MacOSX

Why Vista is a 10-year-old history lesson nobody has learned

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Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista operating system is a perfect example of why people should stop supporting this useless company: it doesn't have most of the new features it was supposed to have, it is more expensive than it needs to be (the feature-complete version costs $400, versus $130 for Mac OS X), and will cause a great deal of headaches both short-term and long-term due to its poor design. Here's a great article which explains why the public needs to realize this is the second time Microsoft have done this and they shouldn't be let get away with it:

So, learn from history, stop taking the garbage that you're been spoon-fed and don't upgrade to Vista! Do yourself a favor, buy a Mac!

SVN+SSH problems on Mac OSX

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I was trying to get SVN set up as a daemon on my OSX 10.4 (Tiger) machine when I started running into this error upon connection:

bash: line 1: svnserve: command not found
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly

Some searching later I really couldn't find anything that might have been causing the problem, other than the obvious notion that the path was not working correctly. A little fiddling later I discovered the problem - the ssh daemon was by default configured to not load any user environment files (which are used to set the command path, etc). To fix the problem I had to first enable the option PermitUserEnvironment and then restart the service:

sudo nano /etc/sshd_config

Search (control-w) for the string "PermitUser" then uncomment the line (remove the # sign) and change the the "no" to "yes". Then all I had to do was restart the ssh daemon and it was good to go:

sudo SystemStarter -v restart SSH

Et voila!

Entourage won't start? Try option-start

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Today at work Entourage 2004 decided it had enough of life and didn't want to start. Not having had this happen before I did a quick Google to discover that if you hold down the option key while double-clicking it (or single-clicking the dock icon) to start it will pop up a database repair utility which will hopefully be able to fix any problems. Cool!

Gallery2Export tip - upgrade PHP!

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At home I use the wonderful Gallery2Export plugin for Apple's iPhoto photo catalog program into a Gallery2-based online album. It has generally worked great, but yesterday when I was trying to upload Halloween pictures it stopped working. Some fiddling later, including going through the hassle of trying another plugin (iPhoto2Gallery, which also failed), I finally upgraded the website from PHP 4.4 to PHP 5.1, and... it magically started working! Hurray! I've no idea if that was the actual problem or if it was just sheer luck, but its working again and now I can get back to the fun of sharing pics with my family :-)

Macs go Intel, then go Windows? (UPDATED)

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After the announcement in 2005 that Apple were going to change their Macintosh computers from the IBM/Motorola PowerPC range of processors to Intel's x86 line everyone thought they were nuts. Well it seems the insanity continues as Apple have just announced a program called Boot Camp that allows anyone with an Intel-based Mac to run Windows! Yowzers!

UPDATE: A 3rd party company has developed a $50 program called Parallels which lets your Intel Mac run a huge array of operating systems while you are still running OSX, i.e. no reboot required, thus giving you much more flexibility. While audio doesn't work and you can't access the CD/DVD drive, for standard applications I think this is a better way to go. Nifty.

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