I was looking into upgrading my 2006 Mac Mini (serving as a media server) with a 2010 model, just to get a bigger hard drive… and also a faster one!

Now, according to this guy, the Mac Mini 2010 still comes with a stinky slow old SATA-1 drive, just as back in the days. And that Ricky guy actually sounds like he knows damn well what he’s talking about!

Anyone got a Mac Mini 2010? Care to check the Negotiated Link Speed in your System Profiler? (About my mac > More info…)

On the screenshot above, you can see a Negatiated Link Speed of 3 Gb/s, which is good… except I made the capture on my Mac Pro. Apparently, 2010 Mac Minis will show you a Link Speed of 3 Gb/s (that’s what the Mac is capable of) but a Negotiated Link Speed of only 1.5 Gb/s (that’s what the HD is capable of)…

What Ricky doesn’t say though, is if he has the 320 GB drive or the 500 GB drive. There may be a difference between these two.

Now, the alternative would be to upgrade the drive myself, but it’s just a big bag of hurt! I’m too old to get any pleasure out of disasenbling hardware any more…

My first impression was: it’s really nicely designed, extremely intuitive and responsive. I gotta get one. I also loved the little switch to lock the orientation. Super useful for reading while lying on your side in bed! (Unlike on the iPhone)

However, after a few minutes I started to realize that a) I don’t quite know how to hold that thing (whether with or without the Apple carrying case) and b) it’s getting damn heavy if you hold it in your hand. Those impression were shared by the owner as well as the other people who played with it.

I believe this is going to limit how much you actually want to use that device in different situations. I think it’s actually very impractical to use when you don’t sit down. Also, I believe Apple should actually drop the stupid glass screens: they’re heavy and the glare is just annoying!

Anyways, until then it looks like the Apple product segmentation goes like this:

• If you’re standing, use your iPhone
• If you’re sitting in an armchair, couch or other laid back situation, use your iPad
• If you’re sitting at a table, use your MacBook
• If you’re sitting at your workdesk, use your iMac or Mac Pro

Ah yes, also:

• If you want to watch something on your TV, use your Apple TV or better yet: Mac Mini.

In Terminal, copy/paste:

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGPlayMovieOnOpen 1

Now movies will autploay when you double click them.

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders 1

Then relaunch the Finder. Press space on a selected folder and admire :)

Well, the operative word here is “appear". It is a common misconception that “echo is the slowest PHP command"! :p

The problem is actually just a bandwidth issue! When you try to pump a lot of content though the Internet, at some point you experience “load time"… and at some point PHP actually experiences “send time"!

You may measure the execution time between the begining and the end of your script, and, on a slow connection, it may show you that it took 500 ms to execute. You may even narrow it down to a single echo statement that takes 480 ms to execute. But that time actually includes wait time where PHP cannot send any more data back to apache!

There is a common trick that consists of starting output befering before echoing, like this:

PHP:

This will allow PHP to move on and appear to terminate fast. But the truth is, all the content is now in PHP’s output buffer, and although your script is done, PHP is still working in the background to send all that data to your web server (apache for instance).

By default a line in the combined log looks like this:

Code:

Notice the 2 dashes - - just after the IP. The first one stands for “I could not identify the user using ident” and the second one for “no user authentication was performed".

Now, let’s face it: you will never identify anyone using ident. Your apache conf probably even doesn’t try. That field is a left over from ancient times. So let’s replace that first dash with something useful, i-e: the processing time of the request! Note that by doing this we keep the global structure of the file identical and any log processing tool you might be using should not be affected.

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