You can use a real, physical drive as a bootable hard disk in Sun Oracle VirtualBox using an undocumented feature, and it even works on Mac hosts!
Friday 12th March 2010
Monday 08th March 2010
Sunday 14th February 2010
Hot off the heels (relatively speaking) of their ribbon interface-clad Office 2007 Microsoft’s Mac division has announced their next version of Office for Mac that will also include the ribbon interface. Problem is, both Microsoft and Apple already solved the problem of feature accessibility years ago with the tall toolbox and the ribbon is a giant step backwards, especially now with widescreens so prevalent.
Wednesday 10th February 2010
Having just spoken about photography, a few hours ago Apple released Aperture 3. One thing of note is the white box instead of black, shock of horrors! Of note for my own personal circumstances was the phrasing of the system requirements:
Aperture 3, which runs as a 64-bit application on Intel Core 2 Duo Macs running Mac OS X Snow Leopard [...]
Tuesday 09th February 2010
Running the ./configure script from the latest nano tarball on a virgin Snow Leopard machine (my dad’s) I keep running into a problem with UTF-8 support.
Using ncurses as the curses library
checking for use_default_colors in -lncurses… yes
configure: error:UTF-8 support was requested, but insufficient UTF-8 support was detected in your curses and/or C libraries. Please verify that your slang was built with UTF-8 support or your curses was built with wide character support, and that your C library was built with wide character support.
I’ve built the latest ncurses and slang libraries from MacPorts and have confirmed they were built with UTF-8 support. Only thing I can think of is it’s using the outdated ncurses from the system instead of MacPorts, but other ports such as Midnight Commander are using it. Will keep digging.
For what it’s worth, it builds just fine without UTF-8, but it’s a feature I’d rather have.
Sunday 24th January 2010
I’ve had my venerable MacBook Pro since 2006 and as such I’ve gone through several batteries. Up until yesterday this three month old unit could hold several hours of charge even with the screen at a reasonable brightness and WiFi enabled, but all of a sudden I can’t get more than an hour and OS X is reporting the unit needs servicing.
Three questions: How could this have happened? Do Apple batteries have warranties you reckon? Is the Bird still The Word?
Saturday 23rd January 2010
I love the Links text web browser and have been using it on FreeBSD, Linux and OS X shells, terminals and whatnot for years but I’ve never once felt the need to customise any builds because it Just Works® so gosh darn well. Checking out the variants (-v) for the Links port in MacPorts on a whim I noticed something interesting:
links has the variants: universal: Build for multiple architectures gcs: Grilled cheese sandwich headers x11: Include X11 interface
Tuesday 22nd December 2009
After worrying that the project had stalled, The Unarchiver 2.2 was released in November and its just as wildly convenient as ever. I really like the phrase "wildly convenient", not sure where I picked it up but it works on so many levels.
Saturday 12th December 2009
Perhaps my internet connection has been a bit spotty, but building the latest version of Ruby 1.9 from MacPorts has been failing on me with a checksum error all afternoon.
Given I do most of my blogging on my retro MacBook Pro, I decided to finally cave in and take advantage of the 30 day free trial of MarsEdit by Red Sweater software for Mac OS X. In an electronic nutshell, it didn’t meet my needs but I could see how it would be useful for most people.
