I’ve owned the domain ‘freebsd.cx’ for a number of years and it’s got a certain amount of history behind it that a few of you may remember.  However, given CoCCA’s recent price hikes (50 USD a year!) and the fact that it’s now only used by a couple of people for email mean that I’m disinclined to fork out for the renewal fee.

If you’re still using an @freebsd.cx address I can offer you @xen.cx instead, otherwise consider it dead.  RIP!

Following on from Dan’s how-to regarding the configuration of SunCluster 3.2 within VMware Fusion, here’s my additional notes on doing this from a minimal install (i.e core software group) so as to keep the size of the VMs down.

First thing you’ll want to do is install some packages to make your life a bit less painful.  Connect the DVD device with the Solaris 10 ISO and mount it within your VM:

# mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/dsk/c0d0t0s0 /mnt/cdrom

Then we can install some packages from /mnt/cdrom/Solaris_10/Product. Let’s start off with some basic utilities, bash, and online documentation (man pages):

# yes | pkgadd -d . SUNWxcu4
# yes | pkgadd -d . SUNWadmfr SUNWadmfw
# yes | pkgadd -d . SUNWbash
# yes | pkgadd -d . SUNWdoc SUNWman

SSH is also quite useful:

# yes | pkgadd -d . SUNWsshr SUNWsshu SUNWsshdr SUNWsshdu SUNWsshcu
# /lib/svc/method/sshd -c
# svcadm enable ssh

The second command will create your RSA and DSA host keys, without this you won’t be able to connect.

Then there’s a bunch of additional prerequisite packages you need to install before SunCluster itself. These are as follows:

SUNWtcatu
SUNWj3rt
SUNWj3dev
SUNWmfrun
SUNWxwrtl
SUNWxwice
SUNWxwplt
SUNWctpls
SUNWxwfnt
SUNWxwplr

You also need some Solaris Zones related gubbins otherwise you’ll see various errors pertaining to missing libraries such as libzonecfg.so.1:

SUNWzoneu
SUNWzoner
SUNWpool
SUNWluu
SUNWluzone
SUNWlur
SUNWpoolr
SUNWlucfg

Finally, the core / reduced networking group installation also disables some RPC related services that are necessary for cluster node communication. You’ll find that installation hangs, for example, when the primary node is waiting for the secondary to reboot. To remedy this, do the following:

# svccfg -s rpc/bind setprop config/local_only = false
# svccfg -s rpc/bind setprop config/enable_tcpwrappers = false
# svccfg -s rpc/bind listprop
# svcadm refresh rpc/bind

One other oddity I noticed was that I was seeing a bunch of RPC timeouts when looking at anything IPMP related. This turned out to be some DNS resolution going on as a result of the IP addresses assigned to the cluster interconnects and my ISP returning bullshit records. It’s easily fixed by editing /etc/nsswitch.conf and amending the ipnodes line as follows:

ipnodes: files

You should then be ready to kick off the install of SunCluster, and everything else is exactly as per Dan’s guide.

I dusted off the D700 last night to take some shots of Rox’s friend’s band, Immergrün, at the Schlosskeller here in Darmstadt.  It’s a pretty cool little venue but awkward to take photos, as while it’s fairly intimate there’s huge columns in the way (well, it is a cellar…) that kind of limit your options.  Anyway, I got a few decent shots – nothing groundbreaking, but it felt good to be at a gig and shooting some pictures.  Checkit:

It’s always kind of hard to take photos of a band whose music you aren’t familiar with, as you don’t know when they’re going to build up and kick off, those being the moments that you want to capture.  Still, these guys were pretty tight and didn’t seem to mind me making a nuisance of myself at the front.

]]> http://dischord.org/blog/2010/02/27/immergrun/feed/ 4 http://dischord.org/blog/2010/02/10/my-hackintosh-one-week-on/ http://dischord.org/blog/2010/02/10/my-hackintosh-one-week-on/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:33:48 +0000 nick http://dischord.org/blog/?p=924

Hackintoshes have always seemed like way more effort than they’re worth to me.  Custom kernels, problematic updates, random crashes, it all flies in the face of why you use an Apple operating system (and computer) in the first place.  While I can appreciate the hacker aesthetic, I’ve never really had the inclination or patience to try it for myself – until now.

