OSX, Xnest, and the keyboard

It seems many people have found out like i did that Xnest doesn't work if the client is an OSX machine -- the keyboard doesn't work properly.  I also tried a non-Apple keyboard but no happiness...  My workaround?  The free version of nomachine (http://www.nomachine.com/) -- works like a charm.  The weird thing is, nomachine uses ssh and X11 just like ssh/Xnest does, but it fixes the keyboard problem.

Upgrade to FC14 and NIC troubles

While upgrading to FC14, the motherboard NIC on one of my machines completely disappeared.  Happily, I had a spare PCI NIC and that worked fine, so I was able to fix things while have network access.  Lots of things were actually wrong.  The motherboard is entitled 'DQ965', well 'DQ965CO' in its full glory.  The NIC is a '82566DM Gigabit Network Connection'.  One needs to download a driver from Intel; the one I grabbed was entitled 'e1000e-1.2.20'.  A typical 'make install' should have worked, but Fedora (I suppose correctly) took itself from i386 to i686.PAE and the kernel sources didn't come along.  So, I had to 'yum install kernel-PAE-devel' to get the correct headers.  Then 'make install' in the e1000e source directory worked.  It also took BOTH the 'acpi=off' and 'pcie_aspm=off' kernel arguments. For more discussion around this, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=649570

All that said, I have to rebuild and reinstall after each kernel update. See bug at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=3116036&group_id=42302&atid=447449

Old BIOS, external USB drives, and Linux

In order to boot an Ubuntu machine with external drives, I had to go in to the BIOS and disable both "High-speed USB" and "Legacy USB support".  The OS has no problem detecting the devices once it is booted up...

Watermark PDF

http://jpdftweak.sourceforge.net/
I used 200 point font and .1 transparency.

Also: http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

Epson Workforce 310 FAX error and fix

I received "0404" communication errors when sending to some FAX machines; when I set the send speed (V.34) to Off (14.4 Kbps) things worked better...

Appigo not found with iPod Touch and MacBook on same "network"

So the Touch (and iPhone for that matter) doesn't come with a todo manager. I was stunned. Appigo todo does the trick and synchronizes over a wireless network. However, there are times I'm using a wireless access point that doesn't allow DNS-SD (Service Discovery (Bonjour (zero configuration LAN))) packets to pass. Setting up the MacBook in an ad-hoc network mode works just fine; Airport, "Create Network...".

And as we're on the topic, where did the handwriting recognition go???  The Newton had it, and I dearly miss it...

Nessus, BT4, and Virtual Box

Nessus seems to believe it should mess with everyone's browser as follows:

<style>  
body {    
 margin: 0px; 
 overflow: hidden;
 background: #2b4e67;
}   

What's with hiding the scroll bars via "overflow"??? I had been running BT4 in VirtualBox under OSX, and the default is 800x600, not enough to display nessus. So, I wanted to make the screen bigger, no small feat. First

VBoxManage setextradata BT4 CustomVideoMode1 1280x1024x16

then add

vga = 0x200 | 0x160

to /boot/grub/menu.lst. Finally

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf-vesa /etc/X11/xorg.conf

and reboot. Quite the complicated incantation for something a developer shouldn't have done in the first place.
<rant>
Why do developers do stupid things like specify overflow, point sizes, etc.? Do they really believe we're all going to run on a box exactly like theirs? What if I wanted to run the nessus client from my phone?
</rant>