Adding NTFS Write Functionality to OSX

Okay the story is like this: I have Windows, Ubuntu and MacOSX systems in my home and office and sometimes I backup or transfer files using a 8GB USB thumb drive (another way is to use Dropbox). This works perfectly fine until one day I met a 4.x GB file and OOPS! FAT32 filesystem does not allow a single file with that size! As a result, I tried to search for a mulit-platform supported filesystem which also supports large files. I tried NTFS. It works fine with Windows and Ubuntu but it can only be read from MacOSX, without write... When I was going to give up, a friend suggested this Lifehacker article to me (thanks again to my friend!). According to that article, I added NTFS write function to the MacOSX system and now my problem is solved~

The steps are simple:

1. Download and install MacFUSE from here
2. Download and install NTFS-3G for Mac OSX from here
3. Restart your Mac
4. Enjoy~

Using Thread in iOS

iOS SDK has its own NSThread (class reference here) class to handle thread operations, and using it is pretty simple:

In the above source, func_to_call is the function to be performed in the thread and parm_to_func (can be nil) is the parameter to be passed to func_to_call. If one would like to call functions in the main thread from child thread (probably you want to do this when the child thread is going to end and notifying the main thread is required), using the following:

In this line, func_in_main is the function to be called in main thread.

Note: The above method should be compatible with iOS 3.x.

Macbook Pro cannot boot up with continuous beep and black screen

Today my colleague told me that his 13" macbook pro (2009 ver.) cannot boot up with black screen. After taking a look, I found that it even gives out crazily annoying beep sound continuously (beep-beep-beep, halt, beep-beep-beep, halt, ......). I have not met that before and turned to Google for help. After some looking and trying (at some time I thought it is because a disc stuck in the drive), finally I found a few sources all point out that the 3-beep sound means "bad memory". The colleague then tried taking the two 1-GB RAM in and out to test and BINGO! The problem was caused by one single faulty RAM! So I will know what to do if any of my machine gives me that sound......

Update: One of my friends told me just now those beep sounds are called "beep code" and their meanings are dependent to different BIOS. A reference of Mac machines can be found here.
Update: Another reference in Wikipedia.