mac os x

How To Boot Into The Apple Boot Camp Menu

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One of my goals for this blog is to make things that are difficult to find on the Internet less difficult to find, and one of those things is the key to hold in order to boot into the Apple Boot Camp menu at system startup. Finding that information once a year when I need it is always a many-step process, because the Apple documentation is wordy and doesn’t just come out and say: Hold the Option key down. Or Alt if it’s a PC keyboard.   There’s also the Boot Camp control panel, too, but obviously you did not, or could not, use it, which is why you were searching for the keystroke combination instead. Hopefully you didn’t have …

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Who Cares About Time Zones Anyway?

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If you think you have a thankless job you should think about Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert. Heck, it’s not even a paying job for them. They’re volunteers. Perhaps even masochists. What do they do? They maintain the time zone database (“zoneinfo”) for all of the computing world. And while residents of a particular country have to put up with just the general stupidity of their own politicians, these guys have to put up with all the stupidity of all politicians, across the Earth. Every time a politician in Russia, or Cameroon, or Indiana thinks it’d be a good idea to screw with the clocks these guys update and redistribute their database[0]. Vendors pick up the update and send …

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8 Things I Really Like About VMware Workstation 8

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I’ve been using VMware Workstation 8 for a few days now. I really like it. A lot of posts have been made hitting some of the major highlights, but there are hundreds of small improvements that add up to be a big deal for me. Here are eight. 1. You can connect to a vSphere setup, and upload your VMs into the server environment. I’ve already used it to set up a new VM template locally, then upload it to my production environment. As I get more into vCloud Director I anticipate using this heavily to set up templates for new (or old) OSes. It’ll also be a great solution for dealing with virtual appliances that make assumptions, like DHCP. …

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