The Graveyard Book
How much does another Gaiman kid’s book excite me? -
TTTHHHIIIISSS MUCH! I think Neil Gaiman as a children’s book author is quite the fit.
See his interview on the Colbert Report which discusses his release – and shows just a bit of his wit. 
Thanks to Alex (a commenter at skwpspace) for this little tidbit for effectively disabling spindump on OSX.
sudo -i
cd /usr/sbin/
mv spindump spindump-backup
ln -s /usr/bin/true /usr/sbin/spindump
Long ago, shortly after the release of the Belkin Vision N1 v1 (the latter half of 2007, if I recall correctly), I made a very conscious decision to move to a platform assuming it would be supported fully by OpenWRT, Tomato or DD-WRT in short order. My main reason there was well considered but lay mostly with the fact that it was based on the Atheros (AR7141) chipset and a fair amount of RAM (18/8), had a guest network, had 1GbE/gigabit ethernet, tested well with various people, and that it had a really cool LCD that my wife and 6 year old could understand as well as be fun to program from one of the aforementioned replacement firmwares.
I also assumed that, at the worst, I could float one of the maintainers in the respective source projects an N1 so that someone could work on it. Well, when I had the money budgeted, Belkin changed to the “Version 2″ of the N1 Vision. To add insult to injury, Belkin also stopped QA’ing firmware for the V1.
Now we are a heavy gaming family (chess, World of Warcraft, and whole slew of other puzzle, logic, strategy, and other games be they computer, paper, card, or board based). World of Warcraft is one of the ways in which our family and friends schedules time together. We are wickedly coordinated as one could expect.
I had been running N1 firmware 1.00.11 somewhat happily since February of 2008 – until Comcast upgraded my area to DOCSIS 3.0 (update) around the start of October. Not knowing this was happening (SHAME ON YOU COMCAST!) or had happened, once I started experiencing issues, I wasted exorbitant amounts of time troubleshooting home Internet connectivity. During the process at most times, I would attach my generic troubleshooting machine (a vanilla XP system that I could re-image each time) so that Comcast would not be able to blame my setup. All my problems ended up being the result of that Comcast upgade and my cable modem.
(As an aside, I did experience VPN issues using my Cisco client with my work with the running firmware but had a simple workaround – broadband modem card .)
So once the Comcast team ended up stepping up (thanks guys) and seemingly fixing my issues, I decided it time I upgrade my Vision N1 to address the VPN Client issues and purportedly address some range performance issues. Before I commenced with the upgrade, I double checked the aforementioned Open Source projects to see if there had been a release supporting the router. Since there wasn’t I decided to go with Belkin’s 1.00.15 firmware. Here’s where life goes downhill rapidly.
After upgrading to Belkin’s N1 Vision 1.00.15 firmware, life in World of Warcraft and Internet in general became miserable. So, bouncing around periodically between boards looking for updates at Tomato and DD-WRT in particular, I decided to go with a safe standby router that only supported 802.11g when I needed to have a solid experience, and revert to Belkin for daily use (due to the coverage and performance typical). As you can imagine, that was a minor pain.
I chose to give up and buy a new wireless card supporting 802.11n (a WMP300N) and to go back to running Linux as a Wireless Router on PC hardware. Until that system is put in, I decided to take a crack at seeing where Vision support lies with DD-WRT and possibly jump to a WRT310N running DD-WRT while working it… By total cooincidence I find the following, summarized from Belkin’s website:
N1 Vision
Part # F5D8232uk4
F5D8232 version 1 – Pre-Release Firmware Update
This is a pre-release firmware update for the version 1 of the N1 Vision Router F5D8232. The firmware has not yet completed Belkin QA testing; it is posted here because it fixes a number of problems that have been reported with the router. The main changes are:
- General improvements in performance and stability
- Fix for a problem where the router would drop some connections on 2-hour intervals
- Updated driver for the Wireless Network card
Two issues I have with this:
Raise your hand if you like:
Seriously, Belkin – I don’t care if SerComm did develop the Vision N1 for you. SHAME ON YOU for letting people who put faith in your product or name to properly understand the gravity of the issue. I would bet many would be buyers or existing users have lost faith in your ability to SERVE CUSTOMER NEEDS.
