I was aching to blog about this since December 18th, when our system quietly and gently slipped into public visibility. Marked as Beta (thanks, Google for making this a legitimate way how to go live) it comfortably made it through Christmas shopping season into 2009.
Now when the site has been announced and mentioned few times in the media, I guess it's OK to mention it here too.
What is "it" ? A new, fresh eCommerce site selling music. A lots of really good music. Without any DRM or any other nonsense, as plain good high quality (mostly 320 kps) MP3's. The selection is actually very good - starting from several hundred thousands in December to several few million songs when full catalog is loaded. More great music being added every week.
Here is the context: in order to upgrade iLife 08 to iLife'09 (which is very nice, btw), I had to install 10.5.6 upgrade. And according Murphy's law, one of the 2 GB DIMM's in my MacBook Pro went bad exactly during the OS-X upgrade process.
It had two rather unpleasant consequences:
some of the patch files got downloaded and saved in corrupted state The machine did not boot back after restart The second problem was fixed by replacing the bad DIMM, but the first caused that upgrade to 10.5.6 was impossible: the files were downloaded, verification failed, after restart I was back to square one. There was no obvious way how to "undownload" the files.
The centos 4.x we are using as platform for the VMWare VMs (yes, I know there is version 5, but we need to be compliant with RHEL 4.x because of the ATG requirements) installs by default the NTP client.
Here is sequence of steps that needs to be performed to enable automatic synchronization of the clocks.
make sure the DNS works cat /etc/resolv.conf sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf and check that nameservers point to something meaningfull, e.g:
I have noticed recently that most of our VMWare instances (and we are running decent fleet of them for the ATG Lab as well as internal system) if left without time synchronization, will loose get late quite a bit: some of them as much as hour or more a week.
Unix date command unfortunately belongs to those commands that I am having troubles to remember and everytime I have to use it with parameters, I end up googling for examples ...
Just tried out to switch the iPhone to automatic Date and Time setting with 3G on. The time jumped from 11:31 to 11:30 (my iPhone was about 1 minute too fast) and STAYED THERE.
This could mean that the issue is finally fixed. Can anybody confirm that ?
Two screencasts, about 80 and 40 minutes long are available at:
http://excess.org/article/2008/07/ogre-git-tutorial/
Courtesy by fellow Ottawan Bert Trojanowski. Really nice job of providing deep enough technical understanding with good illustrative examples.
If you want to get into distributed version control (which is IMHO way to go), check this out.
Since about Sunday, Dec 7th (I remember exactly because I noticed it when leaving the regular ByMUG meeting at Patty Bolands) my iPhone for no particular reason decided to translocate itself to GMT+1 time zone. It was not visible immediately, only emails received at 16:20 were shown as received 6 hour in the future.
All this without any changes or installing anything on my end ...
The Clock application showed what was wrong (this snapshot was taken on Sunday, 16:02 Ottawa time):
I have noticed few of this beauties in Kanata Chapters. Nice replacement for the beaten up CRT terminals that used to be around. They somehow looked right and familiar from the distance.
Beautiful screen, with touch capability.
Nice presentation and user interface.
The keyboard with unique personality.
And after looking closer, it was very obvious why:
Proper keyboard simply must have Command key ;-)
I started to have this error about week ago, out of the blue. I was not aware of making any changes, but suddenly could not reply to an email, send new email or even forward existing email in the iPhone default Mail application. I am using GMail account and because other clients on different platforms worked OK, I suspected either Rogers or Apple. I was trying several possible fixes (and used Safari and Gmail web access - which is not much fun).
If you want to watch YouTube video on the plane (and Google TechChannel has some amazing collection of videos), here is how to save it to disk, without any tools or third party program, using just your Mac and Safari out of the box.
Go to YouTube page and select video you are interested in in Safari. While playing, press Option-Command-A which opens Activity window. Locate the video stream - it will be the largest item in the list. Double click it, which causes Safari to download it.