Yes you did read correctly, my wonderful Mac isn’t working as nice as Apple would like it to.
I don’t actually know what is wrong with it, yesterday when I booted it up I got a grey screen just like normal before OS X begins to boot but it never moved on. I then restarted the computer, it done the same, I left it for a couple of minutes to see wither it would start up but all I got was a kernel panic message asking me to put the machine through a power cycle. I then powered off and reset the PVRAM (I think that’s what it’s called), this allowed the machine to boot up and I got into OS X, I was alarmed when the hard disk capacity was much larger than it should be. I then noticed my entire music collection had vanished. I tried running a few applications but that wasn’t a good experience with many failing and throwing up errors about a vanilla app being missing or something.
I tried to repair disk permissions and other obvious things but nothing was helping. I reinstalled the operating system completely formatting the disk and starting again. The install finished and I booted into OS X for the first time. It worked fine and I installed my applications and hardware drivers and restarted the system. I was greeted with a nice folder with a question mark on it. I went crazy and then gave up and went to bed. This morning I woke up and reinstalled OS X for the third time, this time was more successful, I reset the PMU and PVRAM and the machine is running 100% and boot-up is almost instant even from a cold start.
Luckily I had some experience with failing computers and was able to fix this without too much trouble but something went wrong somewhere long the line and I don’t have a clue what, lets hope it won’t happen again any time soon.
On other news Apple have set a release data on OS X 10.5 “Leopard”, the big day is 26th October. I am looking forward to installing the new build and taking advantage of some of the pretty cool features it has to offer.
Finally got a new desk after the old one developed a hole which became rather annoying over time. Whereas I had an L shaped desk the last time I didn’t like it much so this time opted for a glass topped square model. This was purchased from flat pack heaven or IKEA as we all know it, they have some pretty nice stuff at reasonable prices. I have the smallest room in the house so finding a desk was quite a struggle and even when we did it was still a saga to get it built. Jamie and I measured and measured and every time we were getting different results and didn’t know what to do, eventually we just bit the bullet and built the thing and thankfully it fitted fine. To make things a bit cooler I also purchased LED light strips for under the desk, these were expensive but the effect is fantastic and worth the money. I opted for the more expensive multi-color ones rather than the white, these can do a range of colors and has flashing/cycling modes. The camera is acting up just now but I have managed to get some pictures but they have quite a lot of noise so sorry about that.
In other news, as you know I have been having lots of trouble with my Virgin Media internet connection, basically its a big pile of slow shite. I have been contacting Virgin Media since May about this and they kept telling me the problem was at my end and that I wasn’t allowed to leave due to the 12 month contract. I spent about 20 GNP a month on the phone bill purely to them. Finally this week took a turn for the good and the technical support team whom are very good and admitted that it was their fault from the start finally had a word with the billing department telling them that I should be allowed to cancel as I wasn’t getting an acceptable service, I phoned up the next day to cancel and their computers were down, typical. This was Saturday and they were closed on Sunday but I was promised a call back from them on Monday. Sure enough they did but I was out, luckily they had taken things into their own hands and actually canceled the account and the message was simply telling me that the account had been closed and there was no cancellation fees etc.
I am now looking for a new internet company and I am thinking BT Total Broadband as they seem to be the only decent priced company that actually own their own network. Since cable is not available in my area I am stuck with ADSL services. So if you have used BT Total Broadband or another ISP that you like feel free to comment and I will bring them into consideration next week when ordering the new ISP.
Since I got my Mac I have been running all the services I require to run a successful multi platform house on a Linux server.
I have been reading some websites and reviews and people are praising OS X Server and saying things like its Aqua on Linux, this tempted me as currently I have no GUI on my server and have to do everything through SSH which is a pain but not too bad as things rarely need changed.
I bought a copy and got to work with testing, I installed it on my Mac Mini as I currently don’t have any other Apple computers. The interface is great and easy to use but I think it’s focused mainly on a mostly Apple environment which my house isn’t. With some work I am sure this would be a great alternative. I will consider buying another Mac just for running the server OS off but not a new one. Most likely and old G4 or G5 as I don’t need the power.
