Ontic Oren

UPDATE 5/26: Apogee has a new release of the firewire driver that fixes the issue!

All is not well with my shiny new Apogee Duet.

It’s causing kernel panics all too often. Plugging it in while the computer is on is the sure fire way. It also seems to have issues waking from sleep, crashing 60%+. I don’t appear to be alone on this issue, nor is it limited to the Duet.  Mailed support 9 days ago with my latest info, except for a cursory response nothing yet.  Pulling 50% of my RAM doesn’t sound like a good idea. I really hope Apogee and Apple figure this out soon. It’s a wonderful device that I like more and more as I use it, the crashes are killing me though.

As of 12:30PM today, I’m on to my 3rd iPhone.

Phone 1 died when I dropped it.   Apple was awesome, they replaced it no questions asked.

Yesterday morning, I woke up and all of a sudden the bottom dock area of the phone stopped responding.  I could unlock the phone since the slider is a little bit higher, but I couldn’t actually get to any dock items.  This makes using the phone a bit… difficult.  Actually, impossible.  I figured out that double-tapping the home button to get to favorite would let me dial those people.  My sister was smart enough to point out that I could then add anyone I wanted to the favorites list and call them.

No SMS, no email, no maps searching, since all those require you hitting the nice button in the lower right.

Made an appointment at the apple store, went in, and walked out 15 min later with yet another new phone.   Great service, all is working well.  For now.  Let’s hope that phone #3 lasts for a longer while.

Installed the latest leopard update – 10.5.2 today. NOT a good idea.Neither of my computers can now connect to my DLINK DIR-635 over wifi. Or at least, they connect, get an IP address, etc, but I can’t actually send any data. In fact, it’s really weird. At one point, I could ping external IP addresses just fine, but I couldn’t ping my router. Which is the default route. WTF?

I tried pinging my router – that didn’t work well:

PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=14 ttl=64 time=544.516 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=15 ttl=64 time=0.485 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=16 ttl=64 time=0.483 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=22 ttl=64 time=543.981 ms^C
--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
28 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 85% packet lossround-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.483/272.366/544.516/271.882 ms

I changed my SSID, turned on WPA2 (really bad idea, now I get no route to host) turned it off, rebooted everything. No go.In the middle of writing this, I even just lost ALL connectivity via Ethernet. I had to reboot my iMac just go get connected again. Something very very odd is going on here.

A warning and complaint to all:Offline support in Mail.app in 10.5.1 (and 10.5.0) is a DISASTER!  Actions performed offline (filing) DO NOT get synced when you connect back up.  Further, every time you send a message it warns you that you’re not connected!  I lost 2 hours of email work on the plane.  Apparently only 50% of the 40 emails I sent actually found their way out, I can’t tell what is what, and who has seen whom.  It’s a disaster.  DO NOT USE mail.app for offline.darn it.

Yes, it appears to be a bad deal for the developer. It’s a great deal for the user though.The MacHeist software bundle takes 14 apps and sells them for 90% off – $49 total. And that’s a real discount – not some ginzu knife discount. I personally had purchased 1passwd in the past for the indicated price. I’ve already received my money’s worth – Snapz Pro X is a great way to do screencasts, and costs $69 alone.Ensuring they are buzzword compliant, they also have a viral marketing aspect – refer people to receive additional software. Clearly they’re roped me in to it. Finally, it’s marketing genius that they give 25% of the order to charity – help you assuge your guilt somehow? Turn buying into a community action? Either way, it’s really worth checking out, and taking advantage of. The deal ends Wednesday.Referral link – MacHeist Direct link – MacHeist

I’m having some very weird issues with leopard. The dock seems to have rendering issues – the hover text boxes don’t always have their border, and the spring folders are totally messed up. Those gray round bars are supposed to be the files. No text, and no icons for the files.  Anyone have any idea what’s going on?

CONGRATULATIONS!

