Just a quick snapshot of the past few weeks

• The north coast of NSW in Australia is rather nice at this time of year especially the beaches.
• Vista sucks. Per usual, you go on holiday and a friend or relative asks you to fix their computer. Computer #1 was a pretty high spec ASUS laptop with intel dual core, 2GB RAM, 250GB SATA drive. I thought that was a decent spec for a modern laptop. Now, I have hardly touched Vista since it came out and this computer ran Vista. My friend’s computer seemed unbelievably slow at times. Internet Explorer seemed to have this (non)feature where you would type a URL in on the address bar … and if you were lucky you would get to see what you typed maybe 10 or 15secs later. The problem my friend had was actually related to the iRiver software for her MP3 player. Somehow it used to work, and now it would pop up messages saying that Windows has closed the iRiver program … with no reason as to why. Odd.
• Debian Lenny is being rather painful at the moment. I’ve had random intermittent crashes just in the past week and now it randomly won’t configure my sound card properly on boot, so I end up rebooting several times to get it right. The latest annoyance is that NFS exporting seems to get a bit confused if you share out a bind mount. Frustrating at the moment. I realise its still a release candidate (ie. not stable). I’m thinking I may have switched from Etch too soon.
• My iphone app is still selling … very … very … very slowly. I think I need to get another app out pronto!
• The macbook is running OKish. However, my constant problem at the moment is that it pretty much always hangs if you try to shut it down. I am thinking this may be related to VMware fusion, but not entirely sure. I did look at replacing Fusion with VirtualBox, but VirtualBox is missing the Host to Guest networking that all VMware products have. And I need Host to Guest networking.
• ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell is a fascinating book about successful people. But I wouldn’t advise reading the chapter about plane crashes … while on a plane coming in to land 🙁 . I must admit that I had never looked at his blog before making this post. It’s well worth a read, especially the comments.