Use the XenSource, Luke...

We are preparing to partner up with XenSource so here I am sitting at the product launch. Room is full, and a lot of different countries are represented. Met people from Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. We are the only partner from Canada.

Their VP of World Wide Sales and Channels, John Glendenning is about to give us a presentation on the merits of Xen as a product and XenSource as a company. So will the CEO, Peter Levine.

As today is a Non-Disclosure event, I will have to keep this post short...

... This paragraph would be huge if I wasn't under NDA ...

The big announcements will be December --th.

Now I get to fill in an evaluation sheet and get a free polo shirt. That makes the trip worthwhile :-)

Worse.... Update... Ever...

Well, I am usually keen on Apple's security updates. I have never been burned by them. Except for this latest one. To be fair, I think my laptop's hard disk started failing *immediately* after... SMART reports that I should move all my important data off the drive *right now*. That's lovely, as I am on a trip to California right now. So, it's 3am in a hotel room, and I'm copying what I can to my spare USB drive.

The security update prevents me from running Mail.app and Colloquy, so I have to revert to irssi and squirrelmail. It's the first time that a security upgrade reduces my efficiency. Thanks Apple. (Well, OK, the Mail.app crash *might* be due to GPG Mail and not Mail.app per-se...)

The thing that really aggravates me about the HD failing is that Disk Utility will not permit you to fix permissions if your SMART status is "failing". And no real flags to force the checking either.

So, here's what you have to do:

- Reboot and press Command-S to get into darwin's single-user mode.

- Run the following:

/sbin/fsck -fy
/sbin/mount -uw /
/sbin/autodiskmount -va 
/usr/sbin/diskutil repairPermissions /

- And then reboot