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By Matthieu, February 12, 2010 6:16 pm

Enabling ATSC & QAM in Canada for Windows 7 RTM – Peter Near’s Blog.

Today, I wanted to PVR the Vancouver 2010 opening ceremonies in HD, but was dismayed to find that Windows Media Center does NOT support ATSC if your region is set to Canada. Fortunately resourceful users have found a workaround patch. See link above.

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By Matthieu, January 18, 2010 9:38 am

Update 2: My Inspiron worked great, but took FOREVER to boot because it was “Waiting for DSMOS”. Today I finally took the time to do a quick google and found the solution:

in terminal, type “sudo chown root:wheel /” and restart

It seems the owner of the root somehow gets messed up, probably after Chameleon install (just a wild guess).
Thanks to bertmannaustria @ InsanelyMac! (Original thread)

Update: For anyone who is having problems, I have a new kext package. This is a zip of my /Extra folder that I’m using right now on my Inspiron 640m. 640mExtra-Updated Also my system is 32-bit only, so I can’t guarantee this will work in 64-bit mode.

After much trial and error, I finally found the proper procedure for installing Snow Leopard onto my Inspiron 640m. For reasons that I cannot fathom, I was unable to perform the chameleon cdboot/swap to boot from the retail Snow DVD. It might be my DVD drive, or some other cause, but I didn’t bother finding out; I just took the hard drive out of my laptop and connected it via USB to my iMac.

Here’s the procedure that I followed yesterday to install Mac OS X 10.6.0 on my Inspiron 640m. It’s tested, working and stable, everything is great except that this laptop does NOT wake from sleep. It goes to sleep just fine, just won’t wake. Here goes:

1. Remove hard drive from the Inspiron. Connect it using a hard drive dock or USB to SATA enclosure/adapter.
2. Put Mac OS X Snow Leopard DVD into existing Mac (Hackintosh or real mac, doesn’t matter).
3. Using Disk Utility, partition your Inspiron’s drive as you like, using a GUID Parition table.
4. With your Snow Leopard DVD mounted, in Finder, choose Go to folder. In the box that comes up type “/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Installation/Packages”.
5. This will open a folder with a lot of install pkgs. Find OSInstall.mpkg and double-click it.
6. Follow the steps to install Snow Leopard, making sure to pick the proper drive for installation.
7. Once the installation is done, eject your USB drive and put the hard drive back in your Inspiron.
8. Download the Inspiron6400.iso and burn it to a CD.
9. Power up your Inspiron and boot from the CD
10. From the Chameleon menu, use the arrow keys to select the hard drive.
11. Type the following boot arguments: -v cpus=1
12. Your Inspiron should boot into Snow Leopard. Congratulations!
13. Download my 2 Inspiron kext packages: Inspiron640mExtensions Inspiron640mExtra
14. In the Inspiron640mExtensions, you will find kext helper. Run it, and drag AppleBCM440XEthernet.kext, VoodooBattery.kext and VoodooHDA.kext onto it, enter password and install.
15. You will also find the Chameleon RC4 installer. Run it, but DON’T reboot at the end.
16. Extract the Inspiron640mExtra.zip. Copy the contents of the extracted Extra folder to /Extra.
17. Remove the Inspiron6400 CD and reboot. hopefully your laptop should boot fine from the hard drive.

Just a few notes:

• I cannot get the laptop to wake from sleep. As such, the SleepEnabler.kext is not included. I also included the InsomniaX app which you might choose to install to prevent your laptop from sleeping.
• This method seems to be update-safe. I just updated to 10.6.2 using Software Update and all is ok.
• When the clamshell display is closed, the Dell BIOS or something blanks the screen. Mac OS cannot re-enable the screen and you’ll be stuck staring at a black LCD. To circumvent this, set one of your screen corners in Expose prefs to put the display to sleep. If ever you find yourself with a black screen, move the cursor to that corner to force the display to sleep, then wake it up again.
• The Intel PRO 3945 ABG wireless card that came with my Inspiron (and all Inspirons that are branded “Centrino”) does NOT work with Mac OS X. I swapped mine for a Dell 1505 Draft-N card (cheap on eBay) that works perfectly out-of-the-box.
• The Broadcom 440x ethernet card seems to work fine, I tested it briefly with some light web browsing. However, the original thread says that the driver occasionally drops connections, so YMMV.
• Finally, a quick thanks to all the OSX86 devs. None of the kexts found here are made by me, all credit goes to the original authors. I found all the necessary info over at the InsanelyMac forum.

