Movie of the Week: Iron Man

Posted on 11 May, 2008 by Matthias Scheler

I like movies based on comic books. Unfortunately a lot of them are mediocre and some are really bad.

Based on the trailer I decided to watch Iron Man although I never had read one of the comic books. And it was really worth the visit because it is an excellent movie. It is full of action and humour and (remarkably in a superhero movie) very interesting characters. Especially Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark is brilliant. His portrayal creates a character which is unlike any superhero you have seen before. And he avoids the usual pathos with ease.

If you like good entertainment this is your movie.

Posted in Movies & TV | 3 Comments

Updating to Mac OS X Leopard

Posted on 9 May, 2008 by Matthias Scheler

I recently updated my Power Mac G5 from Mac OS X Tiger to Leopard. I used the update option offered by the Leopard installation DVD which did a reasonable job. The process took about two hours and the machine started up without any problems afterwards. However, there were a few problems I had to sort out over time:

  1. The new automounter maps /home to an automount map called auto_home by default. If such a map is not available the directory /home will appear to be empty. Commenting out the according line in the configuration file /etc/auto_master fixes that problem.
  2. Emacs didn’t work after the update. It died with a Fatal malloc_jumpstart() error on startup. It seems that the update didn’t overwrite the Tiger Emacs binaries properly. Installing the Security Update 2008-002 fixes that problem fortunately because it contains an update for Emacs.
  3. Software Update refused to install the latest version of QuickTime with the rather cryptic error message The update “QuickTime” can’t be saved. The problem could however easily be fixed by removing the contents of the /Library/Updates/QuickTime folder.
  4. Safari had been made the default browser. This can however be changed easily using Safari’s Preferences dialog.
  5. The system didn’t know my private root certificate anymore. I had to reimport it using the program Keychain Access in the utilities folder.
  6. The configuration for my (network attached) printer was removed during the update. Re-adding it was however easy as usual.

I hope these hints will help other people to sort out similar update problems.

Posted in Mac | 1 Comment

10 years as a NetBSD developer

Posted on 30 April, 2008 by Matthias Scheler

I realized yesterday that I forgot about my tenth anniversary as NetBSD developer which was in January this year.

There were good times and bad times in these ten years. But overall it was a lot fun. I learned much and made many new friends.

Posted in NetBSD | Comments Off on 10 years as a NetBSD developer