5.1 surround sound playback on Mac (and maybe...
I’ve been investigating 5.1 Dolby Digital playback on the Mac, and I’ve discovered some limitations with using 5.1 audio under QuickTime – especially when trying to output it to the Mac’s S/PDIF optical output. This makes me wonder about some not-yet-mentioned features of the upcoming AppleTV and its support for surround sound, and Apple’s approach […]
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Using an external hard disk to boot an...
I ran into some problems trying to install Mac OS X on an external hard drive, to make a test clean install for booting up my Mac Pro. I was trying to use a drive that I’d previously formatted on a PowerPC Mac, and the Mac OS X installer disks that came with the Mac […]
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Creating Universal Binary Mach-O plugins for REALbasic
I’ve put together an Xcode template for creating Universal Binary Mach-O plugins for REALbasic. The template will compile a dylib for PPC, and a bundle for Universal Binary – and put these in a plugin folder ready for conversion to a .rbx file.
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Evaluating Microsoft CMS Server 2002 for free
I’ve been trying to evaluate Microsoft CMS Server 2002 (“MCMS”), but I don’t have all of the required (expensive) server software. However, it seems that with a bit of creativity, you can actually download evaluation versions of all the software you need. Here’s how I did it.
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Detecting iPods programmatically (part 1)
I’ve been trying to find a way to detect what kinds of iPods are plugged into a Mac (or PC). Turns out that every iPod (apart from the iPod Shuffle) has a hidden SysInfo file, which contains information about the device. And, with the aid of some friends with iPods, I have managed (I think) […]
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Number and size of cookies in Internet Explorer
I’ve been working on an Intranet project which has been attempting some hefty (and perhaps inadvisable) setting and retrieval of cookies via JavaScript. It’s led to some interesting discoveries, and more importantly the discovery of what seems like a bug in IE6. The project is for users with IE6 only.
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Detecting protected AAC files in QuickTime
Recently, I needed to be able to check if AAC files passed to my application were Protected AACs from the iTunes Music Store or not. Here’s the C code I used to do this:
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Installing XP Pro on a MacBook Pro
Having just been and bought a copy of Windows XP Pro with SP2 – which I must say was a very strange experience – I am now in the process of installing it on my Mac.
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LaCie Big Disk spinning down unexpectedly
My LaCie “Big Disk Extreme with Triple Interface 500GB” (FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and USB 2.0) has recently started spinning down of its own accord. It will just suddenly spin down without prompting. Obviously, this is a bit of a problem.
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Carriage Returns, Line Feeds and Ampersands in IE...
I do quite a lot of work on Intranets, on which the only browser in use is Microsoft Internet Explorer. This often means that IE-specific tricks can be used safely on the Intranet. This specific trick is for using IE with Outlook. I read on MSDN about how to include line breaks in the body of an […]
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