Kernel panic

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve written before about how, according to Apple, reason number 1 to get a Mac is because “all the hardware and software just works, and works well together“. I can’t be bothered to get into the whole Mac vs. [Windows] PC (vs. Linux) thing now… I’ve written plenty on that subject before, and anyway – it’s just a PC – but no sooner had I just commented to Alex about how a certain podcast presenter is very quick to criticise Windows for it’s blue screens of death (of which I’ve seen very few in recent years – and only then because I’ve done something stupid like installing the wrong device driver or removing a hard disk before powering down the computer), did I witness my first OS X kernel panic (actually, from looking at /Library/Logs/panic.log, I seems that I had one a few days ago as well, which explains why the Mac had strangely shut itself down whilst I was at work one day last week).

Mac OS X kernel panic

So, my point is that Macs don’t “just work”. They run software, created by humans, that crashes from time to time, just like non-Apple PCs running any other operating system. Now, if Apple really could create “the world’s most advanced operating system” and it did “just work”, I’d be very impressed.

Tab completion in Windows

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Many people will be familiar with the command line tab completion functionality that can be used to complete folder and filenames in recent versions of Windows, but what I wasn’t aware of (until I just used it, following some instructions from Microsoft in a hands-on lab training manual) was that wildcards like *.reg <tab> can be used to tab-complete filenames. This technique can even be used as arguments to a longer command, e.g. notepad *.reg <tab>.

Dustin L makes a good point in his comment on the Lifehacker article that discusses command line tab completion – Unix admins will already be familiar with the concept but there are a couple of differences between the Windows and Unix/Linux CLI tab completion implementations:

  • “In the Windows command line, if there is more than one match for what you’ve typed, successive presses will cycle through all of the matches rather than just display a list of the matches.
  • Windows will not complete commands, only files and directories.”

Useful digital photography utilities

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve just got back from a weekend in the Peak District National Park and, rewarded with clear blue skies as dawn broke yesterday morning, I rushed to the top of Mam Tor to rekindle my long-dormant desire to make great landscape photographs (I’m no Joe Cornish, but there has to be some reward for leaving my tent at 5.15).

It gave me a chance to try out a number of things that I’ve wanted to do for a while – shooting camera raw (.NEF) images and using the Lee Filters 0.6 ND graduated filter that I bought a couple of years ago. I have to say, that I am definitely a convert to these features (although they would not be practical for the majority of my photography which falls into the “snapshots of the kids” category). Both the OS X Preview application and my post-production tool of choice (Adobe Photoshop CS2) had no difficulty opening the camera raw files and the quality is excellent (Windows users might find this post useful). Meanwhile, whilst using a large graduated filter on a camera with only a 24mm image sensor makes it slightly difficult to position, using the 0.6 ND filter to tone down the sky by two stops meant that I was able to take pictures with a well-exposed foreground, without washing out the highlights.

Renamer4MacI also found a couple of little programs came in useful when I got home. Firstly, having had some issues with my CF card before leaving home, I formatted it and the file numbering recommenced from DSC_0001.* – thanks to a little recommendation from my buddy Alex, I used Renamer4Mac to bulk rename the files. Also useful (although not for the RAW files) was Simple EXIF Viewer for Mac OS XAli Ozer’s Simple EXIF Viewer for Mac OS X, which let me easily examine the EXIF data on my images (something sadly lacking in the OS X Finder).

Finally, whilst writing about OS X and digital photography (apologies to Windows readers but my digital photography workflow is based on a Mac) it’s worth mentioning one little tip that can come in useful (much as I hate to publicise anything from Scott Bourne, whose “advice” often serves only to fuel Apple elitism and general Mac vs. PC bigotry, I think I picked this up from an iLifeZone podcast). Previewing multiple images in Mac OS XUnlike the Windows Preview function, which lets viewers page forwards and backwards through a directory of files, the OS X Preview default is to open just a single file. Switchers are often frustrated by this (I know I was) but it is possible to open multiple images in Preview (by selecting multiple files, then choosing to open with Preview), after which the cursor keys can be used to scroll through the list.

Virtualised demonstrations eating all your memory? Try a ReadyBoost USB key

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Even though Windows Vista will run on lower-specification PCs (it’s fine on my ThinkPad T40 with 512MB RAM), once you add a few applications (like Office 2007), it really starts to bog down and I was struggling recently with 1GB RAM on my work notebook (it’s been fine since I added another gig). If you also run virtual machines (e.g. for product testing or demonstrations), then its not long before the requirements for physical RAM run up against the limits of a 32-bit address space.

Last week, my colleague Alistair (soon to be an ex-colleague as he’s off to Conchango – where I used to work, proving that the UK IT industry is a very small world!) was raving about the Corsair Flash Voyager USB drives. Not only are they shock and water-resistant, but the GT model is ReadyBoost compatible, meaning that if you need a bit of extra RAM in your PC you can plug in your USB key. USB will be slower than on-board memory, and other ReadyBoost compatible drives are available, but the Flash Voyager GT is heralded as one of the fastest such devices available today. Even better, the ReadyBoost memory is a separate address space, so you can exceed the 4GB limit for a 32-bit architecture.

There’s a useful ReadyBoost FAQ at Tom Archer’s blog.