Beautiful Day

If you manage a lot of computers or are often writing scripts to perform administrative tasks, you might find tool I’ve recently released useful. Daemon executor allows a process or script to be detached from the controlling terminal in a very simple manor. Please see Daemon Executor for more information.

Ubuntu is pretty easy - but setting up Ruby is sometimes a bit difficult. There are two important packages that need to be installed to make everything easy:

While I was in Japan, I bought a new MacBook Pro (identified as MacBookPro4,1). It is a really nice machine, and a great upgrade from my aging PowerMac G4. I do a lot of compiling, and the two cores really makes a huge difference. However, I’ve had quite a few issues that all point towards something a bit faulty with the hardware. With the recent admission from Nvidia about faulty graphics cards, one has to wonder what is going on here, and what Apple plans to do about the problem.

I was participating in the Apple Support Forums. A lot of posts were deleted recently, including all of mine, and many others. My posts were deleted for containing “Off-Topic, Advertising and Non-Technical” material. I saw about 80% of posts deleted regarding the MobileMe issues. These posts contained people helping each other, consoling each other and generally dealing with the lack of information from Apple.

The problems with the PT AX200 (fluctuations in brightness) appear to have gone away for now. However, Panasonic have got back to me and asked me to send the unit in for testing. I’ve replied and let them know the problem has gone away, and asked for further advice.

I’ve been doing some more tests, and it isn’t looking good for external mail being sent to your @mac.com/@me.com email. It might be resolved once they bring the services back online, but right now, mail isn’t getting through to my MobileMe email address.

Updated: My MobileMe account just pinged back to life (for how long who knows!?). I’d like to mention that the mail that appeared to be missing is now sitting in my inbox. Therefore, while very slow, it is possible that external emails are not being rejected or dropped silently, as discussed below.

I have a MobileMe account (formally .Mac) and also my brother-in-law has one. His account went down a few days ago, and mine just this evening. I think Apple really messed up their transition, and their communication with customers is pathetic. I’ve called the Apple support phone number and they don’t know anything, I’ve emailed them via the MobileMe support web page and didn’t get a response. Thankfully, I don’t pay for the service directly and it isn’t my primary email account, so I’m not worried. However, I’m interested why they are having troubles, so I decided to do a bit of digging.

Hi, I’ve recently made some software for administrators to help manage many printers on the network. This software currently only has a Mac OS X client, but I’ll be looking to make a Window and Linux clients too. For more information, please see the main Printer Access website.

Hi again. I recently purchased the Azur 540R Amplifier. I was looking at either a similarly priced Denon amplifier and this one. In the end, the clear winner for me was the Azur, for reasons that might be interesting to the less audiophile inclined.

Hello again. I recently got a Wii and set up the projector with a Cambridge Audio Azur 540R 5.1 surround sound. Everything is working out fairly well, but there are a few issues worth mentioning.