Author Archives: Ian

Boot Camp and Fedora

To celebrate the release of [Boot Camp 1.1 beta](http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/), I tried to install [Fedora Core](http://fedora.redhat.com) in the spare space on my drive. Boot Camp worked great to repartition the drive, shrink the Mac OS X partition, and create a 10 GB free space. First, I tried Fedora Core 5 DVD. The installer got to a […]

Weird Connections

I was reading a [blog entry](http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2006/08/ladies-and-gentleman-duke-cunningham.html) with quotes from [an TNR article about Nancy Cunningham](http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060828&s=kelley082806&c=2), the wife of disgraced Congressman Duke Cunningham, when I read the following quote. > Nancy showed little interest in defending her husband’s behavior, which, she said, > was an embarrassment to her and her girls. “When I was going to […]

Typo and Mongrel

I got this blog working with [Mongrel](http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/), a web server written in Ruby designed from running Rails applications. The main Textdrive Apache process is proxying the blog to the mongrel_rails process. This replaces the Apache to Lighttpd to Rails over FastCGI setup I was using before. In the previous post, I talked about how I […]

Typo on Textdrive

I have recently been having problems with running Typo on Textdrive. The cause seems to be that the ruby grows too big and is killed by FreeBSD. Why it isn’t being restarted automatically by lighttpd, I don’t know. The solution is supposed to be to start the rails fastcgi program separately from the lighttpd process. […]

Bridge Pedal

I did the Bridge Pedal for the third time yesterday. It is a signature Portland event where they open the bridges to bicyclist and 18,000 people come out for a mass ride. A big draw for me is that they close to the top decks of the two big freeway bridges which are normally not […]

iTunes & Track Numbers

I was using iTunes today and turned on the display of the Track Number. And discovered that none of my Ogg files had any track numbers. Soon after I got the MacBook, I installed the [Quicktime Components](http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/) which allow playing Ogg and FLAC files because that it what nearly all my music is encoded in. […]

Virtualization on the Mac

[Parallels](http://www.parallels.com/) rocks. It is the first virtualization software for the Intel Macs. They also Windows and Linux but they aren’t well known compared to the big guys of Microsoft Virtual PC and VMware. The performance is pretty good since it makes use of the Intel VT extensions in the Core Duo processor which allows full […]

New Stuff

I answered the question of what laptop to get by buying an Apple MacBook. I got the simplest (and cheapest) model. I put 2 GB of RAM that I bought from Fry’s. One reason is that I could pick it up from an Apple Store. Another is that I liked the flexibility of the choosing […]

Which Laptop?

I have been thinking about getting a laptop. Seeing all the laptops at OSCON made me want to get one now. The problem is, I am not sure which one to get. I want to get a small, light one. I have never gotten the point of the big laptops; the point is to carry […]

OSCON 2006, Day 1

This year, I only went to the sessions for OSCON. This is the sessions on Wednesday. ### [Big Bad PostgreSQL: A Case Study](http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2006/view/e_sess/8379), [Theo Schlossnagle](http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2006/view/e_spkr/1788) This talk was about migrating some data warehouse systems from Oracle to PostgreSQL and the issues they ran into. Some of the issues were ones we had run into at […]