Tech Debug

I came across (via an old school friend on facebook) something which I just had to share. I know whom will be laughing at this.

Only 2 months ago I wrote that Gmail had hit 4GB, but it was still behind the main crowd (MSN, Yahoo, etc). Well in time for the new year, they have finally hit the 6GB (not 6GiB yet!) limit. This was initially picked up by a number of bloggers including WikiGiz and BBCentral. I’ve totally cutover to Gmail since they enabled IMAP and I figured out how to turn it on.

I was looking for a simple way to have someone emailed when an event occurred in Rational Clearcase, like a new branch type being created. If you run Clearcase on UNIX (i.e. Solaris or similar) you can whip up a simple shell script and create your trigger. I will assume you have sendmail or similar already configured on your host so that mail utilities can send smtp mail Lets have a go at it.

A number of weeks ago I gave up caffeine, and was pretty OK with that. But, I have come to the conclusion that there is a direct correlation with Caffeine and all other things tech, including tech blogging. As you may have noticed if you subscribed to my feed, or read this site, my posts have been minimal. Yet after having caffeine on the weekend in an energy drink, and subsequently picking up where I left of with decent illy coffee, I have had the urge to blog again.

Watch this and then you will see why action is the better option than no action

Some friends and I were discussing the benefits of using Open Source software which is low cost or free (as in beer) versus the equivalent Commercial and close source products. Examples of comparison were Photoshop vs. Gimp Apache HTTPD vs. IIS Windows vs. Open Solaris/OpenBSD/Linux etc. It seems like we are not the only ones thinking about this topic. Slashdot today posted that CNET has a feature promoting Open Source application alternatives for the average home user, if only to reduce software costs to the end user.

Chris blogged on PhatBoyG about the Web Inspector included in Safari 3. Previously this tool was a simple content inspector, but now it looks to be so much more. If you are using Safari V3 and you are a web developer, have a look at this useful tool. You can gain access to it by enabling the debug menu. Open Terminal and type this defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1 then restart Safari.

For a long time I used google maps over the local provider, WhereiS (a Telstra/Sensis product). Even though google maps had less local content, WhereiS was so 1999 in its web design that it was unusable. Basic dragging of the maps which is now a staple of so many online map providers, was one of the basic missing pieces of functionality. But recently they have updated their online maps, which can now be accessed as a Beta version.

With the 10.4.11 upgrade came Safari V3. It looks neat, but I started having issues with closing Windows. It turns out the SIMBL input manager that I was using on Safari was conflicting with it. By deleting ~/Library/InputManagers/SIMBL it fixed the issue. On the same theme, here has been a lot of talk lately about Input Managers and whether they will be completely removed in Leopard. Just recently David Watanabe blogged about the uncertain future of Inquisitor.

Recently Gmail activated IMAP for selected accounts, and I appeared to not be one of them. However was it really for selected accounts or was it for ‘selected languages’?! Reading about gmail on digg led me to an un-dug comment (I gave him a thumbs up!) saying that for IMAP to appear your language in gmail had to be set to ‘English (US)’. So I gave it a try, as I had mine on ‘English (UK)’ for the spelling.

Those of you who read this, and also use wordpress for your own blogs, will appreciate this one. WordPress has no native way of moving comments that are incorrectly posted under another post. You can have a hack at the database yourself, or you can use a plugin that recently (in the last few months) went to Version 1. I came across it while trolling google for a decent solution to a mis posted comment.

Did you ever have too many RSS feeds you are subscribed to? Wasting your time posting updates to Flickr, Twitter, facebook, and so on? This guy thinks he has the answers. Cut out the IM and stop reading your email so often. Me? I just removed 70% of my news feeds in my reader, turned my phone off, and I’m going to bed to read a book (and get away from this blog for now).

I have my Powerbook G4 back now. Woooot! It has a fresh install of 10.4.6 on it from the Mac repair shop. The question is, what do I do with my CCC backup firewire HDD? Clone it back? Migrate it back? Having watched others roll into 10.5 aka Leopard, I thought it would be time for me to roll into a fresh computer as well. Sans postgresql, custom php install, CVS repository and the last 2 years of installed junk.

