May 07
Cool videos from times past after the break…
May 07
I’ve hosed systems in the past by inadvertently downgrading the C-library, which breaks… everything. Luckily, this is why I have test machines before updates are rolled out to all of our servers.
Even so, this makes upgrading glibc to a newer version a somewhat fraught experience – especially when it can’t pass its own test-suite (when enquiring about this, I was told that the test suite “is only intended for glibc developers, not end users“… great – an absolutely system-critical component with almost no possibility of roll-back and a broken test-suite. <sigh>
The Debian project isn’t happy with things either, and just a couple of days ago Aurélien Jarno announced initial moves to abandon glibc for the eglibc (Embedded GNU libc) code-base. This was quickly picked up and seem to have been met with approval.
May 07
We now have a fair collection of both 32bit and 64bit Windows Vista installations at work, with Vista Home Premium and Vista Business on laptops, and Vista Business on desktops. However today, for the first time, I came to install Vista from scratch onto a pre-existing machine which had been shipped with Windows XP.
Apr 06
Yesterday, April 5th 2009 at approximately 4:30pm (BST), several messages were sent from my HoTMaiL account to every single one of my MSN contacts. Luckily, this account is long-dormant – but unfortunately, Windows Live operates a shared list of contacts between Mail and Messenger (which I do still use, for my sins).
Mar 02
I’ve now been using Windows 7 Beta on-and-off for a few weeks. In all honesty, I’ve spent most of the small amount of time I’ve had with it playing games, so I can only reflect on my initial impressions. However, there are some observations I have as a (broadly) neutral observer which may be generalised across 64bit editions of Windows, or may be specific to Windows 7.
Feb 26
The two current solutions are to remove ‘GrowlMail.bundle‘ from “~/Library/Mail/Bundles” (or wherever it is installed), or to execute the command:
defaults write com.apple.mail GMSummaryMode -int 2
… to disable the Detailed Summary mode, which misinteracts with the Safari 4 version of WebKit.
Feb 10
We’ve recently been working on remodelling our corporate website, and the decision has been made to make use of the SilverStripe CMS.
Feb 05
At work we have several Sony laptops and have recently upgraded to the latest Vodafone-branded Huawei 3G/HSDPA modems… and on all laptops we’ve experienced intermittent connectivity and constant errors.
Jan 29
There is currently a great demand for laptops which provide the user-friendliness of a Mac without the cost and weight of a MacBook or MacBook Pro, or without the cost of size of a MacBook Air.
Given that the ever-increasing varieties of Intel Atom-based netbooks are low-cost and roughly equivalent in hardware terms to the original MacBook Air, they make a tempting target to conversions to “MacBook Mini”s.
Indeed, there are a large (and also increasing) number of guides which will tell you how to get OS X running using a variety of ISO images downloaded via BitTorrent and hacked kernels which then require extensive changes to the installed system and come with copious warnings not to upgrade the OS when Software Updater prompts you to… and even then it’s common for basic functions such as sleep or USB not to work (although it has to be said that no method is entirely free from caveats).
This guide doesn’t work like that. This guide will describe how to install OS X from an original Leopard installation DVD and how to end up with an entirely unmodified system (*) which will not break when Apple issues updates.