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Daniel

12:06 AM

@IanC Thanks for the edit on apple.stackexchange.com/questions/41228/…

bmike

3:46 PM

Hey @cajunluke - do you want to re-ask that question and re-frame it so it can be really answered?

2

Q: How do I insert radio buttons in numbers for Ipad?

I need to insert radio buttons on a numbers spreadsheet. I tried importing an Excel document with form radio buttons, but it did not pull through. Advice would be appreciated.

If yours and this eventually get flagged - there's no rule the "oldest" and abandoned one shouldn't get deleted and the new one has to go. I'll double check for an existing dupe, but didn't see any last time I checked.

stuffe

V quiet in the chat today

Hi Mike

bmike

@stuffe Hello. It's been really quiet on the site despite the noise in the chat yesterday.

stuffe

I'm trying my best to fill the void with my own questions. My answer rate (never good) is dropping like a stone.

I think I just ask hard questions...

bmike

@stuffe I find I either ask obvious questions that need a good definitive answer or something that is hopeful wishing despite all evidence that it cannot be done.

stuffe

Mind you, I accepted one earlier. Those 2 points felt good :)

bmike

3:59 PM

Like hacking Mission Control to not show grey linen on the secondary displays.

stuffe

I love the linen. I think I must be an alien. I actually like the skeumorphic designs

bmike

Or this gem - I wish I had access to the radio circuitry and can only presume the lack of API is due to lots of hardware differences / distinct chipsets

9

Q: Can a Mac's airport card run 802.11 N, G, B or A only?

Occasionally it's nice to hard code a wired connection network port to not auto negotiate and force things to be 100 half duplex even though a higher speed is configured and negotiable on the switch. Can I similarly force airport software and thus the hardware to only run one flavor of 802.11? C...

osx wifi

@stuffe How about the 10.7.3 address book and calendar?

stuffe

Yup. Even the 10.8 reminders one ;)

I'll take a funny pic - 2 mins

It's far less offensive that the brushed metal was, and the pinstripes.

All the best iOS apps are beautifully unique in their appearance, why should everything have to be made from a generic selection of interface builder objects

That's your corinthian leather iCal (or Calendar in ML parlance) and my notepad.

Just like my notpad stands out on my desk, so I can tell my iCal screen at even the most cursory glance. Imagine if every bit of paper on my desk was on the same headed paper. nightmare, yet people want their apps to have the same generic HIG conforming banality

I see a blogpost brewing on this :)

bmike

@stuffe Phew - I'm glad it makes people happy - and you are in for a treat then. The torn paper on the calendar just seems so silly. BusyCal saves me from iCal most of the time, though.

Ooh - nice picture :-) No wonder you're a big fan.

stuffe

Torn paper, yeah daft and a little distracting, but the rest is all good by me

bmike

4:14 PM

@stuffe I will say - I appreciate the effort and the willingness for them to make the apps distinctive. I suppose I have to revisit my "hrumph" attitude about light skeuomorphism

stuffe

No-one ever complained about the skeumorphism on iOS (well, I am sure some did, but not to the same extent), in fact most people really like it. It doesn;t become bad because it's on your desktop screen. It's just different. fear the change

I like your word distinctive, that's all it is.

It's not as though they change your cursor to a massive pencil when in notes etc.

bmike

@stuffe Well - on iOS 5 there is no skeumorphism in calendar or contacts

stuffe

There is on iPad

bmike

There is no chrome - all data as far as I can see.

stuffe

(I think, not having mine to hand...)

bmike

4:16 PM

@stuffe Yah - it's like they had a "no fluff" until you have x many pixels for it to live.

stuffe

but even in iphone size, ibooks, reminders at least have some form of it.

Notes too, newsstand

bmike

@stuffe True - I wonder what the future holds for iOS 5.1 / iOS 6 apps on iPhone / iPod sized displays.

@stuffe I think I may try to use notes when MoLo arrives on a machine for me.

stuffe

I like it how it is, minimal chrome of any sort on iphone, but matching to the larger distinctive "themes" on the bigger apps

gentmatt

@stuffle "Mountain Lion has considerably improved software support for current cards." Where did you read this? Can you please post a link? I ask this because I'm kind of frustrated with the performance of the HD 3000 in Lion.

bmike

@gentmatt the water's fine - jump right in :-)

stuffe

4:21 PM

(side note - so many people are calling me stuffle on here, I've never had anyone do it on any site before)

gentmatt

Woho! How kind of of you guys :)

stuffe

Current 10.7 utilises opengl 3 something.

