Angelo’s blog

I just did a clean install last night, and Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) rocks!

It looks amazing, and the best operating system did indeed get better.

I really like the stacks in the dock! I used to have shortcuts on my desktop for easy access to certain folders, but now, with the stacks, it’s even easier.

And there are quite some details that have changed as well. For example the lock icon under the AirPort menu, that differentiates the secured wireless networs from the unsecured.

The preview window in finder is amazing as well, and PDF files are rendered in milliseconds using the new version of preview

I do have to get used to the little lights in the dock, that show which programs are active. I kind of liked the old way better, but I’ll probably just have to get used to it.

update: Installing Leopard seems to have solved the DHCP issue I had with my new access point, but I’m not sure whether it’s the reinstall itself or Leopard that has solved it.. Anyway, I’m happy..

Now this is cool.. No more need for an USB stick, I can run this program on my Windows Mobile 5 phone, and it emulates a generic mass storage device.

So I can just plug it into any PC running Mac OS, Windows, Linux, etc, and they think it’s just an USB stick, and I can copy files from and to my phone’s memory card.

I just used it to transfer a file from a Windows Vista box to a server running Solaris 10. I wanted to transfer a package with network drivers, but I did not want to burn a cd with 1,5MB of data. I lost my USB stick, but now I always have one in my pocket

Download here (free registration required)

This week, I ordered a Cisco 1131AG access point on Ebay, at 2/3 of the price.. I got the product because it’s a cisco (support, robustness, etc), and because of the extra range. And this one even looks fabulous! Guess who it’s inspired by

One thing I noticed as I received the AP, is that the circle around the Cisco logo lights up! It’s green when no one is connected, and blue when someone is. (And all kinds of colours in between I haven’t figured out yet, didn’t read the manual all the way through)

As usual with cisco, it has so many options, that you can easily drown in them, and you really need to know what you are doing. In the menu is a ‘express setup’ as well, but it does not satisfy my needs (wpa without radius). The box ships with radios disabled, and as soon as I enabled one, I was up and running. Took me some extra time to get it running with WPA, as I want to use pre-shared key authentication. (don’t want to set up certifates for 2 users, and without a radius server). I had it up and running, but then I got the problem that the AP would not pass DHCP reply packets.. Must have done something wrong.

So I set it to factory defaults again this morning and set it up according to this user’s instructions, and I was up and running again in a few minutes.

I set it to WPA2 only to be secure (WPA/TKIP is flawed or can be hacked as well), and my mac worked immediatly. My girlfriend, who uses Windows XP and the Windows tools to manage the wireless network card on her laptop, had to install the WPA2 update manually (it’s not an automatic update, and requires genuine valiadation!), and after that, it connected as well, and worked perfectly.

update: seems the DHCP reply packet issues is not solved yet. If I reboot my laptop it gets an ip, but when I suspend and resume, I don’t get an IP from my DHCP server. The DHCP server is SENDING the package though, I see in the sniffer. And the laptop is getting ipv6 router advertisements. Hmm.. Looks like the AP is eating the DHCP reply packets.. grrr..

According to g-WH!Z, Leopard will be released on October 26th! Let’s hope so.. I know that I will buy it as soon as it’s released here in the Netherlands.

Come on, just look at this page: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/ and click on the ’take a tour’ button. How can anyone resist?

FreeBSD RELENG_7 was born on 2007-10-11 04:28:08 UTC. I wonder when the official announcement will be made.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-src/2007-October/082249.html

Update: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2007-October/078172.html

A message from Ken Smith, stating that this was done for development reasons, and in a few days, it’ll get beta status, and there will be a schedule for going stable. I hope they go stable soon!

Quote from original article: “The inventors of Sun Microsystems’ ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, distinguished engineer and storage CTO, and Bill Moore, hardware/software architect, tell me what was behind coming up with ZFS. It’s a file system. That sounds boring, right? But it’s not, since this technology is used in many of the world’s datacenters to keep files safely stored even when bad things happen. The conversation takes us all over the place, since these guys are experts on storage systems. Hard drives and all that. What does ZFS stand for? Zettabyte File System.”