Happy Pi Day 2011, Everyone!

It’s that time of the year again – our favorite holiday for the past decade. Pi Day. A reminder of the math geeks that have brought wisdom and light on our planet for centuries past.

Depending on who you ask, they all have different terms for Pi. Transcendental, irrational, easy, hard… but we prefer the term ‘magical.’

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Open Source, 100% Compatible ln for Windows (and Junction Point library)

We’ve been huge fans of symlinks for forever, and even posted about Windows Vista’s new mklink commandline utility with quite the passion back in 2006 when the ability to create soft-links from the commandline was first added to Windows.

However, there are a few things that have forever irked us about the ln lookalike called mklink.exe:

  • It’s called mklink and not ln. (I mean, you just get can’t get around that fact)
  • The arguments are switched around. `mklink something_doesnt_exist actual_file` is just…….. wrong!
  • By default, mklink will create softlinks and not hardlinks. ln requires the /h flag to create a hardlink.
  • mklink isn’t smart enough to distinguish between files and folders. You need explicitly tell it via the commandline.
  • Even then, mklink has two different switches depending on the type of directory link you want. /D for softlink’d directories, and /J for hardlink’d directories.
  • mklink can’t be used outside of cmd.exe (such as in PowerShell). (Hat tip: Jason)
  • And, of course,  mklink isn’t open source.

So we made our own.

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OS X 10.7 Lion Adds TRIM Support, But Not For All

I just happened to upgrade the firmware on my Crucial C300 256GB SSD drive in my MacBook Pro (13″ Unibody, Late 2008) on the same day that I upgraded to OS X 10.7 Lion. In my previous post, I touched briefly on the fact that 10.7 in the renamed “System Information” app under the “Serial-ATA” section does not detect my SSD as having TRIM support.

This is one of the very top SSD models out there in terms of performance and size, and it’s been proven in multiple benchmarks (though with the C400 coming out, things are set to change once more); and has proven to be a popular choice for MacBook owners due to the large size and incredible performance even without TRIM in previous versions of OS X.

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C300 Negotiated Link Speed on OS X

This is just a quick note for anyone using the most wonderful Crucial C300 on OS X.

If in the “System Profiler” (now renamed to the more apt “System Information” in OS X 10.7 Lion), you see:

Link Speed: 3 Gigabit

Negotiated Link Speed: 1.5 Gigabit

And are wondering where your remaining 1.5 (or 4.5 if you have a 6 Gbps SATA controller) gigabits went, then you need to upgrade the C300 to the latest firmware. This appears to be an issue with the 0002 firmware that is resolved in 0006. Unfortunately, this does not seem to make OS X 10.7 aware that the C300 supports TRIM.

Also a tip: if after upgrading to revision 0006, your OS X will hang at boot, re-run the upgrade. It won’t actually upgrade it again (and will finish instantly), but it appears to fix something important.

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The Death of BCC?

In the age of Facebook, in an era where privacy and anonymity are a thing of the very distant past, quite a few “features” of technology have been banished from daily use, forced to languish in the corner in a sad state of disuse and disrepair. But perhaps none have suffered such a miserable and regrettable fate as the BCC.

Quick: if you’re fighting with a friend and want to let your BFF know what’s going on as you send your frenemy a nasty messsage — what’s the best way to pull that off?

If you’ve completed the switch to Facebook mindset, your convoluted answer would consist of something to effect “Send a message to X, copy and paste it, and send it to Y.” And you’d be right – Facebook doesn’t give you another way of pulling this off. FAIL!

Let’s say your technical skills are not in such a pitiful state and you have enough sense to still use email for day-to-day communications. What’s your answer then? “I’ll just send X an email, then forward my result to Y.” aaaaaaaaand that’s another fail.

See, there’s this oft-overlooked feature my commandline mail client from the 80s has that solves this. It’s called “Blind Carbon Copy,” or BCC for short. You can send an email to more than one person without all your recipients knowing who you sent it to!

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UPDATED: As Arabia Protests, Libya Blocks Internet Access

In light of the ongoing battle of citizens against corrupt and unjust regimes throughout the Arab world (more on Wikipedia), protestors have been increasingly reliant on social media websites to rally their numbers and organize their meets.

Over the past two days, protests have flared up considerably in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain resulting in mass casualties at the hands of government security. We now have reports from friends of NeoSmart Technologies in Tripoli, Libya (stay safe, guys! Please!) that the government has ordered ISPs to block access to most websites. Currently, most websites are unavailable and internet access is, by and large, being blocked.

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Contributing to the Open Source Community

A week ago, we tweeted a promise to contribute more to the open source community. As a Research & Development organization, there’s a lot of random code samples, small libraries, forks/modifications of popular scripts, and more that’s just lying around, begging to be open sourced.

While a lot of these may prove to have little to no value to anyone, given how easy it is to make things open source thanks to github, there’s no real drawback to throwing them out there for anyone that may benefit at some unknown point in the future.

We have a couple of hundred miniature projects, test code samples, and other such content across a number of drives to sort through, and whenever we find something useful, this is our promise to the community to share it. To that end, we’ve set up a github repository at http://github.com/neosmart where we’ll be uploading the code, and from where you’re all more than welcome to check it out and contribute back.

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A Brief Message from Hosni Mubarak

You can say what you want about our friends in Nigeria, but the one thing you can’t call them is slow. It’s scarcely been a few days since fellow netizens in Egypt have been clamoring for the ouster of their president/dictator/king-of-the-world Hosni Mubarak, but we’re glad to be able to reassure you all that we have it on the up-and-up that he’s already planning his exit, and is only looking for someone to help him sneak out billions of dollars in money stolen from his people before he can announce his resign. Hooray for Democracy!

Follows is a top-secret and highly-confidential message from government insider Mohammad Hammad, explaining the details of the situation and seeking out a business partner to help out a tyrant in need. Hat-tip to Muayyad for forwarding me this valuable document!

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Happy New Year!

To our dear members, readers, users, and beloved friends:

Happy New Year 2011 from everyone on the NeoSmart Team. On behalf of all the NeoSmart Staff, thank you for being here with us this year!

We’re looking forward to more great years to come, and thank you for being with us every step of the way.