Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

FreeBSD versions 5 and 6 no longer includes perl with the base system. That’s good and bad news for me, since I like the idea of a “stripped down” base system, but I do need perl for some of the software I’m planning on using.
It’s easy enough to install perl from the ports collection ((If [...]

Ever since I started reading about Office 2007 I’ve been looking forward to the new RSS features in Outlook. Now that I’ve been using it for a few weeks, I’ve really grown to love it. As a newsreader there’s nothing special about Outlook (in fact, there are some things about it that are downright annoying), [...]

It’s just a rumor at this point, but I have it on good authority the next version of Office for OSX will include a new, greatly improved Remote Desktop client. This is, of course, good news for anyone using the old RDC client, which hasn’t been updated since way back in 2004. Not that it [...]

One of the first things you’ll want to do after installing FreeBSD is add your user account to the wheel group. This will let you use su to run commands as root, without having to log out or open a new terminal.
pw usermod -G wheel

FreeBSD may not require a lot of resources, but it seems to under-estimate itself when it comes to automatic partitioning. For most servers, you’re much better off choosing your own partitioning scheme than letting the installer do it for you.

swap - I’ve always used 2.5x the physical RAM in the machine, although I’ve heard 2x [...]

SXSW 2007:
I’m searching my articles from last year regarding SXSW and I can’t find any documentation of one of the major discoveries. SXSW is the only conference I know where designers and developers hang out. Designers have design conferences. Developers have nerd conferences. SXSW has somehow convinced both parties to head to Austin and actually [...]

I took the afternoon off work today to attend the Windows Vista Developer Launch Event (free coffee and a copy of MS Office 2007, how could I miss it?). It was an interesting time; the MS technology evangelist gave a four hour talk about the new developer features of Vista and .NET 3.0, and also [...]

Over the next week or two at work I’ll be setting up a new Subversion server, using FreeBSD 6.2. I started playing with FreeBSD a few months ago almost by accident ((I was having problems running Linux under MS Virtual Server and thought FreeBSD might work better, but it turns out to just be Virtual [...]

I thought this was a neat idea.

Regis Duchesne:
VMware products have had a semi-hidden switch for some sort of 3D support in virtual machines on Linux and Windows since VMware Workstation 5.0, which was released almost 2 years ago (April 2005).
Since then, work on the 3D front has been progressing steadily, with DirectX 8.1 support in VMware Workstation 6 and VMware Fusion [...]