New RAM!

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:00:44 GMT

I didn't buy it just because I was waiting, I swear...

I've been wanting to buy new RAM for a while now, but the place I was originally looking at has been out of the brand I want for months now. Hadn't had time to do the shopping until now. While I was there and looking at stuff, I also started seriously playing with the thought of buying a netbook for travel; it just needs to be strong enough to run a browser and let me SSH into my server with minimal painfulness. And also be light and small enough that I can carry it around easily, and have a good enough battery life that I don't need to constantly be looking for a wall socket to charge it -- something like an afternoon's worth, with just a bit extra allowance to be safe. Oh, and I hope to find one with no OS installed, so I don't have to go through the extra step of uninstalling Windows.

I need to do some research on what is a good balance between price and ability -- I really really am not planning on getting fancy with it! -- but I've at least gotten a feel for the price range and range of battery life etc.

I know a couple of you have netbooks. Are they worth it? (Is there any one brand I should avoid or any one I should run to? *g*)

ANYWAY my current laptop is now at 4 gigs, up from the original 2. That, plus I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard, and, well, everything is running quite zippy. We'll see how it feels after Firefox has been on a bit, but right now, I have a virtual machine running, and I don't feel it at all -- before Snow Leopard, running a VM would slow my machine down to a crawl especially on startup and shutdown. After upgrading to Snow Leopard, running a VM was doable, but it made certain actions feel slightly hmmm, sticky/tacky.

Feeling very very very cheerful at the newfound speed ^______^ (And now and now, I'm playing with the thought of running my dev env on a virtual machine, instead of SSHing to my server. Possibilities! Maybe!)

OH and also, I'm feeling quite pleased that I managed to install the RAM myself. As much as I love software, the hardware side of things intimidates me. I always worry that I'm going to break something somehow (not entirely unjustified... the first time we had a lab in electronics, I burnt out three or four cheaps -- luckily the cheap kinds). I have tried my hardest not to have to fiddle with any hardware since. And today I installed RAM on my laptop \o/

(This is the generation of macbooks where it is easy to install RAM. But I'm still quite pleased with myself ;-))

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Snow Leopard network woes (problem connecting to another computer on the network)

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:54:19 GMT

Okay, here's one thing that bothers me: occasionally, I stop being able to connect to my brother's computer on our home network. Let's call this computer "brother".

So I'll still see "brother" under the Shared section of the Finder sidebar, but double-clicking on it gives me a "Connection failed", and clicking "Connect as" on the upper right either has no visible effect, or gives a pop-up with the text "The server “brother” may not exist or it is unavailable at this time. Check the server name or IP address, check your network connection, and then try again."

In Console (Applications > Utilities > Terminal), there's this error message in the system log:
SharePointBrowser::handleOpenCallBack returned 64

Judicious googling tells me that indicates the remote server is down, which is not true! My laptop just thinks it is. No amount of flushing dnscache (whether by doing dscacheutil -flushcache, or killall -HUP mDNSResolver) could fix it. It's also not a network setup issue, because I've been able to connect to this computer before and if I restart, etc, I'll be able to connect to it again.

I just spent the evening digging into this, because it frustrates me so, and I think I've finally got some solutions that work well enough that I want to share (also note them down so I can find them when I next need them!):

( three things that worked for me under the cut )

And there! I haven't managed to google up *any* solution to this kind of issue (except for advice to restart, but again that's not always feasible), so I've tried to put down everything that I could, and maybe it can help someone else in the future.

Future self, if this happens to you again, please remember to look at this entry.

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development corrupts

New RAM!

Snow Leopard network woes (problem connecting to another computer on the network)