• The Author - Bart Busschots

  
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… you’re glad you have a power hungry, heat spewing G4 because it’s helping heat your bedroom. Just my luck that we’d run out of home heating oil just as we hit the coldest spell of the whole winter so far!

I’m sure you know the feeling, you’re on a server, some form of excrement has just hit some kind of spinning thing and know that netstat will do what you want if only you could remember the bloody set of options you needed. Well, from now on I’m adding all those commands to this Blog entry so next time that happens I’ll know here to look!

This page will be continually updated but I’m gonna start with a few of those commands I’ve needed in the last few days that are currently stuck to my display in little yellow PostIt Notes.

What Processes are Listening on What TCP Ports

When you need to easily see what a server is serving in a hurry use:

netstat -lntp

Creating and Extracting tar.gz Files Just Using tar

I used to always create and extract tar.gz files by using both tar and gzip and sticking them together with a pipe (I’m sure that nasty Sun E450 was in some way to blame for me getting into that habit). This command was always long and I never remembered the syntax. So here’s the easy way to create a tar.gz archive:

tar -pczf name_of_your_archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory

(You should leave out the p if you don’t want to preserve the file permissions). And here is how to extract one:

tar -xzf file.tar.gz

This is a step-by-step guide to installing Tomcat 5.0.x onto OS X 1.4.x. Note that this is the Tomcat branch for the 1.4 JDK and not for the 1.5 JDK. I know the latest versions of OS X now have Java 5 as part of the OS but my work is not yet ready to migrate to Java 5 so I’m staying with Tomcat 5.0 for now. The chances are that these instructions with only tiny and obvious alterations will work for Tomcat 5.5 with Java 5 but I’m not making any promises. Read more

This has to be one of the coolest and most original web sites I’ve seen in a long time. Literally hours of fun if you get bored/pissed off at work: www.netdisaster.com

Something which has annoyed me for quite some time about OS X is how little control you get over SMB sharing (unless you run OS X server). I am generally a fan of Apple’s "keep it simple" approach but in this case they’ve gone too far and made it so simple as to deny ordinary users access to many features the underlying OS has. Well, the problem is now solved by some nice DonationWare utils form HownWare (www.hornware.com).

OS X contains a complete Samba Server and a complete Samba server and client but
unless you have OS X Server you only get very limited GUI access to these features. You can fully share your entire home dir to your username
and password and you can have a fully public folder called "Public" in
your home directory that everyone can see and that’s it. IMO that is
not good enough! If you are not afraid of the command line you can of
course set up your own shares manually, as I have done on some of my
Macs, but that is beyond the realms of the Ordinary user.

This is where HornWare come in with a nice set of utils. The best one IMO is SharePoints which gives you both a standalone app for managing all your SMB shares as well as a pane you can add to the system preferences app (OS X’s version of Windows’ Control Panel). This gives you all the control you could hope for and at first glance seems a nice app. Another very useful app is SharePoints Auto Mounter which allows you to set up finder to automatically connect to remote shares when you log in, ideal in a work situation where you want access to files on departmental shares etc..

Screenshot of SharePoints System Preferences Pane:

After much hassle (see here) I finally got SimCity4 installed on my Mac today and I am unbelievably disappointed. The game is so buggy and unstable that I’ve seen pre-alpha releases of software perform better. Both my Macs are dramatically above the minimum spec but the game does not work on either. On my Mac Mini it crashes each time you try to load any city and on my better half’s G5 iMac it just freezes every few minutes and forces you to do a hard reset of the machine. The only way I can describe this game is un-playable. If you’re tempted to buy it, don’t! It is so bad I’ve just emailed to the shop that sold me the game asking for a re-fund because the product they sold me is sub-standard. TBH I am tempted to take them to small-claims if they don’t comply because I genuinely feel defrauded here.

So, I’ve been waiting to play SimCity4 for ages. Because it used to be distributed by EA games but was changed to Aspyr most places have been out of stock on it for ages. The EA games website give you a link to add it to your shopping cart that takes you to Amazon who have been out of stock of it for ages and have no expected lead time on it! I sent EA a customer service request asking for a date when it would be available again and they sent back a message saying "It was released ages ago". Don’t you just love it when they answer an entirely different question to the one you ask! Eventually after a few more replies I got told that it had been switched to Aspyr and to try their website. So I did. They don’t sell direct but they had links to shops that sell it so I eventually got to order a copy off Compu-B who then managed to partly loose my order and didn’t phone me for about a week to get the details again. After all that pissing around I finally get the game today, pop in into my machine, click the install icon, get the screen asking for the registration code, enter it EXACTLY as it is on my CD and it tells me to get stuffed! I try again about 10 times, no joy. I try with the dashes, without the dashes, no joy. I start questioning whether the last character is a K or a H because it is not clear so I try some more permutations with and without dashes, still telling me to get stuffed. Finally I go to the Aspyr website and what does it have to say on the matter:

---

Issue

I am getting "Sorry, you have entered an invalid serial number" when I type in the number on the jewel case.

