marți, 15 septembrie 2009

Hardware Hackers, Illuminato X Machina, Open Source Hardware Bank and Von Neumann's bottleneck

Even if you're not a hardware hacker, this should be a fine piece of reading.
Check it out:

http://www.smoothblog.co.uk/2009/08/23/hardware-hackers-create-a-modular-motherboard/

luni, 14 septembrie 2009

The horrors of Microsoft or how to force an install of Microsoft Office 2008 from command line

Ahhh, I was so happy when I got my Macbook Pro and finally switched
to mac(which is up to now the perfect combination for me at least between flexibility and advanced commands aka. unix style with all it's hardcore commands and ease of use aka. windows style). I must say Mac OS X takes a little to get used with it but
it's waay better than Windows.

Still... I need Microsoft Word 2008 on my newly upgraded Snow Leopard. No wonder that I had problems when installing it because the guys at Microsoft, even though made the package Intel-based only, they made the installation PPC binary, and that means Rosetta(which I have installed already) kicks in and does it's job.(check here http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=775727).

The only thing is that the installation doesn't work properly and after some more searching on the net, and studying the mpkg format I found out that I have to force somehow the installation.

After searching Google for "how to run mpkg from command line" I found this link:
http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/2031/install-an-mpkg-from-the-command-line-on-osx
which tells me I should run this command:
sudo installer -pkg /Volumes/someapp/someapp.mpkg -target /

so I become root with:
sudo su -
then go to the place where the dmg file is mounted, which in my case is:
/Volumes/Microsoft Office 2008
and I find this directory
Office Installer.mpkg

Then I run the following command:
installer -pkg Office\ Installer.mpkg -target /

note the escaped spaces, an alternative would be like this
installer -pkg "Office Installer.mpkg" -target /

The installer starts without asking me anything and after a while(5 mins)
it finishes without any error and when I check the Applications directory,
the directory "Microsoft Office 2008" is present and all the applications
are nicely installed.

Here's the output of the installer program:
installer -pkg Office\ Installer.mpkg -target /
2009-09-14 17:55:12.064 installer[856:3007] PackageKit: *** Missing bundle identifier: /Library/Receipts/PPD_Installer_RICOH.pkg
2009-09-14 17:55:12.257 installer[856:3007] PackageKit: *** Missing bundle identifier: /Library/Receipts/QuickTime Component for Everio.pkg
installer: Package name is Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac
installer: Installing at base path /
2009-09-14 17:55:16.018 installer[856:4c07] Package /Volumes/Microsoft Office 2008/Office Installer.mpkg/Contents/Packages/Office2008_en_word.pkg uses a deprecated pre-10.2 format (or uses a newer format but is invalid).
2009-09-14 17:55:16.538 installer[856:4c07] PackageKit: *** Missing bundle identifier: /Library/Receipts/PPD_Installer_RICOH.pkg
2009-09-14 17:55:16.540 installer[856:4c07] PackageKit: *** Missing bundle identifier: /Library/Receipts/QuickTime Component for Everio.pkg
installer: The install was successful.


After all this hassle I realized that I just lost at least half an hour but
I installed Microsoft Office from the command line. Take that Bill!