About four days ago I started seeing very faint signs of diatoms on my glass - and knew it was not long before the pods would start showing up. Well, three days ago I started noticing them - thousands of tiny copepods.

This is a good day.

Seems I like consolidating things... I have just merged my reef blog with my main blog - I just hate all these billions of small sites floating around.

I'd much rather have one place where I can blog about everything and people can filter based on the categories they are interested in.

Hope this works better for everyone.

So yesterday I upgraded to 10.4.10 only to discover my Cisco VPN is not working anymore. It gives an Error 51... That was real bad since I have a client that I support using VPN.

I tried everything to revert to 10.4.9 but it is not that easy to roll back a service pack. Eventually I stumbled across an article on Parallel's forum indicating that my problem might be related to the fact that yesterday I also upgraded from 4124 to 4128...

I did the following to fix it:

My wife's Parallels broke today. For some reason it just died when starting up - no matter what mode we tried to start Windows XP in. We tried repairing Windows XP by means of the installation CD, but this caused even weirder errors.

So I ran a Disk Repair and Permissions Repair - neither working.

I then decided I am going to try and upgrade the disk image to the latest Parallels - 3.0. Well, whilst copying the .hdd file this happened:

If you run a Swing application under Parallels for Mac v3.0, and are using Java 1.6 and your direct draw extension is enabled you will find the application never draws (render) it's canvas.

It is not a bug in your code - just turn off all graphics acceleration in XP.