libjack.com

I should add “on the Mac” to that title, but I’ll avoid any born again references for now. By virtual, I’m referring to the ever so wonderful virtualization, the ability to run a guest OS within another (see wikipedia entry on virtualization for more). For me, on my iMac, I’m using VirtualBox. It’s opensource, from a company which was recently purchased by Sun. My primary use will be quick access to an OS to test configurations or run (windows-only) software. I currently have debian and ubuntu versions, will get a Windows (Vista probably) as soon as I am willing to shell out the $$. Right now, for the few windows-only apps I have, I VNC to my seldom used windows boxes (Vista, Win2k).

VirutalBox has guest edition software for Windows and Linux which adds nice features such as mouse pointer integration and integrated windows. Plus, sharing host directories is very easy. These features are available in the other commercial virtual host solutions I’ve looked at.

OS installation was a breeze for the Linux distributions, as I simply downloaded the iso images and mounted it as cdrom for the guest installer to use.

Since I’m more into blogging now, it means I’m also into Wordpress; especially exploring it from the technical side. So don’t be surprised by more blogging about Wordpress. And with a more constant online presence, it allows me to explore and use a few technologies I haven’t had much exposure to yet, AdSense, Google Analytics, SEO, etc.. So, signed up for all my accounts and now time to integrate… hmm how to put the Analytics code onto every page of my blog? … Probably have to edit something… maybe a plugin exists? After a bit of searching, found the perfect, simple how-to on Trent Mueller’s blog … simple editing of footer.php..

More fun stuff, played with Automator recently because I wanted to find a quick way to set image tags for multiple images. You can do it manually in Preview.app, but wanted a drag and drop solution. I guess I got inspired after watching a recent ScreenCastsOnline podcast (http://screencastonline.com/); as a demo, they showed building a workflow for scaling images by 50%. After a bit of searching, I found an Write IPCT Tags action on automator.us (http://automator.us/leopard/downloads/index.html)

With that action, can create static workflow, or can prompt for all the tags to set.

woo woo… managed to upgrade to wordpress 2.5, plus installed several plugins as I try to explore Wordpress a lot more..

Well, I just get done writing a happy shiny post about being on a Mac, and now I have to grumble a little bit..

It all started because I was trying to find the location of the apache root by searching for a file I knew would be there, index.html.. But no matter what I did, Spotlight would not show the files I knew had to be there…

After some trial and error and some Google searching, figured out this was because of something new in Leopard… Only way to search system files is via the finder:

1. enter the search term on the finder window
2. (after the search bar shows up) click the “+” to add search option
3. In first menu, choose “Other …”
4. Choose “System Files” from the list that pops up (and check to place in menu to avoid this step later), click “OK”
5. Now back at the Finder, choose “include” from the second menu

Now you can use this to find all system files