I have some WD Green Power drives in a ReadyNAS NV+, and the latest one I purchased was parking its heads far too often. Its load cycle count was growing very high over the few days I owned it.

I followed these instructions to disable the idle timer on my drives, but I just couldn’t get the Ultimate Boot CD to boot at all on my Early 2008 Mac Pro. It would freeze before it ever presented me with its (large) options menu. The CDs booted fine on my 13″ MacBook Pro, so obviously it didn’t like my Mac Pro. (I can’t say I ever imagined I’d boot any flavour of DOS on an 8-core machine with 10GB RAM—crazy!)

After a whole lot of searching, and failed attempts, I finally decided to try the 5.0 beta of UBCD this morning, and that managed to work.

The key (for me, anyway) was to choose option #3 in the FreeDOS boot menu that’s presented to you. That was the only one that was able to detect my CD drive, and actually pass the initial part of the boot process.

So now all my WD Green Power drives have their idle timers disabled, and they seem to be living happily in the ReadyNAS, for now…

All my products: TapeDeck, Capo, and FuzzMeasure are a part of the program. All my sales from today (January 20th) will be donated to UNICEF Canada.

So if you’ve been kicking around the idea of buying one of my products—hopefully helping a charity will push you over the edge. If you’re already a happy customer, please consider buying another app from the list, or telling your friends about the program.

Update: I have made a donation of $1600 to UNICEF Canada as a result of the Indie+Relief event. Thanks so much for participating!

So much was going on with FuzzMeasure 3.2 that I had to stop myself in my tracks, cut features, and simply focus on getting the few key changes that I’ve made so far into my customers’ hands.

I wanted FuzzMeasure 3.2 to be a grand release, with major UI changes and features. Unfortunately, what I wanted to offer was well beyond what I was capable of producing in the given time frame. When I got stuck, I turned to my other products and added features to those instead.

Enough is enough. I need to get FuzzMeasure 3.2 out of beta.

What I’ve done over the past 13 months (yikes) is not insignificant. There are no big splashy features, but it’s definitely a far better application than it was a year ago.

For starters, I’ve added some great new AppleScript commands that should help anyone that needs to do a fair bit of post-processing of impulses. These changes were motivated by members of the impulse response sampling community (the folks that generate convolution reverb presets) who needed FuzzMeasure to do some things it wasn’t originally designed to do.

I also spent a great deal of time dealing with performance and stability issues that cropped up due to the huge memory footprint that FuzzMeasure tends to have. (No, that doesn’t just mean enabling 64-bit compilation, though Snow Leopard users will be happy to know FuzzMeasure now runs as a native 64-bit binary on systems that support it.)

Speaking of Snow Leopard, a lot of bugs cropped up when Snow Leopard shipped. It turns out that many of my silly programming mistakes—made early on in FuzzMeasure’s development—have come back to bite me hard. I’m not exactly sure what Apple did, but lots of ghosts were coming out of the closet. (Ray, Egon, and Peter were not able to offer any help, but rest assured that the ghosts are now mostly gone.)

So you can look forward to FuzzMeasure 3.2 shipping very soon now. Head over to the latest builds page to see the result of what I’ve been working on all this time, and please let me know what issues you come across while using it.

Mike’s series definitely helped me get off my butt to post some more technical information here on the blog. I didn’t think anyone would really be out looking for the kinds of detailed posts I’ve been doing, but it feels good to know I’ve helped people out—now I can see why Mike’s been doing it so long!

If you do any kind of development for the Mac, and consider yourself at least an intermediate Mac developer, check out his Friday Q&A series to help you level up.

The project is located on bitbucket at this URL: http://bitbucket.org/liscio/smugopencl.

The repository includes a simple example that demonstrates how to set up an OpenCL context, and compile/run a kernel. It also provides an example of mixing the SMUGMath and SMUGOpenCL frameworks together.

An example of SMUGOpenCL usage (taken from the included example program) can be seen at the wiki page here: https://bitbucket.org/liscio/smugopencl/wiki/Home

There are many features to come, so follow the project on BitBucket to keep an eye on SMUGOpenCL development.