All things computers...

Windows 7 Beta Applications – Part 1

2009-02-01T00:11:00.001Z

I have decided to do this in a few parts, not sure quite how many yet, lets see what I get to first. :)

This first blog item will be about the apps which come out of the box with the Windows 7 beta.

Media Player 12 seems to be fairly stable, works quite nicely and the user interface changes aren’t particularly major, it appears to have been simplified somewhat and a separate interface appears when you watch a video.

Library View:

VIdeo View:

The few issues that I found are that it likes to eat a lot of CPU from time to time, particularly for a little while after starting but I haven’t discovered the cause of that. The problem with having a 4 core box is you tend not to notice as quick when an app has a thread going wild. :-(

Also, the VIsualisations can sometimes get out of sync between windowed and full screen mode…which is odd.

Apart from that though, it doesn’t appear to have any killer bugs.

Media Centre appears also to be fairly stable and usable, with most features working as expected and as intended. Once my TV tuner drivers were installed (WinTV Nova-T Stick) I set about setting up the TV channels, which worked perfectly. One thing I have noticed is that Media Centre 6.1.7000 saves recorded TV as .wtv (Windows Recorded TV) files, not as .dvr-ms.

The main bug with Media Centre is the mcGlidHost.exe bug which is documented in a lot of places on the internet and which has made a lot of people turn off error reporting in Windows 7 which is unfortunate.

It is down to an exception which occurs in mcGlidHost.exe which is the Windows Media Center In-band Guide Loader. This exception occurs repeatedly and in very quick succession and you can end up with 30 or 40 wermgr.exe processes running, all trying to upload a 100 Megabyte error report. Also, they rapidly begin to fill your hard drive with queued error reports, my folder reached 40GB before I ‘solved’ the problem. Obviously this is unmanageable and causes massive CPU usage and saturates your upload bandwidth.

The obvious solution to this is to disable error reporting, but, this means you are not sending what could be important crash reports to Microsoft to enable them to fix the bugs in Windows 7 before release.

I tried a couple of things. Blocking outgoing internet access to the wermgr.exe process solved the bandwidth issue and because it couldn’t connect to the internet, the processes quit much quicker than before, but it was still filling my C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue folder with hundreds of reports, weighing in at 100 megabytes a piece.

I also tried using Process Explorer to suspend the mcGlidHost.exe before it crashed. This stopped the crash reports being generated, but also killed Media Centre’s scheduled recording for some reason, which was a showstopper.

I actually found my ‘solution’ by accident after installing Visual Studio 2008. When the mcGlidHost.exe process crashed, it automatically attached the Visual Studio debugger (which unfortunately does not work properly in Windows 7, but attaches ok) then I received an error from the debugger saying it couldn’t debug the process (due to the debugger issue).

I then, with Process Explorer, suspended the VSJitDebugger.exe process which had attached itself to the crashing mcGlidHost.exe process. I could then dismiss the error dialog box and everything stayed as it was. mcGlidHost.exe still appears to be working after it’s ‘System.InvalidOperationException’ which causes the crash, as from time to time it’s IO usage and RAM usage goes up.

Apart from that show stopper bug (for some people anyway), it seems to work fine and seems much smoother than the Vista Media Centre.

Internet Explorer 8 is also included and is looking rather good. It works well and except for the few sites that it doesn’t render correctly which have to have compatibility view applied, I have had very few problems with it.

One issue I have noticed is that it crashes after being closed from time to time, but it never affects your current browsing session due to it’s multiprocess architecture.

The other apps which are included in Windows 7 are Paint, with it’s new ribbon interface, which works quite nicely. Then you have Notepad…which is…still good old notepad. You also have Wordpad, which also sports a ribbon interface. Incidentally, I don’t think I have ever used Wordpad on any version of Windows except for opening the occasional file which didn’t align itself correctly in Notepad. You also have Windows DVD maker, which I have not tried. XPS viewer is there also, which does the same as it was before, just it isn’t in IE now. And last, but not least, for geeks and Sys Admins alike, there is Powershell 2.0. :-)

Java Bug with IE

2009-01-31T23:14:00.002Z

I recently had an issue on both Vista x64 SP1 and Windows 7 Beta with IE opening tabs very slowly.

