LyX is crashing - almost

LyX, a professional text-authoring tool, is the tool which I'm using for writing my thesis. Once written in the WYSIWYG-tool  for LaTeX the output is professional styled PDF-document. Forget M$ Word, forget other text processing tools. LyX is free, professional and wide spread in the academic area.

Enough with the advertising!

The current version 1.6.3 for Mac is throughs errormessges every few minutes with the following message:

USING_FORK_WITHOUT_EXEC_IS_NOT_SUPPORTED_BY_FILE_MANAGER

According to (Bug)-trac ticket http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/6168 this seems to be a problem of Mac OS X 10.6 which violates the POSIX standard. POSIX allows to call the systemcall fork() without exec() - Snow Leopard is nagging every 5 minutes. Thats annoying me! It's time for LyX version 1.6.5.

Dear LyX-developer: Please hurry up and stand an exec() to your systemcall! Thank you  

VMware Fusion

In times of Leopard I used VMware Fusion to run Windows XP. I need it for execution of macro containing documents like Excel or useful office software like, one of the best product of Microsoft, Outlook.

VM Fusion 1.1 wasn't really compatible with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. On twitter I read a post of @vmwarefusion that he (or she) tried VMware Fusion 2.05 on Snow Leopard which runs perfectly. One reason more not to use Parallels because it's listed on some blacklists of non-working software for Snow Leopard.

After updating VMware Fusion from 1.1 to 2.05 the virtual machine (VM) must be updated (don't know what exactly, something about 3D acceleration etc...) and the VMs are ready. It rocks!

VMware Fusion 2.05 is available for free on the VMware download page if you own a valid license and uses the existing license during upgrade.

10 GB more diskspace!

In times of Leopard I had only 10GB free of disk space. Don't ask me where I spent the other 240GB on my hard disk... I only know that Windows XP on VMware Fusion is using 35GB but what about the rest? It's not the point for the moment. More interesting is that I've got 10GB disk space more after upgrading to Snow Leopard. Thats more than nice! 

According to Snow Leopard ad (http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/) I can't only add 1,750 of MP3 (for 7 GB) music files but now 2,500 of MP3 files are possible!! Isn't it amazing? I don't care...

The main thing is not run out of space!   

Mail and Exchange Support?

This was one of the reasons why to switch to Snow Leopard ASAP. I had a dream about using Mail with my company mails by accessing the Exchange Server. The company which I'm working for is using Exchange Server 2007. I don't know the Service Pack and the available features offered by our Exchange Server - I don't have to...

I've started Mail.app, configured the Account setting with the mailer information I know and was happy to receive my company mail soon - but no mails came in! Instead I got an error message that my server is not responding. WTF? Entourage is working fine!

It's not sooo easy like described in http://www.apple.com/macosx/exchange/

The problem is that our Exchange Server does not supports "Exchange Web Services" according to http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3748

I  hope our system administrators are cool enough to let Mac users doing their work with Microsoft Server products...