After I read this macosxhints.com post, I decided to have a go at something slightly different. The orginal hint showed how to set up an AppleScript droplet to modify the creation date of a file. But what if you want to sync the modified date and Creation dates instead? This script has been created to do just that. It has evolved from one Daniel A. Shockley provided in a macosxhints comment to the previous hint, and has been extended to fit this purpose.

I’m messing around with the updated Snap Shots code. It enhances the links you see on this page with visual previews of the other sites{.snap_shots}, interactive excerpts of things like: Wikipedia articles{.snap_shots} IMDb titles{.snap_shots} Amazon products like the book I am currently reading{.snap_shots} inline videos RSS feeds{.Snap_Shot_RSS} from a site MP3s like this La Primavera track{.snap_shots} photos{.snap_shots} stock charts{.snap_shots} …you get the idea… They say the “Snap Shots” can bring you the information you need, without having to leave a site, while other times it lets you “look ahead,” before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

I am coming back to earth with my posts, and thinking about Google. They are growing by acquiring technology and companies. They release new products like the Java/Linux based Android (Is linking to google news about Google considered irony?!). How long before Google exceed Microsoft? I remember when their shares where $100. Then months ago I was discussing with friends that $600 was an amazing price to reach. Then weeks ago was amazed that each share had grown from $600 to $670.

So the footage from my previous post was is not a new occurrence. zorgon; a member of AboveTopSecret.com mentions in the NASA UFO STS-120 External Fuel Tank thread that there is similar footage shot during the same maneuver of STS-115. As I previously posted, NASA uses handheld cams to capture this footage for analysis of the tank for damage. Once again it is a spiny like object, similar in colour to the previous crystalline structure seen on STS-120.

Departing from my tech theme, I had to share this. This footage is so clear, and not just some blurry dot in the sky. This footage was captured by crew members on board the current Shuttle Mission, STS-120, after jettisoning the External Fuel tank. They use handheld cams to capture this footage for analysis of the tank, probably after previous well known incidents of damage. If you dont want to watch the whole thing, fast forward to 2 mins 20 seconds to see what the talk is about!

With my recent loss, I had thought about, and seen other people, decentralising data. Luckily I’ve already got an email and RSS feed backup in place. As soon as my Laptop was out of order, I jumped onto my pobox.com account and redirected email to Gmail. Gmail will keep my mail flow going for a week or two. Next I went over to Google reader and reset all my feeds. Previously I had exported all my subscribed Newsfire RSS subscriptions to OPML format, and imported it into google reader.

Last Friday at work my Mac (OS X 10.4) laptop HDD died. After the purchase of an extra external HDD and some custom recovery software, Data Rescue II, I tried to recover as much as I could. The bad news is the Hard drive had not just gotten corrupted, but failed. After an attempt to clone it to a second drive for analysis, and during my recovery attempt it developed the click of death.

The official OpenBSD announcement states: We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.2. We remain proud of OpenBSD’s record of more than ten years with only two remote holes in the default install. We dedicate this release to the memory of long-time developer Jun-ichiro “itojun” Itoh Hagino, who focused his life on IPv6 deployment for everyone. So get to it people, buy a CD and support the project.

I was trying to use someone elses script for logging dansguardian events to an RDBMS.The script was chewing up 99% of my CPU! I got chatting to a friend and a perl coder about this, and got some ideas. He showed me about the perl debugger using the -d switch. Awesome. I finally got my perl script working. Installing the DBI package on OpenBSD was a snap with pkg_add (pkg_add -v p5-DBD-Pg-1.

According to the Download Squad Google’s Gmail has just integrated IMAP. This in conjunction with the recent storage space is the second big thing for google in the mail arena in recent days. I applaud them for this move as the POP3 access they previously offered was great for desktop PC’s but difficult for mobile devices. I can confirm that it appears to be only in select accounts, because as of now, I still only have POP access.

