Blog Moving..!

I have decided that WordPress is a little overkill for what I need, and have moved my blog to Tumblr.

Please update your RSS feeds to point here: http://tommed.tumblr.com/rss
You can find the site here: http://tommed.tumblr.com/

Pownce Desktop App (using Adobe AIR)

Pownce is a Twitter replacement with a lot more to offer.

Unfortunately their desktop app was written with a BETA version of AIR and won’t install now Adobe have officially released it.

I have written a replacement which allows you to post your status on Pownce, using Adobe AIR 1.0. Your credentials are stored encrypted on your local hard drive.

Download Pownce Desktop App

Rss feed for future version of this app

TimeMachine & Samba

Time Machine in Leopard is great for backing up your stuff! (especially as most External/Network drives come with only Windows software for automated backups!!) The problem is, you can’t seem to configure it backup to a Network drive. DOH!

I’m not posting a moan here.. but a solution! Oh yes!! Open a terminal and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Open the TimeMachine system preference and you should now see the drive! Yay!

The only other caveat is, you should eject the disk a couple of times before backing up to it as Leopard seems to have some difficulties with Samba (or similar) NAS drives and files tend to go missing?! :S

FreeBSD in VMWare Problem

If you’ve installed FreeBSD on VMWare and installed the VMWare Tools, you’ll probably find that you get the following message appear every-so-often:

“calcru: runtime went backwards”

This appears to be a problem with VMWare simulating the timer. You can fix it by running the following code:

“sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware=TSC“

 Ping Back

Msn Messenger Worm

This bad boy is doing the rounds at work at the moment, haven’t seen much about it on Google, so I thought I would post a little help up about it.

So what happens is you receive a file from a msn contact called something like image28.zip, if you accept this and open it up, you’ll see an executable claiming to be from Photobox. Opening it, you will see a lot of flicker, as msn messenger windows open up and start sending the file around your contacts.

To stop this worm do the following:

• Close msn messenger (probably best to kill it via task manager)
• Make sure you are not hiding system files and hidden files in explorer
• Navigate to system32 and delete the file mdesvc.exe
• Open regedit and go HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CURRENTVERSION\[RUN and RUNONCE] and remove any keys which point to mdesvc.exe
• Restart your machine

This advice comes with no warranties or support, all I know is it seemed to work for me!?! I will however accepts cheques or BACS transfers! he he!

Radiohead – In Rainbows

I first heard that Radiohead were releasing their new album as DRM-free mp3s only on the TV last week. The real selling point at the time, as the presenter explained, was the fact that you could choose how much you were going to pay for the album and the band would make their money from the Tour rather than the album sales.

So, being a Radiohead fan, I purchased the album and downloaded it.

I have to tell you, it has my vote!! The album is top quality and possibly one of the best albums Radiohead have ever released? (knocking ‘Ok Computer‘ off the top spot) I would recommend some expensive headphones and turning it up loud so you can get the most out of each channel! It has certainly worked as I am really looking forward to the tour!

iPod Classic 80Gb on Amazon £152!

Amazon are offering the iPod classic 80Gb for £7 cheaper than Apple or highstreet shops, that £7 can then go on next day delivery (before 1pm), so if you can’t get your grubby mits on an iPod in your local Currys/Dixons; this is a pretty sweet alternative! Ordered mine this morning!

Cygwin won’t read .bashrc?

Add the following line of code to the very bottom of /etc/profile

. "$HOME/.bashrc"


This will execute the .bashrc file from your home directory.

If you are not sure where your home directory is type the following into a cygwin console:

echo $HOME

If your user folder contains a space; you may have to place the .bashrc file into the root directory and you may still have the calling line into /etc/profile.

Boot Leopard from USB device

Get a USB hard drive (or use your iPod if you are brave enough to wipe that?) and partition it into two pieces, the first will act as the installation disk, the other will become the partition leopard will live on.

Installation will take around 45 minutes and the system overall performs quite well off of the USB disk; however running or indeed building in XCode really is painfull!

Thinking about it however; I would prefer a slow system to wiping my Tiger installation off of my laptop and being left with an early beta of Leopard (trust me it is still an early beta!)

1. Open Disk Utility and select the drive to partition
2. Click the partition tab and choose 2 partitions
3. Make the install partition 10Gb in size and set it to Mac Journaled
4. Make the destination partition fill the rest of the drive and set to Mac Journaled
5. If your using an Intel machine; select the destination partition and click options, choose Guid Partition Table, click OK
6. Click the partition button to start partitioning the disk
7. Once done select the install partition and click the restore tab and restore from the leopard_client dmg you have downloaded from Apple (*Paid ADC membership is required)
8. Click the restore button to copy across the installation files
9. Restart the machine whilst holding down the Option key and choose to boot form the install partition
10. Follow the installation instructions and choose to install to the destination partition (will only not be available if you forgot to set the partition schema to Guid Partition Table, in which case you will have to start from the beginning again! DOH!)
11. Leopard will eventually boot and download any updates, to default boot to Tiger; open system preferences and choose Tiger from the Startup Disk menu

Integrate Yappd (A Twitter wannabe) into your build script

I have always thought these Twitter style sites are a little pointless… “Brian is in the Diary Room”, “Matt is eating Marmite”, it’s almost as bad as watching Big Brother?!

However I finally found a use for these sites.. Our company has a build machine which churns out a build every evening when I’m tucked up in bed. When I get to work in the morning there is an email reporting the build has failed/succeeded and attached is a log file. The pain is my inbox gets full very quickly and these emails are just noise which pop up when I don’t need them.

So I changed the build script to email a Twitter wanna-be site.. Yappd.com.

I attach an image to the email which contains a cross or a tick depending on if the build passed or failed, and I can visit this site when I want to know the build status or just to make sure the build machine is behaving as expected.