It's way out of date, and it was even on 2 until very recently

4 was already out when we got the bump up to 3...

gentmatt

Sorry, I'm confused.... ?! What are you talking about :/

stuffe

The intended direction (and hence the dropping of some older 64 bit macs on a seemingly abritrary basis but which is actuall due to their GFX not supporting OpenGL4) is of further GPU accelerated display rendering via opencl etc, all tied in with maintaining a close link to the current versions of openGL rather than being really backdated

It's like Direct X on PCs, OpenGL is a graphics subsystem targetted at providing acceleration for various things inc 3d etc

gentmatt

OpenGL or OpenCL?

jaberg

4:25 PM

@stuffe I'm generally indifferent to the skeumorphic designs. I might prefer a cleaner look, but it's not so offensive that I feel the need to rant-n-froth about them on the internet.

stuffe

In short, we were always very back level, in future we will be more up to date, and the GPUs will be targetted more and more using openCL which is the method for sharing your processing requirements over multiple architectures, including CPUs, GPUs, etc

bmike

@stuffe I'd love to see a list of Macs that meet OpenGL4 specs. Time to sell some old HW and buy new. Would love to take that into consideration...

gentmatt

If I understand you correctly - <del>Mountain</del> Lion does not utilize the Intel HD 3000 as good as it should? It's just a software problem - not insufficient hardware?

stuffe

@gentmatt Both. OpenGL is accelerated graphics. OpenCL is allowing the crunching of general purpose code (not necessarily graphics) on your GPU

Lion uses openGL3, Mountain lion will use openGL4.

gentmatt

How much of a difference will there be in performance?

stuffe

4:29 PM

So for gaming any anything that is directly graphics related, you should see partial performance inmprovements due to it being newer and better, and partial improvements because the number of available APIs in openGL4 is larger, thus allowing for more things to use an efficient API for drawing some effect or other, rather than hand cranking it.

@gentmatt I can't say, too many variables.

But in theory, newer openGL = faster on the same hardware.

Particularly where the hardware has supported openGL4 for years, but the OS has limited you to V3 or even V2

gentmatt

@stuffe You have to know. My early 2011 MBP with the Intel HD 3000 does not run all animations in Lion smooth - which kind of upsets me. I'd better get over it sooner or later.

stuffe

Yeah, I recall you saying.

That is the sort of thing that may improve.

Because the animations are all pushed out via Core Animation etc, which uses various APIs to accelerate the process. Those APIS in turn call the APIs that the graphics subsystem supports

bmike

@gentmatt 13" MPB?

gentmatt

15''

stuffe

In general using an API to complete a taskis better than rolling your own solution. And the opengl4 apis will be more efficient, and just plain more numerous.

bmike

4:33 PM

@gentmatt Now that's a bummer. My 2009 MBP lags, but I blame mostly bad software and archaic spinning magnets for the bits.

gentmatt

I got to use the integrated graphics most of the time, because the MBP is not connected to a power plug.

bmike

@gentmatt Ok - it has more horsepower, but you're keeping power consumption low.

Ian C.

@gentmatt bit of a Catch-22: you can't have great graphics performance and battery life.

gentmatt

@IanC Ok, but C'mon! I'm talking about basic Lion animations like Mission Control and Launchpad.

stuffe

You know, I still think you have some other problem other than it's slow

Because I have Lion on a 2007 Macbook with an Intel GMA950, and it's fine

Ian C.

4:35 PM

@gentmatt I agree with @stuffe -- sounds like something is more wrong than just running your GPU cool.

bmike

@gentmatt I'm curious if you have vm_stat 1 running and kick a Mission Control or Launchpad after 20 minutes of them lying dormant. Do you get paging or are they all in ram and just slow to render.

stuffe

I think the skeumorphic thing on iPad etc is accepted because there is only 1 window at a time. 1 task open, and it's internally consistent with the task at hand (usually).

I think people hate it on Macs because of overlapping windows.

And inconsistent looking windows.

gentmatt

@bmike I'm not sure I understand everything you say. What is vm_stat 1? I run those animations pretty frequently.

Ian C.

