Category: Tech

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Blogging General Tech Tip

Dated Material

I’ve help develop a couple of websites lately and I’ve been bitten once again by dated material found on the Internet.  I seriously hate it when you are doing research and you encounter what you think is a great page with pertinent data only to find out you based all your research on ‘yesterday’s’ technology/views/opinions.  I guess I’ve been running out of patience to do thorough work in some aspects.  Yet, I do think that anyone that attempts to share information, they should put it into context or at the very least put a date on their article/comment.

On this blog, I’ve been a little re-miss as well.  I’ve taken the easy route and just have the blogging software display the date that the article was published or edited.  I think I’ll need to do more than that as a vanity search has proven that people have been reproducing info from this site (thank you btw for stopping by and I do hope you found the information useful) and basically the reproduce information was ‘archaic’ as one commenter mentioned.  Now I’m not saying that I have any control of what people do with the information I post – but I think I’ll make more of a concerted effort to inform all readers that the information on this site has a limited usefulness lifespan.

Thanks!
JT

Categories
Mac Tech

Hackintosh and 10.5.6

Felt a little brave today and decided to attempt a 10.5.6 upgrade of my machine on the first day of the OS release.  Using the directions that I’ve posted about before, I was able to successfully upgrade with only a couple of gotchas.

Remember – backup everything first!  I again used SuperDuper and my handy-dandy Acom Firewire drive to ensure that I could bring back my existing setup.

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Tip

VMWare – "Fail to lock the file"

I was lucky to get hit by a power outage today.  Nothing like running around the house putting out blinking 12:00s.  I thought that would be the worse of it – I was wrong.  As my Mac powered on it started throwing errors about not able to mount drives, etc.  Then I realized that some of my internal servers may not have survived the power outage. 

As it turn out my main VMWare server machine did just fine – and it spun-up a majority of my VMs that I have running on that server.  However, I quickly discovered that a crucial VM, my Active Directory-DNS-DHCP Win2K3 server, did not power up.  No wonder I couldn’t hit any internal servers.  Launching into VMWare Server console to launch the VM manually gave me the bad news – VMWare threw back an error of “Fail to lock the file” — the file being the VM.

A little Google search later, I found this blog article that seem to have the answer.  Basically remove the lock files.  The article mentions that the lock files end with a “.LCK” extension.  In my instance, running VMWare server, the lock files have an extension of “.WRITELOCK”.

I moved the “.WRITELOCK” files to a temp directory and attempted to restart the VM and – SUCCESS. 

I was so happy .. for 10 minutes then I got hit with another power outage.

-JT

Categories
Mac Tech Tip

MacBook Dead Harddrive – Lesson Learned

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The hard disk in one of the kids’ Macbook finally bit the dust.  No matter how many times you  tell them that they just can’t move their laptop immediately after closing the lid, they are still going to do it.  It does take a few seconds for the MacBook to write it’s RAM to disk before you can move the laptop.  Last week, the MacBook finally decided that it had enough of the abuse and killed the drive.

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Categories
Mac Reviews

Magic Number Machine

Lifehacker just posted a quick entry regarding Magic Number Machine.  I’ve been using this tool since I got my Mac – it’s simply amazing.  Magic Number Machine is an extremely powerful graphic calculator.  It does everything but sit up and beg.  The tool has come in very handy when I’m double-checking the kid’s homework — it’s been a long time since Algebra for me.  This takes all the grunt work out of the problems.

It’s Mac only and can be found here.

-JT