free curl libncurses-dev
# apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-cli php5-curl

Enable scgi for Apache:

# apt-get install libapache2-mod-scgi
# ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/scgi.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/scgi.load

Install XMLRPC:

# mkdir /install;cd /install
# svn checkout http://xmlrpc-c.svn.sourceforge.net/…mlrpc-c/stable xmlrpc-c
# cd xmlrpc-c
# ./configure –disable-cplusplus
# make
# make install

Intall libtorrent:

# cd /install
# wget http://vps6.net/src/libtorrent-0.13.0.tar.gz
# tar xvf libtorrent-0.13.0.tar.gz
# cd libtorrent-0.13.0
# ./configure
# make
# make install

Install rTorrent:

# cd /install
# wget http://vps6.net/src/rtorrent-0.9.0.tar.gz
# cd rtorrent-0.9.0
# ./configure –with-xmlrpc-c
# make
# make install
# ldconfig

Create required directories:

# mkdir /home/seeder1/rtorrent
# mkdir /home/seeder1/rtorrent/.session
# mkdir /home/seeder1/rtorrent/watch
# mkdir /home/seeder1/rtorrent/download

Setup .rtorrent.rc file (rTorrent config):

# cd ~/
# wget http://vps6.net/src/.rtorrent.rc
# cp .rtorrent.rc /home/seeder1/

(Edit the settings in .rtorrent.rc, like max upload/download speed, max connected peers, etc, as needed.)

Install rTorrent:

# cd /install
# wget http://vps6.net/src/rutorrent-3.0.tar.gz
# tar xvf rutorrent-3.0.tar.gz
# mv rutorrent /var/www
# wget http://vps6.net/src/plugins-3.0.tar.gz
# tar xvf plugins-3.0.tar.gz
# mv plugins /var/www/rutorrent
# rm -rf /var/www/rutorrent/plugins/darkpal
# chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/rutorrent

Secure /rutorrent:

# a2enmod ssl
# a2enmod auth_digest
# a2enmod scgi
# openssl req $@ -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out /etc/apache2/apache.pem -keyout /etc/apache2/apache.pem
# chmod 600 /etc/apache2/apache.pem
# htdigest -c /etc/apache2/passwords seedbox seeder1

(Enter a password of your choice when prompted, you will use this to log in to the ruTorrent web UI.)

# cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
# rm -rf default
# wget http://vps6.net/src/default
# a2ensite default-ssl
# /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Install screen:

# apt-get install screen

Start rTorrent in a detached shell using screen:

# screen -fa -d -m rtorrent

(To start rtorrent automatically when the VPS is booted, add the above command to /etc/rc.local)

You can now access ruTorrent at http://xx.xx.xx.xx/rutorrent/ (replace xx.xx with your server’s IP address). You should be greeted with a login prompt, where the username is “seeder1″ and the password is the one you set above in the “secure /rutorrent” section.

So, we’ve shot down SOPA and PIPA. Congratulations Internets for a job well done. Mission accomplished, right? Not so much. While that’s two bad pieces of legislation pushed back, there’s much more where that came from. Leaving aside existing nastiness like the DMCA, we also have the even nastier Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) (PDF). How bad is it? Bad enough that the European Parliament’s rapporteur for ACTA (Kader Arif) resigned over it today (January 27, 2012). Unfortunately for those of us in the United States, President Obama has already ratified ACTA on behalf of the United States.

If you ever though that SOPA was bad, then its nothing compared to ACTA.

ACTA is just about as bad as it gets… check out this video…

Read more here: https://www.accessnow.org/ or ..

.. sign the petetion against ACTA: http://www.stopp-acta.info/english/get+involved/petition/petition.html .. and one more… http://www.avaaz.org/en/eu_save_the_internet_spread/

By signing the above, you help raise your voice against this madness!

The disk used is a 7200 RPM WD Disk with an external casing that supports both usb2+3+esata .. the Machine is a Dell Latitude E6220 with a Intel Series 510 SSD, 8gb memory and Windows 7

I used HD tach to test… now.. check this out…

USB 2.0 with and Average of 30 mb/s

USB 3.0 with and average of 80 mb/s and dropping to 50 mb/s

E-sata with and average of 110 mb/s and dropping to 50 mb/s

.. and offcourse.. the winner without any doubt…

Intel SSD, internally – going steady at 320 mb/s

.. god i love SSD

For those of you who is into SEO, then you properly also know Advanced Webranking.

With the latest 8.5 update they have added more neat features, wich is great.. well.. except if you are running low resolution – because then you will have a problem seeing all the icons in the sidebar.