@stuffe I started liking iCals new look more when I started using it in full screen mode. Specifically for the reasons you mention.

stuffe

But so long as they keep the windows rectangular and use consistent window furniture I'm good

gentmatt

4:37 PM

@IanC Maybe I should try to reinstall the OS? Or a clean install?

Ian C.

@gentmatt man, that's such a Windows solution! :) If you can stomach it, I'd say do a clean install of Lion.

bmike

@stuffe Especially on the 11 air. I want to kill the dock, always, wasted pixels, always and everything to play nice in fullsceen mode.

stuffe

@gentmatt Open a terminal and type it in, it's a tool for monitoring memory (or virtual memory - virtual memory statistics)

@bmike my dock consists of Finder and Trash

gentmatt

bmike

@stuffe Precisely - I want it gone.... Don't be bouncing some icons because I just launched another app. I've got launchbar and the app switcher for that information. :-)

gentmatt

4:40 PM

@IanC What else could I do?

stuffe

I want it to stay, but only appear on a gesture or keystroke. I want my hidden dock to stay hidden unless I absolutely need to see it. Sadly, the best you can do is scale it down, and take everything out, then set ti autohide

Ian C.

@gentmatt I don't know, sorry. :( It just seems so brute force...

stuffe

@gentmatt Have you got an external disk? You could try a quick install on it and boot. Will be slow to boot, but slow disk IO shouldn;t affect animation speeds once it's kicked it's arse into gear.

gentmatt

@stuffe I have one, but I have data on it that I cannot put anywhere else.

stuffe

Oh, by the way, whoever didn't like the popover calendar list for iCal might want to scrutinise that picture a little ;)

@gentmatt Is it full? Can you partition off say 10Gb?

bmike

4:47 PM

@gentmatt Nice - I'll upload a short video of what a system with enough RAM / no paging looks like

It's more about not needing page outs.

gentmatt

@bmike Well, I got enough RAM

bmike

@gentmatt Then you're right - Mission Control and Launchpad should be fine

Look at all that wasted free memory.

gentmatt

@stuffe I will think of this. This is a bit more complicated because the disk is encrypted. One partition is private, the other is for Time Machine.

@bmike I restarted my computer today.

Before that I had almost 4mil page-ins!

and a 1GB swap file....

stuffe

I think I have seen people (you will have to google it) install Lion on an 8Gb memory stick

gentmatt

@stuffe Which I do have. But this is my only Lion recovery USB :/

Well, I can buy a cheap 2GB stick and create another one, but this time without the DMG image.

bmike

4:52 PM

cl.ly/ERlq - it's boring, but it seems you already know enough to look for paging out when free pages gets low. You're no where near that so if the animations are slow after a reboot and after multiple activations of each, you can rule out VM / RAM / swap / paging

@gentmatt You could raid together 4 of those and have a fragile but workable hubtastic lion booting mess.

stuffe

@bmike I have seen video of someone making a RAID array from Gen 1 iPod shuffles....!

let's say it was not exactly fast

gentmatt

@bmike With only 2 usb ports? :)

bmike

@gentmatt hubtastic

gentmatt

Won't there be a bottleneck? Or is USB just that slow.

bmike

@stuffe We did a raid array of floppy drives once for LOLs - the clacking noise was awesome

@gentmatt Oh - it's far from ideal - more of a "holy cow that actually managed to work somehow"

gentmatt

4:57 PM

Yeah, I got it!

stuffe

@bmike (bounce..) I saw a video of someone doing the theme from star wars using multiple floppy drives to make sychronised grinding noises

gentmatt

I bet you all have seen this video on youtube where they RAID 24 Samsung SSDs?

►

Ian C.

@gentmatt isn't that what the do at SE HQ? I thought SE was all on an SSD RAID array now.

gentmatt

@IanC What is SE HQ? Stack Exchange High Quality Version?

Ian C.

@gentmatt StackExchange headquarters.

gentmatt

5:04 PM

Aha! :)

Ian C.

I'm trying to find the article Jeff Atwood wrote about the SE DB setup...could have sworn it was backed by an SSD RAID array....

gentmatt

Well @bmike @stuffle and @IanC! Thanks for your efforts to help. I will attempt to do a clean install within the next 48h. I'll let you know how it goes.

Ian C.

good luck!

CajunLuke

5:50 PM

@bmike @bmike So just ask a new, cleaner version of the question and the older duplicate gets nuked?

bmike

@CajunLuke There's an official policy that two or three versions of the "same" question is not necessarily bad for the site.

