Feb
26
Street Fighter 4, on the iPhone?
The best fighting game series on the best phone ever, but how can this ever play well without a pad?
Read more…
Feb
23
MailServe Snow
How good is it? Good enough to warrant the upgrade to Snow Leopard. That might be a bit of a bold statement but if, like me, you have a site that’s been online since the dark ages you’re undoubtedly bombarded with spam, in the thousands per day. MailServe Snow finally brings bayesian spam filtering to the table and it’s a sigh of relief. Combining the new spam filter options with an RBL like Spamhaus and my inbox finally feels calm again, for lack of better words. And I don’t need to keep mail.app open at all times to try and filter the junk out. It’s finally all taken care of server side, as it should.
How easy was it to upgrade from MailServe Pro for Leopard? Dead easy. Download, install. Launch the old one, save the config and select deinstall from the menu. Start the new one, load the config and you’re up and running.
I rarely rave about software, but if you have a Mac and want to use it as a mailserver you have to get this. I bought it for Tiger, for Leopard and for Snow Leopard and it’s by far the biggest bang for your buck you can get as you’ll have a fully fledged mailserver up and running in literally minutes.
Feb
21
Google Buzz
There’s a lot of hype since the mighty Google announced their latest addition, Google Buzz, but after a quick look it seems to me it’s just Google’s version of Twitter, complete with geotagging and flickr integration.
So for me there’s not really a point as it integrates with Google’s web apps, which I don’t use. Even though the mobile version of Buzz looks nice enough, I don’t want to load a webpage just to use it in a, for me, cumbersome way. I’ve got an iPhone, I want an app for that. And seeing as I don’t use a gmail app but the regular apple mail app to read my gmail… the point is moot. Unless Google were to come out with an all-in-one app that offers all their services neatly integrated I think I’ll pass this one.
Feb
19
World of Warcraft trial
Terribly late to the party with a game that was released in what, 2003? But here I am nonetheless, in 2010, trying World of Warcraft. And it’s fun. It’s probably more fun ’cause I’m playing it with Katelynd which makes things a little more social as I can’t really be arsed to talk to people in game.
The graphics are probably nice if only I could turn up the dial, playing it on my Mac Mini is plenty slow already with all the graphical options set to low. On the iMac is looks lovely though.
So… looks like we’ll be upgrading to full accounts this weekend.
(btw, am I the only one who finds great humor in the fact that when you’re dead and you have to walk back to your physical body as a ghost you still have to jump over obstacles like fences instead of being able to walk straight through them?)
Feb
18
Administrator mailbox whoops
The sysadmin at work suddenly remembered he had an admin mailbox. Obviously he hadn’t checked it in quite a while. And everyone who’s ever had the poor luck to have to use Outlook (and Exchange) knows what a superfast program it is and how well it handles large mailfolders. Or how well it handles deleting email in bulk.
Yeah… that took a few hours.
Feb
17
Computer deskspace
We finally rearranged things so we can now both use a computer at the same time instead of having to take turns. The main idea was that we’d be able to work on themes and coding and graphics together, but somehow the new setup was abused to us both playing a World of Warcraft trial. Ahem.
Feb
17
Reboot in progress
After thinking long and hard about what to do with this site I think I’m going back to day 0; everything including the kitchen sink. I was thinking about switching to a single topic but let’s face it, that’s just not my style. I ‘might’ disable comments for future posts as they rarely have anything meaningful to add, but maybe switching things around might pull a different crowd. Or not, let’s wait and see.
But yeah, X111.com for my random postings, stripping out the community aspect as that’s all dead and buried.
X111.org as my personal newsreader and heuts.org for the portfolio of my wife and I.
Time to get back in the game and get a little more active, 3 years of negligence have taken its toll on the traffic. ;)
Now I just need a new look for the site.
And import my old wallpapers here somehow.
And whip up a few new scripts.
And modify the theme to alter the look depending on the type of content.
We’ll see how it goes. As Bruce said, be like water!
Feb
17
Snow Leopard upgrade
Finally took the jump and upgraded both Macs from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
On the iMac, which is used as our every day computer, it couldn’t be more simple. Plop in the disk and go and at the end everything was upgraded and everything worked, we didn’t have a single app that was borked. Beautiful. And indeed, Snow Leopard is noticeably faster, which by itself is worth the upgrade.
The Mac Mini however… not so nice. Not really Apple’s fault but that one is used as my webserver/mailserver/database server/ftp server and after the upgrade…. well nothing worked. At all. It took me a good day to figure out every single little thing as some problems just didn’t make any sense whatsoever.
First and foremost, it’s a stupidly simple thing to fix once you’ve figured it out, but before you do it can take a while; if you see parts of your site failing without any proper error, with apache processes crashing left right and center (with messages in your Apache error log like “[notice] child pid 7362 exit signal Bus error (10)”), look for mysql_close() in your php scripts and remove it. Simple huh? Apparently it’s no longer supported in PHP 5.3 which is default in Snow Leopard and using mysql_close() makes your page halt wherever its called and the Apache process fall over and die a horrible death. This was during my upgrade the last glitch to fix, but it also took by far the most time to track down as I thought it was simply crapping out due to misconfiguration.
The rest was pretty simple, just make sure you make a backup of your Apache config files prior to upgrade as these get replaced, so you can easily get things like your vhost settings back. You may also have to recreate the symbolic link to mysql depending on which package you were using. As for my mail, that was simply a matter of buying the new MailServe Snow to replace the old Leopard Pro version.
So overall, yay for Snow Leopard. Just make sure you have a good backup if you’re using yours as a server as well.
Thoughts of Imbalanced Mind