This was following an update to Java to 6.0 update 10 (or 6.0 update 11) where whenever I opened a tab or Window or popup or anything in IE, the following command would run:

"C:\PROGRA~2\Java\jre6\bin\ssvagent.exe" -new

This would use up 100% of one of my cores and the tab/window would not complete loading until it had finished, which sometimes took 10 seconds or so.

I figured out that it was to do with the next generation browser plug-in which launches the java applet as a separate process instead of within the browser process. Sun have included this new plug-in since Java 6 update 10 which would explain the issue.

This proved to be highly irritating, so I set about finding a fix and noticed that there were 2 BHO add-ons registered in IE with ‘ssv’ in the name:

Java(tm) Plug-In 2 SSV Helper

Java(tm) Plug-In SSV Helper

So I figured I would disable them to see if it impacts functionality.

The upshot is that it doesn’t impact functionality at all, the 2nd generation plug-in works just fine without those BHO’s enabled. :)

By the way, I recommend process explorer for troubleshooting these painful hanging issues. It is part of the excellent Sysinternals tools and is written by an expert in the Windows Kernel, Mark Russinovich.

Download it here.

Windows 7 Beta UI changes

2009-01-18T19:44:00.000Z

So, if you read the last post, you will see that I now have a fully working Windows 7 system, with fairly little work and only a small amount of swearing required to get it to that stage.

Firstly, regarding the new or changed UI parts of the OS. As everyone knows, the taskbar has been changed substantially, the quick launch bar has been removed and you now pin applications to the taskbar, a bit like, dare I say it, OS X’s dock. At first glance I thought ‘this is shit, I’m really not going to like this’ because it’s a big change for Windows and lets face it, us humans are scared of change and the unknown.

However, I decided to leave it in the default ‘hide labels’ mode, and believe it or not, it works rather nicely and when I have a shitload of programs open, my taskbar doesn’t end up ridiculously full. Hovering over the running program icon gives you a pop up with all of the open Windows like the screenshot below:

As you can see, I have 2 instances of Windows Live Messenger running, logged into 2 different MSN accounts. The first 2 are the hidden WLM main Windows, to show you are signed in. (On Vista these are the icons in the system tray). The 3rd is the main window for the first instance, and the second is a conversation from the first instance also.

See screenshots while I was running IE with 2 instances, 1 with 3 tabs open and the other with 2 tabs open.

And if I right click on the IE icon:

So, while those UI changes are fairly radical, they are actually very usable and very easy to get used to.

The Notification Area has also been changed substantially with a different method of choosing what you want to be shown. It then hides the rest of the icons in a little box which is accessible by clicking the little up arrow to the right of the Notification Area.

The use of Aero for resizing windows is a major step forwards. If you want a window maximised, move the window to the top of the screen and hold it for a second until you see the outline go right round the screen. Pull it back from the top of the screen it goes back to the size it was, see screenshot (Poor but you can see the outline):

If you drag a window to the left edge of the screen it will maximise it to fill that half of the screen, similarly if you drag a window to the edge of the right hand side of the screen it will maximise that to fill the right half of the screen. This makes copying between programs very easy. Also, if you resize the bottom of a window down to the taskbar so it touches the taskbar, it will also do the same at the top so it touches the top of the screen as well. Any movement of the window cancels these out and the window goes back to it’s original size.

The new theme selectors are much better too and the desktop slideshow, although it’s been around for years on KDE, is a welcome addition for Windows 7.

Sorry for the waffling about this new UI, it’s just there is a lot of changes to the way Aero works and the UI in itself, so much so that I haven’t got onto application compatibility yet which I will do in the next post. :-)

View Full Album

Windows 7 Beta Installation/Configuration

2009-01-17T21:05:00.001Z

Well, I have been using Windows 7 beta for 2 days now and I'm pretty impressed to say the least. This post is about the installation and setup, including driver issues encountered. I will post again about the UI and Application compatibility.

As a tester of Vista during the beta stage I was expecting the experience to be pretty similar. I was expecting that there would be quite a lot of bugs and Win 7 wouldn’t really be that usable. How wrong could I be……

The specs of my box are pretty good, it’s an Apple Mac Pro with 2 Dual Core Xeon 5150’s, 8GB DDR2 ECC Fully Buffered RAM, an ATI Radeon X1900 and 4 SATA HD’s of varying sizes.