Dan‘s been running Mac OS X on his Dell for a couple of years with some success, but it was hearing him talk about Snow Leopard and how well that works pretty much out-of-the-box, including updates from Apple, that made me rethink my position.  Fast forward a couple of weeks and here I am in front of my own PC which now runs an (almost) flawless installation of Cupertino’s finest operating system.  The installation was laughably straightforward, but I’ve outlined it below just for shits and giggles all the same:

Hardware

• Intel E6600 2.4GHz Core2Duo Processor
• Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi mainboard.  SATA configured as AHCI in BIOS, no other changes of note.
• 4GB DDR2
• EVGA GTX260-216 896MB VGA
• 250GB Seagate HDD connected to SATA5

Installation was made with Empire EFI v1.085.  I almost gave up at the first hurdle I wasn’t able to boot from my SATA DVD drive as it echoed some random EBIOS error, to which anecdotal evidence on various forums suggested dodgy media.  I was using a disc which I knew to work so this wasn’t the problem in my case, and in the end I made an OS X USB boot disk by following some instructions out there on the Interwebs, and then booted the installation from that.  The only thing of note here was that I had to add the flags ‘GraphicsEnabler=Y PciRoot=0′ in order to get graphics to work, as my nVidia 260-based card relies on that injector for compatibility.

Anyway, the 250GB disk was dedicated to OS X and so partitioned accordingly during install.  The remainder of the process went smoothly, and after rebooting OS X came up pretty much as clean as a whistle.  All that was then left was to run myHack (on the Empire EFI CD for convenience!) which installs the ‘standard’ set of compatibility kexts as well as the Chameleon EFI bootloader onto your disk along with a really fucking ugly set of boot screens.  Everything was working from this point except for wireless and my NIC, the latter of which was easily fixed by a simple modification to one of the Apple kexts for MarvellYukon devices.  Incidentally, the wifi I don’t actually care for as my machine runs into a GbE switch that also has a wireless bridge attached, and so at this point I was happy.

The final litmus test for me was to install 10.6.2 via SU (as well as the recent security updates), migrate everything from my MacBook, and then sit back in amazement as it all worked flawlessly.  So now I have a solid, fully functional install of SL on my PC.  As I’m sat in front of an Apple LCD and using an Apple keyboard, as long as you don’t look under the desk who is to know that it’s not really a Mac Pro!? :)

The only thing that’s broken at this point is sleep mode, but as that’s something I’d never use on my workstation I’m disinclined to spend time hacking around with it any more.  To be fair the installation does seem very fragile and prone to basic errors, such as if the permissions are out of whack on any of your kexts it simply won’t boot with no clear indication as to what the root cause is, and quite often recovery can take a little while so it’s really more hassle than it’s worth.  In practice it’s extremely solid with everything working at full speed (including graphics and I/O) and it seems super snappy overall.  I don’t have to worry about updates or it breaking on a whim and so that’ll do me.

I flit back and forth between Safari, Chrome, and Firefox but always end up using the latter as my ‘main’ browser for one simple reason – the plugins.  While Chrome may be quicker and Safari launches faster and has better text rendering, Firefox can’t be touched for one simple reason – the vast array of community-contributed plugins that are currently available.

I did document my favourites back in 2007, but here’s an updated list now that we’re living in the future:

• AppTabs.  This is handy mainly for Fever, and while previously I used a Fluid-generated SSB for this it makes more sense (and saves on memory I guess) to have it right there in Firefox.
• AdBlock.  Despite the fuss surrounding its use, I find it a no-brainer of a plugin.
• Delicious Bookmarks.  I’ve been using Delicious for a long time now, and I’ve got bookmarks neatly arranged by tags so that I can have a specific ‘Daily’ section, ‘Social’, and so on.  It’s extremely convenient having this arrangement right there in your browser, and the service plays nicely with Quicksilver too (via the Social Bookmarking plugin).
• Download Statusbar.  The default download dialogue in all browsers seems to suck, but this plugin for Firefox gets it right.  It’s unobtrusive and offers at-a-glance progress for whatever you happen to have downloading at the time.
• Fission.  Purely cosmetic, it changes the progress indicator so that it’s in the Address Bar a la Safari.
• HttpFox.  I’ve been using this instead of the ‘Live HTTP Headers’ plugin which has been out of date for a while now.  It comes into its own when diagnosing problems with a particular website.  Provides real-time output of the entire protocol exchange so that you can see exactly what your browser is doing and each server’s response to every request.
• Omnibar.  Integrates the search and location bar, kind of makes the overall appearance a bit tidier.
• Web Developer.  The swiss army knife of plugins, this is handy for anything from CSS teardowns to analysing page load times.
• GrApple.  Ok, so this isn’t strictly a plugin per se, it’s a theme for Mac OS X only that makes Firefox actually look like an Apple application.

