Kool Keith

Last week I went with Rozie, BJ, Patrick, Phil and a few other friends to check out Kool Keith. Its been a while since I’ve seen any live hiphop, and I must say that I found it highly enjoyable. Keith was ripping it up earlier on in the set, but later on he seemed to slow down quite a bit. Probably due to the fact that he seemed really, really stoned. Lucky for him, his sidekick Marc Live was there to back him up, which he did extremely well. So well in fact, in my eyes he almost overshadowed Keith.

One of the more amusing parts of the show was the fried chicken break. Packets of fried chicken and juice poppers were throw into the audience.

You can check out more photos here.

Netboot/Netinstalling Mac OS X with a Linux server

At the moment BJ’s old Apple Powerbook G3 laptop seems to have crapped out. It can’t boot off its hard drive (it times out and then eventually boots in read-only mode after a while) and booting off CD media seems to have just as pathetic results. I guess the hard drive, the DVD-ROM drive and possibly the entire ATA bus are ratshit.

Anyway, not being one to bow out of a challenge (or the jibes from my wife that I might have to get a “Mac Guy” to help me out, pffft), I’ve been looking into possibilites of getting this thing going. Being the kind of that I am in the line of work that I’m in, I instantly thought “Aha, network install. How hard can that be?” I do these everyday at work and their easy as all hell.

Well not in the Mac world (well OK, its kinda easy, but involved at the same time). Basically you need a Mac OS X Server (which I don’t have a copy of, nor do I have a spare Mac lying around to setup anyhow). So I thought, someone has to have figured out to setup a Linux box to serve out Netinstall requests of Mac OS clients. Thankfully, I was in luck. It looks like it requires patching ISC DHCP server, and then the request requires pretty standard open source software which comes with pretty much any distro of Linux or *nix.

It looks like there is some binary RPMs for distros that swing that way. If I get the time I guess I’ll compile some Fedora RPMs. Might even stick ’em online if I get the time.

Hopefully I’ll have this all up and running by tomorrow, and I’ll be able to report back some success. If I fail, I’ll guess I’ll probably go for the install off a firewire drive option (Yeah, I know. Its easier than setting up a Netinstall server, but it ain’t as much of a challenge ๐Ÿ™‚ )

MAME.dk offline

Currently the excellent MAME information and ROM repository MAME.dk is offline. It would appear that their web hosting company went bust.

Update 08/Dec/2003: For those of you who desperately want MAME.dk back, and can’t figure out how to find ROMs by any other means, you can either hit up Usenet (alt.binaries.emulators.mame) or hookup with a ROM burner in your area. Also other suggested reading is alt.games.mame on Usenet. Also this site looks like it could be good for getting individual ROMs.

Derrick May @ home nightclub

Just this Saturday night passed, Derrick May played at home nightclub at Cockle Bay for their 5th Birthday party. Not too bad a night, with a pretty decent selection of techno, deep house, bumping latin sounds and some more down tempo sounds from May. Not the best performance of his that I’ve witness, but it couldn’t have been too bad since I left the place at around 5am or so. Anyway, here’s a more thorough review from Benn. I’ll put up some photos into my gallery when I get the chance as well I guess.

Paris Hilton’s mobile phone number

Ms Hilton’s phone number seems to be kicking around the world at the moment. A friend of mine gave it a call to confirm that it really was her’s and apparently, yes it is. Her phone seems to be off and the voicemail is full, so I guess its time to move on.

And while you’re at it, perhaps you can check out their weblog. I’m not sure whether this is real though…

For the googlers, there’s some more red hot Paris info here. ๐Ÿ˜€

My first blog spam

This morning I checked my mail to find that I received my first piece of blog spam. Not happy about that at all. Perhaps its time to turn off the comments. Mark Pilgrim has a pretty good rant about some of the efforts starting to combat blog spam before it gets out of control, and he doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

Booting Mac OS X in verbose mode (and other boot time options)

Just to remind myself ๐Ÿ™‚

Press Option during startuo to boot into Open Firmware to select a boot device
Press :@:+Option+P+R to reset Parameter RAM (PRAM) and non-volatile RAM (NVRAM)
Press (mouse button) to eject (internal) removable media
Press X during startup Force Mac OS X startup
Press :@:+Option+Shift+Delete during startup to bypass primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume (such as a CD or external disk)
Press C during startup to start up from a CD that has a system folder
Press N during startup to attempt to start up from a compatible network server (NetBoot)
Press R during startup to force PowerBook screen reset
Press T during startup to start up in FireWire Target Disk mode
Press Shift during startup to start up in Safe Boot mode and temporarily disable login items and non-essential kernel extension files (Mac OS X 10.2 and later)
Press :@:+V during startup to start up in Verbose mode
Press :@:+S during startup to start up in Single-User mode (command line)

To turn on verbose boot logging all the time, in the terminal, type:
sudo nvram boot-args="-v"
You can find out the status of your boot args with
sudo nvram boot-args

Fedora Core 1 Released

Amidst all the hoo haa over the impending dropping of support of Redhat linux, Fedora Core 1 was released today. Of interest to me is definitely the graphical boot, laptop IO mode and CPU powersaving, ACPI support, 2.6 kernel preview, GNOME 2.4 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.

I’m hoping there’ll be an apt repository available somewhere so I can dist-upgrade my laptop to the new core.

Also of pretty large interest (‘sif you didn’t already know!) is Novell’s acquisition of SuSE.