The first issue I had was nothing to do with Windows, it’s due to Apples piss poor EFI/Virtualised BIOS implementation which they used, which doesn’t allow keyboard input during the boot stage. This problem only affects x64 versions of Vista SP1 and Windows 7, because they are the only ones with the capability of EFI boot. So, the first thing I had to do was extract all the files out of the ISO into the [win7source] directory and use the oscdimg.exe command like so:

oscdimg.exe -n -m -bC:\[win7source]\boot\etfsboot.com C:\[win7source] C:\Win7noefix64.iso

For info, the oscdimg.exe binary is part of the Windows Automated Installer Kit which is a 1 GB download, but you can download the oscdimg.exe binary (zipped) here.

This creates a nice new ISO image which will get past the limitations of Crapple’s shoddy programming.

Once that was done I could start the install and I installed it onto a nice new 500GB SATA drive which I bought for the occasion from PC World of all places for the sum of £30. It was an unbranded drive in the store and the Hitachi Deskstars were all £49 or more, so considering what I was going to use it for I bought the cheapest, and it actually turned out to be a Hitachi Deskstar when I opened the box. :-)

Install of Windows 7 went without a hitch, probably took about 20 mins all told.

First boot into it and all good, I joined it to my AD domain, rebooted…then logged in with my AD user account…all worked fine, folder redirection works properly redirecting your folders into the Libraries…which is a nice feature.

I then installed the Boot Camp drivers for Windows Vista x64. The install went perfectly, but the Realtek Audio didn’t work. I downloaded the latest and greatest Realtek HDA zip driver from their website and attempted the install, which failed. I then attempted to install it from the device manager using the Update Driver > Browse function……which worked perfectly. I then had sound.

The other thing is the graphics were a bit glitchy and there was no Catalyst Control centre.

So, I tried the Radeon driver available in Windows update, which fucked up and turned the Aero off. So, I rebooted…no joy. So I decided to install the Vista 8.12 Catalyst Drivers, which also didn’t work. But, when I rolled back the driver in the device manager, the MS supplied one started working again and was interacting with Catalyst Control Centre. At this point it was late, I had work the next day and it was pissing me off because I found a bug with Windows Media centre as well, so I put it to bed for the night.

Next day, after work, I started on the graphic problem again. Having read on the interweb that the Catalyst 8.12 Drivers were shit, even in Vista, I decided to try the 8.11 drivers instead. However, 8.12 would not uninstall in any way. So, I remembered I’d had a similar issue on a box years ago and used the Catalyst uninstaller to blow the shit away and have a nice clean start. So, I ran that and it did the trick.

I installed Catalyst 8.11 for Vista x64, rebooted, and hey presto, graphics were much smoother.

As yet, I have not found a driver that does not work with Windows 7 x64 which works on Vista x64 which means that the Windows Kernel Team need a big shoutout for making it as compatible as possible with Vista.

Restart Pending with Bootcamp Drivers (fix)

2008-11-28T08:50:00.001Z

If you constantly get the error that there is a restart pending when trying to install the bootcamp drivers there is a simple fix. Ensure you have rebooted a couple of times just to be sure and if it persists with the Restart Pending error then follow these instructions.

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager and delete or rename the PendingFileRenameOperations value (see screenshot - click to enlarge).

Apple iPhone Security Updates

2008-11-21T21:11:00.001Z

I got this Apple Security Advisory alert email a few minutes ago and along with about 50,000 other security patches for the iPhone/Touch the following amused me very much:

“Passcode Lock

CVE-ID: CVE-2008-4228

Available for: iPhone OS 1.0 through 2.1, iPhone OS for iPod touch 1.1 through 2.1

Impact: Emergency calls are not restricted to emergency numbers

Description: iPhone provides the ability to make an emergency call when locked. Currently, an emergency call may be placed to any number. A person with physical access to an iPhone may take advantage of this feature to place arbitrary calls which are charged to the iPhone owner. This update addresses the issue by restricting emergency calls to a limited set of phone numbers.”

So basically, what crApple are saying, is that if you haven’t got the update, anyone who nicks a locked iPhone can make calls to any number they want.

How amusing…

The Demise of an Apple Keyboard

2008-11-08T00:03:00.002Z

A couple of weeks ago, my wonderful Crapple keyboard decided to expire. Not all in one go however, it was the I key that went first, closely followed by the 7 & 8 keys.

