Reboot. As simple as it may sound, rebooting reinitialises everything and makes you restart from a clean slate. (Doesn’t count as a way to speed up).

1. Repair Disk Permissions. Go into Applications > Utilities > and start Disk Utility. Select your hard drive and click on Repair Disk Permissions. Apparently applications you install or run often mingle with what the OS expects as the right permissions for certain key files. Whatever.

2. Unclutter your desktop. Bad habits have a way of appearing as the natural thing to do. Computer architects are often caught up in a logic of their own (less at Apple’s) that makes no provision for the “natural way” of doing things. Isn’t it easy to just save everything to the Desktop and then just link to it say when you’re adding an attachment to an email? Well don’t. Leopard has addressed this by saving in a download folder right off Safari. Spotlight, QuickSilver and others are there to allow you to be sloppy with your files thanks to meta data describing their contents. Move everything out of your Desktop, leave it at your user level (so you don’t have to worry about “Sharing”). The Desktop makes preview items for all these icons lying around. It takes unnecessary time to process, especially at boot up.

3. Remove unnecessary start-up items. Go into System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items and make sure you understand what is there and for what purpose. Obviously, if you don’t need it, simply remove it.

4. Clean your hard drive. Make sure you have at least 15% of free space on your hard drive. Find files that appear in more than one place, use whatsize to determine where your bigger files are (or use OmniDiskSweeper). Run Xslimmer if you have an Intel machine and couldn’t careless about PowerPC legacy code in Universal Binary applications. Please note that once you do that, your application will only run on an Intel machine. Consider getting an extra drive for data and backups (and for Time Machine). Run AppFresh, stay current and get rid of unused applications. Clear caches. Be careful and use a utility like Yasu. Accept the defaults, don’t over do it. USER and SYSTEM caches are best kept untouched.

5. Add more RAM. Nothing like maxing out your ram and lowering the slower disk access for memory intensive applications or for running multiple applications at once. Crucial and Kingston are probably the two most popular suppliers offering extensive support for finding out what memory chip will fit your Mac. Crucial has a memory scanner that you can download and install on your Mac. Kingston wants you to tell it what computer you have. About this Mac > More Info > Hardware > Memory will reveal the banks of memory your system has and how they are populated at present. Desktop Macs are pretty easy to upgrade. Laptops are another story and involve removing the battery in most cases. Here’s a good chart for the iMacs. Here is a chart for the PowerBooks and the iBooks. Here the memory chart for the Power Macs Finally here is how to change memory on your MacBook.

5 ½. Run Activity Monitor. Find out who’s on first with this admin graphic interface. Go to Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor. It will show you how the CPU is running, how saturated your memory is and use it to check out on the processes running in your system. Google is your friend for any strange sounding process. I include this as a speed gainer because it is the best way to troubleshoot an “intuition” or a “feeling” about your computer’s perceived lack of speed.

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I’ve been having some problems dealing with emails lately. I’m now up to anywhere from 500-800 emails a day now — on the accounts I check daily only — and that’s been difficult to deal with seing how 80-90% of junk email.

My problem is that I’ve always been hesitant to setup junk mail filtering because I’m always afraid of losing emails. I decided to do something tonight because I simply couldn’t deal with all the mails anymore.

Step 1 was setting up the mail server (postfix on Linux for me) to use some real-time black lists. That step, alone, removed a ton of SPAM for my personal accounts. That was awesome, but of course it’s no good for all the accounts that do not live on my server, including my 3 accounts at work that get a ton and a half of SPAM daily.

I looked around online and someone on a random forum suggested SpamSieve, a Mac OS X software I had tried a few years ago and discarded immediately. The setup is quite easy and the documented suggested training it with 1000 emails, 65% of which are SPAM. A few minutes later I was all done and now I’m waiting to see the results. So far, so good, but I hope I don’t get too many false positive.

In the past 5 hours or so since I started this, I haven’t received a single SPAM that was not either deleted by the server or wasn’t detected by SpamSieve. This is unheard of. Of course, as I was typing that last sentence, one got through.

I always liked the iStat menu item found on the Apple web site Dashboard section. Seeing all these activity gauges reminded me of Flight Simulator (use Flight Gear). But if you’re like me, you don’t often resort to widgets (default “F12″ key) except perhaps for the occasional weather check when you’ve been inside too long, on the computer… So I like the iStat Menus even more now as they can be customized to appear right in the menu bar, at eyes’ length.

