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Dropbox authentication: insecure by design

By on April 8, 2011 in Linux, Mac / OSX, Operating Systems, Web/Tech, Windows 7

I have tested this, and can back up what Derek is saying. It is more than a little worrying – but also easy for the Dropbox guys to fix.

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Browser Power Consumption

By on March 30, 2011 in Mac / OSX, Operating Systems, Random Rants, Web/Tech, Windows 7

Ignoring the IE9 propaganda – just for a second… LOOK CHROME REALLY DOES SUCK. Google really have their work cut out there. As more and more people get laptops, the battery usage of the browser needs to be looked at more closely. Also of interest how Safari fairs on Windows there – someone should do the comparison of browsers on Mac.

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Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It

By on March 15, 2011 in Mac / OSX, Operating Systems, Random Rants, Web/Tech

I have now done this on my Air and I’m more than happy with it. Safari is a dream. DF is updated with a few recent update for things like Chrome linking etc.

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The Android phone is for…

By on June 5, 2010 in iPad, iPhone, Linux, Operating Systems

Too funny to ignore… that is all!

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OSX and the 64-bit Kernel

By on March 25, 2010 in Mac / OSX, Operating Systems

Today I flipped over the x64 kernel on my MacBook Pro. So far, noticing the memory allocation/deallocation performs a lot better. Very very nice. Might actually alter the nvram settings to make it permanent.

I did however suffer a stability issue that forced me to hard reboot. I was brew (homebrew rocks – but that’s another post!) building in one tab of terminal and then a ‘svn co’ in another tab. I hit CTRL-C on svn and it hung. Tried to kill -9 things it really wasn’t having anything of it. Not sure what caused it. Logs don’t show much either. I’m sure i’ll get to bottom of it at some point.

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VMware Fusion 2.x and booting USB Memory Sticks

By on September 26, 2009 in Operating Systems

This one of those posts where it’s more for ‘me’ and those Googling around. Today, I wanted to install FreeBSD on a memory stick for a server and then configure it in VMware before plugging into the internal USB slot of my server.

Installation was a breeze, booting was a little more difficult as the VMware BIOS doesn’t support booting off USB devices attached to it. To work around this I did the following

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *320.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            254.3 GB   disk0s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP                65.4 GB    disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS OSX External            499.6 GB   disk1s2
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *16.0 GB    disk2
   1:                    FreeBSD                         16.0 GB    disk2s1
$ /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk2 1 SIXTEENGIG buslogic

So you can see in the diskutil list that the disk is on /dev/disk2 – what we then do is use vmware-rawdiskCreator to make a vmdk file represents it (something that Fusion won’t let you do in the UI). You then have to create a NEW VM and attach it to that, you cannot simply attach to an existing VM.

Then you have a nice bootable USB VM!

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AVG, Windows 7 and a Netbook

By on August 9, 2009 in Operating Systems, Random Rants, Windows 7

How do you take a fast operating system and make it impossibly slow to use? That’s easy, install AVG.

Last night, I installed AVG on my Samsung NC-10 thinking that would be good and useful to have some protection. How wrong could I be? Upon reboot the Resident Shield took 100% CPU on the Intel Atom 1.6GHz chip that the NC-10 has and consequently making the entire machine unusable.

Time to try another anti-virus I think. To think that Windows recommended AVG as well…

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Windows 7 and the Shake Gesture

By on August 8, 2009 in Operating Systems, Windows 7

Today I managed to get time to upgrade my MacBook Pro and Samsung NC10 netbook to Windows 7. Overall, everything went very smoothly however one feature that is on by default caused me much pain; I hate the fact that when I shake the mouse loosely all my windows minimise!

I spent some time hunting for the control panel item to turn it off. Typing in ‘Shake’ into the Control Panel search suggest the ‘Change how your mouse works’ in ‘Ease of Access’. However, there’s no option to turn off shake in there… or is there?

It turns out that ‘Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen’ means what it says AND disables the mouse shake gesture. Thanks Microsoft for making that intuitive – why do I have to turn both off. I like the arranging feature, I hate the shake feature.

mousefun

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Open Solaris 2009.6 CD

By on June 28, 2009 in Open Solaris, Operating Systems

I always like to get this freebie when it comes out. I already had the CD’s of 2008.5 and 2008.11. Now I have 2009.6! I booted it up inside a VirtualBox and I am impressed so far. The stability of the Solaris kernel combined with the userland that you come to expect from Sun. I still feel that the tools around it need a bit of work. Then, one has to remember this isn’t Ubuntu.

Either way, if you haven’t asked for your free CD and are interested in trying out this quite nice OS to develop on, go grab the CD from the Open Solaris CD Order Form. It costs nothing, even the P&P is free.

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The mix up with tickets and Joyent

By on June 17, 2009 in Open Solaris, Operating Systems, Random Rants, Web/Tech

I think the first thing to say is this post is not a slating of Joyent. They are an amazing company and I have never had a problem beyond little things like back end network routing and the like.

So, about two weeks ago, I raised a ticket:

We would like to shut down the accelerator mentioned above as it is surplus to our requirements.

So. The ticket referenced an accelerator with an ‘i’ in it. We got a nice reply that confirmed the request:

I’ve just set xxxxi to be closed on the 17th.

So that’s all good. I verify against my spreadsheets and ensure that it’s all correct. It is, so I think nothing of it. Until this morning! This morning xxxxl (obviously the x’s are censoring the exact numbers/letters) was turned off! Obviously, as we have a large amount of accelerators with Joyent, I picked up the Batphone and gave them a call.

The reply was:

xxxxi was shut down as requested in ticket xxxxx

But xxxxi was up. xxxxl was down. Nope they’d shut the wrong one down. I can imagine what happened. The ticket system is disjointed with the system that manages the accelerators. Somebody typo’d the entry of which one to shut down.

I guess I’ll find out more when it’s not 3am in the morning. Easier to discuss this stuff when people have had a good night’s sleep! Now to try and explain it all to the big boss man!

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