Stack Overflow Blog: Dr. Strangedupe: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Duplication

Posted by Jeff Atwood on November 15th, 2010

As Stack Overflow grows — or any other Q&A site in the Stack Exchange network, really — there’s a natural pressure to discover and link duplicate questions. The more questions you have, the higher the possibility a given new question isn’t in fact a new question, but a duplicate of an older existing question. Because of this, we’ve continually enhanced the tools for finding, linking, and merging duplicate questions:

Handling Duplicate Questions Linking Duplicate Questions Improved Question Merging …

CajunLuke

Huh. Did not know that.

bmike

We're small enough here still, that most honest, trivial dupes can go and do go if/when they get flagged for moderator attention. If the flagger expresses well reasoned sentiment why one dupe is better than the other - I've never seen a mod delete the "wrong" question.

CajunLuke

I'll try some stuff later today and ask the question.

Also: is chat usually like this, just two people talking? I expected it to be … busier.

bmike

6:06 PM

@CajunLuke In the day time - early evening for europe - yes. It's a pretty low volume place.

You usually have to ping someone and be online to get even this amount of activity some days.

Jason Salaz

7:50 PM

exciting day

Everyone should upvote this:

1

A: Community Promotion Ads - 2012

gentmatt

9:54 PM

@bmike @stuffle and @IanC I've reinstalled Lion using the Recovery HD (I would have done a clean install afterwards, if this did not yield any results.) The animations perform better. I'm happy now :)

Timothy Mueller-Harder

10:13 PM

Within the last week, every time I open Chromium, I get a dialog box telling me Chromium Helper EH has crashed. This renders the browser inoperable. I can open tabs, etc., but no content loads (including local pages, like the New Tab page and Preferences).

What do you think I should do?

Jason Salaz

hey people, upvote this please:

5

A: Community Promotion Ads - 2012

so we can delete it and call it a day until the post goes up

@TimothyMuellerHarder Do you use the dev channel, or Canary by chance?

Timothy Mueller-Harder

@JasonSalaz No.

Jason Salaz

That's very unfortunate.

any meaningful output in Console.app?

Timothy Mueller-Harder

Let me check.

…Well, I'll be darned. It's working again. :|

@JasonSalaz Check.

Jason Salaz

Indeed. You pushed it to the level I wanted. Thanks.

stuffe

10:23 PM

@gentmatt Excellent - a reinstall over the top so you still have all your stuff intact? I wonder what it was, but I figured it wasn't hardware.

Timothy Mueller-Harder

@TimothyMuellerHarder Ah. Though, ⌘. doesn't work, and the New Tab button doesn't have a + icon on it.

stuffe

reinstall Chromium?

Timothy Mueller-Harder

OpenScripting.framework - scripting addition "/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax" declares no loadable handlers.
[0223/171930:FATAL:chrome_main_delegate.cc(526)] Check failed: !command_line.HasSwitch(switches::kProcessType) && process_type.empty(). Main application forbids --type, saw utility

Jason Salaz

the first line is likely not relevant.

The rest of that is scary looking.

Timothy Mueller-Harder

Yes, the word "FATAL" in all caps tends to have that effect on a line of text.

Jason Salaz

10:30 PM

heh. indeed

gentmatt

@stuffe Yes, a reinstall 'over the top'.

Timothy Mueller-Harder

10:49 PM

Some more stuff:
2/23/12 5:48:46.806 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.604: ([0x0-0x83083].Chromium Helper EH[893]) Job appears to have crashed: Trace/BPT trap: 5
2/23/12 5:48:47.524 PM [0x0-0x84084].Chromium Helper EH: [895:1547:6968156527471:FATAL:resource_bundle_posix.cc(54)] Check failed: !resources_file_path.empty(). chrome.pak not found

I guess I should look into whatever "chrome.pak" is...

jaberg

@JasonSalaz you checked your audio question? VLC that (for some reason didn't work during my test yesterday) seems to do the trick.

Jason Salaz

yeah, saw that.

it's at this point in the bounty's life that I'm very sad I can't split the total.

jaberg

Don't know why it wasn't working for me yesterday–and I'm remote so I haven't previewed the resulting file through my studio monitors but I think you may have a winner.

I'm unconcerned about the bounty myself, but I agree that you got several good answers.

Jason Salaz

11:10 PM

what speakers do you use?

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