Dave had an interesting problem the other day - whilst the Xserve was functioning normally, he couldn’t access the server using either Apple Remote Desktop nor physically plugging a monitor into the back and the processor usage lights were just over half way. He was however, able to SSH in.

Rebooting the server was out of the question as people were working from it, so our intrepid tech spent the entire morning looking for a solution. It turned out that the CoreGraphics service had crashed, so killing it forced it to restart:

• First log into the machine as an administrator over SSH
• Type “ps -A” to list all processes
• Then type “kill PID” Where the PID is the number next to System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/
  CoreGraphics.framework/Resources/WindowServer -daemon

After you kill the process OS X will automatically restart it and all will be well again. This was performed on OS X 10.5 Leopard Server.

Tags: leopard, server, 10.5, xserve, terminal, ssh, CoreGraphics

They've done it! Clever buggers.
You can now, with a little bit of work, hack the iPod Touch to work on VOIP.

There are few things we at RMStudio towers like less than dealing with the un-organised bumbling goliath that is BT (British Telecom or Bloody Terrible, your choice).
You ring, you get a recorded thing, 10 hours later someone with less knowledge in technical matters than the average Polar Bear answers and tells you that you've called the wrong "section" of BT and that you "need to call 1. BTClick, BTConnect, BTBroadband or Oh'BT from Some mothers do ave em!
So.... when the chance comes along to stop giving them who rule the copper money we snap at it. Hence this story from the TUAW more than caught our eye.
The uber geeks are hard at work trying to get the iPod Touch to work as a phone using VOIP technology and it seems they are winning.

Tags: iPod Touch Phone, iPod Touch, iPod touch VOIP

Bloody............... Finally! Today sees the launch of the iPhone in the UK (and some other places in Europe that don't matter as much).
How excited are we? Excited enough to still be awake blogging about it!
No one from RMStudio was brave/mad enough to sit through a cold evening in Regent Street, we're tucked up safe from the freak pigeons and the rogue ITV news crew. We do have some "Friends of RMStudio" right at the front though! Nik Fletcher (thanks for the photo), who writes for TUAW and our web guru Graham Gilbert are sitting there as we speak. Right at the front of the queue it's quite possible they'll be the first (Legitimate) UK iPhone owners.
Why does everyone want one? Because Steve Jobs said so that's why!

Tags: iPhone Launch UK, iPhone Queue, RMStudio iPhone

If you're doing any sort of photo manipulation it's generally accepted that Photoshop is the program of choice. It's become an industry standard and as such is priced at a level that takes full advantage of it's monopoly. This is reasonably acceptable for businesses, but for the individual it's rather a lot of money to pay just to remove the wrinkles from Aunt Edna's picture. So Photoshop released Photoshop Elements, great! but when using it it always feels like a stripped down version of Photoshop, which is essentially what it is.
Along comes PixelMator. "Image editing for the rest of us" A universal Binary program for Mac OS X.
The first thing you notice is how good it looks, its got a sort of Aperture look with the main colour being black, all the panels float on the screen and they all have that slight transparency that gives the application a professional feel. The second thing you notice is how quick it runs, especially if you've got a meaty graphics card in your mac. PixelMator takes full advantage of Core Image meaning that most of the image processing is done on the image card leaving the main CPU to do other things (like render coverflow smoothly!).
Pixelmator supports over 100 file formats including PSDs with layers and has loads of the same functions as the full version of photoshop all for $59!
Check out the demo, it's well worth it.

I was helping a client set up his home network today. He has a mac mini which he wants to control iTunes on from his laptop. I pointed him towards coverbuddy a brilliant little piece of software that allows you to control your iTunes from anywhere using a web interface. With this in mind I decided to see if it worked on the new iPod Touch - It did!
The interface is a little small on the screen at first but that's easily sorted by zooming in.
It basically means that you can plug your mac into your stereo and control your music from the iPod. I've done it before with the PSP but got a little bored of using the little mouse pointer on the psp, but with the touch interface I can see this being quite a nice cheap alternative to Sonos.

We've had a little play with the iPod touch, (video below) and we think it's rather good. Still no Flash and Flex though, someone please hack it.

Warner Bros are launching The Matrix on HD DVD at HMV Oxford street london on Sep 10th, not in itself a wholely impressive fete but according to HMV the first 150 customers who buy The Matrix Trilogy on HD DVD get a Toshiba HD-E1 DVD player free! Doors open at 8am, worth dragging yourself out of bed for though.

According to the last episode of diggnation Kevin and Alex will be shooting an episode at the Future of Web Apps conference on 3-5 October. Kevin is one of the speakers at the conference which is being held over at the ExCel Centre in the east end. We shall be there sporting our diggnation Ts in true geek fashion!