Al Hoang

Caught this on Dan Barlow’s Diary.

I’ve been looking at Knoppix, and starting to learn enough about it to beat it into a shape I like. Knoppix is an ISO9660 image, which contains another, compressed, ISO filesystem. The inner filesystem is the root of the running system and contains about 2Gb of software. The outer filesystem gets mounted on /cdrom during the boot process and holds a few other files such as X root window images which are presumably put there for ease of alteration.

So, to hack it around you basically unpack the ISO, unpack the inner ISO, chroot into it and fiddle with dpkg/apt-get/whatever else, then pack it all back up again

So here I am after a month of not using NetNewsWire Lite so I fire it up innocently with a bunch of my other well used apps in the background. I watch in horror as NetNewsWire eats up all available remaining memory then continue to keep on allocating more and more memory (i managed to grab top just before this all started) until my machine is basically thrashing due to NetNewsWire deciding it needs all the memory in the universe to do its job.

So I wait 20 minutes…….

I’m still waiting. I have enough at this point and reboot. Time for recovery…..

10 minutes.

THAT really sucked. I had piles of other stuff open and luckily I save often enough I didn’t lose much but thanks to one misbehaving app my machine basically slowed to a crawl SO badly I couldn’t even kill the process once it got running. I really think that the user should ALWAYS have the ability to bring up something to kill errant processes no matter what the situation even if the OS has to reserve memory just for itself and refusee to hand it out. If hackers seriously want to push the limits.. let them figure it out in the advanced advanced settings but personally I hate wasting my time on stupid crap like that.

Okay here’s a thought… I know that iTunes existed before OS X however there’s a possibility that iTunes could have been ported to Cocoa (or at least some parts of it).
If that was the case wouldn’t that mean Apple had quite a bit of Cocoa already ported to Windows and ready to run? That would be a really neat Cross Platform development tool.

Of course this is just a random thought. More likely the answer is no but what if….

Another OreillyNet article strikes again…
This one summarizing the brainchild behind Rendezvous going to FooCamp which must have been some sort of Oreilly geek conference (Sheesh one of these days I’ll dig up the cash to make it to one of these conferences) and trying to give a talk on Basic Rendezvous and getting trumped by the WiFi and Mac hackers already on the scene.
Talk about an alternate reality. I really like Macs but I barely see them. Maybe one of these days I’ll be lucky to be dropped into a Mac rich environment or invited to one but until then to all those brave Mac loners out there!

I like scanning OreillyNet every once in awhile since some of their articles are quite interesting. And some of the OS X stuff they post on is just wild. Too bad I don’t live in a Mac-rich environment to try our some of that stuff. Ah well.
Anyways I was running across a rant on Windows and Viruses on this post when I came across something that really bugged me….

For one, her school recently reconfigured its firewall to insist that any client connecting to the Internet be running McAffee. I’m not sure how that’s done, nor whether there’s a way around it for non-Windows users.

Talk about Network Nazi-ism. I understand the pain of trying to have a locked down network and preventing lots of pain however forcing people to have something that is locked onto >1

Got this link from a Slashdot story on Adobe and Product Activation. Not sure how I feel about Quark moving a bit of their engineering offshotre. I wonder if this can explain why there was a huge delay to move to OS X. I can’t imagine an offshore team having a ton of experience with OS X.

I know I’ve been pretty bad about updating this blog but at the moment enough stuff is in flux about getting a network connection at home that blogging tends to escape my mind. Also, I’ve been taking pictures but it’s a chore to get the pictures uploaded to this server for hosting. I’m hoping to host the pictures on my own server where I have a whole process setup for pulling them back and forth easily then just link them from there.

In the meantime you’l just have to live with inconsistent updates (All 2 of you)