I'm running Windows 2003 server on VMWare Fusion for the Mac. Windows has IIS installed along with ColdFusion 8. When I try to ping the server via IP address, I get the error message "the network is down".

 

What was most puzzling was that I could reach the internet from a browser running inside VMWare.

 

To fix the problem. Open up Terminal application on your Mac.

 

 

I was surprised to see the first add for Microsoft featuring comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Just a few weeks ago they announced the deal that would pay Seinfeld $10 million to appear in a series of Microsoft ads. People speculated the ads would respond to the negative image of Vista.

 

All I can way is "What is Microsoft thinking?"

 

Here is a run down of the commercial. Seinfeld finds Bill Gates at a discount shoe store and give him advice on his shoe purchase. At the register Bill pulls out his discount card with the notorious photo of Bill taken in his twenties, but he looks fourteen and very geeky. Ok, ha ha. Bill and Seinfeld leave the mall eating chiros. Seinfeld asks Bill is computers will be moist and chewy so we can eat them. Bill stops to adjust his underwear to signal yes. The windows logo appears.

 

 

Huh? What was that?

 

I hit rewind on the DVR to show my wife the commercial. Her reaction was the same as mine and after a short discussion. I can only guess that Microsoft was trying to create a "Seinfeld-like" commericial. The TV show known to be about nothing.

 

Not a smart move. Look at what Apple has done in the Mac/PC ads. The PC is sneezing. He tells Mac to stay back, he's got the latest virus. Mac assures him he won't catch it. Bravo apple. You've taken a problem many computer users encounter and demonstrate how the Mac differs from the PC all in a humorous and memorable way.

 

 

Hopefully, future Microsoft ads will follow their software development trends. Version 3.0 of their commercial should finally hit the mark. Or at least suck less.

 

Call Doc Brown, there is something wrong with the De Lorean

 

I've been using my Leopard's new Time Machine for backing up my Macbook Pro for the past two months with no problems. The other day during a routine back up I got the message "Time Machine Error, Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup directory." By the way, I'm using a 1TB Time Capsule to perform my Time Machine Backups.

 

Picked up the phone and called Apple Support. Here are the steps.

 

1. Shutdown my Mac
2. Unplug the Time Capsule (why no on/off switch?)
3. Launch Disk Utility (Go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utilities )
4. Open Finder (or double click hard drive)
5. On the Left side you should see you Time Capsule, select it, if necessary click connect as and login.
6. Open up your back up folder and you should see a dot sparsebundle file. Click and drag that over to the left side of the Disk Utility.
7. Select the Time Capsule in the Disk Utility and click repair disk.

 

Now here is the interesting thing. While I waited hours for this repair to take place I launched my VMWare Fusion running Windows 2003 and got the blue screen of death. A message appeared that asked to shutdown windows and allow it to run chksum. I shutdown windows from VMWare after running chksum windows booted fine.

 

I have no idea if the VMWare crash was related to the Time Machine error, but it is possible.

 

After the Disk Repair completed, Time Machine is up and running again.

 

What happens if you forget your ColdFusion Administrator password or for some reason your CF Admin password won't work?  This actually happened the other day.  After moving all my data from my iMac onto an Intel MacBook Pro running Leopard, I found ColdFusion 8 was not starting up.  Decided to uninstall and reinstall ColdFusion hoping this would solve my problems. 

After a couple failed attempts, the install worked and I saw the beautiful Cold Fusion Administrator Setup/Migration screen.  For those not familiar, this is not the regular login screen, but the final step of the install process.  At this point, you enter the ColdFusion administrator password you just created during the installation.  Well, my password would not work.  CF kept returning "Invalid password". 

Hmmmm, I'm "this" close to finishing the install and my password won't work.  Is this some cosmic joke?

Well, I did some poking around my hard drive and discovered a solution.