The solution/fix is:

1. Go to Settings -> Applications menu and select Small font size

2. Go to the Settings -> Application menu and select the “Use default window decorations” check box.

Poking around in the ~/Library folder, you can find a ‘Mobile Documents’ folder that is used for syncing iWork documents. But it turns out you are not limited to iWork files if you just want to sync between Macs (i.e. no iOS use).

If you are using iCloud and have the ‘Documents & Data’ option selected in the preference pane, you can navigate to ~/Library/Mobile Documents. Depending on whether or not you’ve used iWork and synced documents to iCloud, you may or may not find folders there for each of the iWork applications (e.g. com~apple~numbers).

This doesn’t really matter. What is of use is that any files put into the ~/Library/Mobile Documents folder will automatically upload to iCloud and push to any other Mac you have that is signed in to the same iCloud account and has the ‘Document & Data’ iCloud preference checked. Lion even notifies you of version conflicts and allows you to resolve them when you open the document.

While its not entirely like with mobileme – its one step in the right direction

I recently upgraded my Dell D430 to run OSX Lion – and with that i noticed that coolbook no longer is working.

The problem lies within AppleACPIPlatform.kext in Lion and the solution is to replace it with the one from Snow Leopard 10.6.7

Howto fix it:

1. Download kexthelper
2. Download AppleACPIPlatform.kext from 10.6.7
3. Extract both to desktop
4. Use kexthelper to install AppleACPIPlatform.kext
5. Reboot
6. Reinstall coolbook

Enjoy!

So who cares? My old boss certainly didn’t, but then he was right out of the old school. Ash all over his blazer, half a bottle of Merlot to the wind most of the time. That’s an attitude that modern workers simply can’t have anymore, not if they want to keep their positions. So if you want to get your nicotine hit and you don’t want to get on the wrong side of your own boss, who’s probably way more new school than mine was, it’s electric cigarettes or nothing.

See, the only way people who do not use electronic cigarettes can get their hit at work these days is by going out for a cigarette break. Now, the more stressful or involved your job, as a nicotine user, the more likely it is that you will want to smoke. So you end up trolling downstairs every ten minutes, coming back out of breath and stinking of smoke.

Your more angelic colleagues start giving you the bad eye because you smell so bad. If it was only the smell you could probably put up with it. After all, smokers can’t smell what they smell like so that doesn’t really matter to you unless you are particularly sensitive.

No, the problem for smokers who don’t use electronic cigarettes is much more fundamental than that. Why, say all your co workers (and quite rightly too, to give them their due), should he (or she) get to nip off every ten minutes just because she (or he) smokes? A heavy smoker could end up doing an hour’s less work than everyone else and never being penalised for it.

So your choice becomes: smoke electric cigarettes instead, which means you can stay at your desk and work just as hard as everyone else; carry on as you are and risk the ire of your manager; or go on regulated, unpaid cigarette breaks, which penalise you for what is essentially an illness. You’re an addict, after all: and in most cases addicts get treated with an amount of leeway commensurate (up to a point of practicality) with the severity of their affliction.

Nicotine addiction is one of the worst addictive illnesses there is. Electronic cigarettes are not a cure – they can’t be, they’ve got nicotine in them – but they are an excellent palliative. They’re socially acceptable and it is completely legal to “smoke” them indoors. They give off no second hand nasties and there is no pollution or tar in the vapour they emit.

Ecigarettes mean you can work all day and all night if you like, puffing on nicotine whenever the craving grabs you. I suppose if you really wanted to extol their virtues you could even say that they actually impress the boss. After all, you’ve gone to the trouble of doing something about your habit.

Ever funnier, the uninstall app is also for Intel only.. WTF?!?!?! .. well ok.. after a great deal of research i put together a guide for howto uninstall the damn thing.

1. Remove the actual app from /Applications
2. Open terminal and type:

sudo rm /usr/sbin/tuncfg
sudo rm /usr/bin/hamachi
sudo rm /usr/bin/hamachi-init
rm -r /home//.hamachi

Now remove any Hamachi/LogMeIn of the entries from:

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons
/Library/LaunchDaemons
/System/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchAgents

.. and finally remove:

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tuncfgd.plist

.. reboot..

Home this helps somebody out there…

The cron daemon is used by the system for scheduled daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance, and can be used by users to run various programs at set intervals, such as to handle my site backup program as described elsewhere on this site.

Read the rest of this article if you’d like a simple overview of what cron is and how it can be used.

