asiel’s scratchpad

I have had a macbook pro for about 2.5 years now since the first intel based macs were introduced. Last week I decided to get a faster machine with more ram and hard drive space. So I went to a macbook. Yes, I have a smaller screen and not quite as good of video. However, I was able to upgrade the RAM to 4GB and HD to 320GB in about 15min and both are working great. I’ve been very happy with the machine so far.

Tonight I decided to try out the Migration Assistant. For some unknown reason I’ve never used it in the past when I’ve upgraded my mac. After using it though, all I can say is wow! Why haven’t I used this tool before? What is so amazing to me in contrast to Windows machines is how well it works and how easy it is to use. Also as far as I can tell so far it appears to have transfered everything just the way I told it to. This includes all my files, custom settings, and even applications. Although it technically should be possible to transfer appliations between Windows machines, in most cases it isn’t even an option. Whenever I have moved from one Windows machine to another I end up having to reinstall all the applications. The only thing that really moves well on Windows is files such as documents and other application data. The applications themselves though don’t like to be moved.

With Migration Assistant, the fact that applications can be moved is huge for me since reinstalling all my applications usually takes at least an entire day if not more. Whats more, its really something that isn’t fun and frankly shouldn’t be necessary to redo every time I move to a new computer.

So far I’m completely sold on Migration Assistant. It has definitely made this the least painful upgrade I’ve ever experienced. I’ll have to see if I’m still as impressed after making sure everything really does work over the next week or two.

For some reason Windows Vista enables IPv6 by default. Why? I wasn’t aware of this so I ended up troubleshooting a non-problem with PHPUnit. I have unit tests that connect to the web server to test a web service. The URL my tests were using was “localhost”. Because vista was resolving localhost to ::1 the tests couldn’t make a socket connection.

All I had to do to fix the problem was disable IPv6 and comment out the localhost ::1 line in my hosts file. This took a significant amount of troubleshooting to figure out though. I thought there was some type of problem with PHPUnit or php itself. Luckily I was finally able to solve the problem.

It seems like a really bad idea for Microsoft to enable IPv6 by default and additionally put it higher in the resolution order than IPv4 addresses. Based on the number of active IPv6 networks this can’t be a good default decision. Supporting IPv6 is a good idea, but it shouldn’t be the default method of resolving addresses. Windows should have knowledge that you are connected to an IPv4 network and disable or lower the priority of IPv6 accordingly.

I decided to take the plunge to try out Vista. Because the system I’m using has 4GB of memory I also decided to use the 64 bit version to take full advantage of the hardware I’m using. Everything has worked pretty well so far. The main problem I’ve ran into is the lack of a Cisco VPN client for the 64 bit version of Windows Vista and the 32 bit version won’t even install. This is unfortunate that a huge company making billions of dollars can’t dedicate resources to let their existing customers use an updated operating system. This is especially true when it is likely the majority of customers who use this type of VPN system have service contracts with them. Just goes to show that commercial software doesn’t really mean better support.

The closest I came to any type of solution was by following the discussion at Bill Evjen’s Blog. Even after tinkering though the best pseudo solution I came up with was running XP inside of a VM. It isn’t really a solution, but it gets me by for the few things I absolutely need the VPN for. Hopefully these types of issues will get resolved over time. Unfortunately, I’m pretty certain this isn’t the last issue I’ll run into with 64 bit Vista.

Last week I was trying to play one of my favorite games Starcraft over Hamachi with some friends. Starcraft is not the newest game, so unlike many newer games it doesn’t give you the option to pick your network interface.

While we were logged into our Hamachi network we were able to ping each other and followed all the troubleshooting instructions given by the Hamachi site. This was despite the fact that starcraft is one of the games that is supposed to “just work” with Hamachi. None of us were able to see games that anyone else created. After tinkering around with this for probably about a half-hour my friend orb360 found a solution. The steps to get Starcraft and probably many other older applications working with Hamachi are below. These instructions are Windows specific. Although the method should probably work on other platforms.

The main tip is to make Hamachi the first network interface that Windows tries to use. On other platformsthe goal would be the same. Only the way you accomplish it would be different.

1. Go into control panel then click on “network connections”

2. Click the “advanced” link in the menu

3. Click “advanced settings”

4. Change the order so it looks something like this

5. Reboot Windows

After taking these steps Hamachi and Starcraft played nice together.

People like to have heated discussions about which operating system is better than another. This joke explains it very well. Just don’t forget that you are arguing about an operating system and competition is always good. Just don’t forget to tell someone else why your operating system is better than theirs.

I wanted to get a screenshot in Windows on my MacBook Pro today and couldn’t figure out how to do it. Apparently this is now supported in newer versions of bootcamp. I don’t currently have this installed though, so I had to find another way for the time being. I found a handy resource that showed how to do it with a Windows tool I was unaware of called On-Screen Keyboard. Thanks to this great tool I was able to get my screenshot. This could also be useful on a system where the keyboard may not be working or other similar situations.

I found a blog post pointing to an easy way to automate defrag in windows xp. This is extremely easy to do and is something that more people should definitely do because it will help their Windows computers run much faster.

The steps are basically as follows

1. open up task scheduler
2. put in %systemroot%\system32\defrag.exe %homedrive% as the command
3. select a time for defrag to run every night.

Here is the post

According to this news.com article Microsoft will finally be releasing a plugin that allows for saving Word documents in ODF format. This is great news that many people have been waiting for a long time to hear. It will sure be nice to know that a file saved from Word in ODF format can be read by users who may not have Word.

on a vmware image I was using Windows update was disabled. I had to reenable it using gpedit.msc the instructions are outlined in: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=326686