Friday, May 23, 2008

Help needed to complete the Perl 5 Wiki

I made my way back to the Perlbuzz website today to catch up on some of the news I had been missing out on for the past couple of weeks. The second article that I came across on the page was titled: Help the Perl 5 wiki get to 1,000 entries - Perl Buzz.

Surfing on over to the Perl 5 wiki will have you finding an indispensable resource for any Perl coder out there. Being that the Perl Foundation does so much for the community, it only seems right that everyone should do their share to help out. So, why not stop over and check out the almost 300 needed (most-wanted) pages and see if you can provide any of them for the wiki. Every little bit helps.


Wednesday, May 14, 2008

I DID IT!!!

Well, last night I went ahead and installed Mac OSx on my Dell Inspiron 9200 laptop while I was coding on another computer. The process was pretty easy actually. It started with me finding this website, which gave directions on how to install it. So, following the btjunkie directions (as they were easier), I downloaded the torrent from btjunkie. The download did take a while and I had to let it go overnight, but when I got up in the morning, it was completed and ready to be burned to disc. BTW, since its an image, you can use any software to burn it to disc and aren't required to use Nero. I used Roxio and its fine.

During the install I had to figure some things out. For instance, when it came time to select the media to install to, it didn't show anything. I remembered that I had linux on here, not Mac OS, so the drive format was not correct. So, I saw the menu bar up top and went into the disk utility. This allowed me to format the drive for a Mac recognized format. Once I did this, they showed up automatically. One note though about the disk utility. It looks as if it is only able to format drives, not partition them. I say this because I looked for the ability as I have a 1 gig partition (which was swap for Linux) and a 92 gig partition. That's ok, I can use the 1 gig for storage, but that's not the point.

Anywho, the software installed and when it was done it rebooted. Upon coming up, the video was just screwed!! This was something I had to figure out. I did some research on google and found I needed to get to the filesystem without the graphical interface running. I talked to a friend, Randal Schwartz, online (thanks for the help Randal!!!), and he told me about the -s option to boot, which Mac's us Command-s during boot to activatej. Unfortunately, I am on a dell...... no command button during boot. So, I was playing around with function keys during boot, hit F8 and voila! A boot menu. It allowed me to enter any options for booting. I tried the -s and went into Single User mode (any of you *nix guys know what that is). Once in there, I mounted the main drive and did what I had to do (hid the drivers for my video card that were causing a problem, supposedly).

Upon rebooting, it STILL didn't work, so a little more Google research and decided to boot with the "-x" option, which is like a safe mode. I could not believe it, it worked! Right now, I am staring at Mac OSx, running on my Dell Inspiron 9200. It is SWEEEEEEET!! The only thing so far that is not working is the wireless card, but I will work on that. WOO HOO!!! Sorry, a little happy. Ethernet is working fine though and I am surfing the net.

For those of you interested, there is an HCL for Mac OSx86 which goes through the supported devices and what had to be done to get them to work. It may prove very helpful in your quest.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Perl error is fixed

I completely forgot to let everyone know that the Perl error I was experiencing was fixed. Albeit not in a manner conducive to learning why it happened and how, or what to do to rectify it, but instead, but installing the latest and greatest version of Perl and re-creating the soft links to point to the new version.

Once that was done, all works just fine now. ***sigh***


On a lighter note, I have downloaded MacOSx(86) and am planning on attempting to install it on to my personal laptop. (vice my work laptop, which would be a no no) The version of MacOSx is 10.4.6. If anyone else is interested in trying this, you can find install instructions here. Also, there is a page that shows the laptops that have had successful installs of MacOSx.

The laptop I have is the Dell Inspiron 9200. Unfortunately, not on the list and from what I can find out, that means either nobody has tried or hasn't reported on it. Hopefully, I can report success soon.

And you thought they were offshoring alot before? Just wait!

I was sitting here at work today when a friend from EDS (where I used to work before this job) IM'd me, asking me if I had heard the news. Being that EDS was in the middle of an approximately 45,000 person layoff, moving those 45,000 jobs to India, I was expecting new of friends having gotten let go.

While waiting for his response I was scanning the news wires and saw that HP had agreed to buy EDS for 13.9 billion! WOW!!! What a bit of news that is. In talking with another friend, who also used to work for EDS and HP both, the employees thought EDS was off-shoring a lot? Just wait. HP seems to be one of the kings of off-shoring with a fair amount of its workforce living in India and other countries.

I just wish that off-shoring would stop being so cheap, that way the jobs could stay here in the U.S. Heck, maybe the new president will do something about the situation and cut the off-shore companies off at the knees. That would be a very pleasant turn of event if you ask me.
 
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