The system cron tasks are stored in /etc/crontab. You can “cat” this file to get an example of what a crontab looks like:
user% cat /etc/crontab
# $NetBSD: crontab,v 1.13 1997/10/26 13:36:31 lukem Exp $
#
# /etc/crontab – root’s crontab
#
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
HOME=/var/log

#min hour mday month wday user command

*/10 * * * * root /usr/libexec/atrun

# do daily/weekly/monthly maintenance
15 3 * * * root sh /etc/daily…
30 4 * * 6 root sh /etc/weekly…
30 5 1 * * root sh /etc/monthly…

[NOTE: There are TABS between the items, so don't copy/paste anything you see here; type it with tabs between fields!]

If you want even more info on what the system is actually doing for maintenance, follow the path under the COMMAND column, and “cat” the actual .sh files … there’s quite a bit going on for which you might like to leave your system running at least overnight on occasion!

The basic format of the file is relatively self-explanatory, sort of! An “*” in a column reads as “every”, and the “*/10″ in the first command line means “every 10th minute”. So the weekly maintenance is set to run at 30 mins, 4 hours (or 4:30am) every day of every month, on the 6th day of the week.

After the scheduling block is a column for which user the command will run as (root in this case), and what the acutal command is that will be executed. You can add new system-wide tasks to the cron program by inserting lines into this file (but you must be ‘root’ in order to do so).

More applicable to a typical user would be to schedule their own cron task. I did just that for my backup solution mentioned in another hint. To do this, I first copied the root crontab to a file in my directory (cp /etc/crontab ~/mycrontab). I then edited the ‘mycrontab’ file to look like this (I’ve skipped the header, which I left the same as the root file):
#min hour mday month wday command
25 2,14 * * * sh path/to/getmybackup.sh

The ‘sh getmybackup’ runs my backup download shell script (see the related article on automated backups), and the time section is set to run it twice a day – at 2:25am, and 2:25pm (1425 in military time). Once the edited file has been saved, the final step is to tell the ‘cron’ program to schedule the task:

crontab mycrontab
That’s all there is to it; the task is scheduled and will be executed twice a day at the specified time, as long as my machine is powered on. You can see a list of currently scheduled tasks by typing “crontab -l” at the command prompt, and you can cancel a crontab with “crontab -r”.

Hope this helped shed a little light on the dark world of cron…and as usual, there’s much more to this subject than I’ve covered here, but this should be enough to get you started.

Good way to edit your crontab on mac:

EDITOR=nano crontab -e

The world has lost a visionary today.

Apple has just released that Steve Jobs has passed away, at the age of 56. Jobs had been dealing with liver issues, and had a liver transplant in April of 2009. His health continued to deteriorate, and he died today.

Apple is what it is today due to Steve’s vision and passion for innovation.

There is much to write of his incredible career, life, and the changes he made in today’s technology. However, you probably know his story well by now, so we’ll simply say we, too, will miss Steve Jobs. Our prayers go out to his family and friends.

R.I.P Steve…

We have all met people who claim that ‘quitting smoking is easy.’ They usually say this as they are puffing on a cigarette. Sure — it’s easy to quit for an hour, a day or even a few weeks, but it’s the staying quit part which is difficult.

Unfortunately, what is going to happen 10 years down the road is often of little consequence during a spell of nicotine craving. The longer you quit smoking, however, the less often these cravings will occur – atleast, so they say, but in my case it feels like the longer time i dident smoke, the worse it got – my life involved into a hell, i could not go shopping with sending “long looks” after the cigerat shelf, i felt cheated when co.workers could go and smoke and hardly depressed because i felt like i cheat myself of the life i want.

Smoking is more than just a physical addiction, it is also a behavioural habit, and long after the physical need for nicotine has been overcome you may still feel the urge to smoke in many situations.

Identifying the situations which cause you to reach for a cigarette can be of great help in overcoming the urge to smoke .. atleast.. so they say.. for my… its work. .i work with computers and have done so for many.. many years.. part of that is having a smoking break.. after quitting, i had nothing, i dont know how to have a normal break.. what should i do !!?

Advice: “Despite all your best efforts, you may find that you have lapsed and have taken up smoking again. If this happens, don’t be discouraged — many people have to try four or five times before they successfully quit.”

But fact is, most people feel like they lost and in better terms feel like a looser, they gave into something that they like so much, how do you deal with that ?.. its like telling a smoker “smoking can kill!!.. you think the smoker listens, no.. he feels bad and turns on another smoke..

I’m a smoker, wether i quit smoking or not, it will allways be with me – for the rest of my life.

As it is right now, i’m not sure how to change that, i’m at a split road, where i live a life mising one of the things i like most in life.. or live a life with a chance of getting serius sick..

