B. Mann Consulting

I thought that Apple was going to do a big product release of *some* kind on April 1st, their 30th anniversary as a company. But, obviously, releasing Boot Camp, software that lets you easily install Windows XP on your Intel-based Mac, would really have been regarded as a practical joke, so they waited until today.

Dual-booting is really not that interesting. You don't really share files, and you can't switch back and forth without restarting the system and rebooting completely. I've been speculating if Apple will actually support Xen, an open source virtualization technology that lets you run multiple environments simultaneously. Perhaps Boot Camp is just a start -- Apple has already said that it will be included as part of Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, so perhaps that is when Xen support will be rolled into the base of the operating system.

I'll be looking for mentions of Xen as people dig into the details of Boot Camp over the next couple of days. 

MySQL 5.0 is being pushed hard, but I'm still sticking mostly with 4.1 for the things I'm doing. Here's the direct link to the download page...scroll down to the Mac OS X section.

If you want an easy double-click install of PHP in .pkg format, you go here and use Marc's stuff. The installer even makes the necessary changes so that PHP "just works" on your OS X box.

Translation: I think I managed to screw up several hard drives.

I have had a Maxtor external drive for quite some time (like 3 years or so?). Its main job was to hold our entire iTunes collection attached to the desktop (Gigantor) we have at home. Yes, note the use of "was". I should have listened more closely when Kate said iTunes wouldn't let her do certain things. Turns out those were symptoms of a drive that was going bad.

I ended up recovering some of it by purchasing Alsoft's DiskWarrior. Kate is paranoid (luckily) so she has backups on DVD in a safety deposit box. I also had a recent backup on another hard drive. Yep, another external one, for which I have a FireWire external enclosure that I just swap bare drives through.

It mounted, I was browsing files, and sure enough, that directory called "Music (Backup)" was there. Except, then, it wasn't. A system error about the disk being put away improperly. And the drive was/is toast, at least with the external enclosure I have, using the Oxford 911 chipset. There was of course the Panther Firewire Bug, but it seems there are some Tiger incompatibilities with some external enclosures as well.