ExpanDrive

Check out The Black Keys - they rock hard.

Dan is a master of fuzzed out guitar and soul-ridden vocals. Patrick has a minimal drum kit and a lot of hair.

The Big Come Up is easily one of my very favorite CD’s. They put together a great do-it-yourself superfuzzed guitar sound that has songs that are really worth listening to. Best tracks: Heavy Soul, I’ll Be Your Man, Busted, Run Me Down. Great music to work too and has more than enough oompf to go jogging with. See them live - they rock. Check out their MySpace page for some good content. Girl is On my Mind [live] is a good starting place there.

Here is my least favorite Windows XP dialog:

Let’s say I have a long WEP key - maybe a random 26 digit hexadecimal string [quite common]. Not only do you have to type it in without the option of seeing the characters you type, you must type them TWICE.

This is dumb.

It is only critical that a user confirm a typed password during the process of creating a new password, just so they don’t accidentally get locked because they unwittingly made a typo while entering in the new password.

Here, OS X gets it exactly right:

Type the password once, hit ok. If I mistyped the password authentication will fail and I can try again. Brilliant. In the spirit of complaining, I do have one major gripe with the OS X wireless stack that Windows XP does a much better job with.

Head up the the Airport dropdown on your menu bar and you’ll see the list of access points that have a strong enough signal to connect to. If you’re in a public place you might see 25-30 access points. OS X gives you no indication of which of those are open or closed, and certainly no idea what their signal strengths are. Want to find one that has a good signal and is also unencrypted out of that list of 30? Good Luck.

My 5 month old MacBook Pro often has the MDS process chewing about 45-50% of CPU at various points in the day. Given that MDS is supposed to sit around and casually index - so that Spotlight can quickly perform a search, this CPU usage pattern is a red flag. Chances are something is wrong with either the disk or the Spotlight metadata index [what MDS manages]. After using Disk Utility to verify the volume, I tried Spotless. It worked great.

Spotless is a nice little $15 nagware utility made by Fixamac Software that helps you delete and recreate the Spotlight metadata folder and index, so that it can let MDS rebuild from scratch. It offers a few other moderately useful features, but if MDS is getting aggressive, this makes it real easy to get a clean rebuild.

I admit, I have never quite understood the push behind these VMWare appliances. For me, they fall into the giant soup of enterprise products that I can’t imagine ever using. That being said, I’ve finally found one that is quite useful for me, the non-enterprise user.

Supposedly simple task: Share the wireless connection of my IBM Thinkpad with my MacBook Pro.

Windows Internet Connection Sharing [ICS] has proven super flakey and slow, not to mention its complete lack of advanced options. After 45 minutes of pain, I gave this VMWare appliance a shot. I set up one VMNet1 to run NAT and DHCP against the host and VMNet2 to bridge with the ethernet connection. Set the VM to boot when the Thinkpad powers up. 32 Meg memory footprint. Good to go.

It just works, and the performance is fantastic.

Awesome.

I’ll also use this post to give a shout out to the best-free-product-in-the-universe, VMWare GSX Server. It really is quite amazing. It has nearly all the power of VMWare Workstation, and has some extra cool features of its own. Did I mention it is completely free?