Ok here is a strange one.

Ordered a new Penron 2.4Ghz MBP the other day. It arrived today and i’ve just opened up the box and it clearly states that it only has 1 x 1GB Ram. Even stranger seeing as the base config is 2 x 1GB sticks.
It lists 1×1GB in 2 places.

On the outside of the Black Box.
Inside the MBP under the battery.

Very strange.

I shall be calling Apple tomorrow, however figured i would post this here to give others a heads up. You never know who might be interested.

I dont really care as i will be swapping out the ram anyway with 2 x 2GB sticks, but still it kinda sucks having 1×1GB printed inside the machine.

What are the chances that i will have to send it back?

It was a custom ordered machine with a 200GB 7200RPM HDD, shipped direct from China.

UPDATE: It actually has the 2 x 1GB Sticks inside the machine so i guess someone at the plant made a slight typo.

WWDC 2007 has been a smash hit with more sessions that i can poke a stick at loads of food and sugar-juice to keep every mind working at 110% and a totally crazy number of developers both from Apple and 3rd party dev shops. (eg Omni , Delicious, MBU, Panic.)

Tonight we had the Annual Bash, which saw Yerba Buena Gardens transformed into one massive party venue with stage, booze, food and people as far as the eye could see. This year Ozomatli took center stage to perform the night away and did a fairly good job of keeping the crowd going till the end of their set. Now i cant say that i had heard of these guys before tonight, and cant really say i like their style of music, but someone apparently does as they are on iTunes (Surprise, Surprise) and have won a Grammy.

All in all, its been a great week so far and hopefully tomorrow will also be a good day seeing in the end of WWDC for 2007. Ill be back dont you worry guys :)

I have put up some photo’s for anyone that is interested.

-Rich

My Air NZ Flight to San Francisco, has by now taken off and im winging my way to NZ and then on from there to the USA.

I am looking foreword to WWDC 2007, and hopefully i can take heaps of information away with me at the conclusion of the trip. I have a few days either side of the week long conference to look around San-Fran a bit, and might even venture up to the Apple Campus, so checkout the mother-ship as its known.

Im travelling with a guy that i met up in Sydney at another Apple event (Abdulla), which is kinda cool as it means that we have been able to share accommodation and it makes organising stuff just that little bit easier where there are 2 people both actively try to find a good deal or solution.

Ill be sure to keep touching base throughout the week so this wont be my last post i promise!

-Rich

This article takes a look at what i have been working on recently, integrating OSX clients and OSX server into an existing eDirectory network system.

Our main goals were as follows:

• Users able to log on with there std eDirectory Username and Password.
• Mount there osx home directory on the OSX server, meaning that they have roaming profiles.
• Finally also mounting there Std Novell H:\ Drive (Windows Home Drive) on a novell file share.
• The server running OSX 10.4 also allows us to perform management of the clients and provide other Services like Print management for the machines.
• Last but not least, easy roll-outs with Netboot imaging and the ability to assign preferences to the workstations such as one to sleep the machines at 5pm.

Read on for more details.
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Well it looks like my widgets have found there way into an june 2007 apc article, which is rather funky. You can check out the article with also mentions other great aussie widgets over at the apc website.

In other news there are some cool things on the widget front, coming to you soon!.

-Rich

Relevant section from the article follows after the break.
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I love error messages that mention how to fix an issue, however its not so great when what they suggest doesn’t actually solve the problem your having!

Over the last week or so i have had a hell of a time getting the new version of Adobe CS3 installed on my OS X 10.4.9 machine.

I originally had the Photoshop 10 beta installed, and although i uninstalled it before installing the Final version, as well as running the cs3clean script from Adobe i was unable to get the apps to run after installation.

The Installer would run and finish correctly. I would then go to run one of the newly installed apps and it would pop up a message saying “Licensing for this product has stopped working“.

Well i searched and searched on the internet and had no luck in finding how to fix this.

After a week of trying i eventually worked out a solution for this issue after installing and uninstalling CS3 maybe 25 times. (boy o boy is that installer slow.)

You need to delete the folder found here “/Library/Preferences/FLEXnet Publisher”.

After that all the apps should open correctly.
I cant believe how simple it was in the end, and i cant believe that Adobe couldn’t work this out.

Post your success and failure stores in the comments below!

-Richard

This is one utility that will make your whole archive experience more pleasant. With support for almost every archive format known to man, and the ability to rejoin split .rar files as well as natively unzip .Jar files its all the rage on the scene atm.
Best of all you can set it to by default show the files that its just unachieved in the finder, alleviating that whole, wheres that stinking file that i just unzipped.

So my advice, get this cool utility, it will make your day!

Home - The Unarchiver

iStumbler is like this totally cool wifi tool. It lets you see all those pesky invisible networks around you as well as find open access points for you to jump onto and get your groove on! If your ever out and about with your computer this one is for you!

