To replace my motherboard, graphics card, CPU, heatsinks, fans…. pretty much everything except the actual case the machine comes in.
In their rush to get the product out to the customers…
Apple have obviously made some significant backwards compatibility errors. Firstly, there’s the firewall – altering the on-disk content of applications to make them signed when you accept them. Its an interesting approach, but it’s complete pants. You don’t go around altering binaries on disk. You create a detached signature! It’s not really bloody difficult.
On Vista, you can see *every* rule that exists for the firewall. On Leopard, you only get to see the exceptions you created yourself.
I’ve been having random application crashes. They seem to be related to drag and drop operations that went wrong.
the calendar application does not want to talk to my instance of davical properly (all the calendars disappear after restarting, and I get an error every time I create a calendar).
Then there’s the ‘the application terminated unexpectedly’ – no, it didn’t, I used the <Apple>Q menu item to quit the application.
Context sensitivity on the mail application is kinda limited – It doesn’t detect URL links properly – I have a site that’s called http://foo4/…, and all the link comes up with is http://foo. As I said, a bit limited.
Overall, though, the experience is positive. I would have preferred if apple had simply spent some more time testing the damned thing against anything other than their own applications and services.
And, as soon as they allow a replacement for .mac that can be replaced with an external, non-proprietary service I’ll be a happier person
Plucking dell battery!
Aargh, I just saved my laptop from exploding/catching fire. Literally minutes/seconds away from a potential disaster (losing my hard drive – time to do a backup today).
A dell laptop, with a battery model of C5447 – one larger than the number listed in the dell battery recall program. The battery was really really hot – I mean pretty much frying-pan hot heat on the battery. I’ve contacted dell support. I wonder what’s going to happen with this
Shim me baby one more time
I was reading the ‘Basics on how shims work‘, and all I could think about was the old linux/unix trick of using LD_PRELOAD to intercept library calls in dynamically linked applications (used to great effect to bypass timebombed applications).
It is one of the reasons why I think that static linking is just horrible – after all, it breaks things, and makes you have to use terribly complicated tricks like disassembling and binary patching to fix problems because you don’t have the source code. You don’t get the advantages of page sharing, which is kind of important when you consider how many libraries are loaded by the typical gnome application (last check on nautilus was 117 libraries, excluding VDSO and the binary itself, firefox has 151, excluding fonts and other pango related nonsense). Yes, indeed, winners don’t use static linking.
As a tangent, it’s one of the reasons for not using application compression tools on binaries – after all, the only thing you save is on the distribution size, not on the run-time. The binary itself acts like a static linked blob, and doesn’t share the text segment (program code) amongst the other instances, like other binaries, so every instance can use a lot of private memory, leaving less physical memory on the machine for other things like playing high resolution video.
vmware – moving a network address
Every time you reinstall vmware it seems to recreate your network interfaces, and at the same time reassigns the ip addresses that you had set up. If you want to move them then you need to edit a file and a couple of registry entries.
The first file is %APPDATA%\VMware\vmnetdhcp.conf. On XP it’s normally C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data, Under Vista that’s C:\ProgramData. Note, however that when UAC is enabled, this folder experiences redirection on write by unprivileged users, so editing this file as an ordinary user will have no effect, so make sure that you use a privileged editor when altering this file.
The content you want to change are the Subnet and Range entries to match your original subnet entries you had. You can also put in entries for the domain-name and router. When you add this information it gives you the ability to mark a the subnet as identified under Vista, so you can be in an identified network, and thus be discoverable. Please note that doing this and then putting an insecure OS on the client vm is your own fault.
The other entries that need to be altered are in the registry. The first one is HKLM\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMnetLib\VMnetConfig\vmnet? entries – the IPSubnetAddress entry needs to be changed to match the entries that you set in the .conf file. The next one is a little bit tricky – it’s HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VMnetDHCP\Parameters\VirtualEthernetSegments\?, the value is HostIpAddress – and it needs to be mapped. The value is a endian-reversed representation of your address so if your ip address is 192.168.22.1 the value would be 0x0116A8C0, C0==192, a8==168, 16=22, 01=01. Use Calc to get the values that you should put in there.
Restart the service “vmware dhcp service”, and then you should be OK.
vmnetnat.conf musings
I wonder does the ‘allowAnyOUI = 1’ option that’s commented out allows me to pick an oui from a previously created virtual machine that’s part of the pre-allocated set.
Vista, unidentified networks and vmware
The network interfaces that get configured by vmware always fall into the ‘unidentified realm’. The reason seems to be tied to the lack of a router or default gateway entry for the address.
So we cheat, and add in a router entry for the networks that is the same as the IP address of the connection and bingo, you get the option to put it into another network and give it a label! So I put both the VMware network interfaces and the Microsoft loopback interface into a group called ‘local only’, and providing I don’t use any grotty windows virtual machines, it should service me well. Of course, this is all purely academic for those who don’t use vista
I’m no real friend of Sony, but…
It strikes me as a little odd that a company got a patent in 1991 covering parallel processing of a form that seems to look suspiciously like the Inmos Transputer hardware from the 80’s. They are now suing Sony for their cell architecture (hey, try suing IBM instead; they designed the damned thing). The patent in question is 5,056,000, Synchronized parallel processing with shared memory.
vmware, vista and losing network traffic
I’m replaying network traffic at 1000 packets per second into a vmware client that’s hosted on a vista machine. It’s losing quite a few packets. the Vista OS does not appear to be losing the packets, they are simple missing on the guest operating system. This is a lot like crap, really.
nview is in conflict with copernic
Let’s see. I have copernic desktop search, which injects itself into pretty much every process that’s running on my desktop.
then we have the nvidia nview desktop manager, which is pretty useful in a multi-monitor setting. It also insinuates itself into every process that runs on the desktop.
The end result … they keep hitting each other over the back of the head.