Why i purchased a mac

I have been evaluating hackintosh for a month now and the experience is unparalleled. OSX has been a fusion of an OS that I always wanted. Applications are very easy to install because they are self contained, the UI makes me feel good about creativity, accessibly is just phenomenal and the console is just the linux experience I always liked when running a Gentoo machine. This is considering that I have an erratic install that does not have a proper Sleep and Speedstep.

I have been looking for months on the Apple Store refurb section for great deals. Since last week, it has been a serious spotting and I have learned that they do put current generation machines there. Realizing that Penryn and 45nm are great technologies to start with so I decided to get my first Mac. I am now waiting for a 15″ 2.4Ghz macbook pro with its multitouch and efficient battery life.

Since my wife is doing some serious photography now with her 450d, I also have to get her a current gen Macbook , clocked at 2.4Ghz and with a superdrive. This will reduce some tension if you know what I’m talking because she is just as tech savvy as I am.

I think I was slightly affected by the demo of Google Appengine because they are using macbook pros in one of their campfire and I was enticed to get a Textmate as well. I would like to understand this technology though I have very limited experience with python. It will be nice if they can add in language support for ruby and php.

Addtionally, I have been watching JK Rowling on her Harvard commencement address and when the video is about to be finish, I was slapped with the dreadful blue screen of death. I guess my T30 is due for retirement and Windows XP is just shooting itself on the foot.

So there you go, I bought a macbook pro and a macbook for the first time because of my hackintosh experience, google appengine and to run away from the dreadful BOD! If that makes any sense at all.

Jason Calacanis equals CEO on steroid but not a jerk

Well Jason is just on steroid when he talks about management stuff and he is definitely a humble person. I was able to ask him my queries on the previous post.

How is Mahalo?
How is your Audible ad (the famous twit uber ad for audible)?
He actually says what he is usually saying in TWIT.

I even asked my friend to take a picture of me with Jason through a stranger’s camera. My 400d is still on RMA because of a dead pixel. I hope she(the stranger) will email me the picture.

So in the end, I have a picture that I asked and a business card (that I did not asked) from this evangelist from Silicon Valley. I guess my time was never wasted in Cebit Australia 2008.

By the way, it is better to have a lunch in McDonalds than eating on the cafe inside the conference. The chicken burger is going to give you nightmares.

Cebit Australia 2008 uncertainty

I am bit excited about going to Cebit this year because finally I will be able to get a free 3 day break from work. My great excuse really is that I will be attending the SEO conference on the second day and this will greatly improve my skills in SEO for our website (Yeah right). Well, I am just going to look for trends and the Australian Market for SEO.

Cebit is nothing new, it is like a car show full of enterprisey displays. I am actually looking for innovation and technology that is not only driven by the corporate world but I guess money makes the world go round. I wish there would be something like South by Southwest here or even a Defcon.

I am here now at the Bloggercon booth ready to meet Jason Calacanis in person and see if the other guys blogging about his charater and mahalo campaign are correct about their impressions. I would probably ask him for the Audible Ad he run at Twit or the fancy Tesla.

I think Cebit is not the right place for software developers or technology enthusiast. It’s just like a roadshow with a paid conference running in the background. If there is a business that is getting a lot out of this, it will be those that print brochures and sell giveaways. Who wants printed brochure nowadays? Good thing the Queensland Govt booth gave me a usb flash drive for a change and some others are offerring free coffee and massage.

Bottomline, you can just download the exhibitor’s list and visit their website and you will probably get more information. A few startups have their founders on the booth and they will give you in-depth information about their products and services but the rest are just like Amex card sales rep. No offence for the Amex guys, they are quite better in sales than a bunch of these guys.

I don’t feel excited anymore to visit tomorrow but I have to because of the SEO conference. I will probably stop today at UNSW because they are running a Post graduate openhouse and I am interested in doing some academic stuff next year.

Shared hosting insecurity, core dumps, and troubled disk usage

It always amazed me how some of the sysads of these servers are obsessed with security but fail to see the other side of the picture.

The shared hosting account that I have, a reseller account by the way, won’t let you run normal things in PHP because of their false idea of security. The system uses the infamous CPanel setup as paranoid, when your web app use a fair amount of CPU, your site will be shut off.

Add this to httpd.conf

    RLimitMEM 295490218
    RLimitCPU 240

The funny thing is, they forget to turn off the Core Dump and this will mess the system by filling it with files that only the root can delete. This will give you erros in Disk Usage at CPanel, saying that you are using a huge (GB) space and it is only displaying a smaller (MB) space usage.

So please send the core dump in the void or at least turn them off

$ ulimit -c 0

For the users who have these sysads who don’t listen, instead of sending them to /dev/null together with the core dumps, you can create a script to delete these core dumps and put them on schedule using cron.

From here:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
 
    ## SPECIFY THE PATH TO THE DIRECTORY
    ## NOTE: NO TRAILING SLASH "/"
 
    $dir = "/home/PATHTOYOUR/public_html/phpBB3" ;
 
    ## OPEN AND READ THE DIRECTORY
 
    opendir (DIR, "$dir/");
    @FILES = grep(/^core/,readdir(DIR));
    closedir (DIR);
 
    ## DELETE THE CORE.* FILES
 
    foreach $FILES (@FILES) {
             unlink("$dir/$FILES");
       }

Save as delcore.pl

    15 * * * * /home/PATHTOYOUR/public_html/delcore.pl

Some of them are just clueless when I ask them to delete the core dumps for me. One has even ask me if he can delete the core*.php files in the Smarty library. Geez, what a day.