And here’s the end result:

Exciting stuff!

The Budweiser ‘wassup‘ advert sparked quite a few parodies back in its day – including some from the company itself, but there was one in particular I was especially fond of in which the ‘wasssuuuup’s were replaced by Yorkshiremen saying ‘ey up’ instead.  Fast forward a few years and a conversation with my girlfriend resulted in me trying to rediscover this lost gem but to no avail.  No searches on Youtube or any strings I tried in Google* revealed what I was looking for, so I basically gave up.

Until now.

EYUUUUUP

You can thank the one and only Paul Fletcher for this, as I happened upon on email of his – purely by chance – back from the beginning of 2001 with this attached.  I’ve found a shit-ton of emails going way back to 1997, so I’ll no doubt bore you with some more blasts from the pasts later.  Current ideas include various Minor Threat Q2 demos, early email signatures of the rich and famous (ScanmaN, Shad, Boothy…) and so on.

[*] Cue some nerd posting a direct link in the comments.

This morning Dan‘s mailbox was graced with some shitty Microsoft newsletter which named and shamed 21 companies busted for selling computers with dodgy copies of their software.  It’s surprising to see how many of these are from ‘up North’ (Bolton, Manchester, Oldham and so on), and just out of curiosity I did a quick Google search for one of the offenders – 1Hr Computing, in Manchester – whereby I came across this Microsoft press release.

There’s some pretty choice quotes in there, such as this one:

Mr Murphy from 1Hr Computers said, “We recognise that we weren’t installing Microsoft software correctly, and that’s something we take seriously.”

Yeah, installing Windows Vista from a copy you downloaded via The Pirate Bay is probably a pretty fucking obvious clue that “ur doing it wrong“.  It gets worse towards the end, where it sounds as if they’ve been brainwashed following a visit from Microsoft’s “licensing specialists”.:

After two face-to-face visits from Microsoft licensing specialists, I now look at their products in terms of how they can help me drive revenue, for example using Office Ready PC3.

It’s almost as if these guys were sent off to Microsoft’s equivalent of the `Ministry of Love’ for a little bit of `correction’.

I was nosying back through some old posts on my site and came across this one from 2006 regarding my favourite Mac OS X applications, and figured it’d be interesting to  update this for 2009 / 2010.  While the ‘way’ I work feels like it hasn’t changed, the range of core applications I use to accomplish daily tasks certainly has:

• Google QSB.  Yes, I’ve recently ditched Quicksilver since moving to Snow Leopard on my MacBook, mainly for performance as it seemed particularly sluggish for unknown reasons.  I may switch back, but for now I’m using a customized version of QSB with Google’s obnoxious branding removed.
• Adium.  Still the best multi-protocol chat client.
• Apple’s Mail.app.  I moved all email for my domain to Google’s Hosted Domain service about a year ago, and with that stopped using mutt and started using Apple’s mail client full time instead.  It has its quirks, but the Spotlight integration etc. makes up for it.
• Fever (+ Fluid.app).  I’ve also ditched Newsfire and started using Shaun Inman‘s Fever instead, which does some clever stuff that makes wading through a mountain of RSS feeds that much simpler and quicker.  It also plays nicely with my iPhone, another important consideration.
• Firefox.  My main browser on OS X, it’s quick enough for the most part but wins mainly because of the plugins that I can’t live without.  Losing the Delicious menu feels like I’ve lost an arm.
• Things.  I use this to organise all my ‘tasks’, both at work and outside.  The iPhone synchronisation works a charm.
• Tweetie.  Since Twitter has taken off this is now part of my ‘core’ applications that I feel lost without.  While the desktop client is in need of an update, it’s still about the best there is.
• VMware Fusion.  Always handy to have around, I’ve got a minimal Windows XP install which I use daily (still no fucking VMware Infrastructure Client for Mac or Linux) as well as an OpenBSD VM and an Arch Linux VM.
• Adobe Lightroom.  I now do the vast majority of my photo sorting and editing all from within this one application, only switching to Photoshop when there’s some pixel-specific task at hand.
• Yojimbo.  You should probably read this post by Shaun Blanc on why you need Yojimbo in your life.
• Simplenote and Justnote.  Together these provide the perfect way to keep notes synchronised between my iPhone and anywhere else, the Justnote client on OS X being a neat little HUD-type application that’s minimal and unobtrusive.  While you can pair Simplenote’s web-interface with Fluid to create a little desktop application, the Justnotes client is a little neater and works better.
• Dropbox.  Great service which provides a seamless way to synchronise files and folders with their cloud service.  It’s not just the synchronisation though, their whole service is amazing from being able to restore multiple versions of the same file through to proper clients for Mac, Windows and Linux.
• iTunes, Growl, Terminal.app, and the same core console applications – GNU/screen, lftp, vim, and irssi mostly installed via MacPorts.  Stuff like OpenSSH, bash, and so on also go without saying :)

