Khoji On Tech (and more)

Blue or grey - it’s still a screen of death!

Yesterday I had my first grey screen of death on my Mac Pro. It was probably caused by Parallels running in Coherence mode, with all the XP windows as discrete windows on the OSX desktop. At least, that’s my guess — it seems that it happened so fast that no logs were stored, I’m unable to find any of the panic logfiles that my searches suggest you should look for.

Interestingly, the same searches would seem to indicate that grey screens of death (normally referred to as kernel panics, apparently) occur just about as frequently on the Mac as they do on Windows machines, and for the same reasons: Read the rest of this entry »

Windows Vista protects itself against illegal Registry writes with a “fake” virtual registry, to which the illegal writes can be made without doing any damage to the real registry. The company I work for produces a little free utility that writes some Registry values to solve some problems with certain file types on network drives. In the process of testing this utility for Vista we have discovered some interesting facts about the way this virtual Registry works. We’re not yet 100% sure about all the ramifications, but it looks as though this is going to have far-reaching consequences for many existing programs. Many will seem to work at first but will then fail, many will have to be rewritten.

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Nick Bradbury just put a great post on his blog titled Why do firewalls have to be such a PITA? Right, software firewalls are generally a serious pain, and so are “security suites”.

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Alongside all their travails with the Playstation 3, the audio CD rootkit disaster and the fact that a Korean manufacturer (Samsung) is in the process of taking over their former position as Asia’s leading innovative tech company, Sony now has the dubious distinction of being the manufacturer of a series of high-end laptops with the world’s worst keyboard.

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Like many geeks I tend to be treated as the universal computer guru resource and free support line and repair shop by many of my friends, at any time of the day or night. Liked many others in my position, I’m always trying to find ways to reduce my FFSO in an effort to get a life back. The Mac’s easy-to-use operating system and programs once seemed to be the ideal solution.

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Even though I work in the Windows software industry, I’m still planning to switch all my hardware from PC to Mac as soon as possible. I know that there are a lot of “practical” reasons to switch, but if I really look at my own motives those aren’t really the reasons. The real reasons are more emotional than practical.

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