The Author – Bart Busschots
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Oct
9
CrossOver Mac Beta 2 – Problematic Upgrade but Worth It
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 9, 2006 | 1 Comment
CodeWeavers recently sent round a mailing about the release of the second beta version of CrossOver Mac. I didn’t have time to play with it straight away but over the weekend I gave it a go. The upgrade was not problem free but it did fix one of my problems with CrossOver, IE now seems to work properly.
[tags]Apple, CrossOver, CrossOverMac, OS X, IE[/tags]
Sep
29
RedHat Need to Learn Some Common Sense
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on September 29, 2006 | 5 Comments
I’ll hold my hands up now and say this will be a rant post. I’m annoyed. I’ve just wasted and entire afternoon at work because of pure and utter idiocy by the RedHat people. I don’t suffer fools well so that also adds to my annoyance 🙂 Read more
Sep
10
Free Astronomy Software on Mac OS X – Installing KStars
Filed Under Science & Astronomy, Computers & Tech on September 10, 2006 | 19 Comments
If you run Windows the question as to which free sky mapping software to install is trivial, install Cartes du Ciel. If you run Linux, the question is equally as trivial, use KStars. However, if you run Mac OS X things have traditionally not been so good. I have not found a single good free sky mapping program for OS X. So, instead I have switched my attention to getting either the Linux option or the Windows option working on the Mac.
I had hopped that CrossOver Mac would run Cartes du Ciel but it does not. I tried both V2.7 and the version 3.0 beta but, although both installed, neither worked. 2.7 did run better than 3.0 but failed to render the actual maps so it was still useless! That leaves us with just KStars. This does work on OS X but installing it is not as straightforward as one would hope.
[tags]Astronomy, OS X, Mac, KStars[/tags] Read more
Aug
19
Image Magick on an Intel Mac
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Photography, System Administration on August 19, 2006 | 2 Comments
I'm a huge fan of ImageMagick . I think it's great but I'm constantly and continuously disappointed by their lack of proper support for the Mac. It took them ages to get a binary release out for the Mac at all and even now, a year after the announcement of the Intel Macs and after Apple have compltely stopped selling PPC Macs the only binary release available for the Mac on the image Magic site is still for PPC. You can of course get the source and build it yourself but that's a bit of a mine-field because of the amount of libraries that you need first if you're to end up with a useful ImageMagick install. In the past I've wasted a lot of time and effort getting ImageMagick compiled properly on OS X. When I had to install it on an Intel Mac for the first time today I nearly cried when I saw that there was no binary release! However, my prayers were answered when I cam across this blog entry. I still had to build the lot myself but this took all the pain out of it!
[tags]ImageMagick, Intel Mac[/tags]
May
22
Installing Apache Tomcat 5.5 on Linux
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on May 22, 2006 | 33 Comments
I’ve previously done a guide on the right way of installing Tomcat 5.0 on the Mac but things are a little different on Linux so I figured I’d do another guide. This one is a little less advanced because it only covers running Tomcat as root and not as a non-root user. Depending on how busy I am in the next while I may or may not do a follow-up article on the additional steps needed to run Tomcat as a non-root user. I have tested this procedure on RHEL ES 4 with Tomcat 5.5.17 and the Sun JDK version 1.5.0_6 but it should be the same on all Linux distros and for all 5.X Tomcat versions, the only thing that is likely to change is the location of $JAVA_HOME. Correction, the startup script included is for Redhat based distros only (RHEL, Fedora, CentOS etc).
Apr
7
Finally – a FOSS OS that anyone can use
Filed Under Computers & Tech on April 7, 2006 | Leave a Comment
I got shown a working demo of ReactOS running on an old Dell GX1 at work today and I have to say I was impressed. The idea of ReactOS is that it is a FOSS implementation of Win32 so the environment it provides to apps is indistinguishable from Win32. ATM ReactOS supports WinNT4.0 apps and WinXP apps but it will continue to develop as Win32 develops. To find out more have a look at www.reactos.org. What I found particularly interesting was the screenshots section showing MS Office, PhotoShop, PSP and even Unreal Tournament! And yes, it does run Solitaire!
