Intel Unleashes New Server Processors

Intel have announced today that they will start shipping the Core versions of the Xeon replacements, previously known as Woodcrest.

From the Intel press release:

Intel will ship the 5100 series at frequencies up to 3.0 gigahertz speed and faster 1333 megahertz front side bus and 4 megabytes of shared L2 cache or memory reservoir between both cores.

Mmmmm. Bring on that 1.3GHz bus!

Bin-it!

Head over to mactrash.com and have a look at Bin-it.

It's a cute, little utility that suppliments the OS X trash-can with a few more features.

One thing that's annoyed me about the OS X trash can is that it only has two states. Empty and Full. Even on a 400+ GB hard drive, a 2k file in the trash will show it as full.

Bin-it offers you the ability to have a more analogue-style trash can, that has a level indicator, indicating various states in between totally full and totally empty. 

Give it a whirl and see what you think...

Disclaimer - I did some graphics for this program, so I've got a vested interest in spreading the word =)

The Internet Status

If you are a tech worker at a company that utilizes the awesome power of teh intarweb, at some point on what seems like a weekly basis, does someone come to you to say that the Internet is down?

This site was made to help keep track of when the Internet is really down. Bookmark it and keep it handy.

Finally...

Finally, someone comes up with a use for the backlight keyboards on Apple's newer portables...

Download the iTunes plugin and play that funky music, white boy!

Unraveling The PowerPC Obsolescence Myth

Here's a really good article that helps to dispel the myth that PowerPC Macs are obsolete. I agree totally with the reasoning in it, which backs up the theory that Apple are in no way going to immediately stop development of PowerPC software, and concentrate exclusively on Intel software for the foreseeable future.

Why would Apple stop development of PowerPC software, when there are a lot more PowerPC Macs out there than Intel ones, and they've got a fantastic framework in place for developing Universal software... The same goes for application developers, for instance, I don't see the Adobe Creative Suite 3 being Intel only, it's going to solidly be Universal, and we'll probably get a Universal version of Creative Suite 4 in another two years.

Recognize Intel only apps on PowerPC machines

From Mac OS X Hints, it seems that Apple has implemented a method so as you can easily Recognize Intel only apps on PowerPC machines. It seems that the OS draws a Cancelled icon (Circle with a cross through it) over the top of the icon of any application you can't run on your system. From reading the comments, it's reported that using OS X on an Intel machine will also do the same thing for Classic applications.

Another new toy!

Picked up a second-hand Canon EOS 10D today, along with a 28 - 135 IS Lens, which is a nice, all-round zoom lens with Image Stabilisation.

I haven't had a good go at the camera yet, but have spent a bit of time R-ing-TFM - which explains what all the cryptic symbols around the buttons and switches all do.

I'll take it out this weekend and have a good go at shooting a wide range of subjects. Then, once I've done that, you (my poor reader) will be subjected to viewing the better of the images I'll be putting in the photo album.

Tuning Networking Parameters in Mac OS X

Spotted via Mac OS X Hints is an article on tuning your network stack on OS X for increased throughput.

Mac OS X has a single sysctl parameter, kern.ipc.maxsockbuf, to set the maximum combined buffer size for both sides of a TCP (or other) socket. In general, it can be set to at least twice the BDP. E.g:

sysctl -w kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=8000000

The default send and receive buffer sizes can be set using the following sysctl variables:

sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendspace=4000000

sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.recvspace=4000000

If you would like these changes to be preserved across reboots you can edit /etc/sysctl.conf.

You can use Apple's Broadband Tuner to add the necessary startup items and then put the required parameters into your /etc/sysctl.conf file to have them automatically reloaded at each reboot.

Original Article is here:Enabling High Performance Data Transfers [PSC]

Flock You!

New Browser. Flock.
It's based on FireFox, but with a whole heap more cool stuff - some of which can be done with FireFox extensions, some can't.
It's got an inbuilt blogging engine (which I'm testing here) - simply right-click on a page and hit "Blog This", enter some text and publish. Couldn't be easier!
Here's the lowdown from the site:

Flock is a free web browser that makes it easier than ever to share photos, stay up-to-date with news from your favorite sites, and search the Web. Take our tour to learn what's different about Flock, then download the beta to get started - and please tell us what you think.

