From the 11th to the 14th of June I had the pleasure of visiting the Woodford site to shoot the Dreaming festival once again. As per usual, the atmosphere was fabulous and it was great to catch up with the many old friends who frequent the festival circuit.

This year’s line up included local acts Dubmarine and Chocolate Strings (both bands always manage to put up a great show). Dan Sultan was particularly animated on stage and a definite favourite with the female punters who enjoyed watching him move as much as they enjoyed listening to him.

Dan Sultan

Chocolate Strings

Comedians Shake-A-Speare, Kevin Kropinyeri and Sean Choolburra made the Dingo Shed rock with laughter, while Mark Sheppard continuously cracked up both young and old in the Black Dramatics venue with his “Chasing The Lollyman”.

It has almost become a tradition now for musicians to jam together on the last night of the festival. They are then joined by both traditional and contemporary dancers and makes for quite a show which is not to be missed.

All in all, another great festival, and I’m already looking forward to being back there next year. A big warm thank you to all who performed, danced and organised the event.

As previously mentioned, I recently purchased a new i7 MacBook Pro. I considered getting the 15″ hi-res screen, but decided against it.

An Apple store employee advised me that he considered there to be little noticeable difference between the two versions. I came to a very different conclusion having compared them side by side in store for nearly an hour.

While the menus probably would have been alright, a lot of text is already hard to read due to small font sizes used on many websites. As I didn’t feel like constantly squinting or getting rather close to the screen to read articles on these websites (interestingly enough, the Apple online store was one of the websites I found really hard to read) I opted for a regular screen instead.

So, if you need the extra real estate, by all means, knock yourself out with a 15″ hi-res screen. Otherwise, think very carefully about getting this. If at all possible try before you buy.

Finally, after a long wait for the next MacBook Pros to come out, my patience has paid off: I went down to the Apple store in Chermside, Brisbane, to pick up a brand spanking new i7 MacBook Pro. My previous MBP gave the ghost a couple of months back, and like many people keeping an eye on sites such MacRumours I “knew” that the updated MBPs were imminent.

Wanting to make a near complete switch from desktop to laptop for all of my work, I decided to wait for the faster and relatively cheaper machines to come out.

After buying and swapping a new hard drive, my machine now is a 15″ 2.66 Ghz i7/8gb RAM/7200 rpm (16mb cache) beauty that deals with virtualisation just fine while running every other application that I throw at it.

So you develop websites on your Mac using virtual hosts mapped to the usual localhost loopback (127.0.0.1). Everything is fine until you install virtualisation software such as VMware’s Fusion to fight IE’s dodgy rendering issues. Of course you prefer Fusion to recognise all your locally mapped DEV sites, but you can’t simply tell the virtualised Windows environment to use 127.0.0.1 since this will simply point back towards itself.

Suppose you have set up a virtual host for a site called sample.dev. This virtual host allows you to use URLs such as http://sample.dev/about-us/our-team.html

Now you want to be able to use that same virtual host in your virtualised environment (=guest environment). You’re just a few simple steps away from making this work for you.

1. Unique Loopback Address

   To make all this a little easier, I prefer to use a different loopback address than the standard 127.0.0.1. My preferred address is: 10.0.0.101. I’ll explain why I use this address later on.

2. Hosts file: Mac

   Ensure your sample.dev site is configured in your local hosts using the 10.0.0.101 address file as follows:

   
10.0.0.101 sample.dev
10.0.0.101 another-site.dev
10.0.0.101 yet-another-site.dev


   We’ll use the local IP address to bridge the guest and host environments. Please note that you can use any local IP address available to you (ie, not yet in use or assigned).

3. Host file: Windows

   Next, we’ll add the same lines to the host file of the guest environment: locate the file (windows/system32/drivers/etc on XP) and duplicate the Mac host file entries:

   
10.0.0.101 sample.dev
10.0.0.101 another-site.dev
10.0.0.101 yet-another-site.dev


4. Applying the Glue

   Now that we have configured the host(s) files on both the guest and host environments all we have left to do is create the actual bridge for these environments. We do this by adding an ifconfig directive to our system by using launchd or rc.local

   • launchd

     Introduced in OS X 10.4, launchd is a flexible way to start/stop/edit processes. To put it to our use, we’d create a plist entry in /Library/LaunchDemons/

     We do this by opening a terminal window and typing:

     sudo touch /Library/LaunchDemons/ifconfig.plist

     Next, open the file we just created in a text editor and add the following:

     <plist version="1.0">
         <dict>
             <key>Label</key>
                 <string>ifconfig</string>
             <key>ProgramArguments</key>
             <array>
                 <string>/sbin/ifconfig</string>
                 <string>lo0</string>
                 <string>alias</string>
                 <string>10.0.0.101</string>
                 <string>netmask</string>
                 <string>255.255.255.0</string>
             </array>
             <key>RunAtLoad</key>
             <true/>
         </dict>
     </plist>
     

     Finally, save and close the file.

   • rc.local

     The rc.local file runs in the background at system start up. While deprecated and essentially replaced in Leopard by the more flexible launchd, it still can be used to launch processes.

     rc.local can be found at /etc/rc.local. If you’re running a more recent system installation, chances are that you’ll have to create this file as OS X has not created this file by default since version 10.4.

     You can create the file by typing the following in your terminal window:

     sudo touch /etc/rc.local

     Now, open the file we just created in a text editor and add the following:

     ifconfig lo0 inet 10.0.0.101 netmask 255.255.255.0 alias

5. Almost done

   You may need to reboot both the hosted and the hosting environment in order to have these changes come into effect.

   Thanks to Rob Sanheim for his tips on the subject.

The often heated discussion about copyright, intellectual property, fair use, & public domain remains an interesting one. Of course it is of special interest to me as a person who produces nearly as much content as I consume. And while most people will agree with the need for certain protections of intellectual property, most people will also agree that that side of the equation will need to be balanced with provisions in law that allow innovation, free speech and contributions to our cultural landscape to flourish.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain, a non profit organisation at Duke Law School, has made available a worthwhile read in the form of a comic. It examines the legal & ethical boundaries of copyright and intellectual property versus public domain, and the impact that these boundaries have on our society. How far should we go in protecting property? When should people be allowed to use material for their creative pursuits?

The public domain is the realm of material—ideas, images, sounds, discoveries, facts, texts—that is unprotected by intellectual property rights and free for all to use or build upon. Our economy, culture and technology depend on a delicate balance between that which is, and is not, protected by exclusive intellectual property rights. Both the incentives provided by intellectual property and the freedom provided by the public domain are crucial to the balance. But most contemporary attention has gone to the realm of the protected.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain

So, if this issue is of concern to you, make sure you check out the comic.