Tag Archives: MacOSX

Catchup

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Its been a while since my last post, so thought I’d put a few bits together.

I’ve watched Batman 2: The Dark Knight, which was OK, very dark, but overly long at 2.5+ hours. Anyone who has watched it will know what I mean when I say it should have finished at that point about half an hour earlier, before going off on the tangent.

I thought Iron Man was actually better, it was shorter that’s for sure; about a guy who creates an endoskeleton to escape capture, and goes on to try to save the world with it.

I also watched Get Smart, which was a comedy about an inept secret agent. Much better than Johnny English.

Finally I watched Alone In The Dark 2, which seemingly had nothing to do with the far superior first movie, except it turns out that the main character in both was the same person – you wouldn’t actually know this as the actors were of a completely different race!

I’ve taken the plunge and bought a new PC. I’ve selected the components to be a bit future-proof (well my Pentium4 has lasted a good four years and is still going strong) as it has a quad-core CPU which I’m going to overclock past 3GHz, 8Gb RAM and 1.25Tb of hard disk space!

Sun have just announced that they are almost ready to release their xVM Server product, which is a bare-metal hypervisor based on Xen, and in direct competition with VMWare ESXi, although it is opensource.

I might give xVM a try on my new PC when it arrives, as I think I’ll wait for Fedora10 (due mid November according to the schedule) before installing a longterm operating system – not worth configuring Fedora9 and then have to start again for 10. xVM seems much less Windows-exclusive than ESXi is, as its controlled by web interface that works on Firefox for Linux and Safari for MacOSX, and has a local console, not just RDP.

I just upgraded WordPress to the latest 2.6.2, the upgrade went much more smoothly than usual – just move the old one out of the way; copy wp-content, .htaccess and wp-config.php back over; upgrade some plugins and the database and away you go. The stylesheet modifications I made are still in place.

Firewire Friday

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I’ve just plugged my firewire camcorder into my CentOS 5.2 box and it seems they’ve backported the broken raw1394 drivers that Fedora has into the kernel. Hopefully its fixed in Fedora10, or I’ll be borrowing Mum’s Ubuntu 8.04 laptop to try that – I might try my Mac Mini actually….

I watched The Mummy 3, which was about as good as the other movies, bit of a shame they replaced Evelin and made everyone older – I assume as they’re going to make the next sequel (about Aztecs) the son’s story more than the parents. I wonder what happened to the Scorpion King franchise…..

I have no idea why people thought Jet Li was so good in the movie though – there were barely any fight scenes and he was encased in clay for most of the movie, so could have been replaced by any actor.

Update: I used the Mac Mini and iMovie to import the DV files from the camcorder. Of course iMovie has rubbish export formats – unless you like Mac-centric QuickTime MP4′s at 320×240 resolution! So I just saved the DV files and imported them into Kino on the Fedora7 box for processing and outputting to DVD quality MPEG2.

I also noticed that my fileserver seems to default to 10Mbps half duplex (instead of gigabit/full) when woken using WOL. From the output from ethtool, I think the problem is that if you turn off autoneg, it defaults to the slowest setting.

Update 2: just watched The Love Guru, which was pretty standard Michael Myers stuff, but pretty funny too – especially the acronyms.

Also just used WordPress 2.6′s revision control to restore an autosaved revision over the current revision that I accidently pressed ‘refresh’ on.

I Hate Active Directory

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Myself and a colleague wasted most of today (and some of yesterday) trying to get a VMWare installation of XP to connect to the office domain, after mucking around with various settings, IP configuration, services and Windows patches we got as far as “access denied”, which we assume is due to our users not having permissions to actually join a domain – although in true Windows fashion, the error message probably relates to something like we’ve got the wrong wallpaper/screensaver or something entirely unrelated to access permissions.

What was odd is that one old VM of XP Home did work for a bit. I even installed SP3 – which took over an hour and seemed to practically completely re-install Windows (which was XP Pro Corp SP2 already). No difference between VMWare Server 1.0.6 on Fedora 7 and Fusion 1.1.2 on MacOSX 10.4.

I also restored my Acronis image of my laptop – which went pretty well, didn’t even have to fix the MBR or reinstall GRUB, just restore from USB disk and reboot. Hopefully next week I’ll get a proper XP installed on there (after I’ve fdisk’ed it and deleted the MBR again!)