What is really surprising is how small the ISO is, the one I saw installed was only 16MB! It also booted in literally a few seconds where even Windows98 takes painfully long to boot on the same hardware. Despite still being officially Alpha software it seems stable and quite nippy to me.
I also noticed some KDE stuff well merged into the Windows GUI. The most obvious example being multiple desktops, which can be neatly controlled from the Start menu.
Apart from just running Windows apps the other great things is that you can use Windows device drivers with it too so any hardware that works with Windows should also work with ReactOS. This is a big deal for gamers and may remove the need for people who enjoy playing games to rely on a Windows Partition. Instead you can have just ReactOS or, Linux & ReactOS but either way all your opperating systems are FOSS so you can run them for free without breaking the law, which is nice!
I’m actually going to give this a go on a crappy old machine I have lying around just to see how it behaves (when I get some free time) so hopefully I’ll be able to follow this up with a detailed review in about 6 months or so.
Apr
1
Thunderbird 1.5 Released
Filed Under Computers & Tech on April 1, 2006 | Leave a Comment
I’ve just switched to Thunderbird 1.5 and I’m impressed. There is no real noticeable difference in the overall look of the app but there are some changes that really make it worth upgrading from 1.0. The most noticeable difference is that it now checks your spelling as you type rather than only doing it when you click send. This will save a lot of time and effort and gives Thunderbird the only thing that apple’s mail client had over it IMO. The other thing they have finally addressed is the interface for setting up multiple SMTP servers. Each account now has a simple dropdown menu for specifying what server to use which is a big improvement to the hoops you used to have to jump through in version 1.0.
Basically, if you haven’t upgraded yet, get cracking and if you are still using something ghastly like Outlook Express or Eurdora get switching now, you won’t regret it!
Feb
25
More Reasons Why PHP Sucks
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on February 25, 2006 | 8 Comments
Des made some great points and linked to some other great blog entries on all the things that are wrong with PHP in his recent blog entry I hated php back when it was cool and I found myself agreeing with them all but I also have another gripe with PHP so I figured I may as well share mine too while the topic is hot on Planet MiNDS>.
Jan
27
Some Simple Little Linux Commands You Can Never Remember When You Need Them
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on January 27, 2006 | Leave a Comment
I’m sure you know the feeling, you’re on a server, some form of excrement has just hit some kind of spinning thing and know that netstat will do what you want if only you could remember the bloody set of options you needed. Well, from now on I’m adding all those commands to this Blog entry so next time that happens I’ll know here to look!
This page will be continually updated but I’m gonna start with a few of those commands I’ve needed in the last few days that are currently stuck to my display in little yellow PostIt Notes.
What Processes are Listening on What TCP Ports
When you need to easily see what a server is serving in a hurry use:
netstat -lntp
Creating and Extracting tar.gz Files Just Using tar
I used to always create and extract tar.gz files by using both tar and gzip and sticking them together with a pipe (I’m sure that nasty Sun E450 was in some way to blame for me getting into that habit). This command was always long and I never remembered the syntax. So here’s the easy way to create a tar.gz archive:
tar -pczf name_of_your_archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory
(You should leave out the p if you don’t want to preserve the file permissions). And here is how to extract one:
tar -xzf file.tar.gz
Jan
26
Guide for Installing Tomcat 5.0 on OS X 10.4 Tiger
Filed Under Software Development, Computers & Tech on January 26, 2006 | 24 Comments
This is a step-by-step guide to installing Tomcat 5.0.x onto OS X 1.4.x. Note that this is the Tomcat branch for the 1.4 JDK and not for the 1.5 JDK. I know the latest versions of OS X now have Java 5 as part of the OS but my work is not yet ready to migrate to Java 5 so I’m staying with Tomcat 5.0 for now. The chances are that these instructions with only tiny and obvious alterations will work for Tomcat 5.5 with Java 5 but I’m not making any promises. Read more