I’m sick and tired of people around and their “its so easy to quit smoking” .. yes it is, but its not starting again that is hard, and you – dont have a damn idear about it is to quit smoking, you are not just quitting smoking, you are quitting your life as it is, saying farewell to a “friend” who have allways been with you…

Bottom line: Dont start to smoke!

L.

First of all, you can make “UseDNS no” in /etc/ssh/sshd_config file, default answer is yes and if this line not shown in your config file, just add it to as below:

UseDNS no

This directive tells sshd process to check resolved host name for the connected client’s ip address maps back to the very same ip address or not.

After you have done the change, restart your SSH server with a:

/etc/init.d/ssh restart 

NOTE: It does not prevent the sshd server from performing any DNS lookups at all. That’s not the purpose of that directive.

In order to remove dns lookups completely, you have to use -u0 options when starting sshd server. You can easily add this options to /etc/default/ssh or/etc/sysconfig/sshd or elsewhere suitable for your distribution.

-u0 option’s means that it will not put hostnames into the utmp structure (i.e. what you see when you type “who” at the shell prompt), which means that sshd will not perform DNS lookups for that purpose. However there are still cases where a lookup has to be performed when a user has

“from=<hostname>”

like entries in his authorized_keys file, or when authentication methods or configuration directives are used that involve hostnames.

According to a image sent in to MacRumors, iCloud support may be coming to Snow Leopard users. As you can see in the screenshot above, the .Mac preference pane in a previous OS X’s System Preferences reads: “You will no longer be able to sync with this machine because you’ve upgraded to iCloud. iCloud requires a computer running Mac OS X Snow Leopard v10.6.9 or later for Contacts, Calendars, and Bookmarks.”

This message appeared in OS X 10.4 Tiger after a developer updated his MobileMe account to an iCloud account. The notice appears to be the first indication that OS X 10.6.9 is in the works. Presumably it will only include minor bug fixes and provide limited iCloud support for Snow Leopard. CurrentlyApple states that iCloud will require OS X 10.7, but that is presumably for the more advanced Documents, iTunes Match, Photo Stream, and Backups features. It’s reasonable to assume Apple isn’t going to lock non-Lion users out of their @me.com email addresses.

The 10.7.1 update is recommended for all users running OS X Lion and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability and compatibility of your Mac, including fixes that:

- Address an issue that may cause the system to become unresponsive when playing a video in Safari.
- Resolve an issue that may cause system audio to stop working when using HDMI or optical audio out.
- Improve the reliability of Wi-Fi connections.
- Resolve an issue that prevents transfer of your data, settings, and compatible applications to a new Mac running OS X Lion.

For detailed information on this update, please visit this website:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4764.

Apple has also released a version of OS X 10.7.1 specific to the latest MacBook Air and Mac mini models, adding a few additional fixes.

- Resolve an issue where MacBook Air may boot up when MagSafe Adapter is attached
- Resolve an issue causing intermittent display flickering on MacBook Air.
- Resolve an issue that causes the SD card slot in Mac mini to run at reduced speed with SD and SDHC media.

Finally, Apple has released a separate OS X Lion Update 10.7.1 (Server) update for those systems with Lion Server components installed, improving the reliability of the Apple File Service, and a unique OS X Lion 10.7.1 Update for Mac mini 2011 (Server)update including all of the OS X 10.7.1, Lion Server, and specific Mac mini changes.

Apple has been seeding developers with builds of 10.7.2 to prepare for the launch of Apple’s full iCloud service later this year, but the company did not provide any builds of OS X 10.7.1 for developer testing.

Google 

announced Monday morning that it will acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.

Motorola is one of 39 manufacturers of handsets that use Google’s Android operating system.

Buying a hardware company is an unusual move for Google. The acquisition, Google said in a statement, “will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem.”

Google CEO Larry Page expanded on what that might mean in a blog post.

In addition to citing Motorola’s home devices and video solutions business, Page references recent patent wars that Google believes to be anti-competitive.

“The U.S. Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of one recent patent auction to ‘protect competition and innovation in the open source software community’ and it is currently looking into the results of the Nortel auction,” Page writes. “Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”

Android will continue to be an open platform, and Motorola will continue to be run as a separate business, Page writes.

We’ve already caught a glimpse of Apple’s proposed science fiction museum new campus in Cupertino, but screen grabs just don’t do this behemoth justice. A recently released set of renderings of Apple Campus 2, as it’s known to the city of Cupertino, however, give it that proper otherworldly glow. According to the accompanying proposal, the building will take up a measly 2.8 million square feet, contain a 1,000-seat auditorium and research facilities totaling 300,000 square feet. Really? Is that all? If architectural renderings are your thing, hit the source link for some building-plan booty.

The Apple mothership