Archive for May 2006

on a crashing evolution

David Woodhouse: 30 May 2006:
I’ve taken to running Evolution in a loop: while true; do evolution; done
At least I don’t have to keep restarting it every time it crashes now — an event which occurs ten or twenty times daily.

Oh my gosh. So it wasn’t just me then. This weekend I let Evolution run its course, and I restarted it twice when I came to check up on it. I was wondering if all the mail was causing it to crash, but it wasn’t. No OOM messages that I saw in a log, just an empty workspace. I switched back to Thunderbird (which means no convenient way of reading email via ssh exec-ing imapd), thinking maybe it was just me.

Updated Fedora Core 5, on an x86 even. Just about 3 IMAP mailboxes, and several (~4-5) POP boxes. IMAP mail tends to be large…

Boot Camp

It doesn’t just work if you load up all the default software updates. The Boot Camp page is really useful, and pay particularly close attention to getting the latest firmware update. Don’t just assume that SMC Version 1.2f10 is what you’re after (in System Profiler) – download MacBook Pro (early 2006) Firmware Update 1.0.1 which weighs in under 3MB, go through the firmware update process and only then, will Boot Camp start.

Once it starts up, all seems to sail fairly smoothly. It asks to either create a Macintosh Drivers disc or if you’d like to skip it, pop a CD into the drive, it burns away, and then it asks if you’d like to install a bona fide Windows XP SP2 or not. I say sure too quickly even before inserting the CD, and it throws a helpful error message telling me to wait till the disc is initialized! Thats what I call good UI design.

On my 100GB disk, I notice E: Partition1 (200MB), F: Partition2 (83968MB) which is where OS X is sitting, a usual 128MB of unpartitioned space and of course, C: Partition3 (11100MB) which is where Windows should go. But what is Partition1, at 200MB? Is this like the Apple Bootstrap partition of 1MB on PowerPC?

I decided to quick format the 10GB partition as a FAT filesystem, as opposed to NTFS. Since the Windows installer doesn’t recognize HFS+, it assumes that both Partition1 and Partition2 are actually empty! That can actually be confusing for newbies, that don’t read the relevant documentation.

First gotcha after installing Windows is the eject button didn’t work. Remember, read the manual. The one thing that does amaze me is that my Mighty Mouse works – both the left (obviously) and the right clicking!

800×600 on a widescreen display does look really ugly – once the ATI drivers are installed, 1440×900 is fully supported. The sound driver (SigmaTel) installs in a DOS box! The Bluetooth drivers don’t get automatically installed, so some manual intervention is required. I find it funny that by default, Windows XP decides to take over booting!

What’s with Windows XP asking me to activate their product? It does seem lame. Apparently I’ve already activated it. i find that odd, since I only installed it with Parallels yesterday. I am now activating this via a telephone. Bloody 9 sets of 6 numbers (installation ID) is what you need to enter over the phone. It believes its already been activated on another set of PCs, which I find funny.

So I call the number. They give me a new code. And then I say, “so, do I have to do this everytime I install Windows?”. And drum-roll, she answers me, “Yes. We’re sorry about that Sir.” Why on earth would anyone actually want to run Windows XP? Its so troublesome. I honestly don’t think this is the trouble you’ll go through to get a RHN key, for instance.

It just goes to show that Microsoft still can go suck on a bucket of c***s, and I honestly can’t see why anyone would buy a Mac and use Boot Camp to run Windows. Maybe to transition away, but eventually, you’d not want to run this crap. Heck, with a little more testing, I shall wipe this away and go for Linux.

OSDC talks

I didn’t really know that the Open Source Developers’ Club actually existed, but I’m impressed with the previous topics. I shall aim to be at Ben Cornwell’s MySQL Normalization & Optimisation Techniques talk if time permits on the 14th of June.

Maybe as pre-requsite reading, it might be useful for folk to read mhillyer’s excellent introductory article on Database Normalization.

WordPress, Akismet, and still the spam prevails

I find it interesting that WordPress with the Akismet plugin (yes, I upgraded my blog to run the latest WordPress a while back) is still allowing spam thru. To make it even funnier, my wordpress.com account has also received spam that Akismet didn’t catch. Maybe its not working as planned then.

It seems that the Akismet API is fairly open, which is interesting. Requests for integration with MediaWiki, can be fairly interesting. MediaWiki’s own methods of spam protection don’t seem to go very far, as edits still tend to need patrolling (I subscribe to the RSS feed of changes which seems to make a lot of sense).

Now to decide to go back to patrolling blog comments or just turning the feature off. How do other WordPress users deal with spam?

Software suspend rocks (MacBook Pro notes)

I let the battery on the MacBook Pro run completely dry, and when I plugged the power back in, it resumed to my last saved state. I am highly impressed with this technology, as I never did get a chance to try this on my Powerbook itself. Software suspend is cool. When is Suspend2 going to be integrated into the mainline kernel?

OK, back to the MacBook Pro. The keyboard didn’t become usable until after a period of time (I’d say, about a minute). That seemed rather odd. If time permits, I’ll be sure to try and repeat this – has anyone else noticed this though?

The machine runs really, really hot. Really. I put it on my lap and I’m wearing a pair of jeans, and even then the bottom is really burning me. This is so, not good for a laptop. And Apple saying not to put laptops on a lap just seems rather silly. I haven’t updated the firmware yet, so maybe it’ll miraculously cool after that. I can’t imagine this doing good things to the life of a MacBook Pro, to be honest.

Also, there’s a distinct whine. Sure you can’t really hear it with a podcast playing in the background but man, oh man, its there. “Whirrr”. Its annoying. You can’t be expected to leave the MBP on 24/7 and expect to sleep next to it or anything.

I guess all this is handy now that winter is abound.

Parallels Workstation Quick Review

Its pretty amazing. Download, get the trial key, and use the Wizard to create a virtual machine. Defaults to 8GB for Windows, which does seem sensible. When booting it, there will be an error (doh, Windows isn’t installed); fix this by popping the Windows XP CD into the SuperDrive and it’ll pick it up. Very smart. It takes about 40 minutes to install Windows XP, which does seem rather long.

VM -> Clone VM is something I think is a winner! I just made a pristine Windows XP install and if it needs to get blown away, I’ll have the actual VM image sitting around. However, it seems to have hung when I ran it. Redoing it seems to have made the clone. I can’t reproduce why it hung, however :-(

Another interesting feature is using full-screen guest OSes – the switching is very “fast user switching” like. I’m impressed. However, moving around from full-screen to not, and accidentally hitting the Expose button on the Mighty Mouse, renders all windows to resize in a way it feels like. There’s no defined behavior and its kind of annoying.

Some quick notes:

  • Ctrl+Click isn’t right click anymore – its Shift+Ctrl+Click. Seems it conflicts with other applications and is possibly valid in Windows.
  • The image format is nice. It doesn’t take 8GB of space up-front, but instead grows space conservatively as and when you use it.
  • The .pvs file is a text file, and has a lot of configuration options.
  • My network (wireless) beyond having a WEP key also has a MAC address authentication module. It however, by default, conflicts with my MBP’s MAC address when the WinXP guest wants to get access.

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