Then all hell broke loose. I realized that at least one application was using up to 110% !!! of the CPU, especially at start-up. Aside for the unnecessary wear and tear, that culprit really slowed down resources (memory, CPU and disk access) for everything else. A quick Google search revealed all sorts of Forum truths, some truer than others. I used the Terminal with “top -u” to find out what was hogging all the CPU cycles (q to quit). Alternatively, “ps aux” at the prompt reveals the processes running and their ids.

With that method, “launchCFMA” was found to use all the CPU time. I needed to investigate further as this process manages legacy applications (PowerPC) and bridges the old with the new INTEL Macs. (aside: found this very interesting article if you’re still not convinced Apple is doing the right thing with its OS (inspired from BeOS, that’s how much of a visionary Jean-Louis Gassée was in 1991).)

I then launched “Activity Monitor” (in Applications/Utilities) to isolate the daemon that was ill-behaved. It turned out to be “Microsoft Database Daemon”. Further research revealed that it was used by Entourage and other Microsoft applications to exchange data and especially “Notifications”. I turned everything off as I no longer use these features, especially if they are legacy (4 years ago) and behaving like resource hogs. You go into System Preferences, Accounts and Login to remove start-up applications. You go into the Entourage folder to find Microsoft Office Notifications and in its preferences, you turn it off.

I can’t wait for the new Office release for Mac. Now that promises to be worth some CPU time!

Allow me to go off-topic for a bit.

So that’s what we get for Bill’s last CES Keynote. No product announcement, a few demos or technologies we already know about and a funny video about his last day in the office. I mean, come on Microsoft. Where’s that XBox 360 Ultimate SKU everyone was talking about. How about at least a comment on the ongoing HD format war. What about a shiny new product that I can get interested in ?

Bill is an insanely intelligent guy, very successful, but he’s no Steve Jobs when giving presentations. On the positive side, that presentation gave me the opportunity to test Microsoft’s Silverlight on Mac and it works great. It’s good to know that Microsoft’s ‘Flash Killer‘ at least works well on the platform.

Hey, we got the Zune in Canada. Yawn…. Now Steve, could we please get a canadian iPhone? I’ve been a good boy all year and bought all your products and I swear I’ll continue to do so. Please?

I decided to start the year on target with productivity objectives. I am going to get rid of all Web 2.0 accounts that are simply not adding any value to my online presence. I’ll start with Jaiku. Well it’s not that easy to remove one’s account. I obtained a dreaded 504 Gateway Time-outwhile deleting my account. That’s precisely the point I’m trying to make. Time waster. 504 when dialog fails. Nice thinkgeek t-shirt idea. 

Why would I need a service that cannot get rid of me? Like Woody Allen once said (and I’m paraphrasing you purists (it’s from Annie Hall but Woody got it from Groucho Marx)) why would I be part of an online service that would have me as a member? Just kidding. I like enriching content and that has nothing to do with socializing, that’s the heart of the problem. I think facebook is immature (my ex-coworkers are all there). I dig digg because it’s offbeat.

Why socialize online when I don’t even socialize in real life? Why make this anonymous experience even more shallow?

See how deleting a social network account can be thought provoking? I should create an account in all of them just for the sake of discussing their deletion. It’s simply del.icio.us  Hey come to think of it, I already have an account in the most popular social networks… Oh yeah that was the initial point.

Finally, 2007 is over and the expensive holiday season is behind us. We can now move on to the much more expensive MacWorld season, where Santa Steve showers us with cool, shiny, gotta have ‘em, new products. I have to admit, my chances of not buying anything during that week is pretty low.

As someone who works everyday on a Mac (a MacBook Pro 15″), I’m always looking for new and more efficient ways to manage my work day. Lot’s of tasks to manage, lot’s of email coming in, lot’s of people calling. That’s why MacWorld is so interesting to me. Sure, Steve will give us new products but other 3rd party developers will also do the same.

Leopard was a huge release for developers (in terms of API) and I can’t wait to see what new applications will come out because of it. TextMate, my favorite text editor is scheduled to have its 2.0 release fairly soon, Delicious Library 2.0 is coming any day/week now. OmniFocus 1.0 final is also scheduled to be released monday while OmniGraffle 5.0 is at beta 3 and I’m sure we’ll see many many more in the coming months. Most of these apps will be Leopard-only, a fact that would be surprising if not for the incredible conversion rate of Apple’s OS X releases these last few years. Leopard came out at the end of october, some 3 months ago and we’re already at almost 30% of usage. This is nothing short of amazing to me and it explains why developers are so quick to jump on the new APIs and the new OSes from Apple. This is something you don’t see with new releases of Windows.I’m really excited to see all the cool software we’ll get in 2008.