It annoyed me…and this was the result…………

It was happily replaced by this………

A much better keyboard…… :-)

Windows Live Writer Beta

2008-11-07T20:44:00.001Z

I’m writing this post, the first one in a long time from the new (ish) Windows Live Writer Beta.

Seems to be pretty good…give it a shot from: http://download.live.com

You can also try the Windows Live Messenger 9 beta, which is fairly nice, little bit buggy but fairly good.

Bye for now…

Longest WinXP Uptime ever?

2008-03-05T18:12:00.002Z

OS Name: Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS Version: 5.1.2600 Service Pack 2 Build 2600
OS Manufacturer: Microsoft Corporation
OS Configuration: Standalone Workstation
OS Build Type: Uniprocessor Free
Registered Owner:
Registered Organization:
Product ID: 55274-OEM-0011903-00101
Original Install Date: 19/01/2004, 06:26:17
System Up Time: 790 Days, 20 Hours, 10 Minutes, 44 Seconds
System Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard
System Model: HP d230 MT(DQ443T)
System type: X86-based PC
Processor(s): 1 Processor(s) Installed.
[01]: x86 Family 15 Model 2 Stepping 9 GenuineIntel ~ 2200 Mhz

Discuss....anyone seen more uptime on WinXP than this?

LiquidWeb experiences... ;-)

2008-02-25T02:08:00.006Z

Read this interesting support ticket which was raised by us when one of the services which was advertised to us, and promised to us was not delivered. They had $1300 off us and flatly refuse to give a refund.

http://www.x86it.co.uk/files/liquidweb_fuckup.pdf

Update:
They do appear to be being more helpful now and have fixed the original issue. BUT....it shouldn't take posting on WebHostTalk to get them to do this. After taking so long to acknowledge the problem, they managed to fix it in a matter of hours after that post was made, which makes us think they weren't really trying as hard as they could have been. Unfortunately, due to the experience, we are somewhat reluctant to use their services now.

Just found this too: WebHostTalk Forum it seems that other people are pissed at them too...

Apple Discussions - Why I no longer participate

2008-01-06T18:30:00.000Z

When I first got my Mac, as an experienced UNIX/Linux user, I was always more than happy to help people out on Apple Discussions.

However, there are a number of people on there who are complete tossers, are rude to posters, give out incorrect or timewasting information and feel the need to comment on every damn discussion.

Two that I can think of in particular is Kappy, and TheHatter.

Kappy is the one that pisses me off the most. He's an arrogant cunt, who enjoys being rude to people who ask a genuine question, and then either gives them wrong information, or gives them an excessively drawn out way of doing things which basically waste their time.

The thing that pisses me off the most with him though, if you are rude back to the twat, he goes running off, tells a mod, and gets the replies deleted. The most worrying thing is that he has 5 blue bars, which mean he is allegedly a very helpful person, which he may well be, but i'd rather he pissed off completely than was rude and arrogant to people.

TheHatter on the other hand reminds me of just that. The guy is raving, he puts such random stuff in there, which confuses everybody that reads it. And he won't ever accept that he is wrong.

Bah, leave em to it....I used to keep an eye on the RSS feed for some of the forum categories, but I don't bother at all now. I'm sorry, but I can't be nice to idiots, and as those 2 seem to post on EVERYTHING, it's difficult to keep away from them.

Fuck it.

lol.

Follow up to: Vista x64 on a Mac Pro - Hosed EFI partition

2008-01-06T18:19:00.000Z

Ok, so....time for an update, bit overdue though.

After I had removed Vista again, it seemed that every time I rebooted, I got a BIOS screen which said 'Non system disk' or some shit like that, as a result of I had to power off then press the option key to bring up the list of bootable disks.

I checked the settings in startup disk, it was telling it to boot from my OS 10.5.1 disk, which should be correct.

So, I did a little bit of digging, and while OS X strictly speaking doesn't use the EFI partition, unless you are doing firmware updates, it can cause boot problems such as what I was experiencing if it doesn't exist. So....I checked out my EFI partition, which appeared to be either missing or corrupted.

So, not only had Vista been particularly shit, it had also decided to zap the EFI partition on my primary boot drive, which pissed me off a lot.