The best bit, as with all of the Cool Apps featured on this blog, its free! So go and enjoy this find.

Find a sexy screenshot & link below:
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Chicken of the VNC is a VNC remote desktop viewer for the Mac, its free software which makes me happy and the icon is funky as to! If you have the need for a VNC Client this is the one to get these days. A VNC client allows you to display and interact with a remote computer screen. In other words, you can use Chicken of the VNC to interact with a remote computer as though it’s in front of you.
The best bit, as with all of the Cool Apps featured on this blog, its free and OSS! So go and enjoy this find.

CotVNC - Home

June 11th, 2007 - June 15th, 2007

So here is the big news for this Month, ive been awarded a scholarship by the AUC to attend the Apple 2007 WWDC in San Francisco. I cant really believe its happening as its seriously the coolest thing to happen to me for ages!

I will update everyone with more information once I actually calm myself down a little, but its enough to say that i’m excited!

Looks like ill be jetting off to California in a few months. So Happy!!!

(Well ok in reality those dates arnt free, there smack bang in the middle of my exam period, but im stoked and as if i care about exams being at the same time)

Burn is a really nice, simple CD / DVD burning application that allows you to do all sorts of burns, including: Data, Audio(CD), Video(VCD, SVCD, DVD, XviD) and finally Clone Disks and burn image files.

The best bit, as with all of the Cool Apps featured on this blog, its free and OSS! So go and enjoy this find.

Burn - Home

I find it useful to have a local apache server set up for all my web-dev work so that i can see changes to files in real time, which makes it easier to develop server side web apps.

Up till a month or so ago i had been editing the DocumentRoot line in my /etc/httpd/httpd.conf every time i wanted to work on another project. This has slowly been driving me crazy so i decided to use virtual hosts to do all the dirty work for me.

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Hop Theif….. Hop….. :)

Montastic at JamesX

It is good isn’t it, i just stumbled across Monastic while Dreamhost was down.

So the idea behind the Green Page, or in my case the Red Page is that it basically shows red if any of your current sites are unavailable. This allows you to see if any sites are down if you have a machine with that page open in a browser.

I guess its for people that don’t have email or something.

Enough to say that mine was Red for a few hours today. :)

-Rich

Well I have just poured myself a Black Russian to unwind some more, and thought I would take a moment to announce the fact that i have got a new theme running on my blog. If you can’t tell, well you must be stupid!

No! On a serious note, it blends in with the home and other pages much better than the old one ever did, not to mention the dated 2005 look that it also carried.

The current leader-board image is from a shot I took in Melbourne, a rather nice piece of graffiti i thought. Now heres a challenge, if you can find the piece and take a photo of yourself with it i will you $5!(Only the first person to do so i might add, lest i end up going broke from 100,000 hits for free and easy money.)

Yes, this is just the first of many competitions to appear on multimeter v4.00, so stay tuned for more coming to you soon, very very soon! Not to mention more in the way of Mac how-to content and more news to.

-Rich

Making the perfect little machine to both hack around with and to have connected to your tv to watch all your shows and play music. It would even make a good little home server, with the best bit being that its not that expensive.

I am considering getting one some time next week just to mess around with and should be able to get it to do what i want after a few hours of modding. Its so good when companies bring out embedded platforms that are actually open. just look at the scene that has built up around the Linksys WRT-54G.

Bit more info here.

The Last few days have seen me in Sydney hearing all the latest and greatest developer level features in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard from Apple. To get an idea of some of the consumer level features that will be coming with the next release have a look at Apple’s Leopard Sneak Peak.

Many many cool peaces of kit are to be made available in terms of developing new software for the platform, and i would go further except that i am under NDA in terms of all the pre-release stuff that i have seen so i cant really say much more than what is already available on the web.

While up here in Sydney i had heaps of fun seeing family and friends, and i also took the opportunity to meet some cool people (German Students @ 2am), see some cool stuff (Google AU Office, Leopard) and have a great night out in-between the 2 days of lectures.

I can possibly fill you in a little more if i see you in person, and until then have a good day.

-Rich

I found a really cool pdf reader for windows the other day.

it loads in about a second
and so does the IE plugin
and it looks exactly the same as adobe reader.
but its super fast

Foxit Software PDF Viewer

As a Bonus it is Free.

Chicken and egg debate unscrambled:
How interesting. its always puzzled me.

Just now Chris reminded me just how much this company and their website both suck. I was looking for a link to a copy of stuffit expander the only bulk package from the company for the mac platform. It ended up taking me a good 10mins looking for it until i finally found it on my hard-drive here at home.

So for future reference here is the link to the lite expander version:
Stuffit Expander 10

I will also mirror it here for future reference, just incase the link changes.

Richie

Before and after shots:

fairly cool.