Having had aircon installed today, my headless web server did not recover from the scheduled power outage. It was stuck in a stupid “Press F1 to Boot” screen, and as such Tech Debug was down for the majority of the day. Now I have it all back online it is time to consider two things: A UPS A secondary Web/DB server running OpenBSD Does anyone know they best way to have a failover apache+mysql+postgres OpenBSD server?

Daniel Miessler discusses the benefit of using Quicksilver, one of the mandatory mac applications, for searching the web – instead of using your browser. So you are in any app and you want to search for something online? Use Quicksilver. I blog from Textmate, so if I need to search for something on google (or elsewhere) – Quicksilver does it for me. Its a very simple process to use as described by Daniel on his blog entry.

I was logged into Gmail today and noticed it states You are currently using 92 MB (2%) of your 4044 MB. This is close to a doubling of the email capacity for normal accounts. I’m not sure if this applies to all users, or gets applied progressively, but it is a fantastic number to see at the bottom of your inbox. In comparison, Windows live (aka hotmail) offers 1GB to their users, albeit in the form of a “Skydrive“.

You’ve got a household full of PC’s and you’ve stopped yourself from getting a Mac because you don’t want to deal with incompatibilities. Eight years ago that would’ve been understandable, but today Mac OS and Windows can work together in harmony on the same home network. Here’s a primer on how the two systems inter-operate. I have been using Macs now for 5 years, and the compatibility issues that one would have been there are practically gone.

I’m coming to appreciate IBM’s Rational Clearcase, aside from the price point of course. But work have a license for it, and I have to use it. Don’t get me wrong, CVS is fantastic for tracking your small projects or larger ones with average complexity. I still use CVS for my own code, BUT clearcase has these features built in that you just start to take for granted. Here is a list of the ones I think make it a cut above CVS on a time intensive and complex project:

I’ve recently re-installed OpenBSD and had to set-up my squid intranet password changing tool again. The app I use is chpasswd Version 2.2.3. I had some trouble with getting it working in the default apache chroot jail, and found very little information out there on this app in a chroot jail. Here are my notes I recorded and and steps I took. Hope it helps someone else, but YMMV: Download chpasswd to /tmp

An album I purchased on iTMS recently had a nasty clicking sound in one of the songs. Its was part of the intro track to an Opera, and really hits you in the ear each time you hear it unexpectedly. I had only just got around to reporting the issue, but iTMS staff rejected the issue due to the timeliness of my report – about 3 months after the purchase. I wrote back advising that this was a “premium cost” iTunes Plus track, and there is still an issue with the track they are selling, no matter the time frame.

Some guy was on the train today reading his “Face to Face with God” book, an he kept glancing over my way. No doubt noticing my copy of Morning of the Magicians that I was reading. As he got off the train, he starts saying a bunch of Jesus stuff and handing out these cards – and as he passes me I say NO THANKS! But he forces it on me.

I’m a twitter user, and this morning came across an enterprising web-site called Melbourne Transport. They use the twitter handle @MelbTransport to publish line and train alerts for Melbourne’s Connex train services. This appears to be the outcome of someones frustration with the dreadful SMS alerts services that Connex provide. Connex have their own SMS alert system, which states “From Monday to Friday, between 6am and 8pm, we provide instant text messaging to mobile phones with up-to-the-minute information on any train that is more than 15 minutes off schedule”.

I found myself writing down example commands in clearcase (V6), so I thought I would share them. If you have ever needed to find files like you do in UNIX, but want to be clearcase specific, then these commands will give you a quick headstart on using the cleartool find command: How do I list all files and file versions going into a specific build that is labelled? Assume your label is TR1_PRE_RELEASE

Do you use MQ? do you have performance problems when using persistence? An interesting article on understanding this on a Solaris platform. Koops has always been an informative source on getting my MQ performance under check, and again he comes to the front of the pack on analysis of performance issues. read more | digg story

With the news of the death of an Australian soldier in the middle east, I would like to quickly examine the dangers our troops face. I served an extended period of time in the Australian Defence forces, and have had family members deployed to conflict zones including Iraq, so I have some understanding of the situation, albeit limited. The risk to the soldiers is huge, but the training and leadership that the Australian military has, some of the best in the world, minimises those risks as best as it can.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 recently, but it stuffed up my feed. By default it set the feed content to be cut off. This is now fixed, so sorry for any inconvenience. On the whole, wordpress 2.3 seems to work rather well.

