ExpanDrive

You may have notice from out sidebar that we’ve played a little bit of Flight Control, a simple but extremely addictive iPhone game. If you think Flight Control is exciting, then this FAA simulation of real events at Charlotte Douglas International Airport will probably get your heart racing.

I’ll set it up for you a bit, because the radio chatter can be hard to follow if you’re not used to listening to it. The blue blip labeled JIA390 is a regional jet with 46 people on board. It’s leaving the commercial airport and planning on taking off from the end of runway 18L, which is the left end up the upper horizontal runway. On the radio they’ll refer to this aircraft as “Blue Streak 390”.

The yellow blip labeled N409DR is a single engine turbo prop with 3 people on board. It’s leaving from the civil aviation part of the airport, and it’s told to expect to take off from the middle of runway 18L, by means of taxiway A (which is pronounced “Alpha”). This aircraft has the radio call sign is 9DR (pronounced “Nine Delta Romeo”).

The that after the incident:

ASDE-X is a radar and transponder system that sounds an alarm in the control tower if it thinks there’s a “runway conflict”.

ExpanDrive 1.8.4 is now in testing – you can download it here:

www.expandrive.com/windows/1.8.4b1/ExpanDrive1.8.4b1.exe

The most important new features for this release is that Strongspace [our upcoming online storage service] users are automatically licensed when they connect to their Strongspace account using ExpanDrive. In addition quite a variety of small bugs surrounding some installation quirks and Windows 7 problems have been fixed.

Werner Herzog is the director of Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man, and many other films.

Maybe there’s a killer app on the way, something on the order of VisiCalc for the Apple II, but as far as I can tell, this’ll be the biggest dud since the G4 Cube.

–Cosmo on the iPad. Saved for posterity.

Also, don’t miss the making of.

Today Apple released a new 27″ iMac with impressive specs, a unibody design and an impressive LED backlit display. Somewhat hidden in the announcement is a small but important feature – the DisplayPort connection on the back of the 27″ iMacs operates both as a jack for an external monitor and also as an input for an external computer if you want to use your 27″ iMac as a monitor.

The 27″ iMac [starting at $1699] has the same modern LED screen as Apple’s 24″ LED Cinema Display[$899] – noticably higher quality than Apple’s dated 30″ Cinema display [$1799]. It is of comparable size and weight, nearly the same resolution [2560x1440 vs 2560x1600] – $100 cheaper, and comes with a free Mac – namely a 3Ghz Core2 Duo with 4 Gigs of RAM and a 1TB hard drive in the base configuration.

30″ Cinema display – $1799               27″ iMac – $1699
          

I’ve had Dell’s 3008WFP 30″ monitor [MSRP $1699] sitting on order for a few days now – which I just canceled in favor of Apple’s 27″ LED version, which comes with the free Mac.

A Typophile user named miha has done some amazing pixel art that exploits subpixel antialiasing. In his first post he reworked the YouTube favicon from a pink mess into something that looks sharp and legible.

His second post debuts a draft of a completely legible typeface with an x-height of 3 pixels. The picture above (taken from miha’s comment on the post) shows the word “ipsum dolor” at 16× magnification. The original size text, so small you might not notice it, is in the lower right corner.

Subpixel antialiasing is some magic stuff. As he said in his YouTube post “If you want to be suprised: white text on red is not really white, it is purple & yellow! There is no spoon.” I’d love to see a 9× mockup of what it looks like after antialiasing is applied.

(Mac users can open Digital ColorMeter, in Applications -> Utilities, for a quick way to zoom in on the pixel art.)

ExpanDrive for Mac v2.0.5 [release notes] adds support for Snow Leopard in 32-bit mode. ExpanDrive on Snow Leopard running with a 64-bit kernel won’t be available until MacFUSE, a software library ExpanDrive depends on, is updated to run in 64-bit mode.

ExpanDrive for Mac v2.0.5 is available for download here and is available via the auto updater.

As you’ve already heard, ExpanDrive has bought Strongspace and BingoDisk from Joyent and is going to be deploying a new and improved service. First, we’d like to provide a bit of info about ourselves for those of you who are on this blog for the first time.

ExpanDrive is a software company based in Boston, MA and is in the business of making awesome software that enables ridiculously simple and secure access to remote storage. Our main product is a SFTP/FTP/S3 client for Mac and Windows [previously known as SftpDrive] which allows you to turn your remote storage into a network drive. Many Strongspace customers are owners of the ExpanDrive and use it daily. ExpanDrive’s software provides an unsurpassed experience in connecting to online storage which we’re tightly integrating into Strongspace. BingoDisk users will be treated to drive-based access to their storage that works reliably on both Mac and Windows when they transition to Strongspace.

We have big plans for Strongspace and will be actively supporting and developing the service. Strongspace still runs on top of hardened Joyent Accelerators with ZFS. With the help of Joyent’s expert team we’ve heavily audited the security of every aspect of Strongspace to ensure the continued safety of your data.

Strongspace’s web application has been rebuilt from the ground up and deployed onto a much speedier infrastructure. In addition, you can continue expect to a deep commitment to customer support and experience going forward. ExpanDrive is making Strongspace a disk in the cloud that you’ll love to use – connecting you to your storage like a USB drive plugged into your laptop.

We’re excited to be taking over these services from Joyent and wanted to provide you with some details of our plans. Currently we’re finishing up private testing of the new Strongspace service and will be soon emailing Joyent’s lifetime customers with instructions on how they can migrate their data over to ExpanDrive. Following the initial migration of the lifetime customers we will be sending emails to the rest of the Strongspace account holders with instructions on how to set up new accounts.

Follow @strongspace and @expandrive on Twitter and this blog for continuing updates. Feel free to email us with any questions you have. Thanks!

Hot on the heels of ExpanDrive v2.0.3 comes ExpanDrive v2.0.4 [release notes].

ExpanDrive v2.0.4 provides two major enhancements. First – it allows you to set file permissions within Finder’s standard “Get Info” panel on Tiger and Snow Leopard. Unfortunately Leopard will not play nicely with this feature.

It also provides a “fix” for problem that a we’ve had reported with CSSEdit. In some rare circumstances, CSSEdit report that a file could not be saved (due to a server bug), but then delete the original file. With help from our very dedicated users, we have isolated this issue to a bug in older versions of the OpenSSH server. These servers cannot correctly perform a rename when the filename contains path components which do not all reside on the same filesystem – such as nested ZFS/NFS mounts inside your home directory. However, this problem was fixed ages ago and is therefore rarely seen. Most people don’t use the 4.5 line of of OpenSSH, with the big exception being SunSSH – still based off OpenSSH v3.5p1. Ugh.

ExpanDrive v2.0.4 provides a safety mechanism which ensures the original data is preserved, even if the rename incorrectly fails. If you see CSSEdit fail to save please lobby your admin to upgrade to a modern SSH server.