For now, I’m having a hard time deciding between OmniFocus and Things for my tasks management app. I think I need an app to manage my management of tasks.

How many times have you visited a city thinking where are the hot spots? Oh, sorry I meant WIFI. In any case, here is a quick way of finding hotspots from your hotel room before you go out in the wild. Of course, all precautions should go into effect: a VPN channel to your office, SFTP to any file server and encrypted channels for all your iChat buddies with .mac accounts galore.

Of course I’m the paranoid type when it comes to security and password protection. Not that I own any state secrets but I just like to maintain my privacy. It seems these days, it’s a commodity for organized crime. Hey Computer Associates was hacked!

Pick complicated password. Change them once a month or every time you retrieve your emails in public places. Even then there is so much to discuss. Hey Jonathan that would be a nice discussion to have.

For various reasons, mostly because the vast majority of business users are in a “Windows” environment, I also run Windows XP on my iMac (with Unix isn’t that out of this world?). All compatibility issues can be tested some applications that simply won’t run on  a Mac, can be installed. (and yes there are still fonts and Quicktime issues between the two platforms when exchanging multimedia files)

Trade software (stock exchange, financial analysis, legacy, third party utilities) developers often only cater to the largest market out there: the Microsoft hegemony. Although 

And the first one now
Will later be last

The Times They are A-Changin’. mostly because of the iPod’s and iPhone’s popularity, the design of the Mac and the overall flexibility and robustness of the Mac OS X feline releases. Tigers and Leopards are eating up market shares.

Read this fascinating article on Apple’s recent progression. The most dramatic aspect of their inroads are in the sales and profits they are making in comparison to Microsoft’s. In terms of OS installed base Microsoft has roughly ten times more but, in terms of profit, Apple is making a third of Microsoft’s (hardware and software combined). Microsoft is selling about 770,000 VISTAs a month and Apple is selling about 1 Million copies of Leopard monthly. Count me as both a Mac and Windows advocate when foes coexist… where do I fit in? I just think one should always consider the best tools for any given job, setting aside a priori opinion. I’m buyest for my personal computing but that’s another story. (end of intro I guess)

I picked Parallels over Bootcamp because I wanted the Mac to coexist with its PC foe to fight it out for CPU cycles. Yes this Mac is big enough for the “boot” of them. I recommend 1 Gig of RAM for Parallels as anything under that will make you wish you had chosen Bootcamp.

We invest a lot in hardware, network gear and connection to the Internet but we often leave out one essential aspect of browsing: domain name resolution. I recommend that you use OpenDNS to gain more control over an essential part of your network. It’s very easy to set-up and creating a free account will allow you to configure settings for phishing prevention, typo correction and browsing statistics. OpenDNS caches a lot of Internet domain names so accessing them is much faster. The more you use the service, the more your favourite places are cached. Now if someone could get me fiber optics, we’d be off to the races.

One of the thing that saves me a lot of time these days are keyboard shortcut. Sure, every applications and OSes have some, but some take the concept a little further.

One of these application is the incredible text editor TextMate. If you’re into programming, be it HTML, PHP, Ruby or any other type of text-based work, TextMate can help you quite a bit. It’s not a cheap software per say, but it’s a great tool for those of us coding all day. The reason why it’s so good is that its entire programming language support is based on a scripting language and macros and shortcuts that can be triggered by using a keyboard shortcut. You type a word or a few letter and TextMate will do the rest of you and all it this is done within context so that typing something in a CSS block will do a different action than if you are typing within an HTML block.

If you like that idea but don’t need an advanced text editor, one software I like a lot is TextExpander from Smile On My mac. The software does exactly the same as textmate (it expands a word into a bigger text) but it does so anywhere in the OS. It works within Mail, within Safari, anywhere. It’s a 30$ piece of software, but if you need to write a lot of repetitive text, it’s pretty nice. I’ve been using it lately to answer some repetitive emails and forum support. Since I sometime answer questions in Mail.app, in Firefox or in Safari, it’s useful to have a global software so the shortcuts are available anywhere. The latest version added .Mac synching, which is one of the thing that I really missed before.

The Mac community has a lot of cool productivity software. The problem is actually finding the right one for the right task. I’ve bought a lot of them and I’m just now getting to know all of them and finding out which one works well for me.