1. Shut down ColdFusion 8.  On the mac I launch the Terminal located in the Utilities folder.
   • Enter  sudo /Applications/JRun4/bin/jrun ‚Äìstop cfusion
2. Use Spotlight to search for the file "neo-security.xml"
   • On my Mac ...
     /Applications/JRun4/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/
     cfusion-war/WEB-INF/cfusion/lib/neo-security.xml
3. Select the file and do Command – I to bring up the Info panel
4. You'll need to make sure you have Read-Write permissions.

   
    
   

   
    
   

5. Open neo-security.xml in any Text Editor
6. Look for the line
   • <var name='admin.security.enabled'>
                <boolean value='true'/>
     </var>
7. Change the value to false
8. Restart ColdFusion 8
9. Browse to the http://127.0.0.1/CFIDE/administrator/
10. Click on "security" on the left side.
11. Make sure you turn the Administrator Authentication back on and enter a new password.

    
     
    

    
     
    

Happy coding...

Disclaimer... I'm not a Unix Guru, by any stretch. In fact, I avoid the terminal and that's why I'm doing this post. Hopefully, I'll help get you started using subversion on your Mac. Here we go.

First, download the software

Download latest version of subversion. Martin Ott of The Coding Monkey has been kind enough to provide a .dmg file for easy install. Here is the direct link to version 1.4.4. But check to make sure there isn't a more current version at Martin Ott's site. You'll need version 1.4 to run svnX (the GUI client). After you download double-click and unzip, then double-click the pkg file and walk through the install process. Subversion is run by entering commands in the terminal. In other words, there is no GUI. You'll need to download svnX and double click svnX_0_9_13.dmg (or whatever the latest version is). It will unpack and you can drag and drop the svnX application into your Applications folder.

 

Now here is where I get stuck. I try to launch svnX and get going, but I can't create a repository and start getting error messages, blah, blah ,blah.

 

So a little hunting I discover I have to use the command-line to create the subversion repository. Let's dig deep for those long lost unix commands. Don't worry. I'll walk you through it.

 

Go to Applications folder and open the Utilities folder and double-click Terminal application. That will bring up the terminal window.

 

Go ahead and type in the terminal

and click [enter] on your keyboard. If you're like me you'll the get following

 

 

Hrummmf! That didn't work.

 

A little googling turns up that the SVN files are located in /usr/local/bin

 

So, at the terminal type the following and click [enter]

 

You should get the message

 

If you did, Great you have svn installed and we know where it is and can get started.

 

If you did not, then type into the terminal

(this will switch you to the directory that should have svn installed). Then type to get a listing for the directory. If you don't see any svn files, then you either don't have svn installed or it's located in another directory.

Second, create our repository

Type the following into the terminal the path to your repository could be just the name of a folder like "myrepository"

 

If you do that, it will create a repository in whatever folder you are currently in. So, do a

to see if you new repository was created. Yeah! There is it.

 

Now, type the following to see what's inside your repository.

Third, setup your project folder and import it

I'm going to setup my project folder in my home folder which is called smaestre

 

Double click your hard drive Click on the House icon on the left side (it will have your username next to it) Create a new folder called Project and open it. Inside the project folder create three more folders branch, tags, trunk

 

Copy the files you want to source control into the trunk folder. Any type of file can be source controlled so it could be html, jpgs, photoshop, flash files whatever.

 

Go back to your Terminal application. Type (Remember it's case-sensitive) Press [enter] key.

 

I know it's a BIG command and it's easy to have typos, but don't give up.

Fourth, checkout your repository

Now,double-click your svnX icon to launch.

1. Click the "+" sign
2. Click the Magnifying Glass to locate "mynewrepository"
3. Click on the folder and click open
4. Double click your new repository at the top portion of the window to open it.
5. Click SVN Checkout
6. Click New Folder to create a new working folder. (This is where a copy of your files will be placed and these are the files you will edit using Eclipse, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc.)
7. After creating the new folder, click open button.

 

Now you can edit the files in the Trunk folder. Subversion will track which files you edit and you can commit those changes as you work on them.

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