I got myself some Iron Maiden tickets for their Somewhere back in time 2008 tour. The latest news about the Aussie events is that the Melbourne and Sydney concerts sold out in Record time. Sydney’s Acer Arena sold out within 25 minutes of going on sale and Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena sold out within 15 minutes, leading to promoter Paul Dainty immediately putting on sale second shows in both cities and commenting; “Sales for the tour have been phenomenal with over 40,000 tickets being sold in the first hour.

Growl has been updated to V1.1.1. This is a MUST HAVE application for any Mac user, and without any further hesitation you can download it from the growl homepage. Growl provides notifications, which “… are a way for your applications to provide you with new information, without you having to switch from the application you’re already in.”

macosxhints.com has a hint on how to run your MacBook with its lid closed. They link to this apple technote, but its not just for your MacBook. Powerbook G4 and MacBook Pro owners are just as capable, and can have the joy of their portable beasts plugged into an external monitor as a “faux desktop”. You just have to have an external keyboard or mouse plugged in. Bluetooth keyboard users get their own technote.

Telstra recently upgraded their mobile broadband speeds to give “… typical speeds of 550kbps to 3Mbps, bursting up to 6Mbps in CBD, metro and other areas with our BigPond wireless devices on a Super G Fast plan” While I applaud the expanded infrastructure their pricing makes it useless. Take a look at their business pricing for wireless data: Price per month Data allowance Excess cost per MB $5 5 MB $1.

Looking in my inbox today I read this: This message is being sent to confirm that all credit card information has been removed from the World of Warcraft account ********, effectively cancelling its recurring subscription as of September 23, 2007 5:47 AM UTC. The account will not bill or renew any further unless new payment information (credit card or game card) is manually entered in. The account will remain playable for the remaining time it has already paid for.

The MQ command level is an integer used by MQ clients that identify what version the WebSphere MQ servers is running. This in conjunction with the Platform attribute allows a client know what commands the MQ server supports. Both are required attributes to determine usable commands. You may be asked by someone what command level your system supports. In the case of MQ V6.0 on Solaris, the following is true:

So many people have written long and excellent examples of an internet application layer filtering solution. However, what if you need a quick and simple internet filtering solution? Want to block out all the garbage for the younger generation? Look no further than Dansguardian. I’ll assume you love OpenBSD as well, and have the following in place: OpenBSD running as your router, multi-homed the same machine running pf the same machine with squid installed and working as a transparent proxy Packet filtering is online, your internet access works from the router and from an internal host with your squid working transparently wget installed Download the latest beta from dansguardian.

An excerpt from an MSNBC article about China and another crazy law: In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.

I’ll be taking a blog-break due to workload at work… Back soon! In the mean time listen to some decent music. Ssssh! It’s Secret!

Jonathan Schwartz the SUN CTO detailed on his blog about the new deal between Sun and IBM that allows IBM to offer Solaris x86 as a supported OS on their hardware. What does this mean for sysadmins around the world? More Solaris. That’s OK in my books. The less windows servers the better. Someone should tell IBM about their new interest.

A friend was trying to compile cvsgraph on his Mac (10.4.10 intel) the other day and was receiving the error <br /> configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables<br /> By chance he also tried installing a Fink package by source that day as well, and received the same error. We checked out the GCC version <br /> gcc -v<br /> and it showed GCC 3.3. Some google time later, and it turns out this is an older GCC for the current XCode SDK he has installed.