Reverting Leopard to the Welcome Screen after Install

I usually put the User Data in a different partition. And Leopard has a hobby of corrupting the User Space when you reboot it after it just froze itself.

Save yourself the time from doing the fresh install Setup by going back to the initial boot welcome screen after installation by using the following command:

sudo rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

Then get your user setting from Time Machine.

EDIT: It seems that Leopard is messing the mounting of Volumes everytime a cold reboot is needed. Unmount the UserData (Will be UserData 1) in Disk Utility

sudo rm -rf /Volumes/UserData

Mount the UserData in Disk Utility
Re Login

Controlling itunes from SSH

Code Listing. Combined with codes on comments

#!/bin/sh
#
####################################
# iTunes Command Line Control v1.0
# written by David Schlosnagle
# created 2001.11.08
####################################
 
showHelp () {
echo "-----------------------------";
echo "iTunes Command Line Interface";
echo "-----------------------------";
echo "Usage: `basename $0` ";
echo;
echo "Options:";
echo " status   = Shows iTunes' status, current artist and track.";
echo " play     = Start playing iTunes.";
echo " pause    = Pause iTunes.";
echo " next     = Go to the next track.";
echo " prev     = Go to the previous track.";
echo " mute     = Mute iTunes' volume.";
echo " unmute   = Unmute iTunes' volume.";
echo " vol up   = Increase iTunes' volume by 10%";
echo " vol down = Increase iTunes' volume by 10%";
echo " vol #    = Set iTunes' volume to # [0-100]";
echo " shuf  = Shuffle current playlist";
echo " nosh  = Do not shuffle current playlist";
echo " playlist "@" = Play iTunes' playlist named @";
echo " stop     = Stop iTunes.";
echo " quit     = Quit iTunes.";
}
 
if [ $# = 0 ]; then
showHelp;
fi
 
while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
arg=$1;
case $arg in
"status" ) state=`osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to player state as string'`;
echo "iTunes is currently $state.";
if [ $state = "playing" ]; then
artist=`osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to artist of current track as string'`;
track=`osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to name of current track as string'`;
echo "Current track $artist:  $track";
fi
break ;;
 
"play"    ) echo "Playing iTunes.";
osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to play';
break ;;
 
"pause"    ) echo "Pausing iTunes.";
osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to pause';
break ;;
 
"next"    ) echo "Going to next track." ;
osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to next track';
break ;;
 
"prev"    ) echo "Going to previous track.";
osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to previous track';
break ;;
 
"mute"    ) echo "Muting iTunes volume level.";
osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to set mute to true';
break ;;
 
"unmute" ) echo "Unmuting iTunes volume level.";
osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to set mute to false';
break ;;
 
"vol" ) echo "Changing iTunes volume level.";
vol=`osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to sound volume as integer'`;
if [ $2 = "up" ]; then
newvol=$(( vol+10 ));
osascript -e "tell application \"iTunes\" to set sound volume to $newvol";
break ;
fi
 
if [ $2 = "down" ]; then
newvol=$(( vol-10 ));
osascript -e "tell application \"iTunes\" to set sound volume to $newvol";
break ;
fi
 
if [ $2 -gt 0 ]; then
newvol=$2;
osascript -e "tell application \"iTunes\" to set sound volume to $newvol";
break ;
fi
break ;;
 
"playlist" ) echo "Changing iTunes playlist.";
osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes"' -e "set the new_playlist to \"$2\" as string" -e "play playlist new_playlist" -e "end tell";
break ;;
 
"shuf" ) echo "Shuffle is ON.";
osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to set shuffle of current playlist to 1';
break ;;
 
"nosh" ) echo "Shuffle is OFF.";
osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to set shuffle of current playlist to 0';
break ;;
 
"stop"    ) echo "Stopping iTunes.";
osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to stop';
break ;;
 
"quit"    ) echo "Quitting iTunes.";
osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to quit';
exit 1 ;;
 
"help" | * ) echo "help:";
showHelp;
break ;;
esac
done

Reference:
MacOSX Hints

Sharing a folder into a Group of Users in Active Directory Windows 2003

Sharing a folder into a Group of Users in Active Directory

Open Active Directory
Star>Run>das.msc

Create a Group
Right click on the Domain > New > Group > Group Name (‘Enter your preferred name’), Group Scope is Global, Group type is Security > Ok

Add Members to the Group

Add Share Permission
Righ click on the Shared Folder > Properties > Sharing > Permissions > Share Permission (‘Authenticated User:ALL’) > Apply

Add Security
Righ click on the Shared Folder > Properties > Security > Add the new security Group > Apply

Reference here (Best practices for AD and share permissions)

Essential bloggable material

On Windows 2003 Server
Running DOS 16-bit app on Windows 2003:
Besure that there is a copy of Config.NT and Autoexec.NT on Windows System32 folder

“Printer Driver was not installed. Operation could not be completed.”
Apparently the drivers.cab is corrupted. Delete drivers.cab from C:\Windows\Driver Cache and copy the one from the Installer

Installing Old Driver in Windows 2003
– Has something to do with Group Policy on restricting Windows NT4.0 and Windows 2000 kernel-mode drivers

Start > Run
gpedit.msc
Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates >Printers >
Disallow installation of printers using kernel mode drivers > Disabled

On Wii
Playing Rayman Ravvings II is fun
Ghost Squad is an FPS cooperative fun ;-); can’t wait for House of the Dead