In Loki We Trust

If you are using VMWare Fusion under OS X 10.5 (Leopard) with bootcamp, and get an “Error loaded operating system message”, there is finally a simple fix.
Open your *.vmx file for your virtual machine, and add the following line:

ide0:0.biosGeometry=”1024/255/63″

that should do the magic!

So there’s this thing called BarCamp – (haven’t heard of it? you have to check it out). This past weekend was the first BarCamp in Portland, and it went off amazingly well.

Though initial expectations were that it would be a good even if 100 people managed to show up, by Saturday morning there were over 250 people registered on the BarCampPortland wiki. Big thanks and props go out to the vendors, especially Jive, JanRain (and their Pibb platform), and CubeSpace, all of which put a lot of effort and time into the event – and can’t forget Microsoft, for that wonderful dinner from the Nicholas they provided.

There were a lot of good sessions, and a lot of very interesting people at BarCamp, and I can’t wait for another one!

Nathan Young introduced me to MoonEdit (and later, we discovered Gabby, though I have not had time to use it), and I set up a server Friday night. Saturday, Nathan, myself, John Sechrest, and others used it to take notes during the sessions, and after BarCamp was over, I was able to use the files on the server to put together all the notes. You can find the notes either in seperate blog posts here, or on the BarCampPortland page.

Session I attended:

• Enhancing User Experience
• Dig into Coding for the Browser
• IA Slam
• Open HArdware Design
• Redundency & Load Balancing Web Applications
• Hack Share

I’ll see you all at the next BarCampPortland!

I have a friend, relatively computer literate, but definately not a “geek”, who was taking a low level computer course at a community college recently. After taking his first exam, he came to me, asking about some of the questions.

Well, I thought, ok, I’ll take a look, and explain to him why some of the answers he gave were wrong – until I saw the questions.

after the break are the worst of the questions on the test, and you can get the whole test here. The “correct” answers are designated by an asterisk

For reference, the community college in question is Portland Community College, the course was BA 131, and the instructor’s name was Bill Bruno.

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