Recently I posted about our Websphere MQ MQCONN 2195 errors, and how we needed to apply the minimal recommended Solaris Kernel tuning for Websphere MQ. Well, we applied the changes, rebooted and connection problems were gone. Our application was able to spawn multiple connections to MQ without the errors we were seeing before. However, we were still getting climbing response times when doing load tests between a request message being sent and a reply message arriving back.

On linux and other [Unix like operating systems][1], you can untar a tar file with an absolute path to a different location. On Solaris using tar you can not. How do you get around this? [Perderabo on the Unix for Advanced and Expert Users forum][2] describes how. Here is an example (names and servers changed to protect the innocent):

I was wondering how to set permissions on an element in clearcase under unix. You can’t just use your normal chmod. After reading “Phil for Humanity” I had the answer: cleartool protect -chmod 550 myscript.sh Quite simple after all. Your file, in this case myscript.sh, will now have the permissions you want. Remember however, if you try to set write permissions on a file element, it wont set. The clearcase man page for protect advises that write perms are ignored – instead to obtain write permission to a file element, it must be checked out.

In Solaris (and UNIX), a process is a zombie, as shown by the message defunct in the ps report. A zombie process is one that has had all its resources freed, but has not received an acknowledgement from a parent process, receipt of which would ordinarily remove its entry from the process table. The next time a system is booted, zombie processes are cleared. Zombies should not affect system performance, and you should not need to remove them.

I think I may have stumbled upon the answer. I’m so set in my CVS ways that I though the best thing was to branch the entire top level folder – recursively. What I really was after was a way of setting the configspec on the NEW view I create for the new branch, and making it show code that is labeled with a particcular label, then when it is checked out and in, a new revision exists on the new branch.

Following up from the last post, you may be interested in a little reading on Sun’s explanation of the semaphore and shared memory settings for Solaris Kernel parameters, using /etc/system. set semsys:* is for System V Semaphores set shmsys:* is for System V Shared Memory set msgsys:* is for System V Message Queues My personal server OS of choice is OpenBSD, so if you know OpenBSD, then think /etc/sysctl.conf as it is similar.

I was working on a recently built Solaris 9 server with a fresh copy of MQ installed. During application testing, we were getting 2195 errors from our application when establishing more than 3 concurrent connects to MQ. After a day of wasted de-bugging of our application, we put it down to the system, and it seems we may have been correct. There is an install chapter in the MQ V6.0 documentation that should NOT be overlooked.

The Two Beans Worth Coffee Blog at espressocoffeesnobs.com references an LA Times article as stating: In a study done by Rutgers University, NJ, the scientists found that rats could reduce the likelihood of pre-cancerous sun-damaged cells from becoming cancerous by 100% if the rats either exercised or drank caffeine. However, when both the exercise and caffeine were combined, the preventative qualities of the combo raised the efficacy to a whopping 400%

Just when I had gone and written my own init scripts for MQ, IBM release a support pack for Linux/Redhat. It is in RPM (rpm2cpio.pl anyone?) format, and seems very linuxy. I’ll stick with my own Solaris scripts, but should you run MQ on linux, then check it out.

I’m so used to making branches in CVS. <br /> cvs tag -b system_test<br /> As the CVS doco states simply, “This splits off a branch based on the current revisions in the working copy”, and these revisions will get assigned the branch name, in this case `system_test’. Simple, powerful enough and quick! But Rational Clearcase is a different beast as I learn it. You have to make your branchtype.

I’ve started blogging from textmate. And this is one of my recent posts using this app. A friend uses Textmate and swears by it as his main text editor, so here I am using it more often (Thanks Tim). I’m still a dab hand at vim, BUT now that I can blog from textmate, then its looking like my licence will finally get some use. From where I stand using the Mac is soooo much more than just jumping on a computer to bang out some email.

I know it has been blogged to death by now, but Mac OSX, my desktop OS of choice, is now officially a standard UNIX. Specifically to the UNIX 03 Product Standard. This confirms it conforms to Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification. This makes Apple Inc. an official UNIX vendor along with all the other big boys. On the serverside, I will stick with OpenBSD as my personal server OS of choice, with Solaris following close behind.