It was easy enough to fix, but hassle I didn't really want. I first made sure I had an up to date time machine backup, just in case I fucked it up. I then tried to repair the EFI partition in single user mode, which didn't work at all, the size of it was wrong, and it just wasn't having it. When I attempted to reboot after attempting the fix, it booted straight on to the OS X install DVD, which for convenience, is in a 10GB partition on one of the secondary drives.

When I fired up disk utility, it couldn't see the name of the system volume, it couldn't repair it, so basically my repair attempt hosed it completely.

Still, not to worry, so I erased it, and restored a time machine backup onto it, which completed in about 20 mins.

Lucky. :-)

Vista x64 on a Mac Pro

2007-12-25T01:30:00.000Z

Don't fucking bother. Worst experience that I have ever fucking had in my life. Half the devices don't work properly, and all it seems to do is read and write to the hard drive excessively.

I first tried 32 bit Vista a few months ago and it saw 1.9 GB of my 4GB memory, even with PAE enabled, which is a sack of shit to be honest, which was why I ditched it then, god knows why it does that, it may be a limitation in the Apple EFI emulated BIOS, or more likely a limitation in Vista.

So...................tonight, I was bored and thought 'Oh yeah, lets try Vista 64, it may be better than 32 bit.' Big Mistake....read on.....

I installed it, and in all fairness it installed fairly quickly. Checked the Performance Index, 5.9 on all counts, so far so good....

Then.....update time....47 updates available.... it seemed to take an age to download them, my network usually works at 1500kb/sec, but for some reason in Vista, I was getting 400kb/sec at most. It then took the best part of 40 mins to install those, which was rather annoying, then came the reboot, which took equally an age to complete the 'Windows is configuring updates' shit...

Finally, upon reboot I tried to find a driver for my Kensington Trackball....no 64 bit drivers available....GREAT, which meant that anything that required scrolling, you can't do in a quick manner. :-(

Then, I realised that the sound wasn't working. It had detected the hardware and installed drivers....but no sound at all...so I pissed about with it for 10-15 mins, no joy.

Then I found out that MacDrive doesn't work with 64 bit Windows, so my 500GB of data on HFS+ drives was inaccessible.

So.....I thought fuck it, and did the sensible thing, and erased the partition and went back to an OS that 'just works'.....maybe not as well as Apple try to make out....but much better than Windows. :-)

End result....don't bother, it's really not worth it.

Facebook 'viral' ads....more privacy concerns...

2007-11-10T02:54:00.000Z

Facebook has released it's Facebook Ads initiative:

"Called Facebook Ads, the new program is threefold: advertisers can create branded pages, run targeted advertisements, and have access to intelligence and analytics pertaining to the site's more than 50 million users. Partners can participate in all three components of Facebook Ads, or a combination of them."

"Additionally, Facebook has unveiled targeted advertisements that will allow marketers to target by any information inside Facebook profiles, from relationship status to favorite television shows. Zuckerberg demonstrated the interface by targeting a hypothetical running shoe ad toward women aged 18 to 30 in New York who have listed "running" among their interests."

From: c|net

The thing that concerns me is the 3rd one "have access to intelligence and analytics pertaining to the site's more than 50 million users"

To me, this basically reads, they get shitloads of information about you, in order to piss you off with adverts, spam and general annoyances.

I don't want companies generating a database of information about me, surely that is for me to decide. Where is the 'opt out' button? It seems that Facebook are playing this off as some kind of good thing, well to their users anyway, saying that we have asked for it. Er....no.

Basically, as far as I am concerned, there is enough junk in the news feed already, without bloody advertising to boot.

Anyway, I have found the solution. Simply zap all your apps, turn your privacy settings right down, so apps can only see very limited data about you, and then re-add the apps, assuming you want them.

Heres a couple of stories about this issue:

Facebook decides to bastardize its community c|net Blogs

Facebook Rolls Out Highly Targeted Viral Ad System Wired

Personally, I view this ad system to be as bad as adware installed on a PC. Basically, it's stealing your personal information in order to "track" your habits, and "offer" you shit you don't want.

Programs like Adaware and Windows Defender remove things called tracking cookies, which basically do exactly what this is doing, but at a much reduced level.

The simple fact....don't trust Facebook. At all. Period.

Leopard Roundup....