I had been without my MacBook Pro while it was in repair for a power-related issue. Prior to my handing over my system to Apple, I secure wiped the entire disk but some Vaulted users for demonstrating the system malfunctions.
Upon my first system restore, I was unable to run any of my machines as the reported “File locked” in the Virtual Machine list as their state.
The machine packages themselves were not locked at a file system level; however, upon exposing the package contents of each Virtual Machine, there existed a series of .lck files. So, knowing I had a good backup still of course, I proceeded to delete the least innocuous and most likely candidate file first: .vmx.lck.
Presto! Once that file was removed, I reloaded Fusion and confirmed the status had changed to “Powered off” which was its true status. I had a hunch that the machine still would not work though as there were several lock files remaining. Where had they come from? Hadn’t I powered the machines off prior to the last cloning? Then it hit me… I test all my clones by booting directly to them though I don’t use the disks once I confirm they are operational – except once when I launched my XP virtual machine to get access to files I left within it. While this could be the reason for one series of lock files, how could that explain that my Vista, 2008, Ubuntu, RedHat, CentOS, Celerra, and so on were all in “File Locked” state when I know those systems hadn ‘t been accessed subsequent to the clone operation and, therefore, were in a clean state?
For now, I decided to delete all the lock files and confirm each machine’s health. Though I chose to relaunch Fusion for good measure, simply double-clicking the package, using “File | Open…” or “File | Open Recent” would all have worked.
What I need to schedule for a lab now is to test if recovering from a clone is related to the creation of the lock files. Until then, case closed… happy VMing again. 
The Klitschko brothers are certainly two of my favourite boxers, heavyweight or not. Wladimir is the current IBF, WBO and IBO world champion while his older brother, Vitali, holds the WBC title. They are the only two brothers in history to hold all the titles in a division in professional boxing.
I always appreciate watching the Klitschkos perform their art which they have honed so well over the years. Each is physically impressive, of course, but their technique, control and accuracy makes for deadly composition.
Recently, Vitali came back from years of retirement to dominate Samuel Peter, the Nigerian Nightmare. I respect Peter’s ability and need to comment that his destruction was not because he shouldn’t have been in the same ring: Vitali just controlled the fight from start to finish in every aspect.
Now I’ve heard that a rematch with Lewis may be on the horizon. While I would watch that fight with interest, I think it would be a mistake by both fighters. Klitschko, disputedly, was rising in that loss and would’ve won had the fight not been called due a gash above Vitali’s eye. Lewis has nothing to gain either. Lewis was a great and no one can take that away from him. I know in my heart what the result of their first bout would’ve been but the TKO was fair and that’s part of boxing.
For more information:
I am an avid user of virtualization and emulation since as long as I can remember. However, what a heavy-weight solution it is to support an application only by means of a virtualization host.
For example, I use a great program to learn German called the Rosetta Stone. Unfortunately it ships only with a Windows installer and no means of running on my other two primary OSs, Linux and OSX (Leopard and Panther), other than by means of some emulation/encapsulation/virtualization layer. Here is where CrossOver and products such as VMware can readily and reliably step in (especially the latter).
As it has been for a while, I first try to run the application in CrossOver then should that fail, I’ll install it into as a guest into my VMM, usually VMware nowadays. Of course there are programs I will install straight into a VM for other reasons, such as interaction, dependencies or data exchange between existing or planned programs.
The downside to both of the above solutions is cost. Now aside from running free virtualization products (which I do), I don’t see cutting ties to VMware any time soon (not just because I’m certified and therefore must proselytize).
A CrossOver license is required for each machine that I install it on, regardless of whether or not there isn’t concurrent usage.
The pros for Bordeaux are:
The cons for Bordeaux are:
Right now, I’m betting on CrossOver over Bordeaux only in that it is the established player. Once I see Bordeaux support Office 2007, I’ll reconsider. I run a few Windows VMs on my MacBook Pro so I’m well covered regardless and can wait patiently.
Matthew Kurowski's generally eclectic blog.