January 2008

As you probably know, the MagSafe adapter is a great invention. Someone trips over your power cord, and the connector pops off.

And if you think “well, cool, but won’t happen, a normal connector won’t break your notebook” you’re very wrong.

A few months ago, at school, during courses, someone tripped over my Powerbook’s power cord, and pulled everything off the table. This resulted in complete data loss + broken adapter + banana-looking case; 926 EUR repairing costs (Yes, this is when I dediced the get myself a Macbook (Pro), and the good thing was that Leopard was about to be released).

I finally got a reply from the Parallels support team. After using the alternate Parallels installer it finally works again! Even after rebooting Mac! joy

Before trying to run Vista/Bootcamp through Parallels again, I’m waiting till the end of my exams (Thursday). Don’t want to blow up my Windows install again when I’m in desperate need of it. ;)

As usual with Parallels, creating/installing a new OS isn’t easy. Wether it crashes or you get a bunch of errors, you’re always up for a day full of fun!

While checking the logs of one of my websites I noticed something rather weird.

Some person (65.210.123.237) with User-Agent/browser “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows NT; ……/1.0 )” was downloading all files from my website. Totally ignoring robots.txt and requesting pages without providing a referral.

This seemed quite odd and didn’t seem to be a decent/real search robot. It kept requesting files every 3-4 seconds for about one hour. Decent search bots try to spread the load over a few minutes, and wouldn’t request about 1000 files (1.6 Gb) at once.

I recently got my hands on Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

I must honestly say I really enjoyed the singleplayer. Great action, nice graphics, damn exciting maps, cool effects, nice movies, cool story, …

The only big downside was how short it was. After not even 2 days (so, around 4-5 hours of gaming) I completed it. I was just getting warmed up, finally mastered all controls, felt a small addiction coming up, when suddenly I saw the credits flashing over my screen… That day, will be remembered as a sad day. :(

From the (very) few things I watch on TV, I believe it’s That ’70s Show I enjoy most. It’s one of the only (comedy) shows I can just keep watching to. Yes, 24 and Lost aren’t too bad either (and, well, it’s not really comedy, is it?), but the last seasons have been going downwards and all tension is gone. That ’70s Show is different and hasn’t really changed over the years, it still makes me grin for about 25 minutes each day I manage to watch it.

Whilst reading over “Chapter I: The Internet” in my Hypermedia course; I couldn’t help noticing a few things.

I quote:

• All IP's of local PC's in a local network begin with "192.168"
• DNS is a service on the internet that links hard to remember IP's to easy to remember domain names
• A PC with a Pentium processor and at least 64 Mb RAM is needed to be able to connect to the internet.

When surfing the web, I came upon an old site we (read: Rootspirit) used to host.

Nick, one of the posters, wrote an article I totally agree with. It really reflects why I’m using Mac instead of Windows now.

Read about it here (Dutch), or here (Google translated, far from understandable)

For those who have to work with IP’s and subnets, I have only one word; Bitcricket IP Calculator.

It converts decimal IP’s into binary or hexadecimal IP’s (and, the other way around too); it gives you the IP class; it calculates subnets, with the number of hosts/subnet, and gives you the number of host bits; and many more!

Shiny tool to quickly do subnet calculations. Has proven it’s use when doing the Cisco CCNA tests. ;)

For a few courses I’m following at school, I need to be able to run Windows.

As I’m owning a Macbook Pro (with Leopard) that shouldn’t have to be any problem using Bootcamp.

I created a 5 Gb partition and installed WinXP a few weeks ago. So far all fine.

As I don’t really like to reboot into XP (I can’t access my mails, don’t have my IRC client, all my Camino tabs are closed, …) I tried Parallels.

So, after years of ‘why should I have a blog? No one is going to read it anyway…’ I finally made one. Don’t ask me why.

It’s probably going to turn out into a rather tech-blog, as I’m not the kind of person to write down my emotions on the net, or to keep some kind of diary, but nevertheless, hope you’ll enjoy it, or even better, hope someone might read it. ;)