Joel Mama’s Blog

For those of you wondering, “websitewelcome.com” is HostGator.

I downloaded CentOS 5.2 Minimal Installation v1.3 pre-made VMWare virtual machine. After I upgraded CentOS from 5.2 to 5.4 (yum upgrade), my network connection stopped working because it wasn’t getting a dhcp address. Turns out my ifcfg-eth0 file had the wrong “HDADDR”.

Luckily the solution was easy:

1. Run ifconfig eth0
2. Make note of the “HWaddr” from it’s output. You’re looking for a hex value that looks something like: 00:0c:29:72:46:d6
3. Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and make sure the HWADDR in that file is the same as the HWaddr from the ifconfig command

That solved the problem for me

I have two clients that I’ve grandfathered in working on their PCs. Everyone else I told — in much prettier language — to get a Mac or go to hell. One of those clients experienced a nice little BSOD stating: “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_DEVICE … Stop: 0x000000ED (89d28900, c000009c, 00000000, 00000000)”.

Ugh, with windows crap like this, I could care less about what caused it and why. Let’s just cut to the part where I found the solution to this problem. I found the answer on how to fix this at MSGOODIES. I wanted to dupe their info here in case that page goes away. All credit goes to this post on MSGOODIES!

1. Boot off of a XP CD
2. Type “r” to go into recovery console
3. Run these commands:
chkdsk c: /r /p
fixmbr
exit (which reboots)
4. Done.

That fixed the issue for me. Hope it does for some other poor windows souls. Thanks guys!

I’ll just preemptively ask that you don’t post comments asking for assistance. The above information is all I know or care to know. Like I said before … Windows can go to hell!

Don’t even get me started on “Document Compatibility” in Internet Explorer 8. In my opinion, flagging content as kosher for a specific version, of a specific browser, on a specific operating system, flies in the face of everything Web developers have been pushing for in the last decade plus. But I digress.

What’s the definition of irony? When you’re in an editor and click on the “learn more about document compatibility” link, which opens in your default browser (Opera 9.6x) and this is what you see. Yes ladies and gentlemen, the following screen shot is of a document labeled (and all about) “Defining Document Compatibility“:

Screen capture of Microsoft's "Defining Document Compatibility" page in the Opera Web browser

Seriously … Microsoft … is this some kind of giant Andy Kaufman-esque joke that I don’t get?

I’m working on digitizing my 700+ CD collection (oy vey!). I may go into greater detail about that whole process in another post, but here’s a quick tip for now. If you want to isolate the songs in your iTunes library based on their file type (like MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, etc.), you can do so with a Smart Playlist. But there’s a bit of a trick here, you need to know the magic string to type into the “Kind” field of the playlist. The folks over at Mac OS X Hints have done the work for us. Here’s a pretty table:

Another way to get the magic string is to simply view the Get Info window of the file in question. But as Doug Adams of Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes pointed out, you can’t copy and paste that. So he whipped up this bit of code. Paste this code into the Script Editor and run it while the track in question is playing in iTunes:
tell application "iTunes"
display dialog "Current track's kind is:" default answer ((get kind of current track) as string)
end tell

If you have other file types not listed here, please comment with their magic string so I may compile them here. Thanks!