Andrew Beresford's Blog » Computing

Installing the Perl DBD::Oracle on SPARC/Solaris 10

beezly — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:55:02 +0000

Installing the Perl DBD::Oracle driver on Solaris is traditionally a complete ballache. I hate most things about Oracle software packaging and installation instructions, so I thought I’d get my own instructions going. So here goes; Compilers Start by ensuring you have Solaris 10, patched up to date. First thing we need is a compiler, so [...]

Getting VMware Workstation 6.5 to work on AMD64 Ubuntu 9.04

beezly — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:36:14 +0000

If you get a segfault when trying to start vmware on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) you can fix the problem by moving /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary to somewhere else (binary.old) will do. The included 64 bit binaries cause vmware to segfault when starting up. Good luck!

Encyclopedia Britannica’s rant on Wikipedia

beezly — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:18:38 +0000

From the SMH article: “If I were to be the CEO of Google or the founders of Google I would be very [displeased] that the best search engine in the world continues to provide as a first link, Wikipedia,” he said.”Is this the best they can do? Is this the best that [their] algorithm can [...]

Fixing Comment Counts in WordPress

beezly — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 09:29:18 +0000

As I’ve just migrated to using WordPress for my blog, I thought I’d add some useful information in my first post. WordPress caches comment counts for each individual article in wp_posts.comment_count. If for some reason these cached values don’t match up to the real comment counts per article, you can fix this using the following [...]

Bad user…

beezly — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

# uptime

  2:05pm  up 49 day(s), 20:17,  45 users,  load average: 7938.89, 5199.82, 1657.09

A few months on…

beezly — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

It's been a few months since I bought my Mac now. It's really become my main operating system at work and I use it fairly frequently at home, so I thought I'd list a few of the applications I'm using frequently:

iTerm - iterm.sourceforge.net.
An enhanced terminal application. I was used to gnome-terminal on Linux and the tabbed window feature was something I missed in the Apple supplied Terminal. One minor gripe was some broken keyboard mappings, but I fixed that.
VMware Fusion - vmware.com/products/fusion.
Basically this is VMware Workstation for Macs. The Unity feature is excellent, allowing me to embed Windows applications on to my OS X desktop without having to have an entire Windows desktop running in a window. My main requirement for this is to run Linux and also for Windows XP (my work use Microsoft Live Communication Server - Windows Messenger is the only client that I can use to talk to it and the Mac version doesn't seem to work). I've always been really impressed with VMware's products and Fusion also excels.
MacFUSE - code.google.com/p/macfuse.
FUSE for Macintosh. It allows me to mount filesystems on machines just using SSH. Another great piece of software which I was used to from Linux.
Azureus - azureus.sourceforge.net.
A cross-platform Java BitTorrent client. I'm not too keen on what they are doing with v3, but v2.5 is ok. I've also been using Transmission - tranmission.m0k.org, although sometimes it doesn't have some features that I want to use.
VirtueDesktops - virtuedesktops.org.
Virtual Desktops for OSX. If you used Virtual Desktops before you'll find this to be a really nice implementation with some clever features that allow you to use the tilt and light sensors to change desktops (although they're more of a gimmick than anything else). Development of VirtueDesktops has stopped as it is about to be out-moded by the inclusion of a Virtual Desktop feature ( Spaces) in the next release of Mac OSX. Until then, VirtueDesktops is great.
Firefox - getfirefox.com.
The best web browser out there for my purposes.
MissingSync for Palm OS - www.markspace.com/missingsync_palmos.php
Decent synchronisation for my Treo 680 phone.
SpanningSync - spanningsync.com.
Synchronises my iCal Calendars with Google Calendar. I'm not usually that keen on "Subscription Software", but this application seems to work reliably.

It’s Alive!!

beezly — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I finally got Gold, my "borrowed" E4500 running last night. 14 CPUS and 4.5GB of RAM. It has two dodgy memory banks which it has disabled, but that still leaves it with 4.3GB.

Here's some of the output it churns out as it turns on...

{0} ok boot /sbus@3,0/SUNW,fas@3,8800000/sd@9,0
Boot device: /sbus@3,0/SUNW,fas@3,8800000/sd@9,0  File and args:
SILO Version 1.4.8
boot:
Allocated 8 Megs of memory at 0x40000000 for kernel
Uncompressing image...
Loaded kernel version 2.4.27
Loading initial ramdisk (3391488 bytes at 0xC00000 phys, 0x40C00000 virt)...