Hackintosh / computers in general

I just this evening did the hackintosh thing on my Dell Inspiron 9400. It runs really, really well.

It makes me wonder if my laptop will ever actually become out of date. It will be three years old in January, a mere 7 months away, yet when I visited apple.com/uk/thestore this week there was little that made it seem out of date, certainly nothing under £1500.

Snow Leopard is meant to throw out all the PowerPC stuff and reduce the HDD footprint. Windows 7 is less bloated than Vista. Either way I can't see any requirement from the OS for more power.

What about games? PC games seem to be tied to the console power now, more than ever. So we just get console games but we can up the resolution and lock the framerate at 60fps if desired. So nothing much will change here - new consoles aren't even rumoured.

So, it's down to video encoding I think. That's the only thing I can think of where I could use the speed. I would still be interested for my desktop of course :)

Security by isolation

I've been playing around with VirtualBox again. My original plan was to set up some kind of virtualised "corporate home network", in order to get some experience of doing such a thing on Linux, but also maybe having something ready should Helicoid suddenly need to take off in a networked support applications fashion. Of course it was a little pointless, not just because we're using Google Apps, but also because my computer (recently

Recent news articles have highlighted a couple of interesting things for me. Firstly, neatx/nomachine etc. is very, very cool Much better than TightVNC for remote access. Secondly, there is some sense in compartmentalising your various kinds of web access.

Think about the web being more like three webs: Web 1, the general Wild West of forums and the like; totally open potentially user-contributed content: highest risk of trouble. Web 2, where you do some basic shopping stuff - a mixture of http and https and you want to know when you're doing both. Finally, Web 3, https only - for banking etc.

So the trick is to use a VM for each one. A bit heavyweight? Not really, considering web vs. local application usage is only going to get more common.

There are some tweaks you can do to make sure you do it properly. In your Web 1 system, put broken hosts entries in for your banks etc., so you can't accidentally visit them. In Web 2, turn on all the 'warn me when switching to https and back' type stuff, so you're not irritated day-to-day but you should know when you want to. In Web 3, put in a broken proxy for http traffic - this should be entirely https only.

I've only just implemented this, so I'll probably think of more stuff to do. One thing I've already done is pop a little thing in .bashrc to show my last logins etc. I could probably do my accounts spreadsheet in Web 3 as well.

Really now. How many game systems can the market bear?

PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, DS, DSi, PSP, PC, iPhone, Mac.

Just how much longer can this go on? I genuinely expected at least one of these to die off in the recession regardless of how "recession-proof" the gaming industry is.

xVM Ops Center

Went to an interesting product demonstration at Sun in London this week. xVM Ops Center accomplishes quite a few of the more mundane tasks of managing a network of Sun, Redhat and SUSE systems.

For starters it can function as a Jumpstart build server, and part of the infrastructure is optional proxy systems that can host the necessary DHCP service on the various VLANs where you're running the servers.

Once a system is built or identified, it can log in (assuming you provide credentials) and install the client software it uses to interface with the various systems to perform its management tasks. It does this securely.

Once systems are under the management umbrella of xvmops you can roll out patches (all dependencies handled) across your whole estate, simultaneously if required, with kernel reboots also handled (ALOM/ILOM support for SPARC systems as well).

It can do all this for virtualbox clients too. Also, snapshot functions, rolling back patches, simple capacity monitoring and effectively the ability to restore systems is also provided. Pretty good stuff all in all.

Fresh start

Wordpress sucks on the Eee - all the assets overlap because of the small screen. I tried looking around for a decent local client but there doesn't seem to be anything there, so I've given up on that.

This is more of a reminder post to myself. I'm going to get some proper tags laid out on here. I seem to be doing more stuff now that Google doesn't necessarily help with, so perhaps I can contribute a bit here and there. Not sure whether to keep this as a personal weblog and start some new ones for work areas, or just make pages under here. Merkdot is a quite memorable if stupid name after all.