Below are some screen shots attached that show varies aspects of the operating system:
About This Mac
Workgroup Manager
Server Admin
Server Monitor
XGrid Admin
That’s the blog back up and running, had some MySQL problems but nothing a restore database and run Wordpress upgrade script wont help!
Only thing that has changed due to the upgrades are comments, unfortunatly the plugin I use to produce the image verification before posting comments is not available for 2.3 as yet so comment moderation is enabled again, as soon as an upgraded version of the plugin is available it will be turned back off.
If you are about to upgrade, please remeber to backup!
That’s WordPress 2.3 been out for 13 days now. I have been testing it with all my current themes and plugins on my development server and I am pleased to say that everything went fine, some CSS had to be changed for the skin to render properly but that’s to be expected with new builds that have things in slightly different places.
I am now in the progress of backing up my HTTP and MySQL servers then I will be preforming the upgrade, this will most likley be in the morning as their is quite a lot of stuff on those servers.
I will post again once we are all updated!
A couple of days back I broke my Logitech G7 Mouse. I was rather pissed off because it was my own fault and didn’t think it would be covered by warranty. It was the USB receiver that broke. I emailed Logitech asking if the receiver could be replaced. They emailed back saying that would not be possible because the G7 mouse had came to the end of it’s product life and that replacement parts were no longer available. However they did say that because of this they were more than happy to replace my current mouse with either a G9 or MX Revolution. I choose the MX Revolution for two reasons, it was wireless and supports OS X.
A couple of days later UPS turned up with my new mouse. I have been using it for a couple of days and have to say its great. The Mac software is very functional and allows you to program all the buttons on the mouse for custom use. Not only can you have them do things universally but you can program them to do certain things when in certain programs for example in Finder the back and forward buttons control the volume but in Safari they are navigation buttons, in iTunes they switch tracks.
The mouse is very comfortable and the charging cradle is well designed and sturdy. Looks and preforms great, what else could you want from a mouse.
Here is a picture of the mouse.
In other news, I have switched back to Tiger because a few bugs in Leopard were annoying me but I will be sure to upgrade again when the final release comes out this month sometime, hopefully bug free and another great addition to the OS X operating system family.
Talking about operating systems, I have installed a BETA of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista. I have this installed on my laptop on top of Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit. I cannot notice any difference to be honest, good or bad. Hopefully this is due to the BETA stage of the release and not actually what it’s going to be like when it comes to the final release. One thing however is really annoying me and that’s the fact that it has applied a time bomb to my installation which is normal for BETA software but I do not need the big stamp on my desktop saying that my operating system is an evaluation copy, makes me look like someone running pirate software or something.
Here is a screen shot of system description panel in Windows Vista showing the SP1 tag after the version.
As usual any questions feel free to comment or contact me via the link at the top of my blog.
Not really…
Had problems with my phone (Sony Ericsson K810i) which sucked. Phoned 02-UK insurance and they replaced it no bother. Getting the new handset delivered tomorrow.
In other news, I have been playing with the latest developers build of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and I have to say it’s pritty much complete. I have not noticed any huge bugs but there is some performance issues sometimes, I do have a LOT of applications installed though so one of these could be causing the problems. The biggest improvements are the general UI, CoverFlow for finder and finally FrontRow!
The updates are nice but im not sure it’s worth the retail price if you are already running OS X 10.4 Tiger. Maybe Apple has a big feature up it’s sleeve that we do not know about yet, but I really doubt it. I would have reviewed Time Machine but I am afraid I am out of storage. I will need to upgrade my file server to bigger hard disks or buy an external disk. Most likely the server option as no external HDD can offer the flexibility of a dedicated Linux driven file server.
Here are some screen grabs of OS X 10.5 Leopard in action, if you want more feel free to visit my Flickr.
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