Flock — The web browser for you and your friends

Manually Execute Javascript from Terminal

I recently received some spam, or more accurately, a phishing email, claiming doom and gloom regarding a bank. It had an innocent-looking URL in the email to click on, to supposedly read the news.
I'm not about to post the URL here on my blog, but you can email me if you're interested in having a look at it.
Through using some cURL action to have a look at the various server responses, and see where it was being redirected to. Eventually, it ended up on a page containing "encrypted" JavaScript.
Banking on the fact that the JavaScript code, when decrypted, would do something funky with Internet Explorer, I wanted to see what the code contained. As the decryption routine was at the start of the JavaScript code, all I needed was a method to run JavaScript from the command line.
Enter the Rhino project from Mozilla. Simply put, Rhino is JavaScript for Java.
Downloading it gave me a zip, containing among other things, a js.jar file, which is what we need.
I put the js.jar file in my ~/Library/Java/Extensions - you can put it anywhere you want.
I then set up a CLASSPATH environment variable for bash, in my .bashrc file like so:
export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:~/Library/Java/Extensions:~/Library/Java/Extensions/js.jar

and then closed and reopened the shell to use the new classpath.
Next, I used cURL to download the file, which was wrapped in <script> tags (which I removed) and saved it as test.js
Lastly, to execute it, I called the Rhino stuff like so:
java org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.Main demo.js
You can also define an alias in your .bashrc as well:
alias js='java org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.Main'
Which will make things easier if you plan to do a lot of JavaScript stuff.
When I executed the downloaded JavaScript, I had to manually edit it and change a reference from document.write() to print() so as the output from the decrypter was printed to standard output (ie, the Terminal)
The encrypted JavaScript then generated a bunch of regular-looking JavaScript that does a whole heap of browser detection (looking for IE or FireFox) and checking for some patches, before passing the detected version off to another CGI script, presumably with the payload in it, however when I checked it, the page was suspended =)



Update: The Australian IT has more details

Blender

Not much happening at the moment. I've been sinking a bit of time into having a crack at Blender a really powerfull, open source 3D graphics program. It's got a rather unique interface, that really takes some learning, but it shows a lot of potential, and has a very good rendering engine that can do ray tracing as well.

There is a massively steep learning curve involved, as the GUI, while it's come a long way since Blender's early days, is still difficult, and really optimised for the power user. There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts, so once you learn them, you leave one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse, and you can get pretty quick at navigating around in 3D space and manipulating objects. The modelling tools are also quite powerful, leading to the ability to relatively easily create organic curves and surfaces.

Once I've become a little more proficient in the program, I'll post some of my creations =)

Fiat Lux - The Movie

I've also been looking at HDRI (High Dynamic Range Images) recently and rediscovered Fiat Lux - an incredibly realistic animation done with some pretty cutting-edge computer graphics techniques. Check it out.

Here's a tutorial on creating HDRI images in photoshop using multiple exposures of a still scene to capture a wide range of lighting values.

deviantART

I've been a bit of a lurker over on deviantART for a little while now and have decided to put up some of my favourite photos, and any other half-decent artworks I've got. I'm going to dig through some old archive/backup CDs and see what I can dig up from my early days tweaking stuff in Phososhop 2.5 on Windows NT 4.0 =)

Anyway, it's a good site, there's some inspirational imagery there (there's also a heap of crap as well, but you get that with teh intrawabs these days) and definitely worth checking out every now and then to see what's going on at the down in the trenches of contemporary art these days...

Kai's Pesto Recipe

Take 1 bunch of Basil and pick off the leaves, leaving all the stems behind. Rinse them well and pat dry with a tea towel.
Gently roast a small handfull of pine nuts in butter or margarine over a low heat. Keep them moving in the pan and as soon as you see them start to turn a pale brown colour, remove from the heat immediately. They go from brown to burnt black in about 5 seconds. You have been warned! =)

You can also use peanuts, or cashew nuts if you like, or don't have pine nuts. I'm not a big fan of peanuts, but cashews are pretty good! Get the roasted ones, not the raw ones, and if they're salted, then don't add any extra salt to the pesto.

Put the basil leaves in a food processor (or, it will taste even better if you have an old-skool stone mortar and pestle) and give them a quick whizz to chop them up. add the pine nuts and a clove or two of garlic. As the garlic is raw, it will be pretty strong, so go easy, you can always add more later.

