Noooo! RIP AirPort Express

No! My AirPort Express has just died.

It's just given up the ghost - no warning or anything. It has never crashed, or tweaked out in any way, yet when I went to play some music through it, iTunes didn't show it up in the list, and sure enough, it's dead. The (not so) little green light isn't on, different power cords don't make any difference - can't reset it... IT'S DEAD! Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any easy way to open it either, so I can't even crack the case and see if there's anything obviously wrong with it that I could fix. =(

Spring Cleaning in the Garage?

Well, who's bright idea was it to seal the cement floor in the garage
this weekend? It all seemed like a good idea at the time.
Clearing the garage out didn't take too long, an hour or two, and
then a quick blast with the high-pressure cleaner to remove the grit
and dirt.
Painting the floor itself was pretty quick too - ½ an hour per coat,
with two hours drying time. Painted the floor car-park grey and
nearly put in yellow stripes for the car. =)

Then, it was time to put everything back. OK, after spending most of
Sunday doing just this, I'm still only half-way through. I'm taking
the time to dust things and tidy it all up a bit before putting it
back, and also moving a few things around to make better use of the
available space. There's also a heap of rubbish and junk that didn't
need to go back, so when I get it finished it will all be pretty damn
good. How long it will stay like this for, I can only hazard a guess...

Parallels Workstation 2.1 Beta 6

Oh yeah, there's no doubt about it - the programmers at Parallels have been busy lately!

They've just announced Beta 6 of Parallels Workstation for Mac OS X.

Keep up the good work...

It's Friday!

What a week - even though I've had two four-day weekends, in a row, with a four-day week in the middle, it's still been pretty tiring! As good as it is to have the time off, there's still the same amount of stuff that needs to be done, just less work time in which to do it. D'oh!

Well, the post for today features the iBoom LoFi... I'm not overly impressed with the Pod Hi Fi and my main gripe with it is the iPod sticking up out of the top of it, just begging to be knocked and breaking the dock connector, or iPod. The iBoom LoFi solves this problem in an elegant way, by having the iPod live inside the tape deck on an old boom box. Bring it on!

Parallels Workstation

The talented programmers over at Parallels just don't stop. They've just released beta 5 of Parallels Workstation and the fixes and improvements keep on coming!

We've now got Shared Folders which is great, as to copy data to and from a VM, you no longer need to go via a network share. There's also Direct USB Support which should mean that it will be possible to run software inside the VM that uses, say, a USB dongle for authentication.

Stop Press! 17" MacBook Pros!

Stop Press!

Apple have just announced the 17" version of the MacBook Pro

Have a look at the Technical Specifications on this thing!

• 17-inch widescreen display


• 1680 x 1050 resolution


• 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo(1)


• 1GB (single SODIMM) 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM


• 120GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive


• 8x double-layer SuperDrive


• ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB GDDR3 memory


• One FireWire 400, one FireWire 800, and three USB 2.0 ports

It's still huge, just like the PowerBook it replaces, but it means that it can't be too long till the 12" with the CoreDuo will be released, just to complete the round-up.

Then, once they've released all three MacBook Pros, it can't be too long till the 15" is given a slight revision, and then it will be time to get one =)

Photos still to come...

I'm working on a 100% standards-compliant, PPH and CSS based photo album. I've had a look around, and can't seem to find one already there, so Louis and I are working on it.

The PHP bit is pretty straightforward, as Louis already has most of the functionality happening, I just need some tweaks to the look and feel of it, to keep me happy =)

When it's up and running, it will be easy to keep the albums updated. All I'll need to do is upload JPEGs to a directory and the rest of the album will be generated on the fly with PHP. The layout in the browser will all be taken care of via CSS, so it will be very easy to change the way the whole thing looks, without having to touch any of the PHP code - all the PHP will do is generate the thumbnails and the XHTML. Thumbnails will be created the first time an image is shown, and the XHTML will all be dynamically created. Easy!

No Blog History (yet)

There won't be any blog history brought forward just yet, as Blogger doesn't support it. They know it is an issue, and may or may not be working on it. It seems that if I want to have this level of control over everything, then I'll need to use something like Movable Type; or Wordpress.

Edit: I'm having a go with ecto as a blogging client, and it supports modifying the date and time of posts, so even though it's not a published feature of Blogger, there is apparently a way to do it. Unfortunately, it's not an import from the old blog, but selectively entering each entry with cut-n-paste. As such, there will be some entries that are skipped - mainly any entries that don't contain anything useful (which, I'm sure some will argue, is the vast majority of this blog).

