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Mac OS X Tiger is released this Friday. In anticipation of its arrival here’s a helpful little Perl script I stumbled across. If you alias ls to this script it will display the live contents of a .savedSearch virtual folder.

CLI Spotlight enabled!

“A system running Microsoft Windows 2000 with 4GB of physical memory installed will show approximately 3.5 to 3.7GB of RAM available. This is because the operating system is not counting memory reserved for PCI resources as user available memory. PCI resources include: onboard ethernet devices, onboard audio devices, PCI/AGP video adapters, etc. Typically machines with more devices installed will have more memory reserved to operate these devices.

Be aware of the differences between “physical” installed memory and “available” memory, as “available” memory may differ from machine to machine even though they both may have equal amounts of “physical” memory installed.”

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This only seems to be the case with 32-bit Windows XP installs that have over 3GB of RAM. I had a machine with 4GB and it was reporting 3GB available. I removed some of the PCI devices and was able to get it to show 3.4GB available. However, if I enabled all the PCI devices and removed one of the 1GB chips the machine would still show 3GB available.

Microsoft Visual Studio .Net does not support installing from multiple CDROM drives. If you see an error mid-install that reads “error 1309 reading from file” the fact that you’re using multiple CDROM drives is the problem. VS is a particularly long install to begin with, so catching this error half way through only to watch it roll back your install is particularly frustrating.

Sun has historically had some funny versioning and naming history. Here’s how the Solaris and SunOS versions match up.

Solaris 1.0 = SunOS 4.1.1
Solaris 1.0.1 = SunOS 4.1.2
Solaris 1.1 = SunOS 4.1.3
Solaris 2.0 = SunOS 5.0
Solaris 2.1 = SunOS 5.1
Solaris 2.2 = SunOS 5.2
Solaris 2.3 = SunOS 5.3
Solaris 2.4 = SunOS 5.4
Solaris 2.5 = SunOS 5.5
Solaris 2.5.1 = SunOS 5.5.1
Solaris 2.6 = SunOS 5.6
Solaris 7 = SunOS 5.7
Solaris 8 = SunOS 5.8
Solaris 9 = SunOS 5.9
Solaris 10 = SunOS 5.10

This morning I was trying to connect to a MySQL database via a forwarded SSH port on a Windows client and it wasn’t working as expected. It seems the Windows machine was identifying itself as localhost.localdomain instead of just localhost. The linux machine had no trouble, so it took me a little while to realize that was the problem. Its easily fixed if you give the mysql user as well as the user you wish to connect with the ability to come from a machine named localhost.localdomain. Log in to mysql and issue the following command to take care of the mysql user.

grant all privileges on *.* to mysql@localhost.localdomain identified by ‘mysql’ with grant option;

And on your way out, don’t forget to flush (privileges)!

“Linux is emerging as a widely-used version of Unix. At this time there are over 600 Linux systems registered at Princeton, and the number is growing rapidly. One of the advantages of Linux is that it makes it possible to take advantage of the economies of Intel-based computing and a full-featured operating system with a complete set of high quality software tools available gratis. We recommend that consideration be given to expanding the university DeSC program to include the Linux operating system as an option. This would benefit the university in several ways.”

Read on for the mirrored copy of the Sub-committee on Research Computing’s proposal from 1999 (original copy stored here).

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A while back Josko posted this XML file to his website. Dropped into Thunderbird’s install location under defaults/isp as princeton.rdf the file creates a customized Princeton Email option in the setup wizard. It takes care of most of the settings specific to Princeton and only really requires the user to know his or her own NetID. I’ve mirrored it here.

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