Yesterday afternoon I all of a sudden started to get GSODs (Grey Screen Of Death) - the equivalent of the Windows Blue Screen of Death. Not good - actually those were my first serious crashes on this particular machine ever (which is about 2.5 years old). I went through the usual diagnostics, OSX permissions and repair, fsck from single-user mode etc. but nothing helped. One thing I noticed…

Note: This is a political post. It's highly driven by my political opinions and the ongoing discussion on the preferred NZ election system. If you don't like to read about these topics, please move on. I was inspired to write this one up after reading a blog post of stuff by David Farrar. I don't share his political opinion, but he's asking a very valid question: "Why should the MMP threshold in…

This was weird. The other day I was trying to commit something into an Hg repository. Not a new one, not a new setup - I had done thousands of successful commits into this repository in the past. The result of my commit was weird though: Error: transaction abort! rollback completed abort: decoding near 'ailbox, we're not': 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 24: ordinal not in…

The flight planning software I use is Windows-based and unfortunately Windows-only. It's a really powerful tool and there's nothing comparable for OS X (at least not for Australia and New Zealand), so I'm happy to go the extra mile making it work. The easiest way would obviously be to install the software in a virtual machine and to run just Windows in such a VM with VMWare Fusion or Parallels.…