Rambling Bloke

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The old BP Garage, which closed a few years ago, which is situated on Station Road has apparently been leaking fuel oil for several years. This was the conclusion from a report that BP have commissioned themselves. The report goes onto say that the contaminiation is several meters down into the ground and that the area could not be used for residential homes. It also mentioned that the path of the contamination is around south-east and heading into Agricultural land at the back of the property.

Details of the report have been passed onto the local council to determine if the leak posses health and safety risks to the general public and the surrounding countryside.

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As I continue in my travels into the world of the Mac I found that G.I.M.P didn’t work when I installed it from Apples site. Frustrated by this I turned to ‘MacWorld.co.uk’ for help. The people on the forums are superb! Always helpful and supreme in their abilities. It turns out that even though I had X11 (because X11.app was present on my application folder) installed, which is needed by GIMP to work well, I had downloaded an older version and hence it failed to start. I installed the latest version and all it good in the GIMP world! For those concerned GIMP is “GNU Image Manipulation Program”.

Here is the link I used for download.

So I have 1Gb memory stick (given to me at a trade show) and I wanted to do two things. Partition the drive to work on Windows and Mac machines. Encrypt the Mac partition for security.

So I this is what I did (Partition the USB Drive) :

• Insert the memory stick into a USB port on the MacBook.
• Go to the ‘Applications Folder’.
• Go to the ‘Utilities Folder’.
• Open ‘Disk Utility’.
• Select your USB Drive in the left hand window.
• Click the partition button in the main window.
• Under ‘Volume Scheme’ select 2 partitions.
• Select the first partition.
• Under Volume Information change the format to ‘MS-DOS’
• Select the second partition.
• Under Volume Information change the format to ‘MacOS’.
• Click the Apply button on the bottom right.
• A window asks ‘Are You Sure’, click ‘Partition’.
• Your USB stick now has a Mac and PC Area.

So I this is what I did (Encypt the MacOS Partition) :

• Select the USB Stick on the left hand side of the window.
• Select ‘File’, ‘New’, ‘Blank Disk Image’.
• Enter a name in the SaveAs field, like “iEncypted”.
• On the left, under devices, select your MacOS Partition.
• In the Encryption drop down select the level you require.
• In the Partitions section, select Single Partition - Apple Partition Map.
• In the Image format, select Read/Write.
• Click the ‘Create’ button.
• Next, after a few seconds a password box appears.
• Enter a memorable password to unlock the disk when you need it.
• Once the process is complete you will now have an encrypted disk image on your Apple partition.

Note: I would have used a numbered list above but there seem to be a bug in Wordpress Blog software which restarts the number after 9 to be 0.

An update, I have been now using the MacBook Pro for around a couple of weeks and one quite frustrating thing that seems to happen is a network freeze for a period of time. The example is browsing using say Firefox and everything is working a treat. Then it appears that all name lookups fail. That is to say that DNS queries seem to stop and I get a browser timeout.

At first this was a little annoying but after a while it is very frustrating. I stumbled across the fact that if I opened the Network Utility in the Utilities folder under the Applications folder. Then I selected the interface that I was using to see the statistics of packet transfer the connection would come back for the browser and all worked.

The struggle was that I had no hard evidence on what was going on. No log capture, no data to look at. So I started searching around the internet and found that several other people seem to have the same issue. Although you can never be 100% sure it is the same as there is no hard data on it. Anyhow the long and short is that people suggested using OpenDNS.org addresses in the DNS tab of network preferences (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220). So I have put them into my settings and shall see if this resolves (no pun intended) the problem.

Update : Several  days on the connections hangs are gone, all seems to work really well. This appears to have fixed the issue for me.

Well I received my Western Digital external drive WDG1T3200 (350Gb) drive for use with Time machine on Leopard (10.5.2) and upon connecting it up to the Firewire/800 port it was well a bit damp. The speed of the transfer was probably about as good as USB 1.1. So after a lot of messing about with cables, drivers and the power switches I found that it was a problem with driver and firmware.

Weird thing was that dragging an dropping a file onto the externaldrive desktop icon worked a treat. Just the timemachine transfer which suffered from damp Firewire.

Here are some of the articles that I used to fix the problem:

(1) Updated the driver/management software on my MacBook. It appears the software that came with the external drive had some updates.

Driver Management Software Update

(2) Updated the firmware of the drive to 1.08a

External Hard Drive Firmware Update

Well I have just booked a VXR day at Brands Hatch in May and can’t wait. This came on a recommendation from a good friend and so I hope that it all goes well. The cars range from the little to the V8 monster that is the re-badged holden. Also I have just updated “The Engine” pages with some more top vidoes form the BBC Top Gear programmes, enjoy.

Just ordered an external Firewire hard drive so that I can make backups of my MacBook, should arrive in a few days. I will update my “The Bite” section with specs and information on how it went.

Well I have now had a chance to use a MacBook Pro and first impressions are good. It does take some getting used to coming from a Windows environment but the more usage the easier it becomes. Here are some of my early challenges..

• Figuring out how to turn a screen saver on or locking the MacBook.
• Time machine backup seemed to hang the system upon logoff (update it was timemachine backing up over USB before logoff as I had FileFault turned on).
• NTFS Filesystems are not read/writable.
• Entourage 2004 email is pretty poor for corporate communication.
• There is nothing out there that does netmeeting on a Mac machine.

So these are some of the early ones on this experience of mine..