Windows Event Logs to Syslog – Update
I came across this site earlier, seems to have a good amount of resources linked for anyone looking to… [more]
iPhone Data Recovery
iPhone needs to be jailbroken to do this (tested on my iPhone 4, with iOS 4.0.1 using the www.jailbreakme.com… [more]
There’s always a better way – Windows Fixes
It really annoys me when people say, "oh, why don't you just re-install Windows" or "do a repair install".… [more]
Mac OS X Gaming Part II
In my last post about MacOSX gaming, I mentioned I like to play Counter Strike / Left 4 Dead, and how I attempted to run it via Parallels virtually etc etc etc. Well, yesterday, Valve announced some AWESOME news for us Mac owners… I can’t wait to try this out 
Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve’s gaming service, and Source, Valve’s gaming engine, to the Mac.
Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.
Delicious sauce: http://store.steampowered.com/news/3569/
Mac OS X Speedup Bits
I decided my Mac was running a bit slower, something I would usually refer to as the “Windows downhill effect”. Turns out Mac OS X has it too! Albeit slightly less intrusive…
As usual, Google delivered. I tested out a bunch of apps, and heck, even purchased my first piece of shareware, EVER.
Amongst the tools I tested out, were:
- iDefrag – disk defragment
- Monolingual – removes unused multi-language code
- Onyx – runs a bunch of system scripts and generally checks over the system
- Xslimmer – removes unused architectures from universal application packages – i.e. in my case, removed PowerPC code from apps that contain Intel code. Read More
Mac OS X Gaming
Having bought a Mac, I sort of stopped playing Counter Strike, in the absence of a mouse etc. I managed to have a crack at TOCA Race Driver 3, which is still by far one of my favorite games (second only to Gran Turismo, for those at home playing along on a PlayStation).
I am quite impressed really, that a notebook can handle gaming as well as this. I have the early-2009 MacBook Pro with 2.93ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM and the Nvidia 9600 GPU, so it’s not really a sluggish platform.
A month or two ago I decided to re-ignite this old flame of mine, World of Warcraft, seeing as it was supported natively on the Mac. About 3GB of downloading later, I had it installed, paid my dues, and jumped on. My initial impression was slow… I had to tweak WoW a little to have it running at a decent 40fps during mob scenes, by pushing the quality to around half way/medium, with the resolution set to the MacBook Pro native of 1440×900. It seems to run pretty well…
Having played CounterStrike and Left4Dead a fair bit just before I bought my Mac, I HAD to try run it virtually on the Mac. I initially tried it out on VMWare Fusion. FAIL. I was quite disappointed to be honest. Mind you, it was running under Windows 7 RC1. But still, frame rate and general loading of the system was down right average… Heaven forbid you enter the hybrid Mac/Windows mode (whatever it’s called)…. Read More
Macintosh Performance Guide: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Booting the 64-bit Kernel
I was stunned the other day when I was looking through my system info on my Snow Leopard equipped Mac Book Pro to find it was running in 32bit mode…. Turns out you have to manually configure it to run in 64bit every single time you boot up (as seen further below), or by holding down 6 and 4 on the keyboard at startup.
The permanent fix:
Edit the file:
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist
Insert arch=x86_64 into the Kernel Flags field.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>Kernel</key> <string>mach_kernel</string> <key>Kernel Flags</key> <string>arch=x86_64</string> </dict> </plist>via Macintosh Performance Guide: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Booting the 64-bit Kernel.
Web Design Busy-ness
After a LONG time of dissatisfaction with the design of Cruising Brisbane, I finally sat down and went, stuff this, I’m fixing it. Over the last weekend I planned out a new front page layout, and began putting the forum skin together.
I must say, I’m very happy with where it’s at. It’s no masterpiece, and it might break every rule in the web design handbook, but it looks the goods, and will do exactly what I want it to – attract more visitors, and KEEP them.
Check it out here – http://www.cruisingbrisbane.com
Watch this space.
PHP Templating
I’ve always wanted to create a CMS system using PHP. I currently have an opportunity through my work to develop a custom form webapp for one of our clients, which I’ve been working on non-stop for the past day or so.
I’ve got no idea how anyone else does templating, but I’ve devised my own little method to replace BBCode style tags embedded within HTML with little bits of code here and there. It really is nasty, but it does the job. At the moment, all it’s being used for is to create a form, which is dynamically updatable by our client so they can add new fields and new forms as required. Read More
SR20DET Machining Videos
This pretty much serves no purpose but to entertain me and anyone else interested in the SR20DET engine.
Outlook 2010 + Social Networks
I thought this was super massive awesome cool plus plus!!!!!1111oneoneone
I just installed the Office 2010 beta, and jumped in to my email quickly to grab a call. When I went to reply to an email, I noticed a little bar, similar to the “security” bar you get at the top of Internet Explorer, at the bottom of the email I was drafting, prompting me to install Windows Desktop Search. I clicked on that, and noticed another notification sitting there prompting me to add a social network for the contact who had sent me the email!
This looks pretty cool I must say. It looks like Outlook will have the functionality to look up your contacts Facebook status updates and what not when you receive an email from them. For home / personal use, this could be really cool. Don’t know how suitable it would be for corporate use however – I mean, who wants their boss seeing all their Facebook updates when they send an email?
First iPhone “Virus”
Interesting. Only affects jailbroken iPhones. I’m curious to see *how* it does this, but I’m taking an educated guess that the virus scans for iPhone’s with SSHD running, and then attempts to logon with the default username / password (which is root/alpine by the way), and then has it’s way with the victim’s iPhone. Clever, yet so simple…
Suffice to say, my root password on my iPhone is now changed!
Oh and I love the Rick Roll effect. Personally, I would have set the ring tone to Rick Astley as well 
Read more here: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/the-worm-turns-on-the-iphone-as-virus-hits/story-e6freuy9-1225795892928
INB352 Network Planning links
These are just for my study reference for a network design / planning subject I’m doing at Uni.
Testking” title=”http://www.free-testking.org/642-515/\”>Testking” target=”_blank”>www.free-testking.org/642-515/”>Testking CCSP 642-515 Exam Questions
Network Planning and Design Guide
Introduction to WAN Architectures – very handy reference…