2007-11-10T02:33:00.000Z

Ok, so...i've had Leopard for 2 weeks now.

Problems that I have had have been minimal, a few app incompatibilities, but nothing major. To be honest, it's not much different to using Tiger, the reliability seems to be similar, and the bugs are annoyingly similar.

Such as the SMB bug, when connecting to a Windows machine and the connection hangs up for some reason, Finder hangs and there is no way of recovering it, hard reset is the only way. I experienced that one last night, which pissed me off somewhat. :-s

I have an idea how to get round that one though, make sure you have a terminal window open so you can kill Finder or halt the system if it happens. ;-)

Apart from that, that's the only complete system hang that I have had since the iChat backgrounds facade 2 weeks ago.

Memory usage is pretty stable, Safari seems to eat a lot now and again, but then seems to release it back too now and again, but thats web browsers for you in general. Load wise, the system isn't really doing much, and the load is minimal.

Few app incompatibilities have been noticed, such as X-Lite (softphone) not working at all, but apparently a new update will fix that. ClamXav's scheduling also doesn't work properly, although, I don't really care. I'm quite capable of updating virus defs manually.

Everything else appears to be working fine.

Time Machine is brilliant, I have used it several times to go back to prev versions of files that I have been hacking about with, and I also used it to do a full system restore, which worked flawlessly.

It seems though, many other users have not been as fortunate as me, if you go on the Apple support forums, it's full of people with various problems. My honest belief is that these people are creating the problems themselves, by doing upgrades for a start. Who in their right mind upgrades an operating system? God, no...not a good idea. Always start fairly clean at least, I think archive and restore is the way to go personally.

Also, people don't think to remove all the silly hacks they implement. If you want hacks, at least expect some system instability. It seems that many users prefer to mess about with the internals of their systems, which is up to them, but, what do you expect when you do an upgrade?

Silly people.

Also, macosxhints.com, I don't think they have actually published a decent hint for Leopard so far, most of them have been complete crap, or ugly hacks that are most likely going to be zapped by 10.5.1.

So, if you want my advice, don't bother.

10.5.1, by the way, has been seeded to developers, so i'm sure it wont be a million years till it's out. It may well come out at the same time as 10.4.11 and Safari 3 Final. In fact, 10.4.11 will probably include Safari 3 final on Tiger.

I'll post some more at some point when I can be arsed, but those are my thoughts for the moment.

Bye for now.

Prince is going to sue thepiratebay.org

2007-11-10T02:29:00.000Z

What a complete nobhead.

Say no more.

For comedy, read this lot:

http://thepiratebay.org/legal

Why Linux Will Succeed On The Desktop

2007-11-05T08:29:00.000Z

Just a quickie, here's an interesting story that I read this morning.

To me, it makes sense.

Enjoy ;-)

http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=202600158

Leopard Security....

2007-11-01T02:03:00.000Z

Come on Apple, you can do better than this:

http://www.matasano.com/log/981/a-roundup-of-leopard-security-features/

http://www.heise-security.co.uk/articles/98120

Not very good is it...what was all that touting about security?

And while we are on a similar subject, where the FUCK is Java 6 in Leopard? Why the hell is that obselete Java 5 still included?

Apple, stop fucking about with phones and pissy ipod's and sort your priorities out, you know, the things that got you started in the first place...

Porn trojan on OS X

2007-11-01T01:35:00.000Z

Fortunately, this won't be bothering me, because of 2 simple reasons:

It's highly unlikely that I would ever be looking at pictures of Britney Spears, dubious or not, or any more straight porn for that matter. ;-)
I'm not a fucking idiot.

Amusing though...even more amusing that some dumb users have actually installed it, weird desperate bastards. It proves to me that even some users shouldn't have a "more secure" mac. The computer is only as secure as the user, and the user education....oh and the fucking common sense.

http://www.macworld.com/2007/10/firstlooks/trojanhorse/index.php

Taking the piss out of Microsoft...again.

2007-11-01T01:29:00.000Z

Sorry, I just can't help it.... ;-)

http://www.bbspot.com/News/2007/10/microsoft-debuts-update-update-suite.html

Mail....problem solved!!!

2007-10-29T20:12:00.001Z

Ok, the other day I was whining about mail.app v3 not working with IMAP and MDaemon 9.61.