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By Matthieu, January 10, 2010 7:35 pm

grep ‘Googlebot’ access.log | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq

Fantastic little command.

via » How to extract uniq IPs from apache via grep, cut, and uniq Dan Collis-Puro.

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By Matthieu, January 7, 2010 12:54 pm

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/how-do-you-properly-install-a-novatel-turbo-stick-usb-modem-773492/

I used Network MAnager “Mobile Broadband” and entered the APN (“inet.bell.ca”) instead.

These are the important steps:

Step 1:
Connecting the device, it starts as a usb-storage device but at this point the device has the idVendor: 0×1410 and idProduct: 0×5010, Ubuntu recognizes and mounts the device automatically and puts the icon on the desktop

Step 2:
Right-click on the mounted icon named “Mobile Connect” and select Eject, now the device will change its idProduct id from 0×5010 to the more re-assuring 0×7030 but somehow Ubuntu doesn’t know it’s supposed to be a usbserial device…

Step 3:
sudo rmmod usbserial
sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0×1410 product=0×7030
and /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUSB1 etc.. up to /dev/ttyUSB5 should appear on your file system.

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By Matthieu, December 22, 2009 10:42 am

Today I booted up my Windows Server 2003 laptop. All seemed OK, but I couldn’t get an IP address on my wired connection and my wireless card didn’t detect any APs. I thought i would have to reimage my machine, but a quick google brought up this page:

Tech Support Guy Forums – View Single Post – Solved: Wireless networks detected – no wireless networks found.

In a command prompt window,
Reset TCP/IP stack to installation defaults, type: netsh int ip reset reset.log

Reset WINSOCK entries to installation defaults, type: netsh winsock reset catalog

And it works!

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By Matthieu, December 18, 2009 11:39 am

http://trac.adium.im/ticket/6569

XSLT could be used to transform the .chatlog files to HTML. Attached is an XSLT stylesheet that I have written to do this. The libxslt library is present on all versions of Mac OS X since 10.2, and its command-line tool can be invoked in a sub-shell using system(3):

xsltproc -o 'foobar (2007-03-08T09.19.11-0700).html' format-html.xsl \
            'foobar (2007-03-08T09.19.11-0700).chatlog'

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By Matthieu, December 2, 2009 4:42 pm

I’d forgotten how much Vista sucks… I waited through over 45 minutes of “Preparing you computer” and “Installing software” and “Measuring your computer’s performance” for this?

Well, I suppose there is the spiffy sidebar and flip 3D……

Or, to be more accurate, I forgot how much garbage OEMs put on your brand new PC. *cough* HPToshibaDell.

OOH COOL! McAfee, Norton, Windows Live OneCare AND ZoneAlarm! Now my computer is quadruple-protected!
But wait, there’s more you say? A copy of Microsoft Works AND a FREE trial of Microsoft Office? and AOL, Yahoo! and Google toolbars, each with pop-up blocking? AWESOME!

-_-

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By Matthieu, November 28, 2009 3:16 pm

Early this morning I was at Tim Hortons. I had the opportunity to see this:

Tim Hortons uses LINUX!

tim hortons uses linux on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

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By Matthieu, November 27, 2009 2:02 pm

Ultimate NVIDIA® ION™ Netbook Bundle Contest.

My friend Alex Laplante was one of the winners of the NVIDIA ION netbook contest. Congratulations Alex!

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By Matthieu, November 26, 2009 10:41 pm

Today was quite the day. As the title says, systems were failing all over the place. Our main switch at work (a Cisco 6509) crashed about 3 times this week, causing our vSphere environment to crash repeatedly, taking all the guest VMs with it. We searched for a long while before discovering that a faulty UPS battery was to blame for the switch’s instability. Meanwhile, we’re left with a misconfigured iSCSI SAN and 3 ESX hosts with no storage.

At home, my crazy MythTV/OpenVZ/KVM/PBX/Windows 2003/Seedbox/RADIUS server had to be shut down when my home network started acting up. DHCP stopped working, and the machines that were left had difficulty pinging each other. This time, a Cisco device was to blame. A WRT610N router that I use as an ABGN Access-point running DD-WRT had somehow bricked itself and started broadcasting packets on the network, thus flooding my routers and other computers. Then, I tried booting up my server again. MythTV and OpenVZ started up OK, but the qemu-server/kvm machines didn’t start, throwing “can’t open lock for VM 107 ‘/var/lock/qemu-server/lock-107.conf’ – No such file or directory”. Weird error. The fix is to create the /var/lock/qemu-server folder.

And finally, everything at home is up and running again. We’ll see tomorrow morning how things go at work. David was staying late today on the phone with Dell EqualLogic specialists, so fingers crossed!