Voodoo Programming » Windows http://www.cneophytou.com Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything. Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:54:02 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc Share Windows XP license between Parallels and Boot Camp http://www.cneophytou.com/2007/07/18/share-windows-xp-license-between-parallels-and-boot-camp/ http://www.cneophytou.com/2007/07/18/share-windows-xp-license-between-parallels-and-boot-camp/#comments Tue, 17 Jul 2007 19:46:40 +0000 Constantinos http://www.cneophytou.com/2007/07/18/share-windows-xp-license-in-parallels-and-boot-camp/ Boot Camp and Parallels, I’ve kept two separate Windows XP installations on my drive. One on Boot Camp, used for gaming and other resource-intensive tasks, and the other exclusively on Parallels, used for running some random software I come across and also to test the websites I build in IE. The reason I’ve been doing this is because even though Parallels touts being able to run a boot camped windows installation [via lifehacker], you can’t do BOTH (at least not off the shelf). You have a Boot Camp installation that you either run through Parallels, or by itself. The reason for this is that Parallels has to create a new hardware profile which XP picks up as a different machine, and invalidates your installation.

No matter how much I searched I couldn’t find a way to use the same installation under both circumstances. Thus, when Parallels 3 came out I immediately paid for the upgrade (even before the release) for the much promised ’3D’ support, which, I believed, would enable me to play at least some of my games under Parallels, thus relatively eliminating the need to boot into XP. Alas, as most others, I was frustrated to find out that Parallels’ so-called 3D support was actually marginal support for DirectX 8.1, and absolutely NO support for DX9 or greater.

After all but giving up hope, I came across this comment on the afore-mentioned lifehacker post, which pointed me to a Parallels’ forum thread. To cut a long story short, I am now able to boot the same Boot Camp installation of XP both directly AND via Parallels without having WGA complain and invalidate my copy!

The process (reiterated from the above thread), is very simple:

  1. Find the MAC address of your Apples’s “en0″ adaptor. To do that, either:
    • Open Terminal.app and type ifconfig en0, the MAC address should be located on the line that says “ether 00:00:00:00:00:00″, where ’00:00:00:00:00:00′ would be the code you’re looking for
    • OR open “System Preferences”, click on the “Network” icon, from the “show” drop down select “Built-in Ethernet”, click the “Ethernet” tab, and the MAC address should be listed under ‘Ethernet ID:’
  2. Start up Parallels and select your Boot Camp installation (do NOT start the virtual machine)
  3. Go to “Edit”/”Virtual Machine”
  4. Select “Network Adapter 1″ on the left, and the “Advanced” tab on the right
  5. In the “MAC address” field replace the entry with the MAC address of en0 which you lifted above, minus the colons.


That’s it! No more complaining by that damned WGA :)]]> http://www.cneophytou.com/2007/07/18/share-windows-xp-license-between-parallels-and-boot-camp/feed/ 1 WP-Cron-Mail plugin http://www.cneophytou.com/2006/03/14/wp-cron-mail-plugin/ http://www.cneophytou.com/2006/03/14/wp-cron-mail-plugin/#comments Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:20:30 +0000 Constantinos http://www.cneophytou.com/2006/03/14/wp-cron-mail-plugin/

The first problem is overcome by using the wp-cron-mail plugin which comes with the wp-cron plugin. However I still wanted some more functionality from this.

My modification to wp-cron-mail.php accomplishes the following things:

  1. Adds the option of specifying which categories the post should be placed in. This is accomplished by (optionally) having the first non-empty line of your email message be in the form of:

    {* Category Name, Another category name, catID *}

    where “Category Name” can be any text. If the specified category exists it will be correctly identified, if not it will be created. catID needs to be the ID number of an existing category. You can use either method to define categories, or both of them together.
  2. Limits posting to registered users only. When an email is received the plugin will try to match the Reply-To: address (or if that does not exist, the From: address) with all the emails of the registered users. If such an address is found, then the owner of that email address will be assigned as author (as with the default version of this plugin). Even though posting this way is strictly limiting, the option to override this is provided through the Options page, where you have the ability to either allow all email addresses, or provide a list of additional allowed email addresses (which can be empty – the default). With either of the last two options, if a message is posted from a non-registered email address, it will be marked as authored by the admin of the blog.
  3. Added the ability to replace wp-mail.php with a single function call to take advantage of the wp-cron-mail improvements, with the option of sending a notification email if posts are retrieved through this file, instead of just outputing the results to the browser.
  4. Added an Options page in the admin section to manage a lot of the configurable options of this plugin.


You can download a copy of this file in a zip archive or a tarball, which include a README file with instructions for replacing wp-mail.php. Before you use these files however, you should make sure of two things: that your wp-mail.php file is indeed working (to ensure that you do not suffer from the known bug that WordPress is still suffering from), and also that you have a working installation of wp-cron-mail. Then you can go ahead and replace that file with the one found here.

As always, no guarantees, and there is always room for improvement. I haven’t changed the code from the original wp-cron-mail, merely added to it. And it seems to be working, both this and the previous post were posted using this plugin :) . Feel free to comment.

UPDATE: Apparently something went wrong with this plugin… If you visited this site in the first 3 hours after this post was posted, you would notice something very strange… all spaces were encoded as “=20″!!! I need to track this down…]]> http://www.cneophytou.com/2006/03/14/wp-cron-mail-plugin/feed/ 1