With the help of somebody on the Apple support forum, the problem has been solved.

The solution is simple:

Shutdown Mail.
Delete or rename: /Users/username/Library/Mail
Start up Mail.

Mail will come up with the update dialog again, and then after that should work correctly. However, you may need to shutdown and start up mail again for this to work.

It may take a while to synchronise your folders, but it will do it eventually.

This seems to be related to the automatic update that Mail.app v3 makes to the v2 mailboxes.

Hope this is helpful to somebody.... :-)

Funny...and so true!

2007-10-29T01:24:00.000Z

Windows: n. 32-bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor, written by a 2-bit company that can't stand for 1 bit of competition.

Leopard, a few days in.

2007-10-29T00:12:00.000Z

Ok, so....i've had Leopard for 3 days so far, theres been a few minor problems, but nothing particularly deadly.

The main issues I have had are as follows:

Occasional random Finder crashes, unsure what is causing them, it could be 3rd party, but unlikely as the only thing I have installed 3rd party that interacts with Finder is ClamXAv - com.apple.launchd[110] ([0x0-0xa00a].com.apple.finder[143]) Exited abnormally: Segmentation fault - is what keeps appearing in the logs.
Weirdness with file and folder permissions, easily fixed by running chgrp and chown a few times. ;-)
Complete UI lockup when using iChat's video background feature, whole user interface unresponsive, mouse unresponsive, keyboard unresponsive. But NOT a kernel panic, something else. Needed to hard reboot to sort that problem out.
Excessive memory and swap usage when Secure virtual memory is enabled. In fact, it managed to make 2GB of my memory active when no processes were using it, and it also managed to use 1 GB of swap, which on a 4GB machine, is ridiculous.
Mail.app v3, still a pile of shite, don't know why it won't talk to my server, mail v2 did with no problems what so ever, so god knows what they have fucked up with that update. Unfortunately for me, I can't even get mail.app v2 working on Leopard, as a temp workaround, because one of the required frameworks is missing. :-(
The new SMB settings, yes, very nice Apple, but no fucking good if you can't change the workgroup. The workgroup input box just blanks itself out every time, and /etc/smb.conf is not the samba config file anymore, it reads its input from /var/run/smb.conf, which is dynamically generated...so there doesn't seem to be a workaround for that either.
Finder...again. Lol, has a problem finding network computers, possibly because of the SMB workgroup issue above....it doesn't seem to like finding them at all in fact.
top keeps reporting stopped processes, and when I go do a ps auxc I find several processes with U next to them, which are still running....bugger knows what's going on with that.

I'm sure there's more, but these bugs could do with being fixed, nothing major really, just minor annoyances, except Mail....it means i've got to use that piece of Mozilla junk Thunderbird, unless someone can suggest a decent alternative client... :-)

Going to bed now....work tomorrow. :-(

Night. x

Mac OS 10.5 aka Leopard - My experience

2007-10-26T22:34:00.000+01:00

Installation:

When I installed it, I decided to go for the archive and restore as opposed to the upgrade, as I thought this would give me a faster, cleaner system.

So, I started the archive and restore process, everything went fine until it tried to restore my files at the end and it came up with an error saying 'Install Failed'. So, I rebooted, and tried the upgrade after that, and that seemed to work ok, apart from the fact it created me a new user account and didn't copy any of my stuff over.

However, I needed all my files, and to be honest, couldn't be bothered customising everything again.

So, I set to work finding out what was causing the migration assistant to fail, which, by the way is the program that the Leopard installer uses to complete the archive and restore. I traced the error to a strange cache file, which appeared on disk, but didn't exist. Using rm -rf in the terminal didn't work, so, I enabled the root account, trashed the entire cache for my old user account, then ran the migration assistant again. Fortunately it worked that time. :-)

My advice, is if you are upgrading from Tiger, and wish to archive and restore, trash the Cache directory first. :-)

After a bit of mucking about moving user files about, I finally got my system the same as it was under Tiger.

User Interface, User experience, settings:

The whole user experience seems very smooth under Leopard, except for a couple of UI glitches where finder Windows open too high up and appear to go under the top menu bar, which is odd. I''m sure they will be ironed out by 10.5.1 though.

The system preferences are definitely much improved from Tiger, they have added an option to use folders other than your home folders for SMB shares, which is definitely a good thing, specially on my system, which has 4 hard drives, and 750 GB of files in various places.

