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    My Last Mac

    by  • 2008/10/14 • Uncategorized

    From today’s new Macbook announcement: 11:01AM Q: Concern about the glossy screens. Are you going to offer another option? A: Steve: We're going all glass -- we won't offer another version. Phil: You offset the reflection by the brightness, and consumers love it. One of the great things about a notebook is you can...

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    Anybody Heard of CISSE 2008?

    by  • 2008/10/13 • Uncategorized

    I got a spam today advertising a ‘virtual conference’ called CISSE 2008. Apparently they compiled at least part of their spam list by harvesting the Mozilla Bugzilla database. Their address harvester had trouble with basic e-mail parsing but got enough of my address there to positively identify the source. It’s apparently organized by: Tarek...

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    The End of CD-R

    by  • 2008/10/13 • Uncategorized

    I noticed today that quality CD-R media has crossed the price line with quality DVD-R media, and is now more expensive than DVD-R*. This means for daily data archiving purposes CD-R is dead. I’m ordering one last hundred pack for specialty use in machines that cannot handle DVD-R (very old computers, CD players, and...

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    Leopard is Still a Turkey

    by  • 2008/10/08 • Uncategorized

    I’ve been writing a short note here after each minor release of Mac OS X 10.5, noting the major problems with it, and 10.5.5 is unfortunately no different. Today I applied it to my main machine’s Leopard install and tried two fairly simple operations: * delete a partition with Disk Utility * install Software...

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    iPod Command-Line Sync on Mac OS X

    by  • 2008/10/07 • Uncategorized

    This will sync any attached iPods if iTunes is running: #!/bin/sh osascript <<_END_OF_UPDATE tell application "Finder" set processList to get name of every process if processList contains "iTunes" then tell application "iTunes" to update (every source whose kind is iPod) end if end tell _END_OF_UPDATE It can be called from a cronjob to keep...

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    Fedora Strands Xen Users

    by  • 2008/10/06 • Uncategorized

    From Fedora Weekly News: Daniel P. Berrange laid it out there. “There is pretty much zero chance that Fedora 10 will include a Xen Dom0 host. While upstream Xen developers are making good progress on porting Dom0 to paravirt_ops, there is simply too little time for this to be ready for Fedora 10. So...

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    Cost of Home vs. Business Shipping

    by  • 2008/10/03 • Uncategorized

    I just ordered a new hard drive from PC Connection and when I went to check out I got quite a surprise. I realize that for a while companies have been charging more for shipping to residential addresses than business, but PC Connection has taken this to a whole new level. My home address...

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    Package Cleanup – Leaves and Orphans

    by  • 2008/09/30 • Uncategorized

    On an RPM-based system, yum-utils provides a utility called ‘package-cleanup’. It has two useful options: –orphans shows RPM packages that do not belong to any currently-configured repositories, and: –leaves shows RPM packages for which there are no dependencies; that is removing them won’t trigger the removal of other packages. By default it’s concerned with...

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    Fedora, Cobbler & Newkey

    by  • 2008/09/18 • Uncategorized

    Folks running their own local yum repositories using cobbler will have to add new repos to get continued updates, the ones signed with the new signing key. This isn’t hard, simply pick your mirror for f8 or f9 and add it to cobbler like the following: cobbler repo add --mirror=http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/fedora/linux/updates/8/i386.newkey/ --name=f8-i386-updates.newkey cobbler repo add...

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    iPhone: Developers Burned, Investors Leery

    by  • 2008/09/16 • Uncategorized

    Fraser Speirs, former iPhone developer, had his application rejected by Apple on grounds that it might compete with iTunes. Unfortunately for Speirs and every other developer out there, you have no way of knowing if an app will be allowed by Apple until the last step in the development process, unless the app already...

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