mattgadient.com

I recently pulled my sites off of a shared host and onto a VPS.  If you’re like me and the extent of your linux knowledge is “I know how to set up an .htaccess file”, then you just might be in for a few days of banging your head against the wall. 

I know I sure was.

My VPS was through VPSlink, and I kid you not – I went through at least 5 reinstalls of CentOS and WHM/Cpanel per day for 3 days because something wasn’t working right each time (hangs on “Updating IP list from WHOIS database” in WHM for example) and I was convinced things were broken beyond repair.

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When you can’t count on HP, the Linux community is fortunately there for us Mac users.

No, there are no “HP Certified” drivers. Yes, there are Mac ones.

I pulled the information from a thread here. Thanks goes out to craigverse for the info.

Before going any further, Leopard users seem to have a very high success rate using the 1st package listed (the drivers I used). Snow Leopard users however have been met with very mixed results – some get it working, and others don’t. If you try and it doesn’t work, there are many possible side-effects: you may end up with printers permanently listed that don’t work, you may have conflicts with other installed printers, and there could be other issues.

First of all, you’ve got to download 3 programs. You can find them at  http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/MacOSX/hpijs. The ones you’re looking for are foo2jzs, Foomatic-RIP, and gplgs (choose the gplgs that corresponds whatever verson of OS X you happen to have).

If you’re a little lazy, I’ve zipped all 3 and uploaded them here:
MacOSX_HP_Color_LaserJet_1600_drivers.zip (drivers I used)
MacOSX_HP_Color_LaserJet_1600_drivers_new.zip (new drivers with SL support – not tested)

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November 6, 2009 update: I’ve taken a look at Fusion 3 vs Parallels 5.

November 5, 2009 update:
Parallels 5 is now out too, which also supports DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 3 (PS3.0). I’ll have to test it later.

October 30, 2009 update:
VMWare Fusion 3 has come out, which now supports DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 3 (PS3.0). If you read this article earlier, you may have noticed that Mass Effect 2 didn’t run on either VMWare 2 or Parallels 4, because they only supported PS2.0. Now that Fusion has PS3.0 support, it *may* now run Mass Effect 2, although I haven’t tried it yet.

In any case, if you’re looking to purchase Fusion, make sure you get version 3 (and not the older 2.0.1), as it’s likely to play even more games.

Finally, feel free to continue reading this review – I apologize for it being insanely long (it was originally split up between 4 pages). Note however that it is now outdated. It’s still valid if you’re using Fusion 2.0.1, but if you’re using the new Fusion 3, keep in mind that your mileage may very.

I’ll try to test both of the latest versions at some point in the future.

VS
Which one is better for Windows gaming on the Mac…?

Q: I like Apple Computers, especially Mac OS X. Problem is, I also like gaming, and all the games are for Windows. I know I can dual-boot with Bootcamp, but I’d really like to be able to play from within OS X. Question is, are the emulators (or more accurately, Virtual Machines) good enough that I can play my Windows games while in OS X?

A: We’re about to find out…. Read more…

A little hiccup on my OSX86 machine… I’d double-click the regular WoW installer, and the little animation would happen, and then… nothing.After a little searching, it appears I needed what’s known as a “Carbon Library Fix”. I’m guessing it has something to do with Rosetta being a little broken or something with the iDeneb install. In any case, I downloaded it from a korean site here (Google Translated).

I’ve provided the file here: CatbonLib_FIX.pkg.zip

So it’s been a few days since Microsoft unleashed the Wn7 beta on the public. Reluctant at first, I decided to take the plunge. I’m not a fan of dual-booting, but from what I had gathered it was fairly stable, so I decided to use it as my main OS.

Initial observations (aka what anyone would notice within 5 minutes)

Installation is similar to Vista. It’s a little more polished, but no major changes there. Vista was already a right step in the direction away from XP.

Once everything’s said and done and you’re at the desktop though, things are noticably different.

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Took a bit of searching (seemed to have to find the right key-words), but I’ve got a site where I’ve utilized the submenu’s quite heavily. However, since there’s not a lot of information in each menu page itself, it looked… well sparse. Getting down 3 levels also meant that people had to click over, and over, and over again.

In any case, I wanted to simply show ALL the menu’s and submenu’s at the same time – something not set by default in Joomla.

It’s easy enough to fix though.

In the administrative section, head to Extensions/Module Manager. From there, find the menu you want to change the properties of (in my case, Main Menu). Click to edit it (or check the box and choose “Edit” from above). Once editing the properties, you’ll see in the right side (under Parameters/Module Parameters) an option called Always show sub-menu items.

Simply change that value to yes and you’re golden!

Situation:

DS1 (Dark Star One) in Windows 7 Beta (x64) was crashing immediately upon trying to start it. This is the Steam version of the game, although the fix may apply in other situations.

The Ascaron Exception Dialogue pops up with a “Walhalla Exception” and says there’s been an “Ascaron Exception Error”. If you look through the Advanced tab details, you’ll see mention of D3DERR_NOTAVAILABLE and a file called dxapdirect3d.cpp .

In any case, I was able to fix it.

I’ll give credit to the post here for the info.

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Grabbed DSO for $5 through Steam over the holidays. One hiccup I found was that the rest of the Stromok system was discovered, but I couldn’t get to Odia, which is pirate infested, and hence, grants an artifact when you clear it.

As it turns out, you have to head to Cabracoy first and complete the sidequest there.

Took a bit of searching to find, but I got the info from here.