Thursday, April 9, 2015

To Yosemite!

No, not the place, but the newest Mac OS X operating system. I had recently upgraded to Mavericks, and now I’m on to Yosemite. Why? See this: https://truesecdev.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/hidden-backdoor-api-to-root-privileges-in-apple-os-x/. My work is extremely sensitive to security issues. Security is probably the biggest feature and differentiator between our services compared to our competitors. Of course, with the recent Sony hacks, regardless of whether it was internal or external, security has become an even bigger issue for us.

And so I’m now on to Yosemite. I have to say that unlike the last time I tried upgrading, this time, it went fairly well. The computer didn’t reboot entirely on its own, but after a manual turn off/on cycle, the upgrade went smoothly. So far, I only noticed that Mysql didn’t start automatically. And I had to install a new version of the USB DisplayLink driver specifically for Yosemite.

Here’s hoping everything else works smoothly!

Friday, April 3, 2015

Samsung 850 Evo

Just installed the Samsung 850 Evo 1TB after cloning from a 512TB Samsung 840 Pro, which took about an hour. After cloning and creating a recovery partition, I have a 999GB boot partition of which I’m using 324GB. Performance on the 512GB was starting to slow down. I think partly from age, and mostly from space. Now I’m less than 50% full again and thus getting write speeds of 470MB/s and read speeds of 515MB/s. Not too shabby. Boot up time takes about 10 seconds again!