Zit Seng's Superwall

I opened the lid of my MacBook, it resumed from the previous suspend, and I clicked something on Safari. Then, Mac OS X told me: You need to restart your computer. It explained how I could do that, and it did it in 5 languages. Yes, it is the Mac OS X kernel panic. It’s the first kernel panic I experienced on Snow Leopard. The last time I saw a kernel panic was on Leopard. It’s the same MacBook, before upgrading to Snow Leopard 2 months ago.

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Have you come across those annoying situations when output on your computer screen scrolls on and on so fast that you cannot read it? It doesn’t matter too much if they were just merely informative messages that you can afford to not read. But what if your computer is crashing and that somewhere hidden in that scrolling text contains some important information that might help you figure out what might be wrong? That’s something that happens to me from time to time.

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For many Mac users, it is inevitable that Microsoft Windows will be needed at some point or other. There are a few solutions to running Windows on a Mac hardware. I much prefer the virtualization solution than running Bootcamp because I can still access the Mac OS X system at all times. The two main virtualization solutions are basically VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. Then, the next inevitable question is, which is better? Which is faster? Which is more integrated? Which is more interoperable with various guest operating systems?

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Today I woke up to be greeted by a rather contradictory headline in our Straits Times paper. Civil servants will not get a bonus this year, but they will get a one-time payment. Hmm. Aren’t bonuses like one-time payments too? It is not like you get it every month, and it is not guaranteed or the same quantum every year. So what is the real difference between a “bonus” and a “one-off payment”?

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Obviously this is the kind of joke only for IT people, particularly the Linux people. It’s a case of a post sent to the wrong mailing list which quickly developed into a series of hilarious follow-ups. I myself had a good laugh when I sifted through the email I received from the list this morning. Someone posted to the Fedora mailing list about the worsening mileage he was getting on his Toyota Prius. He realized quite immediately his mistake. But other funny people on the list followed-up with serious-sounding Linux advice.

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Google announced their intent to build their own operating system called Chrome OS in July this year. Last week, the project made its public debut with code released to open source. Honestly, I would not have really bothered to try it out myself, but someone in the community made it really easy. A prebuilt VMware disk image of the Chrome OS installation was made available through BitTorrent and other download sites. Since it was so easy, and the download was quick, I grabbed a copy of the disk image to give it a try.

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The hacked Lenovo running Leopard 10.5.x.
— Posted from my N97 Share Online.

A colleague recently acquired the recently launched Nokia N97 mini, so I had an opportunity to see it, hold it and use it first hand, albeit just briefly. Prior to this, I had only seen photos on the web, and the closest I got to the real thing was to see the actual phone in a Nokia Store display. At the store, all I saw was the front view of the phone while it was in the display. I did not ask to pick it up to play around with it.

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We bought a brand new branded computer. It came from a reputed brand vendor (or also called a system integrator). We would expect it to come with brand new components. One of them was a branded hard disk. The hard disk died. That’s nothing too unusual. Hard disks are one of the most likely components to fail because it is a mechanical part. However, we were in for a surprise when we removed the failed hard disk to do a replacement.

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I thought they’ve all but disappeared from Singapore, but they just opened an outlet not too far from where I stay, in a shophouse along Chun Tin Road. They describe themselves as “the world’s no. 1 pizza delivery company”, and “the pizza delivery experts”. They deliver in 30 minutes too! They are all about pizza delivery, not about the pizza themselves. It struck me as a little unusual that they are focusing on the delivery experience when they aren’t a courier service like DHL or Fedex.

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