Netinfo manager has gone, but the same settings are available in various different places, such as in System Preferences, and for NFS and mounts and shit like that, the settings are in Directory Utility.

Stacks are great, some have been quite critical of the grid, but I disagree, it beats having to open a Finder window.

The coverflow thing in Finder looks nice, but yet is quite pointless as far as I can see, why bother having that when you get previews for every file, and you can hit space bar to get a full preview with Quick Look. Finder, in general seems to be a lot better, the new icons are very nice too, and it will do an icon preview of most files, including avi's which it would never do before.

Spotlight seems scarily faster than Tigers spotlight, and will do much more efficient boolean searches.

Time Machine, very customisable, you can back up whatever you want, and it seems to be quite efficient. It's extremely easy to restore from a backup too. I have it backing up to my smallest hard drive, and although it has produced about 25 backups so far, it hasn't used much more space than it did with the first backup.

Spaces is a very good idea, and it appears to be a good implementation of it. I have set it up so Vmware fusion uses space 2, so it doesn't clutter up my main workspace with Windows, not that I use Windows that often, but it's nice to have for Office 2007 and msn webcam support if nothing else. It's very easy to switch between them and it multiplies the available desktop space a lot. Definitely very useful, but nothing new, because it has been in Kde for ever!

In general, user interface wise, it is much cleaner and tidier than Tiger, and it seems to be easier to get to places that you need to get to.

UNIX:

The UNIX backend of OS X is very much as it was, nothing much really has changed. Memory management seems to be much better however, and the whole system backend and a lot of the frontend is allegedly 64 bit now so it can address more memory on high memory systems.

The terminal app retains all of its power, you can even have tabbed terminal sessions now.

One thing you might notice, is that all your user apps now run under launchd, instead of running under windowserver like they did previously. I believe, but don't quote me on this, that this is the sandbox feature that protects your system better from malicious software.

I haven't really had a look round inside to see what unix components have been updated, but i'm assuming that many of them will have been updated components. Samba is at 2.0.25b, which is pretty recent.

Problems:

Mail 3.0 does not bloody work properly with my MDaemon imap server. It will not download the headers, and basically wont do anything. :-( So for now, i've had to download Thunderbird (yuk), until Apple come up with a fix for it, which hopefully will be soon, as I have put in a detailed bug report.

Last.fm application doesnt work properly, and its shit anyway, so I downloaded iScrobbler instead.

Couple of UI glitches specially with Finder windows.

Front Row uses an excessive amount of memory, and doesnt appear to terminate itself once you exit it. Might be a candidate for being disabled if it persists in that behaviour. :-p

Anyway, thats about it for now, if theres any more, i'll either do an edit or a new post....

;-)

Storm worm turns antivirus software into a useless ornament.

2007-10-25T08:15:00.000+01:00

It seems that the infamous Storm worm has got even more clever now. Instead of simply terminating antivirus programs, it patches their memory so they run fine, but if you think they are protecting your system, think again, because they ain't.

Real handy that isn't it? A virus scanner that is nothing but an ornamental icon sitting in the system tray.

The Storm worm botnet is huge now, estimates vary between 6 and 15 million PC's...all running Windows surprisingly enough.

The scary thing is, this thing actually acts like it is alive.

It knows when somebody is investigating it, and launches a denial of service attack against them in retaliation.
It hides itself on a PC using a rootkit so that the average dumb Windows user can't find it or remove it - Which also changes every few weeks to avoid detection.
It renders security software useless.
It changes its program signature every 30 mins to avoid antivirus software.
It can defeat so called secure networks.
It has the ability to launch massive Distributed Denial of Service attacks/spam floods against anything that its owner/herder wishes.
All in all, it's one scary piece of "software".

And why has this happened? It's down to the idiocy of users for downloading every shit thing on the internet, not having up to date antivirus definitions and generally not following BASIC security practice when using the internet.

Last but not least, it's also down to Microsoft, for pushing their shoddy, bug ridden junk that they call an operating system, namely Windows.

I think it's time for anyone with half a brain to switch to an alternative operating system and call time out on Microsoft and it's shoddy software, which is a threat to us all.

Thanks for listening.

The original post which I got the inspiration from is available here.