Firstly, I’ll say that this isn’t for the IT-challenged. If you freakout when you see command lines and wonder if ‘kernel’ is a brand of cereal, look elsewhere, you don’t want to endanger yourself. Grab someone to do it for ya instead

Hack Attack: Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800 is a very comprehensive guide from LifeHacker on how to get Mac OS X Leapord running on an Intel machine. At the very least, the article is a good read because of the pictures of the beautiful Mac OS GUI running on a self-assembled PC.

A shame that the Hackintosh seems to only run a select set of hardware components and the need for a Mac OS X DVD in the drive to boot properly.

Note: I don’t know if this is legal or not and in no way condoning it, you know, the kind of projects you’d do for educational purposes *cough*.

Looks like the folks from VMWare have been busy. Check out the new features

* Web-based management interface: A new Web-based user interface provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive way for you to manage your virtual machines.
* Expanded operating system support: VMware Server now supports Windows Vista Business Edition and Ultimate Edition (guest only), Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn Server Beta 3), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ubuntu 7.1, among others.
* Greater scalability: Take full advantage of high-end hardware with support for up to 8GB of RAM per virtual machine, up to two virtual SMP (vSMP) processors and up to 64 virtual machines per host.
* 64-bit guest operating system support: Run high-performance operating systems in virtual machines with support for Intel EM64T VT-enabled processors and AMD64 processors with segmentation support.
* Support for VIX API 1.2: This feature provides a programming interface for automating virtual machine and guest operations.
* Support for Virtual Machine Interface (VMI): This feature enables transparent paravirtualization, in which a single binary version of the operating system can run either on native hardware or in paravirtualized mode.
* Support for USB 2.0 devices: Transfer data at faster data rates from USB 2.0 devices.

Can’t wait for the official release. Get the beta here - VMware Server 2.0 Beta.

Excerpts from “Spring in Production” whitepaper.

The Spring Framework and Spring Portfolio products are used in production in mission-critical applications all over the world and in every kind of industry.

For example, almost all of the inter-bank transfers in the United Kingdom are handled by a company called Voca. They process over 80 million items on a peak day, handle bill payments for over 70% of the UK population, and handle salary payments for over 90%. Voca are proud of the fact that they have never lost a single payment. These transfers are powered by Spring.
For example, HSBC recently took out a support contract with SpringSource to support their mission-critical use of Spring in production applications.
For example, 25% of the world’s cargo movement through port and intermodal facilities is managed through a Spring-powered application built by Navis.

Good to know that Spring looks to be here to stay. It’s a vastly superior framework compared to plain-vanilla JEE.

bernie.net.my will be upgrading has upgraded its Wordpress version to 2.3.1.

Update: Upgrade successful, please tolerate the theme for now. Decided on a new theme. Now to reinstall all the plugins I’ve been using (yes, upgrading manually means you lose your plugins).