Stanford: The Future of the Internet (Audio Course)

An interesting class from Stanford.

lynda.com: Python 3 – Essential Training (Video Course)

Python become one of the languages of choice for many applications.

eBooks: Preferred book formats in the digital era

It was in the mid 90s when I read a Gartner study that predicted the end of the photographic film era and the rapid shift to digital photography. By that time I was shooting dia slides, using a large SLR camera, and the strange idea that something digital will be able to replace film seemed quite remote. However, things accelerated, and, in 2000, I got my first digital camera.

Today, if someone would predict that in a few years the number of books distributed in digital format will exceed those printed (on dead trees!), I wouldn’t be that surprised.

OS X: How to backup the Mac OS X Install DVD?

I recently decided to make some Mac OS X installation tests, and, to avoid destroying the original Apple Install DVDs, I thought it would be great to first make some backups of the disks.

And so I discovered the intricacies of the Apple hybrid disks…

OS X: How to get nice screen shots?

It’s this outstanding attention to details one of the reasons I like the Apple products.

I was using the Mac OS X Grab application for long time already, but it was just recently that I discovered the special keyboard shortcuts, more precisely the differences between using them and directly using the Grab application.

OS X: Where do various programs store licensing information?

Have you wondered where some programs store the licensing data, or various information to account for time limited or to count for limited demo/test licenses?

Well, these files should be shared between all users. Then… take a look at /Users/Shared!

With the default configuration, Finder will probably not show you what you expect, but open a Terminal window and type

ls -lA /Users/Shared

You’ll probably notice some hidden files, with names starting with dot. Deleting some might even reset your demo licenses!

Enjoy!

OS X: How to write to a NTFS disk?

NTFS support is available in Mac OS X for some versions already, but only reading from NTFS is currently (v10.6.4) possible.

Like it or not, there are moments when we need to share files with other non Apple computers (Windows, Linux). I dedicated a slim USB powered disk for this and I thought that formatting it as FAT32 is the best option in terms of portability. As long as you have only small files, FAT32 is fine, but if you need to transfer files larger than 2 GB (like .iso images, movies), FAT32 is no longer appropriate, and a solution based on NTFS needs to be considered.

OS X: How to backup (rip) a movie DVD?

First of all, this post is not about making illegal DVD copies. My goal is to transfer my DVD library from optical disks to a hard disk (ok, a large one), the same as I did with my music CD library, entirely transferred to iTunes. Well, not exactly the same, since the DVDs are significantly more complex than audio CDs.

The classical audio CDs structure is very simple, just a list of tracks, without any additional information, so ripping it did not loose any content.

On the other side, DVDs usually have a very complex structure, with multiple audio tracks, multiple subtitles, menus, special features, photos, etc.

The common approach when ripping DVDs is to preserve only the main video and audio streams and repack everything using a very high compression algorithm to produce a DivX or MKV stream. For my taste, this approach is not acceptable, due both to quality issues and missing content.

A true backup should preserve the full content and the quality; the only solution I know is to use a disk image format, like ISO.

Apple SuperDrive fails to write DVD DL disks?

It looks like I’m a victim of some kind of CD/DVD curse. I encountered various problems when trying to burn CDs from the moment I bought my first (very expensive) CD writer. That’s why I’m very reticent when someone asks me to make a copy of some disk, and that’s no surprise I’m rarely burning disks.

Crockford on JavaScript, Scene 6

To my nice surprise, Douglas Crockford continued his series of successful presentations with the sixth part, “Loopage”.

Once again, Crockford started with some history, chaining events from Grace Hopper’s first compiler to modern events based programming, marking the potential of JavaScript to reshape today’s Web by bridging client side with server side programming.

Recommended!

[For the first 5 parts, please see my previous post. The complete and up-to-date page regarding Crockford’s presentatios is Crockford on JavaScript]