Logging on to Warcraft on the weekend, I note that a new expansion has been announced at Blizzcon. It features Arthas as Lich King, no doubt in some mega dungeon that you and 25 of your closest friends get to take down. In addition there is new land to the north including buildings you can take down – towers, etc. – very reminiscent of Warcraft3 for all you old school gamers.

A quick lesson (for my own benefit as much as yours) in applying Access Control Lists (ACL) on files and directories under Solaris (in this case Solaris 9). To allow group “somegroup” read only access to a folder recursively, you need to set the ACL on EVERY directory and file. This is due to the fact that the Solaris setfacl command does not have a recursive option (do not confuse -r with recurse).

It is really amaing what a “branded” piece of computer equipment can do compared to its 1/2 price no-name competitor. 3 Years ago I purchased a 400W PSU. It suited the PC system fine, but when I got my new Leadtek Geforce 7 series card, it had a molex power connector on it which required dedicated power direct from the PSU. The bus power is just not up to speed o supply this Graphics Beast to drive all those pixels.

Is there a difference between a Programmer and a Serial Killer? See if you can tell.

I have to say something about policing transport in Melbourne. I have had a number of occasions where I have called emergency services. Only once were they able to respond, and they let the crazy violent people back onto the train – the crazy people acted normal for the Police and resumed their craziness after they left. In the case of calling 000, it is difficult to advise the operator where you will be (which station, town, etc.

Was implementing an MQ cluster at work recently, and the question arose on setting up init scripts for MQ, specifically the listener, runmqlsr. I was advised that inetd is the usual method for setting up any MQ daemon. However, I read a blog post on A Hursley view on MQ blog, and it stated that launching the runmqlsr seperately, and not using inetd is the now preferred method of having your MQ daemon running.

I’ve hit level 50 with my main character now. Whilst I want to get another 10 levels and start on the BC content, I have found the gold I make farming with this character, particularly on recipes, enables me to spec out my alts like never before. So I started a hunter. I already have him up to level 12 and besides being a bit time consuming, its fun. Playing a hunter is like being in a 2 man group all the time.

If you want to install an MSI with no user intervention, and scripted, you can use msiexec. But what if you want to do a complete installation on the product, instead of a typical installation (which would be default)? Put this in your script: <br /> msiexec /i yourpackage.msi /passive ADDLOCAL=ALL ADDLOCAL=ALL is the key to a complete install. Enjoy your automated windows installation.

Of interest to most “Tech” people out there would be the chat between Steve Jobs (of Apple fame if you are from under a rock) and Bill Gates (of Microsoft fame if you are not in the know). This occurred at the All Things Digital conference, and is now available for your aural or visual pleasure on the iTunes Music Store in the form of an audio and video podcast.

I recently upgraded to a 22″ widescreen monitor. To drive this monitor in a Digital fashion, I jumped from a Geforce 3 series to a Geforce 7 Series with a Dual Link DVI connector. It turns out the monitor wasn’t dual link, but this review is on the card, not the monitor. The old 3D card was some major brand, I can’t remember which, and since I was upgrading an existing AGP card, I had to choose a replacement AGP card as well.

A friend recently said he had been steering clear of the iTunes Music Store because of the low bitrate. This is even though he uses an ipod, mac and iTunes. I personally have purchased over 300 tracks at the previous 128Kbps bitrate, and up to now, have been happy with the quality of these AAC song files. Now apple have released a (so far limited) portion of their catalogue, being from EMI at 256Kbps, and DRM free to top it off.

I am developing a web-site for a business. A really simple web presence with some Content Management. I am yet to fully convince the Business Owner that a CMS will be so beneficial to customers, but I am already using Joomla for the site, so we have one in place. I used the DocMan extension for Mambo/Joomla to cover document content and access control for the published documents. After some initial headaches with that, I sorted the issues out (to be blogged some other time I suppose) and started looking around the net for free templates.

Evo Terra aptly describes what all information connected people have gone through. You know how it feels when you just can’t catch up on your podcasts, or RSS feeds? Evo is going through this right now and is about to get out his “CyberMachete”. I have even removed Slice of Scifi from my podcasts when information overloaded, but it always seems to return. read more | digg story

Espresso

The WordPress upgrade went painlessly, and now I am all up to date and back online. V2.1.3 works fab, and all the plugins were compatible.

I recently starting using Clearcase for versioning, at work. I come from a CVS background, so initially found it to be cumbersome. For example, here is how i added a file to the repository: CVS method: <br /> <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23" class="tweet-hashtag">#</a> Change to your already checked out working folder<br /> cd /your/working/dir<br /> <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23" class="tweet-hashtag">#</a> list folder contents, will see checked out working files<br /> ls -l<br /> <a href="http://search.

I have finally purchased a new domain name, and here we are: <techdebug.com>. The old one still works, and will be setup to redirect to this one (its the same server, just a proper domain name). The reason for this move and name change? Some guy had bought up a bunch of domain names, and parked digitalrss.com. He was willing to sell it to me, asking $100USD plus fees, so a quick trip to <godaddy.

Listening to Starman talk about his Arcane/Frost spec on worldofwarcast makes me want to hurry up and get a move on in this game. I’ve played the game since it came out in 2004, and my main char is a lvl 49 arcane mage, so why can’t I make it past lvl 60, and why can’t I even get into to the outlands? (I have the expansion). Life.. that’s why. Family and a full time job too…

Today I was using the Windows Transfer Wizard to migrate someone’s old laptop data to their new laptop. This worked perfectly for me the week before on a different system, YET now I got the following error: “The location you specified does not contain stored information. Please enter a valid folder path into the edit box.”. The thing is, that I did enter a valid folder. After much looking (well 5 minutes on google) I found the answer at this site dealing with corrupt Files and Settings Transfer Wizard (F.

I just saw a youtube video over on Slice of Scifi today. It has been around on youtube for a while, but still it is something funny for all Trek and Monty Python fans. Without further ado:

Do you play World of Warcraft? Do you play on a Mac? Do you want to listen to music from the game on your iPod? Jean-François has the solution over at his blog.MPQ Extractor 1.0! Update: Jean-François has suggested that it is easier to use MPQFS. I haven’t test this however.

Looks like I’m officially “on tha interwebs”. I just got hit with my first comment spam. 50 comments in one hit from many IP’s and all about drug/pornography/medicine. How crass.

Nearly ALL windows apps I use are CTRL+F to start a new find… On my mac, APPLE+F . Microsoft apps: Office = F4 for find, SHIFT F4 to find next. Outlook (part of office but yet different!) = CTRL+E What tha?!!!! Just hope in word that you don’t bump ALT+F4 in office or it will close your window!

Watched a video linked from a work memo today. Its a good reminder for people in Australia as we go into winter, with the flu, and all sorts of nasties spread by coughs and sneezes. Why Don’t We Do It In Our Sleeves?. This covers how to sneeze and/or cough into our sleeves. The experts say that germs on cloth die out pretty quickly, whereas coughing into our hands spreads the germs onto everything we then decide to touch….

I’m catching up on the world (I am a slow news reader). Earlier this month, one of the most useful applications I have used on my mac has stopped development. Virtue Desktops is a great app that gives you multiple workspaces ala CDE on Solaris. However it does it for your Mac. I have been using it since late last year, and whilst it was in Beta, it is fairly stable.

If you got the gist of the “iRack” then here is another video of great moments in Presidential Speeches. I think the video says it all. Maybe he could trump apple and introduce an iRack!

Now I thought this video was another typical funny take on Apple, and Steve Jobs in particular. However the social commentary embedded in this video makes it WORTH watching. A very funny ending to this video. Now if only Dubya would watch this one!

I’m finally in a job where I can get to use Solaris close to 100% of the time. Goodbye, Au Revoir, Arrivederci Windows 2003 Server. Hello, Bonjour, Ciao lovely UNIX!. Oh yeah so I started a new job with CGI today. Technical Architect. Very business sounding, but a good role!

What a neat thing. Yet again another AWESOME use for quicksilver. The comma is a shortcut to add selected documents/files/objects to a stack, which you can then do with what you will. Check this 60 second or so video out on The Merlin Show. HOWTO: Quicksilver: The Comma Trick. Windows users: you have NO IDEA what you are missing. PS: Enjoy Vista

I am currently travelling. and am in Adelaide this week; Flying with Qantas. Besides getting up at 3am, all is good with today. I have started eating at 3 hourly intervals, smaller meals, in an attempt to get my metabolism kickstarted. This is still on a calorie intake 20% less than my Base Metabolic Rate (approx. 2100 per day). Combine this with my jogging, and I should see some results over the next few months.

I was playing around with a side project of mine, a web site in Joomla, and I added some XSLT to allow users to get directions in the Google maps component of this particular Joomla site. Besides the fact that I’m enjoying playing around with this CMS, I am also learning new things. One of them was the fact that I discovered you can now get driving directions for Australian addresses in google maps now!

I went for a walk today, and it turned into a jog. Total distance about 4.59km (according to my GPS). I think this was the first time I have run for exercise in about 8 years, and the first time I have exercised in weeks. It feels good, and I think I will be doing this each day!

I thought people understood this simple premise. You write your code to the standard, not to the browser. The browsers then adhering to the standard display the code correctly, or lay it out based upon the chosen style. Why in this day and age are Telstra/Bigpond NOT doing this? I am a customer, and nearly all their web based products MANDATE the use of a single browser; i.e. they write their code to a platform.

I was on a Virgin Blue flight today. Last month all my flights had been on Qantas. I have noticed a difference in the way the cabin crew act. The Virgin Blue staff behave less “professionally” than the Qantas staff. On this particular flight, the things that occurred; some of which were funny, and some of which would have been embarrassing to the person affected; are: A cabin crew member asked a young lady to blow into a straw attached to a breathalyzer, before serving her wine she ordered.

I rang nintendo today and it was very painless to order my free wiimote strap replacements. They asked for the console serial number, the number of wiimotes, and told me to keep my old straps to send back. They will include a return envelope for me. Painless, quick, and finally we will soon be able to use our wiimote with straps again… It feels very unsafe swinging these things around without straps.

So it finally happened… The strap on my Wiimote broke whilst playing Wii Sports on the Nintendo Wii. With luck, we have no broken television or anything else. Lets hope Nintendo will replace these.

I was looking at CelticBear’s blog, and saw a link to MSNBC, who has a piece by Keith Olbermann with comments about President Bush and his recent speech about Iraq. He likens Bush to the boy who cried wolf, noting that this time around, who will believe him that the same thing will work (sending another 20K troops to Iraq). I highly recommend watching the streaming video, as it conveys the commentators opinions much better than the written piece.

CBS have posted a video with a closeup look at the new Apple iPhone. Worth watching if you like tech gadgets. Its a pity that we have to wait till 2008 for it to get to Australia (Asia) but hopefully that wait is so we can get a 3G enabled phone.

Apple have released their Apple TV My question, is why does Australia get CONSISTENTLY marked up prices from Apple? The Apple TV is USD$299, and AUD$449. At the current exchange rate of 1 USD to 1.28683 AUD this item costs AUD$385 when purchased in the US. That is over $60 more expensive for the pleasure of purchasing from Australia! How do they justify this? The exchange rates do not fluctuate that much.

Just watched this awesome video on YouTube. It’s a stop motion of two guys sorting their problems out mano e mano. Me and my bro tried this once when I first got a webcam, nothing like this though! If I find mine, I will post them on YouTube as well

I have been messing around with feedburner. It seems to offer a really good service for free, with some premium options if you choose to enable them. I have cut my feed over to it, as I get stats of who/when is subscribed. They also allow for funky embeded items (like the Digg and Email this links you see on each post). Have you ever clicked on an XML/RSS feed in your browser and seen only xml code come up?