Richard's Notes

My Apple Magic Mouse has lost its magic.

Last week, my Magic Mouse started playing up. It decided that it was not going to reliably recognise a right-button click. Most of the time it thought I was left-button clicking, even though I was pressing on the far right of the top surface. And no, I had all of my other fingers well away from the mouse. I checked the batteries and they were at 47%, so flat batteries should not have been the cause. I changed the batteries, just in case, but that didn’t resolve the problem.

So, I’m no longer convinced that Apple has built a better mouse.

I’ve reverted to using my old Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 2.0 (no longer available?). At least it works.

I should start looking for another mouse now. The Logitech V470 Bluetooth Mouse is OK, but has too much lag after it has gone into power saving mode. It’s annoying to have the mouse cursor jumping around the screen. I might be better off forgetting about buying a Bluetooth mouse and just get a “normal” wireless mouse with a nano transceiver.

My Mac Mini is running out of USB ports, even though I have two four port USB hubs attached. Might be time for another USB hub too.

Tonight, System Update notified me that OS X 10.6.3 was available for installation.

I took the hint and updated OS X, iTunes and iPhoto. So far, there’s been no downside to the update. In fact, I think there was an upside to the update — after the forced reboot, my little Mac Mini feels a bit quicker than it was before the reboot. Maybe I should reboot more often?

Time Machine is now having the time of its life backing up the 2.5GB of changes to my Mac Mini.

Tonight, I tried to connect my Mac Mini to a Windows 7 share. As you can probably guess, what should have been stupidly simple was frustratingly complex. Thanks Microsoft, for nothing.

As it turns out, Microsoft have tweaked the SMB protocol to make it incompatible with Mac OS X (10.6.2) and samba (3.4.7 on my Debian machine) on Linux. Microsoft have changed a few settings so that Windows 7 network shares no longer behave like the LAN Manager shares of Windows XP.

What you have to do is this … (apologies to person who I copied this from because I did not record their URL)

On your Windows 7 machine, navigate to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Local Security Policy. In the left hand pane, expand Local Polices -> Security Options. In the right hand pane, scroll down to …

• Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level and change the value from Not defined to Send LM & NTLM responses; and
• Minimum session security for NTLM SSP (there’s two entries — one for client and one for server so I changed both) and uncheck the Require 128-bit encryption.

After you make those three changes, reboot.

You should now be able to connect your Mac and Linux machines to your Windows 7 shares.

Looks like I lost the bet.

I am pleased to report that VirtualBox 3.1.4 was released on the 12th February 2010. Download your copy now.

As viewers of Drop the Dead Donkey would know, Dave Charnley would run a book on anything. (Yes, I am watching the Series 5 DVDs at the moment. I wish I could remember Gus Hedges’ management double-speak so that I could use it at work. Yes, I know, I digress.)

It’s my turn to run a book. The bet? How much longer will VirtualBox be actively developed?

(Now do you get the reference to the DNS term “TTL”? )

Have you noticed that since mid-December 2009 there have been no public releases of VirtualBox? Between September 2009 and December 2009 there was frantic development activity which resulted in quite a number of releases, culminating in version 3.1.2. I’ve been using VirtualBox since version 2.x was first released. I have used both Linux and Mac as the host OS and have had Windows, Linux and *BSD guest OSes running successfully. For me, VirtualBox has just worked. It’s been great.

But now, I’m having second thoughts about running VirtualBox. I’m suspicious of Oracle’s intentions towards VirtualBox and other Sun sponsored Open Source projects. I won’t be surprised if Oracle announces that it will cease to sponsor further VirtualBox, MySQL and OpenOffice.org development.

Oh, my bet? Due to the lack of obvious development activity, I fear that active development has already ceased.

What’s your bet?