So there you have it, that’s the definitive – for now – list of applications that I couldn’t live without.  I’ll look back in another year or so and see how that’s changed….

Here’s a choice quote from Simon Aldous, who is a Microsoft’s partner group manager, regarding Windows 7.  While on one hand it’s nice that Microsoft have (finally) admitted that they’ve drawn heavily from Mac OS X’s design and philosophy when it comes to the user interface, his closing comment is what stands out (for all the wrong reasons):

One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.

Emphasis mine.  What a truly remarkable thing to say.

According to this post, booting into a 64-bit kernel in Snow Leopard on the ‘original’ 13″ Unibody MacBook is artificially crippled by Apple, despite the hardware being perfectly capable:

$ ioreg -p IODeviceTree -w0 -l | grep firmware-abi
| |   "firmware-abi" = <"EFI64">

This is somewhat annoying given that I’m a proud owner of said machine.  Why bother, you might ask?  Is it worth it?  Well that’s up to you, but significant performance increases have been reported especially in applications like Lightroom and Photoshop, so for me it’s worthwhile.

Anyway, the trick – as that article describes – is to modify the list of 64-bit capable models in boot.efi, and it’s more straightforward than you might think.

Firstly you’ll need to download an application called HexEdit from here, and then copy the boot.efi file somewhere for editing:

$ sudo cp /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi ~/Desktop/

Fire up HexEdit, and then open up the boot.efi file on your desktop.  Select Find / Go To Address from the menubar, and enter 0x266E8 as the address to jump to. You’ll see the following:

0x266E0: 38 47 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Amend this to say:

0x266E0: 38 47 01 00 00 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Be careful that you overwrite those values, and not accidentally insert.  Save the file, go back to the terminal and enter the following commands:

$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices
$ sudo chflags nouchg boot.efi
$ sudo cp boot.efi boot.efi.old
$ sudo cp ~/Desktop/boot.efi .
$ sudo chown root:wheel boot.efi
$ sudo chflags uchg boot.efi
$ sudo bless --folder /System/Library/CoreServices --file /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi

Note that we took a copy of the original boot.efi, just in case things happen to go awry.  You’ll also need to tell SL to boot the 64bit kernel by default, so do the following:

$ sudo vi /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

And amend the Kernel Flags to read:

<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>arch=x86_64</string>

This will make your change to a 64-bit kernel the default.  If you wish to revert to the 32-bit kernel, press and hold 32 on the keyboard as your computer boots.

If all’s well, System Profiler should report that you’re running a 64-bit Kernel and Extensions:

23:31 [nick] man nice
23:31 [nick] my twitter account has been suspended
23:31 [nighty-] lol wtf
23:31 [nighty-] why?
23:31 [Durz|lnx] oh noes
23:31 [nick] no idea
23:31 [Durz|lnx] gonna be climbing the walls within a couple of days
23:31 [Durz|lnx] trainspotting style

I’ve been a pretty keen user of Twitter for about 18 months now, but that all stopped last night thanks to my account being suspended due to ‘suspicious activity’:

This happened while I was using the service as per usual;  I noticed an authentication failure message from my Twitter client, checked on the site, and saw the above.  There isn’t any immediate or obvious reason for this, but according to the relevant section from the Twitter help site, it was one (or more!) of these things:

• Terms of Service Violations
• Technical Abuse
• Spam Investigation

Given that I was using the service via a pretty popular client, doing normal shit such as replying to people, I can’t see how it’s any of the first two.  But ah, spam investigation – that rings a very small bell.  The only thing I can think of there is that I mentioned Cialis and Viagra when commenting on a spam email I’d received for Tamiflu.  But surely Twitter’s spam filtering isn’t so overly zealous to suspend an account for the mere mention of these words, regardless of context?

