Flash 10.1 doesn’t help video playback…

Posted on June 11, 2010

Adobe have just released Flash 10.1 Player and I was hoping that it would include GPU acceleration, just like the Windows version. Why is this important? Next time you open up YouTube, LoveFilm, or the BBC iPlayer, take a look in Activity Monitor. I bet you’ll see your web browser chewing up loads of CPU power (in fact I’ve sometimes seen Flash banner ads on websites cause the browser to take 150% CPU activity).

GPU acceleration pushes some of the complex video decoding off to the graphics card, means your CPU has less work to do, meaning your Mac doesn’t chug like a pig playing video. There’s a development Flash Player that supports GPU Acceleration on some NVIDIA based Macs, but unfortunately my MacBook Pro uses an ATI video card, so I’m going to have to put up with screaming fans for a while yet…

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MobileMe synchronisation problems

Posted on May 26, 2010

Whilst MobileMe is a great way of keeping your Address Book and iCal data synced between multiple Macs, it’s known to have quite a few quirks. You can particularly have issues after migrating data to a new machine that uses the same computer name and account name, as MobileMe gets confused which machine it should sync with. Try stopping synchronisation on both machines, changing the computer name to something distinct and then performing a resync.

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Coping with the Seige mentality

Posted on December 28, 2009

Over the last few days I’ve started to think more carefully about performance optimization, from both the user’s and webserver’s point of view. A few tests using the rather excellent Siege showed huge drop offs in performance when serving quite basic .aspx or .php pages compared to straight .html pages. Rasmus Lerdorf ‘Simple is Hard‘ lecture at DrupalCom gave me a lot of food for thought, and whilst it focuses on PHP/Apache, many of the ideas are still relevant to IIS/.NET.

When optimizing performance the objective is always the same – get the complete page with all assets downloaded in the shortest possible time. This goal can be split into a number of distinct tasks – frontend code, backend code and environment optimization. Continue reading →

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Problems with Apple Remote control and Snow Leopard

Posted on December 28, 2009

If you have a problem with your Apple Remote not working after upgrading to OS 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’, you aren’t alone. Unfortunately the problem is quite common, has numerous time-consuming suggested fixes that generally don’t work, and utterly predictable. Apple added a new facility to Snow Leopard that let you pair a specifc remote to a Mac, so people couldn’t mess about having ‘Remote Wars’. Because of this you might find your Mac refuses to see your remote simply because it thinks it’s paired to another one.

It took me all of about 15mins to work out how to fix it for a client, when another nearby Apple Reseller had apparently suggested they had to buy some 3rd party software to fix it. Odd world.

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