Posts filed under 'Software'
I pretty much hate every official IM client because it's usually bloated with ads, and apparently thinks that you like to play flash games while chatting (I'm talking 'bout you - icq), but clients such as Trillian, Miranda and Pidgin (Adium on MacOS) make IMing worth your while. The support for multiple IM accounts makes you available to everybody, and everything is integrated in only one program, fairly less resource hungry and ad free. Perfect.
I am a big fan of Trillian, but the v3 that served my needs for a while quickly got replaced (due to my uncontrollable urge of curiosity towards new software) with Trillian Astra - an alpha version of Trillian IM. For an alpha version, it runs fairly quickly 
and steadily (although I have to bare with the fact that it crashes about two times in a month, for no apparent reason). One of the key benefits - it looks beautiful. No excessive smileys or hippie-like color mixes... Just plain old IM. Also, the built in effects go great Windows Vista! Oh, and there's the iChat behaviour that I like - chat bubbles! 
If you can't get a hold of Trillian Astra just yet, I'm sure you can get one from a torrent somewhere out there (wink wink)... But seriosuly, I think the Trillian crew at Cerulean studios won't mind you testing their alpha version outside the official alpha program, after all, it's in their best interest to get that thing done with as few bugs as possible. So if you are willing to take a different approach to IM, be sure to go for Astra.
April 9th, 2008
The upgrade was, as always, a sinch and went through fairly quickly. I haven't found any user-visible changes, but as for the admin part... Whoo whee! Everything is much more simpler and faster! The WYSIWYG editor works way better and has loads of new features. There's only one thing that doesn't look like it should - the admin page width, it's fixed. Only the header has a 100% width property, while everything below it is optimized for a 1024px resolution, a shame for my 22" widescreen monitor...
April 2nd, 2008
I've got a "neat" exam in Unix shell commands next week (and it's not the only one too), so I'm kind of obligated to use my Ubuntu Linux or MacOS installation to do the needed exercises... Seeing that Ubuntu refuses to work with TeamSpeak and XMMS together (it's actually TeamSpeak's fault - it grabs the default ALSA sound output and no other app can access it), I had to settle with MacOS. No tunes - no dice. Fortunately, the guys from Cupertino managed to squeeze in the BASH shell, so I'm good to go. It's still very boring to use today's modern GUI OSes to execute huge shell text commands with a few folders and files as an end result.
One of the most complicated tasks I need to do is to manage to use pipes along with regex-based searching, which looks very cryptic and leaves me with a "did I type that?" grin in the end... But hey, it's not as hard as it is boring, so I think I'll manage... Hopefully. (Must... resist... from... watching... retarded... 4'o clock... TV shows...)
March 24th, 2008
After managing to kill my partition table and render my hard disk useless (only temporarily, thanks to Hiren's Boot CD, Windows Vista's DVD rescue features and the most recent Ubuntu Live CD with GParted installed), I finally managed to install OSX on my leg warmer that I dare to call my PC. Finally!Now, the steps taken to make everything work are not very hard, nor plentiful, but seeing that every PC has it's own soft spot, it can take a while to figure out what's wrong. As for me, here's what I did:
- Replaced the installed kexts for "AppleVIAATA" with the ones from the Kalyway Install DVD (fixes the "waiting for root device" problem)
- Replaced the installed kexts for "IOATAFamily.kext" and "AppleACPIPlatform.kext" with the ones from the Kalyway Install DVD (fixes a kernel panic and the "using xxxx buffer headers..." lock up, respectively)
- Removed all NVidia NVInject or any similar kexts because they killed my soul until I figured out that they were the ones that kept my MacOS from booting. Installed the Punk92 NVidia patch, and everything works fine (native resolution + Quartz extreme).
- Used EasyBCD in Windows Vista to setup a triple boot between MacOS X, Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux. (be prepared to have loads of rescue CD's in handy before attempting to dual/triple/xxxple boots)
And that's about it. Remember to go from the very bottom - using safe mode with "-x", verbose mode with "-v" (so you can see any error that hits you), "cpus=1" if you are having trouble using your dual core processor or you are experiencing reboots during the boot process and eventually "-s" to see if you can boot in single user mode. Be sure to hit "-f" regularly to make sure all extensions are loaded. Oh, and hanging out on the insanelymac.com forums is a must. You will also find much needed files over there! And to complete the deal, here's a pair of screenshots:
March 17th, 2008
Since I can't run OSX yet on my hackintosh machine, at least I have something to cheer me up until I do - Sheepshaver! I was usually playing around with Basilisk II, installing System 7 and eventually MacOS 8 on it, but Sheepshaver supports MacOS 9 - which means - I get the benefits of using (ehm... emulating) the powerPC architecture! Now that I have installed the "blast from the past" or the "classic environment" - MacOS 9, I can taste that sweet feeling of speed, even on a pittyful 100MHz of simulated processing frequency! How cool is that? One of the biggest arguments of die hard fans for continuing on publishing working applications for the OS9 is the speed that it brought to the table (nevermind the memory protection though 
), and the simplicity that, supposedly, today's eye candy takes away. I do have to agree that OS9 lacks good memory protection and all the nice features that newer operating systems have to offer, but still, a great sum of people use their Macs or PCs for day to day office work - aka - nothing special, and OS9 coveres all that with the speed and simplicity only it can brag about. Think of all the Vista users out there that have the Windows classic theme active, I bet there's nothing that can replace that gray 2D environment... If I ever get the chance to fix someone's Mac running OS9, I certainly won't complain about it. Anywhoo, here's how it looks (yeah, yeah... I know - it's a cheesy background, but it still looks nice):
March 8th, 2008
Argh! You may have won this round Mr. Murphy, but I will triumph sooner or later! After several attempts, I still can't natively run Kalyway OSX Leopard on my PC, even without using FireWire kexts which make my motherboard reset itself, and with using only one CPU core (the "cpus=1" switch)! I managed to boot to the installation wizard, and after successfully installing everything on my SATA HDD drive (one PATA drive I have is not detected at all), the dreaded thing won't boot, dieing on me with a "Still waiting for root device error" (translation: "No, I can't access your HDD, now stop staring at me"). Wonderful... The obvious problem is that my motherboard doesn't support AHCI mode (the advanced SATA mode that OSX works with perfectly), as the MSI customer service has informed me: "P35 Neo doesn't support AHCI mode.". Yeah, my motherboard is an MSI P35Neo - the one of the few rare Intel P35 based motherboards that don't support RAID or AHCI. How lucky am I, right? Now, as a last resort, I will try to get my hands on a 4GB USB thumbdrive so that I can install a copy of MacOSX on that. However, I would suggest on NOT using the journalled HFS+ file system to format it because of the major number of writes that occur during normal operation in this mode, which wears down the flash memory inside the USB drive fairly quickly. It's wise just to stick to plain HFS+, without journalling enabled.
If this works, I'm gonna replace my Recycle Bin icon in Windows with a picture of Steve Jobs... If not, at least I'm gonna have a neat porn transfer device.
March 6th, 2008
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and steadily (although I have to bare with the fact that it crashes about two times in a month, for no apparent reason). One of the key benefits - it looks beautiful. No excessive smileys or hippie-like color mixes... Just plain old IM. Also, the built in effects go great Windows Vista! Oh, and there's the iChat behaviour that I like - chat bubbles! 
