iMac 27-inch SSD Install (Out with the Superdrive, in with the SSD)

Being in that the optical drive in the iMac uses a full speed SATA connection (albeit using a ’slimline’ SATA connector), and the fact that I rarely use optical media – I decided to swap out the Superdrive with a 128GB SSD drive.

Not large enough to use for all of the data on the iMac, but more than enough for the OS, all of my apps, and even a couple VMWare fusion images I use on a regular basis.  Meanwhile the 1TB 3.5 drive handles all the rest of the junk (download files, iTunes library, etc.)

The results – After cloning my boot drive (SuperDuper), and restarting – the boot time was cut down to less than 1/4 of what it was with the 1TB drive. Launch times on big/slow apps (Eclipse, DBvisualizer, MS Word,etc.) is incredible.

Notes:  The slimline 2.5 Caddy was purchased from NewmodeUS.

A couple pics:

SSD Drive and Slimline sata drive caddy

SSD Mounted in Caddy

The iMac opened up, exposing the Superdrive

SSD installed

iMac 27 Takeapart

Just some pics from taking apart my new 27-inch iMac.

The pictures will just have to speak for themselves for the time being.

Fixing Zend Studio for Eclipse Code Assist with SVN projects

For whatever reason, when adding a project from SVN without first creating the PHP project, you lose code assist.

Found a very useful post that addressed this, with a pretty simple fix by editing the .project file:

Change buildCommand name to:
org.eclipse.php.core.PhpIncrementalProjectBuilder

And natures to:
org.eclipse.php.core.PHPNature

Refresh/Rebuild and Zend/Eclipse will once again be as helpful (or annoying) as ever.

Passing Javascript Arrays to PHP

Needed to pass a simple Javascript array to a PHP script for some back end processing. Here’s a quick and dirty way of doing so by ’serializing’ the javascript array as a string to send along in your request, and then splitting this string into tokens to create a PHP array.

Javascript: (using jquery javascript library)

var selections = new Array;
var userSelections;
$('#multipleSelection :selected').each(function(i, selected) {
selections[i] = $(selected).val();
});
userSelections = selections.join(",");


In the PHP script, it’s just a matter of processing the individual elements of the array. Depending on how you sent the ajax request (POST/GET).

PHP Example:

$selectionsArray = explode(',',$_GET['userSelections']);

foreach($selectedArray as $index=>$value) {
echo $index ." = ".$value;
}


Project ‘DorkPro’

I recently decided to trade up from my Mac Mini, and into something a bit more powerful. Which led me to create the ‘DorkPro‘.

Made out of cheap PC hardware and put into carefully wedged into a discarded G5 case, the Dork Pro performs like a real Mac Pro, at a fraction of the cost.


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Mac Mini eSATA

Warranties be damned.  This article explains how to connect larger/faster full size 3.5-inch hard disks to Mac Mini using eSATA.

The Mac Mini is modified to route the internal SATA port to be used as an eSATA connection, providing full native SATA speed, which is much faster than Firewire 400 or USB 2.0.

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