Pulse it all a few times to get it mixed and then, with the food processor on a low speed, drizzle in some olive oil to make a thick paste. Sprinkle in a pinch of sea salt flakes.

Next, finely grate a couple of handfulls of parmesan cheese (I like it pretty cheesy!) and add this to the mixture and process a bit more.

Lastly, with the food processor on a low speed again, drizzle in more olive oil until it's a relatively thick paste - not as thick as, say, peanut butter, but not too thin, although it's entirely up to you...
Keep scraping down the sides of the food processor bowl, to make sure that everything's all mixed evenly, and whizz it until it's all blended smoothly.

Make sure you taste it at various stages through making it, to keep it all on track - however it can take a fair amount of variation and still turn out good pesto.

You can also experiment with adding other things to it, like substitute some coriander instead of basil, change the pine nuts for something else, use a different hard grating cheese in place of the parmesan.

When are the G5 replacements coming?

A question I am getting asked quite a bit at the moment is "When will
Apple release the G5 replacement workstations?"
Let me go on the record as saying that we'll see them in the last
week of July. Sometime very shortly after Intel officially launches
their Core 2 (AKA Conroe) processors, which is scheduled to be on
July 23rd. They will be hitting the streets at somewhere around
somewhere between 2.5 and 3GHz, and if we get the Extreme version in
the workstations, then we will see a continuation of the liquid-
cooling systems in the current G5s. It will be a 64-bit CPU, so we
will still have the ability to use more than 4GB of RAM in
workstations. I'm not going to speculate if we will get quad CPUs
(via two Core 2 Duo chips) across the entire range, however it will
be an option at the high end. As much as I like the current G5 case,
I'm really hoping that we will see a redesign of the handles on the
top, to make them slightly more handle-like (ie, easier on the hands!)

The Wurst Gallery

Stumbled across The Wurst Gallery in my travels around the internet.

They have some good, contemporary art on their site, an immediate favourite of mine is a piece in their Vintage Vandals range by Driscoll Reid. How good is that, taking a pretty dodgy piece of op-shop artwork and "fixing" it – turning it into something I'd actually like to have on the wall.

More on iMac/Vista

I've had another go at it, following a combination of steps that I've found in various forums all over the internet.

I've now gotten Vista as far as getting past the boot loader, and displaying the progress bar on a black screen, where it is, I assume, loading drivers.

To get it this far, I had to:

• Run Boot Camp to repartition the drive


• use the gpt command, in OS X, to remove the 200MB EFI firmware partition at the start of the disk


• Run the Vista Installer and install on the Boot Camp created partition


• Boot off the Vista DVD again, and go into the repair options


• In CMD.EXE off the DVD, use bcdedit from the C:\Windows\System32 directory to change the boot device


• reboot =)

I'm assuming it's a driver problem, or more issues with GPT/MBR weirdness - what I think Boot Camp is doing is tweaking the Protective MBR so that Windows sees the MBR as being a representation of the GPT partitions. VIsta, knowing explicitly about the MBR and the GPT, isn't so easily fooled, and even though I've nuked the EFI partition on the disk, it's still a GPT partitioned disk, and I think this is where Vista is getting confused, as it works perfectly (well, a whole heap better anyway) if Vista formats the disk as MBR.

3 Column View for Mail.app

Similar to the 3 Column View in Entourage, which works really well on widescreen monitors to show you more of you email, some dude (with, it seems, a fear of html) has made up a bundlethat extends Mail.app to do the same thing. Now, rather than the regular 3 Pane View, you get 3 Columns, so you can see your mailboxes on the left, the emails in the currently selected mailbox in the middle, and the contents of the currently selected email on the right.

Try it out and see what you think...

Vista and OS X on an iMac

I had no problems getting Vista to install on the iMac Core Duo, as long as it was the only OS on the hard drive, or more specifically, if it initialised the hard disk itself, and used an MBR partitioning scheme.

Getting Vista and OS X to coexist is turning out to be rather difficult.

There's some useful information in the Windows and GPT FAQ on Microsoft's web site. I think that the problem is that Vista knows about a GPT partioned disk, and for the 64-bit version, it will boot off a GPT disk if you have an EFI firmware, whereas the 32-bit version, uses the BIOS and expects to boot off a MBR disk.

