Apple hard disk failures or how I stopped worrying and love the SSD

Ever since Apple tried to pursue mainstream, things went bad for them. It’s not like their computers didn’t crash before — that’s normal. But recently, they started to crash a lot. I had a late 2007 white MacBook with a 160GB hard drive. Well, exactly after 12 months, this drive failed me, a few days before the warranty expiration. It started clicking and died. They changed it for free to an even crappier one — it failed too, a few days ago, exactly after 6 months, and out of nowhere. Similarly, started clicking and just died.

Wolfram|Alpha launching today and what it means for Google and search

Wolfram|Alpha knowledge search engine is set to launch online today, May 15, with a live webcast beginning at 7pm CST. A lot of hype has been made around this new project by the iconic Stephen Wolfram and his team most widely known for their brilliant Mathematica package and online math encyclopedia. We have seen a lot of attempts to create a Google killer, the last being the unfortunate Cuil. But Wolfram|Alpha is anything but a search engine — it’s not a Google killer, it’s the future.

Windows 7 on MacBook first look

Installing Windows 7 RC1 32-bit on my late 2007 MacBook was a piece of cake. Boot Camp manager created a 32 GB partition, installation from the DVD was quick and smooth, and the system was running nicely even without the drivers from Apple. The decision by Microsoft to release an almost complete product for free, with a one-year license, is a great opportunity to get used to the next iteration of Windows systems. Let’s have a look at it.

Get Semantix - a multilingual semantic mashup

It’s been a little quiet on the blog, because I was busy developing the next version of Semantix — a semantic mashup connecting all major semantic web services that is probably the first semantic service with multi-language support. By analyzing texts, Semantix gives you smart summaries, annotates contents with keywords and categorizes them. And it’s all written in Perl, so it’s uber-cool ;) If you’d like to learn more about Semantix and get an invite to the private beta, continue reading.

The 140 Characters Webapp Challenge Awards!

After the final wrap-up of The Challenge, I gave you 4 weeks to vote. A lot of votes have been casted on different contenders. Big thanks to all who participated! Today I closed the voting and summed up the points. Here are the results.

rel=“canonical” and Expression Engine SEO

If you have read my previous two articles on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Google-friendly links for Expression Engine (EE), then you know how important these tweaks are. They help with various things, duplicate content among them. Google recently introduced another tool to deal with that particular problem — canonical page tag. And there are a few places in Expression Engine where it works perfectly.

4 weeks with Safari 4 Beta

Four weeks have passed since Apple released Safari 4 Beta, and I have been using it since. There are things I like about this new browser, and even after this short time I think I couldn’t live without some of the features. On the other hand, a few things are irritating and could be fixed. I’ve been using the previous version of Safari, so the transition was not painful. But even for Apple, who is very picky about user interfaces, Safari 4 is revolutionary.

Extract and change file icons in Leopard

There exists an extremely easy way to manipulate icons in Leopard (and previous OS X versions too), just by using copy-paste between files and folders. Using this technique you can quickly customize your disk items, as well as extract rich graphics for further use or simply inspiration. With just a few clicks you can get these sweet looking designs in an up to 512x512 PNG file. Here’s how you do it.

Make separate RSS feeds for each category in ExpressionEngine

It’s time to talk about ExpressionEngine (EE) for a change. If any of you can speak Polish, I recommend subscribing to EExpression.pl, a nice new site that talks about EE in my native language. Now, to the subject — let’s assume for a moment that you use the EE feed templates. If you are running a daily news site, there’s probably loads of different categories you are broadcasting. It would be nice if your readers could subscribe just to the topic they are interested in (on CNN you can), but without the need for you to create tons of separate feed templates. See how EE can do this task for you.

Final wrap-up of The 140 Characters Webapp Challenge!

The 140 Characters Webapp Challenge is now over! If by chance you don’t know what it was, read this article at Mashable or see the original post at f055. It was great 2 weeks, everybody. You showed some awesome skills, and really raised to The Challenge! Kudos :) And thanks for making it all so exciting for all of us!

I have wrapped up all of your apps into this long, 32 apps list, which all are indeed functional and below 140 chars! (plus 4 that are interesting, but too long) You can VOTE for ONE of your favorite apps. And yes, the voting script is 140 chars too!

Check the VOTING results!