Best iPhone game so far
I haven’t tried a lot of games on the iPhone, but so far, the best I’ve encountered is FlightControl. I must warn you though, It’s extremely addictive.
Whine about your Mac
One of my favorite podcasts, MacBreak Weekly, used to include a segment called Mac whines. This was the part of the podcast where the otherwise extremely pro-Mac cast got to whine about stuff they didn’t like regarding Macs, iPods, iPhones and other Apple products. It’s been a while since the last Mac whine segment was featured in the podcast though, and as a switcher coming up on his third anniversary, I think there’s more to whine about! I absolutely love my Macs, but I’ll be the first to admit that there are things that annoy and sometimes confuse me.
So, as a pet project, I put together MacWhines.com. It’s a very simple voting website where you get to bitch and whine about all things Apple. While creating the website, I took the opportunity to learn a little about OpenID and decided to rely completely on OpenID for the sign in mechanism. Additionally, I added “Sign in with a Google Account” and “Sign in with Yahoo! ID” buttons that redirect you to Google or Yahoo! and allow you to sign in via their federated login systems. Give it a spin and let me know what you think.
PS. There’s not a lot of functionality on the website apart from signing in, voting for whines, submitting your own whines and commenting on existing whines, but that’s kind of the idea. I didn’t want to overshoot the target so to speak.
I want a Drobo
Scott Bourne is giving away Drobos on Twitter like it was Christmas! Here’s a link to the new Managing Your Digital Life Podcast in hopes that I will be a a lucky winner.
Fingers crossed!
Getting SPSS 17 to work with Softgrid/App-V
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, we use Softgrid (or Microsoft Application Virtualization as it’s called these days) at the university. Every now and then, I run into problems sequencing an application. My latest encounter with a troublesome application was SPSS Statistics 17.
The problem I encountered was that the installer would hang at the very end of the installation process. In some cases, the box would even blue screen at this stage. I scratched my head on this problem for some time, but today, I finally figured out how to solve it.
I had a look at the Windows Task Manager when the installation had hung and discovered that there were a couple of processes called spsslinit.exe that appeared to be doing nothing. So I fired up the installer once more with MSI logging enabled and when it had hung, I looked at the end of the log. There, I found mention of a script function called PostInstallCommands. From the log, I could tell that the script function started up 7 spsslinit.exe processes (with various different parameters). I don’t know for sure what the spsslinit.exe processes do, but I believe they are somehow related to SPSS licensing when running in standalone mode. We use a network license, so we don’t need the standalone stuff.
The next step was to somehow prevent the SPSS installer from running the PostInstallCommands script. So I fired up Orca (Microsoft’s MSI editor) and looked in the InstallExecuteSequence table sorted by sequence number. Sure enough, at the end of the sequence, there was PostInstallCommands. I then created a new transform and dropped the PostInstallCommands row together with another row called SPSSlinit. I’m not sure the latter is needed, but I thought it can’t hurt.
With my brand new MST file, I started the sequencer and fired up the installer with the following command line:
msiexec /i “SPSS Statistics 17.0.msi” TRANSFORMS=1033.mst;SPSS17_Softgrid_Fix.mst
It worked beautifully! After the install, I upgraded to 17.0.1 and even that went without a hitch. I’ve done some testing and the app is running just fine with our network license. If you’re trying to do this with a standalone or site license, I’m not sure this is the way to go, but then again, I don’t think SPSS can be sequenced using anything other than a network license.
I’ve uploaded the MST file if anyone needs it.
Manual MAC address for a VMware guest
If you’ve ever tried to manually specify a MAC address for a VMware ESX virtual machine, you might have encountered the error message:
The MAC address entered is not in the valid range. Valid values are between 00:50:56:00:00:00 and 00:50:56:3f:ff:ff.
The reasons why VMware force manual MAC addresses into this scope are unclear to me (probably to prevent collisions), but regardless, it can be an issue. I needed to specify a particular MAC address in the 00:04 range. The reason being we were retiring an old physical server running the FLEXlm licensing service and the licenses were granted for the MAC address of the NIC on that machine. Renewing the licenses for the new virtual machine turned out to be ridiculously expensive so our only real option was to “spoof” the MAC address.
I then ran into the aforementioned issue. However, the problem was easily solved by setting the MAC address from within the guest operating system instead. In this case, the server was running Windows Server 2003 and changing the MAC address was as simple as modifying the parameter “networkaddress” in the properties for the NIC in device manager. Voila!