XP, being more tied to MBR, is fooled into seeing an MBR disk by Boot Camp, and will happily boot, however Vista sees past the MBR on the GPT disk and looks at the GPT partitions, and from there it won't boot, as it's using BIOS to boot, not EFI. At least, that's my theory on it all.



There are reports of people getting it working by doing the Boot Camp thing, installing Vista and then when it won't boot being able to run the repair off the install CD, however in Beta 2 this doesn't work for me - the repair fails.

The strange thing is that Vista installer sees the Vista partition created in Boot Camp as C:. it's just the bootloader doesn't, and therein lies my problem.

More Vista on a Mac

I'm having problems getting Vista and OS X to co-exist. I
successfully installed Vista on the iMac, but that was with
formatting the disk in the Microsoft installer, which then left me
unable to format the additional partitions as HFS+ for Mac OS X later
on. Vista booted fairly quickly, I seemed to get the whole user
experience, Aero Glass looks quite nice, with the realtime shadows
and blurry transparency, most hardware in the iMac was detected, one
exception being the AirPort card, however I was surprised to see the
iSight in the Device Manager.
Anyway, I've erased Vista, reinstalled OS X and am now trying more
Boot Camp action to see if I can get them to co-exist.

Windows Vista - on a Mac

I've had a pretty good run so far getting Windows XP to install, and run, quite happily with Parallels Workstation, but so far, no joy with Vista - I'm definitely nowhere near as happy with the experience as the chick on the Microsoft Vista site is, that's for sure... It's all to do with Parallels not having an ACPI BIOS, and Parallels are aware of the problem and plan to fix it in the next release of Parallels Workstation.

I've also had limited success going down the Boot Camp route, but at least it's looking a bit more promising than the dead-end I've hit with Parallels.

Problems formatting disks on Mac OS X

*Warning, following these directions WILL erase your hard disk, and you will have to pay large amounts of money to even try and recover any data*

I've occasionally had problems partitioning or formatting disks on Mac OS X. It seems that OS X will look at what's on disk before it writes a new partition table, and if it gets confused trying to understand what's already there, then it will fail to repartition or format the drive.

Having a disk that's been partitioned in a PC, and formatted as NTFS will also give it grief, sometimes, and sometimes it's just not possible with Disk Utility to reformat the disk as a Mac disk, either APM or GPT.

Enter good ol' dd to the rescue.

to completely erase the first 100MB of the internal disk in a Mac (note, you have to be started up off another disk) type the following:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk0 bs=1m count=100

(use sudo if necessary to gain root privileges)

what this does is:

dd :: for more info, see the man pages, or wikipedia. There is no consensus what dd actually stands for.

if=/dev/zero :: take the input from /dev/zero which is a device that, when read from, will return an unending stream of binary zeroes.

of=/dev/disk0 :: *DANGER WILL ROBINSON* this is the disk that will be nuked. There will be no warning, if you type this wrong, you will probably lose important data. No, really. If you do not want to wipe the first, internal disk in your mac, you will need to find the /dev/diskn entry that specifies your disk. The easiest way to do this is with the mount command.

bs=1m :: copy blocks of 1MB. This is optional

count=100 :: do 100 blocks, and if using blocks of 1MB, then it will copy 100MB of zeroes onto the disk, wiping the partition map, and most, if not all, of the directory structure of the first partition on the disk. As far as Disk Utility is concerned, after you do this, the disk looks like it's fresh from the factory. This is also optional, but if you exclude it, dd will just continue writing from the input file (if=/dev/zero) until the output file (of=/dev/disk0) is full – ie, the whole disk.

From AFP548 - Combining DHCP and DNS

Those geeks over at AFP548 have been at it again. I've always liked the integration between the DHCP and the DNS server in Microsoft's Active Directory. It's great to not have to use anything like $GENERATE statements to make a range of IP addresses for DHCP clients, and instead as a DHCP client gets an address, the DNS tables are updated with it's hostname.

Here's their writeup on how to combine DHCP and DNS on OS X Server. Unfortunately, you then won't be able to use Server Admin to control the whole lot, so you might want to get the DNS zone files set up with Server Admin first, and make sure that static addressing is all working, and then roll the config over to use with dynamic DNS updates.