I also helped another colleague get IPv6 working on his test server. We basically installed CentOS 5.1 (after Xubuntu 8.04 had really poor performance on the 512Mb Pentium3/1GHz), configured the interface with IPv6 and disabled IPv4, changed Apache’s Listen directive and then tried out ping6 and traceroute6 etc between that and my laptop. For some reason we didn’t manage to get Firefox to connect to the website (even using a DNS entry) but I think that had to do with a static route or interface binding.

My agency is mucking about again – switching our payment terms from two to about six weeks and making us use multiple timesheet systems – Excel/Email, website and paper!

Start Of Bank Holiday

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Urgh I hate bank holidays – when you’ve got nothing to do (and have a cold!) they can really drag – plus you don’t get paid! Weather’s been pretty good lately though.

I’ve been playing with my GPS a bit more, and I really like iGO8. I tried to get it to direct me from Boulogne to Chaillac without going through Paris, and it found the same route that I usually take – after I told it to go via some point on the N154. I also installed the 3D buildings, which are quite cool. It can also tell you if you’re speeding silently via an onscreen warning, and it can tell you about UK speed cameras too.

I watched Semi-Pro, which was a pretty bad example of Will Ferrell’s latest work. I think the guy plays the same character in all his movies – which all seem to be about sports too!

How To Rob A Bank was much better, with the guy from T3 and the very sexy girl from Swimfan.

The Andromeda Strain was a pretty good mini-series, the usual super virus from space stuff.

The Forbidden Kingdom should have been much better, starring Jet Li and Jackie Chan – instead of a KungFu action movie it was a fantasy along the lines of Big Trouble In Little China!

21 was a pretty good film about a bunch of MIT students who become card counters in Vegas.

I tried VMWare Workstation 6.5beta2 the other day, and must say it was pretty appalling. Even less stable than Fusion 1.1.2 its looking likely to not be an alternative to Server 2 on Linux. Things like the auto-installer just not working at all, changes to config not sticking, and the downright failure to import old VM’s or create new ones was a bit of an issue! ;-)

It seems that the XBMC for MacOSX team have pissed off the XBMC devs by not releasing sourcecode quickly enough, so not sure how long that project will stay viable. Apparently the official team have an OSX port, although I can’t find it…..

Back in France

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I’m back in France for some R&R to get over my back pains from the car crash. The weather’s been lovely for a couple of days – at least 28C.

We noticed that the spray job on my car isn’t 100%, so that will be at least another two days faffing around with Citroen.

I’ve added tag support to my blog, so you can see the tag cloud on the right sidebar, which shows what I’ve been writing about mostly – the bigger the text, the more entries. Its more fine-grained than just categories.

I opened up my Mac Mini and upgraded it to 2Gb RAM. It wasn’t too hard – definitely needed two very thin putty knives. I followed the tutorial here.

I upgraded to OSXBMC 0.4.5 yesterday and found that the web GUI isn’t as reliable as the Xbox version, it seems to crash the application – something MacOSX is not very good at handling.

I installed VMWare Fusion on the Mac now it has more RAM. I used the auto-install feature to install WinXP Pro x64 and even used an NFS mount to store the VMDK’s. It all worked pretty well, even installing the Tools and connecting the WiFi/Bluetooth drivers for you. Like Workstation it has USB2.0 support, instead of USB1.1 like Server does. Screenshots.

We watched National Treasure 2: Book Of Secrets last night, it was alright, not as good as the first and a bit too Indiana Jones for my liking.

VirtualBox (aka Sun xVM) 1.6 has been released – with support for Solaris and Mac hosts!

Update: I’ve just installed the RPMforge repository for CentOS 5.1, along with the Priorities plugin (stops nasty repo’s overwriting RedHat packages) and it works a treat – all the multimedia stuff has installed without screwing up any packages or even using dependencies from the base RPMs.

I installed the WinTV Express card in my CentOS box, and it works fine, I have TVtime displaying the output from that wireless CCTV I got from eBay Hong Kong – and it turns out the range is essentially line-of-site, as it worked fine when the receiver and camera were next to each other, but in the next room I got no signal at all – plus the audio can just about be heard if you click your fingers next to the camera with your speakers on full blast. So eBay UK: 1 (for WinTV), eBay HK: 0 (for CCTV).