After well over a year of research and trying to make Apple accountable for faulty firmware in some of their computers, I have finally given up. Apple still refuse to admit to any problem on these drives, and sadly I must devote time to other projects.

From the superdrive site:

Update 28/01/2007 02:47am (+11 GMT)

Well, it looks as though Apple won’t do anything about this problem. What I can advise however are a number of brands that do work accordingly - and why.

It seems that Apple only support media created by the CMC factory. Discs made by this factory (and banded as other labels) seem to work fine in the drive. CMC make the Verbatim and possibly LG, SHINTARO, TDK and some DATACELL discs.

This means in theory, any of these discs that happen to come from the CMC factory should work fine. Anything else, and you’ll get 2x burns.

Looks like Air Services Australia has updated their DAPs page with all the airport charts for Australian Airports. To reflect this, I’ve re-run my script to combine them all for us flight sim pilots who like to use them for procedural approaches and departures from airfields.

You can find them here.

Better late than never. I hope you all had a great Christmas and have a fun new year!

Christmas for me was a little different as I had a visit from one of my cousins from the UK on her way around Australia. There was much consumption of alcohol and a great time was had by all that night. Alas, with only the basic public holidays off this year, it’s a very busy time.

Work on the (until now) unmentioned project to trunk IP data between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane is well underway and have already signed up our first 50Mbit customer. If you need data transport between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, drop me a line for a quote.

Be safe, and I’ll see you all in 2007!

EDIT: Oh, and my good mate Andrew Cameron that I’ve known ever since high school is getting married on the 30th. Cheers to him! :)</p>

I gave in. I purchased a Mac Pro. Clocking in with 2 x Dual Core 2.66Ghz CPUs, 2Gb RAM and the 512Mb ATI X1900 video card, it’s one hell of a machine. The first boot it ever did took around 18 seconds - very quick. Of course, the first thing I had to do to it was throw in a second 160Gb SATA HDD and throw Windows XP on there (for those all important games). I must say that I’m quite impressed with bootcamp (which allows you to boot Windows on the Intel Macs). The one thing that does annoy me is that it doesn’t give me the menu so I can pick which OS I want to boot to on startup - something I miss from other boot loaders such as grub.

I do have some hassle with the Logitech LLC drivers causing the mac to hang on shutdown, and even making the mouse buttons not work (however I can still move the pointer), however these have been reported to Logitech and I’m sure will be fixed soon.

All in all, a grunty as hell machine, and very nice to play games on ;)

One of the things you’ll notice quickly is that by default, Windows Vista will not map samba shares - nor can you use Samba as a PDC (Primary Domain Controller). This is due to the default security policy of Windows Vista only using NTLMv2 for authentication - something Samba doesn’t support as yet.

To fix this, run (Win+R) secpol.msc

Navicate to Local Policies -> Security Options

Change the value of the policy “Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level” from “NTVLM2 responses only” to “LM and NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”

This should now allow Windows Vista to both map network drives based on Samba servers, and use Samba as a PDC.