Posting to the blog via email?

Could this be the easiest way, ever, to post to my blog? Simply bash out something in Mail.app and email it to my blog. With any luck, things like hyperlinks will come through unscathed, however I don't know how I'll post pictures this way. Maybe a good ol' dose of RTFM is in order...

Could this be the one?

Blogger is looking better - I can easily edit posts in the browser, and don't need to use any additional software, plus it can publish my blog to my ftp server, rather than having to host it on blogger.com.
The next few posts will be some tests of how well it handles different things.
This one has an image, that should be sitting to the right of the text. let's see...

Richard and Lyn's Wedding

(Imported from rocketcat-v2)

Nadia and I went down to Tassie over the Easter break as Mum was getting married. The ceremony was in the Conservatory in the Royal Hobart Botanical Gardens then the reception was held upstairs at the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania.

It was a nice day, slightly overcast at the start of it, and as the Bride was (fashionably) late, there was a bit of rain she was caught in, but then everything else went like clockwork. It was great to have all the family in one place at one time again, and catch up with some old friends who we haven't seen in years.

We didn't spend too long in Hobart - flew down on Friday night and back again on Sunday morning, but it was nice to get out of Melbourne for the Easter break.

Xen and Virtualisation

(Imported from rocketcat-v2)

I'm keeping a close eye on Xen at the moment - hoping that now we've got Intel Core chips in Macs, the Xen kernel can be ported to Apple hardware and appropriate drivers can be written for Mac OS X.

There's a lot of talk about Boot Camp and Parallels (and the like) at the moment, and they are each pretty good solutions, but for me the holy grail is full virtualisation of the hardware, and guest operating systems running, not one at a time, or one inside the other, but side-by-side, each having nearly full access to the hardware, and each running at nearly full speed. Being to, say, alt-tab between Mac OS X and Windows XP would be a fantastic ability, and it would mean that an Apple Mac would really be the most versatile PC that you could buy. Imagine running a copy of Solaris, and Mac OS X side-by-side on a server - Solaris to do the heavy-duty server stuff and OS X to do the easy-to-manage stuff.

We are in very interesting times at the moment. For more information on Xen, check out the wiki or have a look at Xensource.

More on Boot Camp and Parallels Workstation

(Imported from rocketcat-v2)

I've had a bit more time playing with Boot Camp and Parallels Workstation, and they are two, very good, solutions, each to suit a different purpose.

Parallels is for the kind of environment where you have that one critical Windows app that you just have to be able to run, and everything else you do can easily be done on a Mac. The Mac version of Parallels is on special at the moment, as it's still in beta, so can be pre-ordered for $USD39.99 (normally $USD49.99) and then you need to supply your own copy of Windows with it. Parallels will run pretty much any x86 operating system, from DOS and Windows 3.1 through to Solaris x86 and Windows Server 2003 with a sprinkling of Linux and OS/2 thrown in for good measure. It virtualises the whole PC's hardware, so you see a single CPU, an Intel chipset, SVGA Graphics card with VESA 3.0 support, NIC etc... It seems to perform pretty well, the main downside being the bog-standard graphics chipset with no 3D acceleration. Lack of 3D support, however, is generally not going to be a problem for your business applications. If you want to share files with the Mac side of things, you will need to use personal file sharing, via a network connection (even if it is Mac OS X and Parallels running Windows on the one machine)

At the other end of the spectrum is the Boot Camp solution. It seems that no sooner than someone had won a competition to get Windows booting on Apple hardware, then Apple released their official solution. Installing Windows via Boot Camp is quite straightforward - the installer even offers to (non-destructively) repartition your disk as you have to use a dedicated Windows partition. Running Windows via this method is fast. As fast as a comparable PC. Windows has full access to all the hardware in the machine - your ATI graphics accelerator, the 667MHz RAM, the hard disk, the whole lot. The downside is that you'll need another piece of software, Windows aside, if you want to be able to access your Mac HFS+ partition from Windows called MacDrive, which is also $USD49.99. The upside is that Mac OS X can read NTFS partitions, but not write back to them, so accessing your Windows files from OS X is pretty straightforward.

Boot Camp and Parallels Workstation

(Imported from rocketcat-v2)

I've been spending a bit of time lately using Boot Camp and Parallels Workstation on a new Core-based iMac.

They're both different tools, for different jobs, and each has advantages over the other, but between them they should enable you to use a Mac for just about any personal computing task that could come to hand.