Dusty Reagan

I just bought my first Mac. It’s a 2.33 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro 15inch model. It has taken me a little bit of time to get use to, but I’m starting to get the hang of it after I plugged in my favorite 2 button cordless mouse. Let me tell you, coming from a Windows background, right-click makes all the difference in the world.

Anyways. I’m working on setting up Windows XP using Boot Camp. Then I plan to use Parallels to quickly switch between OSX and my Boot Camp partition of Windows XP. By using a Boot Camp partition instead of a pure Parallels virtual machine, I can boot directly into Windows if I need more resources for playing games or whatnot.

To do all of this I had to slipstream my old copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 2. This requires creating a bootable CD. I thought I did everything correctly, but when Boot Camp Assistant restarted my Mac to install Windows, my Mac hung on boot-up. Turns out my CD burning software didn’t have all the features I needed. So now my Mac is stuck trying to load a boot CD that is incapable of booting. How the hell do I get the CD out to get back into OSX!? There is no manual mechanism to eject a CD on the MacBook Pro.

The Payoff
Do a hard restart. Then click and hold down the mouse button while the system boots up. Continue to hold down the mouse button until the CD ejects.

Totally intuitive. Not sure why I didn’t immediately think of that.

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In the past I have been worried about checking the availability of some of the domain names I have thought of. Can I actually trust the registrar to not purchase the domain name I’m checking on if I don’t buy it immediately? Apparently this topic is more popular than I once thought. I found this blog post on Digg recently Who Is Monitoring Your Domain Searches?

In an attempt to fix this problem I set out to make a domain research tool that people can trust. My solution? Use an open source whois script and give the web users directory browsing rights to the site. This way the users can verify that their searches are not being monitored by looking through the source code.

Check it out here at http://www.overtwhois.com/

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I can’t believe this recent Windows patch fiasco. I recently scored a side-gig at a local business with about 30 computers and no internal IT person. My task is simple, tune the desktops and fix all the problems that come with aging computers.

Well this recent round of Windows automatic updates managed to hose at least 4 of my computers! These machines are running Windows 2000 Professional with PCAnywhere installed. Apparently this last round of patches triggered something that caused PCAnywhere to interfere with Windows control of the display drivers. When you click the “Settings” tab in the “Display Properties” dialog box you get a “Stop” error in the VGA.dll. I managed to find a solution to the problem here. This support article was written in 2003. It’s very strange that these computers have been running just fine with PCAnywhere and suddenly, after this recent patch, they succumb to an issue discovered circa 2003.

This is totally unacceptable. My reputation with this company is being threatened due to Microsoft’s flub. And I have found myself in a position where I have to defend Microsoft and my decision to keep these machines up-to-date and patched. I’m tempted to setup Window Patch Manager and wait to install patches a few weeks after they’re released. I know there are probably many other professionals with the same thought.

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