A huge group of people have pulled off the impossible. They have managed to release a developer preview of Open Solaris in October. 8:32PM PST 10/31 shall go down in history!

I immediately downloaded and ran the image in VMware Fusion 1.1RC1 on my 24″ Santa Rosa iMac. Booted fast, and I was running. LIVE CD! Hooray! Ran the installer, enjoyed myself a trivial process, and waited ~20 min for it to finish.

Sadly, there is some weird weird bug that I’ve run into before that all the recent solaris builds, including Opensolaris exhibit – they hang/take forever to boot. Waited ~5 min and it finally started it’s thing. Sure enough, it’s got a nice bash shell, it’s snappy, firefox works, the package system seems to have packages, and it’s even running ZFS by default! I was even going to drop the output from “zfs list” here, but realized without VMware tools there’s no easy way to copy/paste between opensolaris and OSX, and I’m not in the mood to type it all in, nor FTP/SCP it around. So trust me, or just run it yourself!

Took the mandatory screen shot too:

Upgraded to Leopard last night. (BTW, drove by the Palo Alto Apple store on the way home, where there was a ~100 person line @ 6 waiting for the store to reopen. For an OS. Apple, please rub some juju on me too). As you can imagine, there are thousands of people pontificating all over the web. I haven’t seen anyone cover the one change that means the world to me: Spotlight and mail.Previously, searching for mail was tedious. My standard M.O. involves remembering that Steve sent me an email with a presentation in it, but not really remembering anything else. It used to be, I created a “smart folder” for email from steve, then searched that folder for emails to me or that contained a presentation. Not exactly useful.Now, just type: “from:steve to:oren odp” (yeah, I use neooffice/staroffice) and I’ve got my results. This is the way google desktop, MSN desktop, and even ancient Lookout search all worked. It’s been the ONE thing I’ve really missed in my switch to a mac, and now it’s here! I’m such a loser – but this made the $120 upgrade totally worth it. Doesn’t hurt that spotlight is now blazing fast too.

Upgraded to Leopard last night.  (BTW, drove by the Palo Alto Apple store on the way home, where there was a ~100 person line @ 6 waiting for the store to reopen.  For an OS.  Apple, please rub some juju on me too).  As you can imagine, there are thousands of people pontificating all over the web.  I haven’t seen anyone cover the one change that means the world to me:  Spotlight and mail.Previously, searching for mail was tedious.  My standard M.O. involves remembering that Steve sent me an email with a presentation in it, but not really remembering anything else.  It used to be, I created a “smart folder” for email from steve, then searched that folder for emails to me or that contained a presentation.  Not exactly useful.Now, just type: “from:steve to:oren odp” (yeah, I use neooffice/staroffice) and I’ve got my results.  This is the way google desktop, MSN desktop, and even ancient Lookout search all worked.  It’s been the ONE thing I’ve really missed in my switch to a mac, and now it’s here!  I’m such a loser – but this made the $120 upgrade totally worth it.  Doesn’t hurt that spotlight is now blazing fast too.   

Recently decided to try out VMWare ESX.

• ESX offers two management interfaces, a desktop client or a browser interface. Neither support the Mac.
• It looks like you must use the “Virtual Infrastructure Client”, a windows app, to get started using ESX
• Took me a little bit to figure out how to get ESX running inside Fusion. Virtualization.info had some good pointers. Watch out if you’re copying from the web for “smart quotes”. Curly quotes will crash VMware right quick

The results: a really silly screenshot. What, you may be asking, is that? It would be Joomla appliance from rPath running on ESX running on Fusion, with the VI client running on Windows running on Fusion. It worked amazingly well, though joomla booting was a bit slow – about 30 min.In case you’re wondering, the key lines to add/edit in the vmx file are:

scsi0.VirtualDev = "lsilogic"ethernet0.virtualdev = "e1000"monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = TRUEmonitor_control.vt32 = TRUE