I logged a ticket in appeal – which was immediately set to resolved, what the fuck – reopened said ticket, and am now awaiting some kind of update.  I’m not going to hold my breath though, because apparently “accounts may be suspended for a minimum of 30 days for research.”

All this comes two days before I’m due to jet off to sunnier climes for a couple of weeks, which is a shame as normally Twitter is what I’d used to spam update my friends with what I’ve been up to.  The wonders of the modern web eh?  I’m almost tempted to do a Fletch and fuck social networking off, although ironically he still uses Twitter.  Maybe I’ll update this thing more often instead?!  Fancy that!

Update:  This has been fixed!  I had literally no communication from Twitter themselves – no update on the support website, no emails, nada.  Then I woke up Friday morning with an email in my Inbox saying I had a new follower, so I checked my account and it had been reinstated.  The new follower was, of course, a spam account.

A decent RSS client is one of those must-have applications in my experience (if you value keeping up with anything on the Internet that is), something that let’s you quickly sort the wheat from the chaff, save time by not having to browse sites individually, and consolidate all that information flow into one place on your desktop / mobile device.

For the past couple of years I’ve been content with Newsfire on the Mac, and getting by using Popurls.com when I’m on anything else (including my iPhone).  This all changed for me though when Shaun Inman (of Mint fame) released Fever, an application that takes a fresh approach to managing large volumes of data that result from subscribing to numerous RSS feeds.

Firstly I should say that it’s not a desktop application in the traditional sense, although you can treat it as such.  It’s actually PHP / MySQL based, the idea being you host it yourself on your own server but if push comes to shove you can of course install it on your desktop (easy on OS X, not so much on Windows).  It has a pretty web-based interface that’s also optimised for the iPhone (more on that in a minute), and when combined with SSB technologies such as Fluid.app or Prism it’s a close call to discern it from any other ‘normal’ application.  The former even updates the icon in your dock to show unread post count, for example.

Visual goodness aside, two things sold this to me.  The first being how Fever manages your feeds – Shaun has created an interesting analogy by having two different ‘types’ of feeds, ‘Kindling’ and ‘Sparks’.  Essentially, Kindling are those websites that you consider to be pretty much essential, sites with unique content and editorials that you regularly check out on a daily basis.  Sparks are the sites that basically just link elsewhere and whose purpose is mainly to propagate content rather than generate anything unique.  Stuff like Digg, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz and so on fall into this category for me.  Fever’s party piece is to consolidate these two into a hot list, aggregating the really popular links that appear in your Sparks and Kindling thus raising their profile (or temperature if you want to stick to the analogy) in this hot list.  Once you’ve got a few things on the go it ends up looking like this.

The other selling point for me was the iPhone optimised interface.  I’ve been waiting for what seems like an eternity for a port of Newsfire, with the author promising that it’s coming “some day”, but I’ve pretty much given up hope.  No need now though – check out how Fever looks, it’s swish:

Anyway, it’s all detailed over at the Fever homepage and there’s even a video to watch which does a far, far better job of explaining how it works than I could ever do.

All in all I’m pretty impressed.  It might seem like a relatively steep purchase at $30 in these times of super cheap deals on the App Store, especially considering you have to host it yourself, but given the thought behind this application and the polished quality of implementation I think it’s a bargain.

My usual system of managing emails is pretty simple.  Anything that I need to follow up or reference in the near future lives in my Inbox.  If it’s something I want to save, it gets archived out of the way and I can search for it later.  Pretty easy, right?

This is straightforward when using Gmail’s web interface – you have your Inbox view by default, and a big ‘Archive’ button to move those emails out of your way.  When using most mail clients, such as Apple’s Mail.app, you achieve the same thing by dragging a mail from your Inbox view into Gmail’s “All Mail” folder (as it’s represented via IMAP).  Deleting mails works fine, assuming you have your Trash folder set up to be Gmail’s “Bin”.

