Archive for the 'General' Category

One thing I’ve not read with all the buzz on Apple’s new iPad is this simple fact that you must connect the iPad to another computer to perform backups and updates via iTunes.

This statement means, unceremoniously, that you cannot ONLY have an iPad as your sole computing device. If you want to have the magical experience that the iPhone OS experience gives you, with automatic backup of all your applications, music purchased OTA or via wifi, your personal settings, notes, audio recordings, (and now) downloaded iBooks, you must connect it to another computer to sync that information to an iTunes installation.

And when the next new iPad OS is released, if you want those new features and functionality, you had better not have pitched that clunky old Dell or old iMac you “used to use everyday, but haven’t in months” because of the new freedom granted by your spanky new iPad.

All the talk of the freedom to chuck the traditional OS in favor of the stable, predictable, controlled existence of the iPad (iPhone) OS which seems to be the huge buzz now misses the fact that you, at least in the current form and for the foreseeable future, simply cannot live with an iPad as your only computer.

I’d like to think that someday Apple will provide a .mac MobileMe experience that will negate the need for a “real computer” in your home, backing up and installing OS updates over the air, but that may not be the case. Apple is in the business of selling hardware as well as the underlying software and media (conveniently downloadable via the App Store or mobile iTunes). Why would they give up the revenue stream of selling computers for one that will be arguably smaller, even though it would be subscription based?

Maybe someday this will be your only computer, but today is not that day. So let’s all tether up and sync away.

Copying this here, in case it ever disappears and I need it again.

Today I needed to compile mod_xsendfile for OS X on Intel. The standard command for this,

apxs -cia mod_xsendfile.c

resulted in a module that was for i386 only.

Apache on Leopard (untested on Tiger) doesn’t appreciate this, throwing this error:

4/7/08 5:08:08 PM org.apache.httpd[ 15990] httpd: Syntax error on line 116 of /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf: Cannot load /usr/libexec/apache2/mod_xsendfile.so into server: dlopen(/usr/libexec/apache2/mod_xsendfile.so, 10): no suitable image found. Did find:\n\t/usr/libexec/apache2/mod_xsendfile.so: mach-o, but wrong architecture

Turns out the solution is pretty simple. Just change the command to apxs to this:

apxs -cia -Wc,"-arch x86_64 -arch ppc -arch i386 -arch ppc64" -Wl,"-arch x86_64 -arch ppc -arch i386 -arch ppc64" mod_xsendfile.c

This will generate a fat-binary for all four current Mac architectures.

Color me stymied. What a poor choice.

So, if you’re wondering why root doesn’t get any mail for cron jobs or the like, /var/root/.forward contains /dev/null

If you want root to get mail so you can see it, rm /var/root/.forward (or edit it and put in a real email address)

Just paste the following text into the image’s vmx file while it’s shut down:

bios.forceSetupOnce = “TRUE”


# The VMware Fusion BIOS posts too quickly to access.
Most users will not need to access the BIOS, but advanced users might want to do so, to change the boot order, set a boot password, or enable a second floppy drive. To work around this problem, use a text editor to add the following line to the configuration (.vmx) file of the virtual machine:
bios.forceSetupOnce = "TRUE"
The next time you boot up the virtual machine, it will automatically boot into the BIOS. This configuration option then reverts to FALSE. You must set the option to TRUE each time you want to boot the virtual machine into the BIOS.

via http://www.vmware.com/support/fusion/doc/releasenotes_fusion.html

Congratulations President-elect Barack Obama! Yes We Can!