Discussion

Some of the boxes of SimCity 4 seem to have been shipped out with an invalid serial number. If your copy doesn’t have a valid serial number, please fill out the Aspyr Support form for assistance.

---

As well as showing their incompetence doesn’t that just show so well how little they care about us wee plebs who give them money! Rather than re-call their CDs which they KNOW to be broken they just make the customer jump through some hoops instead. For their sakes I hope they get their act together mighty quick and give me a fresh code electronically because if I have to wait weeks for a new code I am going to be VERY un-impressed. I also think that they should offer to ship me the Delux edition for free after this cockup.

I can see why people don’t bother to buy games and just pirate them, less time consuming and the games are actually more likely to work!

Well, it’s taken them long enough but Google Earth for the Mac is now available all be it in Beta form. Had a bit of a play with it and so far I’m impressed, seems stable and looks bloody shinny with all that Mac graphics goodness at it’s disposal!

There have been rumors around about this for a few weeks now and try as I might the closest to an authoritative source I can get is a post on Blake Ross’ blog (he is a FireFox co-creator). Should this turn out to be true it could have quite an impact on the browser usage on the web, particularly for UK sites. I can only see it as a good thing. I also enjoyed some of the rumors I’ve seen about the reasons for this on the web, the best being that it’s a ploy by Dell to reduce the amount of support they have to give because it will cut down on spy-ware infections and the invasion of those annoying porn pop-ups!

So yet another Macworld has come and gone so it’s inevitable that Mac-heads reflect on such things. Personally, my predictions were about 50% right and 50% wrong on the big stuff. The Intel iMacs were a complete shock to me, the Intel Notebooks, totally expected.

Well, we may as well start with the BIG stuff, and lets face it, the move to Intel CPUs is the biggest thing to happen to the Mac since OS X. I fully expected that there would be Intel based Macs unveiled this January. I really didn’t expect Apple to let a whole year pass between their announcement of Intel Macs and those macs being unleashed. Why was I so sure? Simple, sales would have started to plummet as we got nearer and nearer to the summer as more and more people started putting off getting a new Mac until the new ones were out.

Personally, I had expexted the iMac to be the last Mac to get the Intel treatment. Why? Because they were the most recently re-vamped and were not particularly unders-peced or anything like that. Since Intel PowerMacs have been available to developers since last summer I was quite sure that an Intel PowerMac would be the first Intel Mac to be released, WRONG! After that I had expected Intel Notebooks to be the next because lets face it, the G4 iBooks and PowerBooks were just not good enough to compete anymore. Another machine that I expected to get the Intel treatment very early on was the MacMini, again it’s a G4 and again it is rather under-powered compared to what’s out there in the PC market. I also expected to see it released with Front Row and a to be a full TiVo complete with TV Tuner. This could still come to pass in the next few months but nothing at Macworld about it. Basically, I’m shocked to see a G5 machine replaced with an Intel chip before all the remaining G4s are all replaced. What makes it worse is that I accepted delivery of a 20" G5 iMac yesterday!

There was nothing really major with regards to the iPod in Steve’s key note. We got the usual sales figures with the standard blurb about how great iTunes is doing but nothing really new or revolutionary on that front was revealed to us.

The other major part of the Keynote was apple software. Aperture looked very impressive as did the new and improved iPhoto with its PhotoCasts. I was also impressed by the themes in iMovie and the PodCast Studio in Garrage Band also looked good. However, what really intrigued me was the release of iWeb. There can be no doubt that the pages it produces look very flashy on the surface and that the interface seemed very good, however, I am reserving judgment on it till I see the source code that it generates. Perhaps Apple will have achieved a miracle and invented WYSIWYG web software that doesn’t suck but I’m not convinced yet!

Finally, going back to the Intel thing for a moment, I have to say I like their new adds about Apple "liberating" the Intel chip form the dull little boxes they used to be confined to. The slogan on their web page is also great IMO; "What’s an Intel chip doing in a Mac? …. A whole lot more than it’s ever done in a PC".

keep looking »