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

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.

Oi, apple stop installing the ‘update service’

For some reason even though I explicitly un-check the ‘apple software update’ option when installing either itunes or the bonjour service I am unsurprised to find that it has been installed.
Along with the quicktime icon in the notification area. Please respect my wishes to keep my notification area clear. It’s already cluttered with the detritus of outlook, pidgin, vmware, creative X-fi, hotsync, sync manager, bluetooth, quickset, virtual daemon manager, the power status, network status, volume and the sidebar. At least I can switch off clock, volume, network and power if I so choose, and they respect my authoritay.

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.

No unicode file names in cygwin

Not always a problem. Except when I’ve got international characters in my filenames. Which seems to be quite common with the import albums I’m downloading.
Dang. There is a patcharound, but it’s unsupported. Honestly, this backwards compatibility is a pain in the ass.
The next issue is cygwin/X. It’s hanging on Vista. Seems to be related to dwm and the pretty aero effects and the occasional toggle to non-aero mode caused by some applications (not java 1.6, though).

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.

Stealing someone else’s tag line

Apparently the PS3 has this new thing called ‘home’. It’s basically second life for all those people who bought a PS3. Or there, or something equally as silly. The benefit of it is that sony don’t have to program for every GPU on the planet – they only need to get it working for the PS3 and they’re golden. Everyone on the site has at least one thing in common, and they don’t need to congratulate each other again and again. Based on the sweet graphics, I’m presuming that just about everything on it is small-c configurable, rather than big-c configurable (involving lots of downloading).