Franz Kelsch on Tech

I just finished replacing the hard drive in my Mac Book Pro.  Unlike most notebook computers, this was not an easy task.  I had to remove 25 screws, remove the keyboard and disconnect two ribbon cables from the mother board before I could remove the old hard drive.  Fortunately there are many good tutorials on the web to follow. I used a video tutorial at Other World Computing.

My model came two years ago with a 160 Gb drive.  It was just plain out of space, especially after taking all the photos in Europe recently.  Although I find the Mac must better in terms of applications using disk space, the documents, music and photos all add up.

I decided to go with a 7200 rpm drive, instead of the traditional 5400 rpm.  That meant I would only get a 320 Gb drive, instead of 500 Gb.  I bought the Western Digital drive online at newegg.com for $99, plus tax. Shipping was free.  I arrived late in the day.

I put the new drive in my external hard drive dock.  This is a cool device that holds either a 3.5 or 2.5 bare SATA hard drive.  I ran SuperDuper to clone the existing drive to the new drive so once installed it would boot right up.  Since this external doc is only USB 2, it took awhile, 5 hours in fact.  It was now 11 pm and I was wonder if I should start this project.  Of course I could not resist.

I put a piece of paper on the desk and wrote down where all the screws were coming from and place the screws there as I removed them.  When I finally was removing the keyboard, the ribbon cable came disconnected before I could look underneath to see where it was attached, which gave me a bit of a startle. But I finally figured it out.

After the old drive was removed and the new on installed, and all the screws put back, I turned the computer on.  It seemed to not start and I was now worried.  But I guess it was just trying to figure out what to boot from since it had a new hard drive and shortly it started up.

I am very happy with the performance.  It seems to be a much faster computing experience.  The increase in performace could be from the faster hear drive, the larger hard drive with high density or the fact that I have much more free disk space.  In any case I am glad I went with a faster hard drive.  Only by testing a 5400 rpm 500 Gb drive compared with what I installed would one really know the best solution.

I did some benchmarking of the new drive compared with the what the database for the MacBook Pro.  The graphs below show how the new drive (in green) compare with what the baseline was for a MacBook Pro.  I included graphs for both random read and random write.  It seems the 7200 rpm does make a significant difference.  Click the graphs to view enlarged.

Internal 320 Gb 7200 RPM - Random Read

Internal 320 Gb 7200 RPM - Random Write

Just looking at the specifications, my new internal 7200 rpm drive takes no more power, has any more vibration or a higher noise level, compared with the Western Digital 5200 rpm drive.

With the update of WordPress to version 2.6 you are allow you to switch from the flash uploader or Browser uploader (see the above image).  That was working just fine after upgrading WordPress.  At least it was until I came upon a website that said I did not have Adobe Flash installed in my browser.  I knew I had it installed but went ahead and did the update, which installed Flash 10.

That broke the WordPress Flash based file upload so each time I wanted to upload a file, I had to click the link for Browser based, select the file, then click Upload.  Lots of extra clicks.

Later when I was attempting to post a new Word Press blog entry and upload a file, the Choose File button did not work.

I was forced to select the use “Browser Upload” method instead.  That mean everytime I went to use upload a file I had to change the upload method. I found this anoying.  Research showed Flash 10 introduced a new security measure which prohibits the calling of the File Browse dialog from code. This means all flash based file uploader applications need to be radically changed in order to function with Flash 10. This change is affecting all flash based file uploaders across the web including Pixie, Flickr, WordPress etc.

Okay, so I did not need this headache so I decided to go back to Flash 9.  That was not so simple.  I finally found Flash 9 on the Adobe website.  It was there for developers to use to test software, just assuming everyone would want to use Flash 10.  Then I had to figure out how to uninstall version 10.  If found an unistaller here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_14157 .

Intially the uninstaller stalled when it started to access my Time Machine external drive.  I had to a force quite, take that drive off line, and then start over.  Finally after getting Flash 10 uninstalled, I installed version 9.  Now I can still click to choose the file using the flash uploader, but when when I select a file, it does not seem to upload.  So more trouble shooting is needed.

So the real question, who needs Flash 10 when it crippled things? They should have given a warning before they install.

Long before most people had up a personal website, I started a website at one of my domains, kelsch.com. The problem with websites is trying to keep them current and updated. Eventually the information there was so out of date that I gave up and changed kelsch.com to a family blog. Blogs, such as this one are much easier to keep up and post new information.  I have setup several blogs for different purposes, as have most all of my children.

I still have several websites I do maintain. I decided to do a make over on all of them using some of the techniques I have found including:

• Flash based slide show that goes through about several images.
• RSS feeds from the various blogs and photo galleries.
• Contact form

So with these feeds the website keeps current without any need for me to do anything. I can change the images for the slide shows at any time by using Lightroom, selecting 30 images, and doing an export to the right folder, then FTPing them to the site. It only takes a minute.  I also setup a photo gallery on the website, which is accessed at http://www.kelsch.org/gallery .  This is a gallery created entirely within Lightroom send directly to the webserver.  I am still playing around with this feature.

See the screen shots below.  Click on any of them and visit that website.

Here is a screen shot of what Kelsch.ORG looks like now [Visit Site].

Here is a screen shot of what the FranzKelsch.com site looks like now [Visit Site].

Here is a screen shot of what KelschFamily.NET looks like now [Visit Site].

Here is a screen shot of what my Photography site looks like now [Visit Site].

Here is a screen shot of what my Tech site looks like now [Visit Site].

I did have one issue with the kelsch.org site that that showed up only on Windows based browsers. I am using a Spry hortizontal menu and when I would click on the menu item, the drop down portion of the menu would be hidden by the flash slide show below.  Doing some research, I solved this by adding this command to the flash slide show coding:

<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />

This makes the background transparent.  Inside Dreamweaver, select the Flash slide show and in the properties select Parameters.  Add “wmode” with a value of “transparent”.  Change the order so this is the first parameter in the list.  That solved the issue.  For more information refer to this item:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15523&sliceId=1

It might be good to list down now all the domains I have, along with the subdomains, and what they are currently being used for.