JT's Blog

So if you know me, you know that I’m a fan of the MAC operating system and I’ve moved my entire professional and personal lives to this platform.  I’m also a big fan of Open Office.  Unfortunately, in order exchange documents with people standardized on Microsoft Office, I’ve found that I actually need to use Office on MAC.  *sigh*  There is actually no substitute for template integration and collaborative document editing.

I recently had problems installing MS Office 2008 on a MAC due to a serial # issue… I had to re-enter my product key.  There are many documents available on the internet that explain the process; however, I found the most usable rundown at this blog, and of course I wrote this post to fit that bill as well 🙂

See, here’s the catch – if you buy MS Office for MAC, the software will regularly talk to the network in the background.  It basically calls home to the Microsoft mother ship all the time.  In all fairness, Microsoft does this is to protect its revenue stream.  If someone on the internet has Office with your product key, then the key will be red-flagged and instances will be disabled when you check for updates.  To be honest, MS it well within its rights because the above is piracy.  However, if you have a laptop and a desktop and you run the same MS Office install on both, technically, you’re supposed to buy two licenses.  Yup, that’s right, you thought you bought the software, and you thought you could use it on all your computers, but no.  You bought a license to use the software on one single machine; you’ll have to pay again if you expect to use it concurrently on two machines.  I, for one, think that’s ridiculous.

If I haven’t already made myself clear: don’t steal software.  If you use it, pay for it.  There are ways to get discounts… google it.

Continue reading…

The default root password for VMware Data Recovery in vSphere 4.x is: vmw@re

So I’ve been working with VMware quite a bit for the past few years and I just learned what the “ESX” in VMware ESX stands for:

• ESX = Elastic Sky X
• GSX = Ground Storm X  (VMware GSX was the predecessor to VMware server, their host-based server virtualization product)

So the next time somebody talks about “Enterprise” or “Groupware”, you’ll know that info is incorrect.

Thanks to Carl Linkletter for the following additional VMware acronyms:

• VPX = Virtual Provisioning X
• VPXA = Virtual Provisioning X Agent
• VPXD = Virtual Provisioning X Daemon
• VMX = Virtual Machine eXecutable
• AAM = Automated Availability Manager
• VIX = Virtual Infrastructure eXtension
• VIM = Virtual Infrastructure Management

Another cool acronym: TWAIN = Technology Without An Interesting Name

So I mentioned in a previous post that I recently upgraded the hard drive and reimaged my MBP with Snow Leopard.  There have been a few headaches along the way, but none that couldn’t be worked through with google and a little tenacity.

The latest issue is: how to sync iPhone and iPod to the newly imaged computer?  Thanks to parasitic organizations like the RIAA, the manufacturers of mp3 players have to design the devices so that music can be uploaded to, and not downloaded from the device.  This has been standard operating procedure since the aforementioned parasitic RIAA sued the Diamond corporation after it introduced the first commercial quality mp3 player.  They claimed that it could be used to distribute copyrighted materials.  They used the same argument used against VCRs in the 1980s, but Diamond settled by making the device writable to by not readable from, so they would be able to release their product.  I digress.

Continue reading…

So I just upgraded the hard drive in my generation-1 MacBookPro, from the 160GB that it came with to a groovy new 500GB drive.  I took advantage of the opportunity to do a clean install of SnowLeopard; I figured that enough people have probably struggled through getting their old apps to work on the new OS that I could probably quickly Google whatever didn’t just work for me right from the get go.  Well, I needed to install new versions of most apps for them to work right.

An unfortunate and secondary effect walking around with a pristine and clean new install was that all the previously memorized WiFi networks (and encryption keys) were all lost.  Fortunately, I still have my original 160GB drive as an external USB.  It turns out that all the previously “remembered” WiFi networks are basically in an XML format in the following .plist file:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist

Simply recover that file, drop it in the correct path (you’ll have to use sudo if you’re a command-line jockey) and *bang*… it works.  Unfortunately, you can’t simply extract the WEP or WPA credentials, they’re stored in some <key> format.  *sigh*

Still, this saved me a lot of time and headache!