October 2003
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October 31, 2003
panther

Note to self: wait a month or two before switching to a new operating system.

Pro: Expose is pretty cool.
Con: the PPTP VPN client can no longer connect to the UBC wireless VPN and Apple tech article 107706 doesn't help.

Posted by tim at 03:38 PM | Permanent Link | Comments (6)
October 25, 2003
fugu

Hooray for Fugu! Finally, someone wrote a good free graphical SFTP client. And it's for Mac OS X. And it uses ~/.ssh/known-hosts instead of its own database and it uses ssh-agent if you have your environment set up properly. Fantabulous.

Posted by tim at 01:49 PM | Permanent Link | Comments (2)
October 21, 2003
rtfm

My OpenBSD 3.4 CDs arrived yesterday. In this age of pointy-clicky everything, it's refreshing to see a straightforward text-based installer.

Posted by tim at 01:50 PM | Permanent Link | Comments (0)
October 06, 2003
resetting PowerBook Power Management Unit (PMU)

I was one of the unfortunate souls affected by the Mac OS X update 10.2.8 snafu. I didn't have any ethernet problems (probably because I use wireless connections almost exclusively), but it did significantly shorten my laptop's battery life. At least I think it did. In all fairness, I could be imagining things, since I don't rely on battery power that much and haven't really timed it since I first got the machine over 2 years ago. Unlike a lot of Mac idiots on the fanboy web sites, I realize that rechargeable batteries eventually die. It's one of the many corollaries of the old "the universe always wins" rule from thermodynamics.

Anyway, it took a bit of work to find Apple knowledgebase article 14449 about resetting the PMU. Anecdotal evidence indicates that this might fix the problem. At the very least, the battery level in the status bar indicates a longer battery life and I noticed that it used to be wildly inaccurate for low charges.

The fan still runs most of the time, which annoys me and is probably responsible for most of the power consumption.

Posted by tim at 12:36 PM | Permanent Link | Comments (0)
October 02, 2003
standing on the corner, watching the girls walk by...

I saw a little dog wearing little doggy sunglasses this morning. I think its yuppie owner was sporting a matching pair.

A couple of weeks ago I saw a golden retriever happily carrying its owner's (folded) umbrella in its mouth.

There sure are a lot of dogs in my neighbourhood. Some good, some pointless.

Posted by tim at 11:51 AM | Permanent Link | Comments (0)