Rants

Laptops are complicated wee beasties!

Submitted by on

Last night when I went to bed my new (to me anyway) Powerbook G4 was working fine. This morning when I got up it was severely misbehaving - there was 9.5gb of RAM in use and nothing was responding. I started shutting everything down and at one point tried to turn off the local ColdFusion 8 server using sudo, only to have an error that my account wasn't in the sudoers list; given that my account was an administrator, this was not good. I left it to continue rebooting but when I got back, a half hour later, it had pretty much frozen up trying to load a few starter apps. This, along with the noise coming from the drive, told me what I already knew - the drive was dead.

Tags: 

Vista sucks, let me count the ways

Submitted by on

Microsoft's Windows Vista has become the most hated release of Windows yet - missing features (hardware accelerated GUI, database-based filing system, smart search engine, etc), irritating features (the security requesters), confusing number of editions ( seven available in the USA, two more in Europe), confusing graphics system (DirectX 10.0, incompatible with the upcoming DX10.1, slower than DX9), and more.

...So, to set the record straight, Linux kernel hacker Robert Love responded with a wonderful reply that cut Mr Russinovich's reply to shreds, simply saying that Vista is poorly designed and that Linux doesn't suffer from the same stupid bugs.

Tags: 

Dumping Outlook again

Submitted by on

Well, enough of that, I'm dumping Outlook off my Mac again until I can work out a better way of doing it. I spent another half day putzing around with it as it decided to explode on me. I went back to an older backup of the Crossover "bottle" but it still didn't work. Created a new bottle with Office XP, it wouldn't work as I hadn't ran the setup program yet?!? Then I created another new bottle with Office 2000, which is supposed to be more highly supported than the newer releases - even it didn't work, complained about there not being any network connectivity. Argh.

Tags: 

Compiling software is a pain - Cygwin, PHP, MySQL

Submitted by on

I'm working on a lengthy article explaining how to install a bunch of web server software in Cygwin and I've found that I have to manually compile several key pieces. While I'm not unwilling to do this, the sheer hassle of having to go back 'n forth testing different configuration and installation options is a pain.

Tags: 

Pages

Subscribe to Rants