However, performing this via mutt isn’t quite so straightforward because of how Gmail’s tagging system works and how it’s interpreted by IMAP.  By default, deleting a mail in mutt will move it out of your Inbox, but it won’t be stuck in Bin, so it’s effectively just archived.  You need to tell mutt that your trash folder is “[Google Mail]/Bin”:

set trash=”imaps://imap.googlemail.com/[Google Mail]/Bin”

All good so far.  So what about archiving?  In mutt, it seems if you manually copy a mail to “[Google Mail]/All Mail” it stays in your Inbox, which is of no use to me.  So instead, and after some experimentation, I use the following macros:

macro index,pager \Ca “<enter-command>unset trash\n <delete-message>”
macro index,pager d “<enter-command>set trash=\”imaps://imap.googlemail.com/[Google Mail]/Bin\”\n <delete-message>”

So now if I want to archive a mail I hit Ctrl-A in the index or in the pager, and if I properly want to delete a mail I just hit ‘d’ as before.  Problem solved.

This is a cheap (and nasty?) hack for ignoring a DHCP server’s hostname suggestion when using Mac OS X. Add this line into /etc/hostconfig:

HOSTNAME=”deadline”

Obviously change the value to something other than the name of my laptop (deadline).  The comment at the top of this file concerns me, but it works for now – on 10.5.6 – at least.

Quick tip: If you’re suffering from annoying timeout issues when using mutt to read your Googlemail over IMAP then try the following setting in your .muttrc:

set imap_keepalive=5

This solved the issue for me.

My hate for Twitter is growing. It’s recently subsided following a lamer purge with me removing people like @bobbyllew (his idiocy has pretty much ruined the Kryten character for me), @stephenfry, @wossy and so on.  The daily minutiae of these people really don’t concern me, and once the novelty factor has worn off it’s just grating to see the dullness that they post about.  Of course, what I tweet is probably just as boring to most.

Anyway, some of the ‘services’ that are popping up just seem beyond ridiculous.  I don’t understand ‘news site’ updates (surely that’s what RSS is for?), ‘radio station’ spammers, and so on but this one so far is the winner:

@yankcrime Nick, if you need an easy way to be reminded to keep hydrated, why not follow the water sprite and we’ll do it for you.

With a bio of:

When you forget to drink water, we’ll give you a friendly reminder.

Unreal.

Last night, in what can only be described as a moment of technical sadism, I decided to reinstall a Linux distribution on my PC.  Actually truth is I pretty much despise using Windows but I’m bored of having to hook up my MacBook everytime I want to get on with something other than games.  So why Linux?  Hardware support, and I guess professional interest to a certain extent seeing as that’s what I look after for a living (amongst other things).

Anyway, here’s a quick aside and some background.  I also have an IBM X40 which runs OpenBSD.  There’s a lot of OpenBSD devs that use the same laptop so the hardware support is pretty much fucking spot on.  It’s slightly creaky now given that it’s only a 1.4GHz Pentium M with a single GB of RAM, but for what I mainly do when I’m not playing games – which is run ratpoison + xterms + firefox – it’s plenty.  So my idea was to have the same setup but on my bigger ‘main’ PC, but using Linux as the support for the newer hardware is there.  Oh, and the wireless works fine with this machine at home.

Wireless networking – even with WPA-PSK etc. – in OpenBSD is easy.  It’s done The Unix Way (i.e as you would expect) via options to ifconfig.  The man page does a fantastic job of explaining what you need to do, which is basically pass a few options and the key in a specific format (encrypted with another tool) and you’re away.  Plumbing this up so that it works on boot is also as just as easy.

So onto Linux.  Now I’ve dabbled with wireless networking before in Linux and it wasn’t pretty.  wpa_supplicant, ndiswrappers for Windows network card drivers (not Linux’s fault, but still), and so on.  The documentation is poor, there’s multiple disparate pieces and all in all it gave me a headache at the time.  Fast forward a couple of years and so surely now this should all be a little simpler?  Apparently not.  We’ve had time to create stupidly pointless wobbly window animations, drop shadow effects, and equally redundant boot splash screens though I see.

To be fair, after installing Fedora 10 my initial impressions were good.  All hardware was properly detected and worked out of the box, and I configured the wireless network initially via the purty and seemingly helpful control panel applet which popped up in Gnome.  It all worked splendidly.  I didn’t much care for the large amount of turd that the installer placed on my disk in the form of internationalizations galore, ‘games’ I’ll never play, printing systems I’ll never use, but still – minor things that I can clean up afterwards, right?  First things first though – install ratpoison, disable GDM, and let’s go!

