When Technology Really Sucks!

My Macbook Pro just decided to stop working. I won’t do into technical details but it came to the point where I dropped it off at Mac Outpost here in London.

Now normally the Mac Outpost guys are great! But I’m not sure what happened to them but they’ve had the laptop for over 24 hours without having even looked at it. This is not acceptable as the laptop is basically my hammer. My primary tool!

While I don’t want to spread bad things about these guys here in London Ontario at Mac Outpost, currently I’m really frustrated!

I expect computers to break-down, but it’s way too often that they do.

UPDATE May 09
Apple is replacing the logic board for free even though it’s out of warranty. See this KB article for more info.

Firefox 3.1 with 3~7x Faster than 3.0

Just posted by Schrep, some awesome patches have landed in the mozilla firefox tree for version 3.1, looks like it’s going to be another break-away release!

Remind me why everybody doesn’t use Firefox?

Debian Lenny Beta 2

Installing Debian Lenny in VMware Fusion right now. It looks really good.

If I really like what I see, might consider adding more information here.

ESXi is now Freely Available

Today, VMware has made their ESXi Hypervisor for server virtualization product publicly and freely available.

The only problem is it doesn’t run on my server which is currently using VMware Server 2.0 RC-1 that I built not too long ago. It actually requires a name brand manufactured computer to run on which kind of sucks for me, but should be OK for clients where we always use name brand servers anyway.

Well they say you can’t have everything.

Hatred for Internet Explorer Reconfirmed

Hello folks,

I’ve just started do web site design work again. For the last year or so I havn’t done anything that really matters when it comes to web design, but am now.

So I’m basically done and what do I find? There’s one little things that Microsoft Internet Explorer messes up, again. If there was a way I could force everyone to use Firefox or Safari, it wouldn’t even take me a millisecond to decide to do it.

(Windows Server 2008 Vista Done Right) = Confirmed

Hey folks,

Havn’t posted anything here in awhile but just had to post this. I read awhile back on an MSDN blog where a developer basically was using Windows Server 2008 as his main desktop OS and gave a few tips on how to make that happen.

So today I got my copy from the action pack subscription and couldn’t resist trying it. I had Vista Business running inside VMware on my Mac without any issues for some time but lately it’s just been getting very frustrating. So I setup a new virtual machine and installed Server 2008 on it.

It’s absolutely awesome. In fact I’d rather use this than Windows XP, which doesn’t say much but still. I hope Windows 7 follows the trend of the server release rather than the desktop consumer release.

It’s fast, responsive, and just plain works like you expect (as far as Windows is capable of) instead of constantly working against you as does Vista.

Have fun trying it out for yourself!

Free VNC Client Inside Mac OS X 10.5 from Apple

Inside Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)  there is a new feature called screen sharing. Basically the way it works is if another computer is connected to the local network with remote desktop (VNC) or screen sharing enabled it shows up in the Shared section of the Finder like this:

Clicking on “Share Screen” asks for a password and then you can remotely take control of the other computer.

Now it starts to get interesting. I enabled Remote Desktop on a Ubuntu 7.10 box and OSX saw it immediately. So basically it’s completely cross platform compatible. So I thought maybe I could use this application as a general purpose VNC client, and yes you can!

The “Screen Sharing” application is stored in file:///System/Library/CoreServices/.

So basically I dragged it into the Dock and now it’s there for me to connect to your box whenever I want. All it asks is for the host and password if needed so it doesn’t have any advanced features at all. But it works.

Backup Your Data

So recently I became an entrepreNerd. Great stuff. Now my first message on my blog is backup your data. And my second message is keep your installation disks and packaging!

How does $2 for every Gigabyte of data backed up sound? Cheap I’d say. Now what if you lost all your data. How cheap is that?

If you’re interested in a reliable and efficient backup solution, give me a call.

Airport Problems in Mac OS X 10.5 due to Virtualization Software

Today I finally fixed the problem I was having with my wireless network connection. It would cut out completely requiring a restart or sometimes it would randomly work again. It would loose the network easily or if the display dimmed or the computer went to sleep, you wouldn’t have much chance of getting back online for the moment. My computer is a Macbook Pro and the network is 802.11N with WPA2 Personal security. Now after digging around for a couple of hours I uninstalled VMware Fusion, reinstalled using the new 1.1 Release Candidate, and it works grand. Just to be sure I also completely uninstalled Parallels which is also known to cause such problems. So now I’m happy to have a reliable wireless network again. The cause was some network related kernel extensions these VMs added. I guess it messed up the OS upgrade.Lesson to be learned. Don’t blame the OS right away. And by the way, VMware is a lot better than Parallels. I’m working on compiling VirtualBox as well which is an open source virtual machine. I’ve heard good things of it, but it will have to be good to beat VMware Fusion.

Gmail Now Features IMAP

The major thing holding me back from using Gmail on my desktop mail client is the fact that it only supported POP for mail access. But now all that’s changed as of this screenshot from my account: