I’ve finally gotten access to an Intel Mac, and have installed Parallels on it. Pretty snappy, and easy to install.
Currently installing AutoDesk Inventor, as that’s the only PC-only (other than Eve!) program I use. Actually, running Eve in a VM would be great, as then if it crashed my system the whole machine wouldn’t go down. Not that I’m sure it was Eve causing the crashes anyway…
Thu 15th Mar 2007
I’ve commented before on how people use my template conversion, and remove the attribution to myself, and more importantly to Patricia, the original person who did all of the work on the template for vanilla wordpress.
What is quite funny is that they remove the tags that attribute me, but usually leave in the AdSense code. Which means anyone clicking on ads on their blog will be doing me a favour.
Not that I’ve ever got anything from AdSense. I can’t even log in, since there is a clash between my original AdSense login and my new hosted domain google account. Which they haven’t fixed, last time I checked.
Perhaps I should write into the code that attribution needs to be left in. I must check…
Tue 6th Mar 2007
Microsoft to blast Google for its copyright policy - Yahoo! News
“Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people’s content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue and IPOs,” says Rubin, who oversees copyright and trade secret law at Microsoft.
Okay, let’s examine Microsoft’s record.
MS-DOS 6.0: Stac successfully sued Microsoft for patent infringement regarding the compression algorithm used in DoubleSpace.
Softimage: Microsoft was found guilty of software piracy last year [2001] by a French court.
Windows Media Player: Microsoft used a cracked edition of Sony Sound Forge 4.5 to make the sound files for the Windows Media Player tour.
And it’s fairly well understood that MS don’t make good stuff, they buy good stuff from other people, and make it worse…
Pot. Kettle. Black.
I haven’t tried this software yet, but it looks great: Versomatic is automatic version control for all of your files. What it does, is set a service running that monitors changes in the filesystem. When changes are scheduled to be made, the service automatically backs up the previous version of the file.
Of course, there’s some flexibility bound to be built in. After all, you won’t want to be backing up cache files, and so on. I suspect you’ll be able to choose particular file types, particular locations, or even just particular files to control the revisions of. Of course, the less work the user has to do, other than install it, the better.
Getting back a previous version appears fairly simple, too. You can either right-click on a file and choose a previous version to edit, or use the Version Manager to see all managed files. You can, apparently, set the amount of disk space that will be used (I assume that after this older files will be discarded, or some method of choosing which ones to keep).
Apparently there’s little extra resource usage, since it just copies the files to the revision archive, however this would also make disk usage more of an issue. Having a difference between files stored instead would save space, but use a lot more CPU time.
Oh, and it’s OS X and Windows.
Mon 5th Mar 2007
I don’t have the newspaper article in front of me, but I am riled up by this story. Basically, some church-type fellows have raised a petition about some “anti-religious” laws, that, apparently, “limit people’s right to free speech.”
Now, before we get started, let me state that Australia, and South Australia do not have the same rights to free speech for citizens as the USA.
Secondly, one of the arguments that is made by the preacher in the article is that it will erode moral values.
What makes Christians think they have the dibs on morality anyway? Because the bible tells them so? Let’s have a quote from the bible:
(more…)
The other morning, my power went off. I almost slept through my wake-up time, but just made it to work on time.
However, the power failure must have caused some sort of a problem with my NSLU2 server. For some reason, I was no longer able to connect to it in any way shape or form. Samba connections failed, and even SSH-ing in didn’t work, with any of the users I had set up.
I finally figured out that it had something to do with not being able to boot off the disk properly. It was booting up, then beeping loudly three times (two different tones). Then, it was responding to pings, and accepting ssh connections, but not authenticating.
So I connected using the root account and the default password, and it worked. And, true to form, the disks were recognised, but for some reason not mounted.
I tried the turnup disk /dev/sda1 command, which doesn’t do anything destructive, but tells the machine to boot up from that device. It failed, with the following error:
turnup: /dev/sda1: partition does not seem to be a valid root partition
The partition must contain a full operating system. To ensure that
this is the case it is checked for the following, all of which must
exist for the bootstrap to work:1) A directory /mnt.
2) A command line interpreter program in /bin/sh.
3) The program chroot in /sbin or /usr/sbin.
4) The program init in /sbin, /etc or /bin.One or more of these items is missing. Mount /dev/sda1 on /mnt
and examine its contents. You can use turnup disk|nfs -i -f
to copy this operating system onto the disk, but it may overwrite
files on the disk.
Okay, that might help. A quick mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 showed that the partition was valid. But no /mnt directory inside there. Create one, then run the turnup disk /dev/sda1 command again. Then shutdown -r now.
Upon reboot, only a single beep (which, IIRC, I put there!), and everything is normal. Phew!