But wait, now I’m in ratpoison I no longer have a configured network.  Odd.  It seems Gnome provides a little applet that works as a front-end to the omnipotent NetworkManager that enables your wireless network when you login.  That seems somewhat counter intuitive and goes against everything that an established Unix admin would expect – networking should be ever present, whether you’re in X11 or not – but not to worry, must be easy to fix that right?  Let’s have a look at the man page for NetworkManager(1):

The NetworkManager daemon attempts to keep an active network connection available at all times. The point of NetworkManager is to make networking configuration and setup as painless and automatic as possible. If using DHCP, NetworkManager is intended to replace default routes, obtain IP addresses from a DHCP server, and change nameservers whenever it sees fit, with the aim of making networking Just Work.

And that’s all of it, pretty much.  There’s a couple of references to nm-tool(1) and something else, but that’s your lot.  The man page for nm-tool is just as sparse.  No pointers to any configuration files, no word on command line options, nothing.  And this is supposed to ‘Just Work’?  After  digging around on various cretinous forums I found a some juju method of adding an undocumented option to one config file, rebooting, then pissing about with some system authorisation controls in Gnome, only to find that it still doesn’t work.

What a joke.

You’ve probably noticed that it’s been snowing a bit as of late, and with that comes the typical flood of news with an array of idiots weighing in on what we should or should not be doing.  Here’s one choice comment made a Margaret Morrissey, who represents the ‘Parents Outloud’ campaign group, when talking about the school closures on Monday / Tuesday:

“We are giving children the message that when things get difficult, you should just stay at home and have fun.”

I dunno.  That sounds like a pretty fucking great idea to me really.

A combination of the winter evenings drawing in, having no Internet at home, and me now finding myself with a fair mount of free time on my hands means that I’ve decided to catch up on some gaming and play some of the new titles that have been released recently.

Lack of Internet sucks for a whole host of reasons, but none more so that I’ve found than, out of three games I’ve purchased (yep, with my own money), I can only install and play one of them – Fallout 3.

The other two require either an Internet connection to install (Left 4 Dead) and / or to play for the first time (FarCry 2).  How fucking ridiculous is this?  You’re basically considered by default a pirate and as such the copy protection software distributed with these titles insists on authenticating with a remote server before allowing you to play.

People like myself who don’t have an Internet connection can’t be all that uncommon.  You’d think that purchasing the physical media would be enough, but oh no – evidently not.  So what’s the point?  It’s enough to make me want to pirate the shit out of everything that’s released in future.

Update: I borrowed a Vodafone 3G USB adapter from work last night which allowed me to activate FarCry 2 meaning I can now play the game.  It is really quite good.  L4D will have to wait until I have a ‘proper’ Internet connection, whenever that may be.

On a whim I’ve recently purchased one of the new unibody MacBooks, and it’s a fantastic piece of kit.  The idea was to sell my ‘old’ MacBook (a blackbook with 4GB of RAM) for a decent price to someone I know, but a combination of the original easy sale falling through, having to face eBay, and the fact that my parent’s laptop is pretty much on its last legs meant that I decided to give it to them as an early Xmas present.

Of course, up until now my parents have only ever used Windows PCs and they’re fairly set in their ways.  They become accustomed to performing tasks in a certain manner without really thinking about what it is they want to do, and so when something changes (“why is the icon for Office different??” etc.) they are easily overwhelmed.  Therefore my only problem with this upgrade was that I figured this might be a bit of a challenge, given that functionally Mac OS X is very different from Windows.

So far though I’m pleased to say that they’ve been able to pick it up very quickly indeed.  The Dock took a little bit of explaining (“where’s the Start button gone?”) but when I showed them how to launch applications and a few other basics they repeatedly made comment on how it was much more simple it appeared and how everything made more sense.  My Mum could never understand why you’d click on “Start” to shutdown the computer, for example.

An hour or so later and my Mum has most of the basics wired.  She’s now using Mail.app, Safari and Adium, she understands how to access Spotlight to find various things and even launch applications, Finder’s handy features such as Quicklook and Coverflow are “great”, and of course it’s a much nicer machine to work on than a four-year old budget Dell ;)

All in all it’s a good start, and I’m hoping I won’t receive too many support calls over the coming weeks…