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Items by Marc

Word Up! on You Tube

Posted: October 30th, 2008, 11:23pm MYT by Marc

Somebody posted a review of my iPhone game, Word Up!, on YouTube.

Xcode/iPhone error 0xE8000001: problem and fix

Posted: October 24th, 2008, 3:12pm MYT by Marc

As you all probably know, I’ve written a word game for the iPhone called Word Up!

<shameless-plug>

</shameless-plug>

Tonight, I started getting an error while trying to run my app from Xcode on my device (provisioned for development). The error was:

Your mobile device has encountered an unexpected error (0xE8000001)
during the install phase: Copying file.
Try disconnecting and powering off the device; then power the device
on and reconnect it.

I tried resetting the device a number of times and rebooting my MBP as well to no avail. It was beginning to look like I was going to have to do the dreaded restore and then lose all the cool jailbreak stuff that I’ve become so accustomed to. And then that made me remember that because my device is jailbroken, I can ssh to it and poke around. I wondered if a previous failed copy left some garbage on the device that was causing subsequent copies to fail.

iPhone:/ root# find . -name 'Word Up*'
./private/var/mobile/Media/PublicStaging/Word Up!.app
iPhone:/ root# cd /var/mobile/Media/PublicStaging/
iPhone:/var/mobile/Media/PublicStaging root# rm -rf Word\ Up\!.app/

Bingo. That fixed it. So if you hit this problem and you happen to have access to the filesystem of the device, give it a shot.

Push Button For McCain

Posted: October 21st, 2008, 1:20pm MYT by Marc

McCain apparently has a pervasive campaign where he’s managed to somehow get his name on tons of street-crossing button thingies in Sunnyvale, California.

Look closely at the picture below. “McCain” appears in two places.

“Push Button For McCain” these things read and if pushing these buttons does indeed register votes for McCain, then forget about ACORN - this would be an unprecedented level of voter fraud.

The California Academy of Sciences

Posted: October 19th, 2008, 4:16am MYT by Marc

Could be more aptly named “The San Francisco Museum of Crowds and Waiting”.

I’ve been here for an hour and a half and have so far only had a $35 lunch for two, waited in several lines (several for lunch and currently in one for a rainforest thingy), found out the planetarium is sold out for the rest of the day, and wrote a cranky blog post on my iPhone while waiting in line.

The Hollywood Principle

Posted: October 13th, 2008, 6:03am MYT by Marc

No, not this one.

Republicans have to stop saying that Hollywood is the worst thing in America - until they can stop saying that Ronald Reagan is the best thing that ever happened to America.

Hand dryer of power

Posted: October 12th, 2008, 7:35am MYT by Marc

I love it when a hand dryer creates waves in the skin on the back of my hands.

Test post from WordPress iPhone app

Posted: October 12th, 2008, 5:42am MYT by Marc

Test post from WordPress iPhone app

Yay

DreamHost: Unlimited disk and bandwidth deal

Posted: October 3rd, 2008, 6:32am MYT by Marc

Just noticed that DreamHost is offering an incredible deal for today only to celebrate their 11th birthday. From their site:

The first 1,111 new customers (Update: less than 30 remain!)
to sign up with DreamHost today will get UNLIMITED resources, both disk space and bandwidth, for the life of their hosting with us.

Check it out!

Zerorez

Posted: September 27th, 2008, 4:08am MYT by Marc

Yesterday, we had Zerorez come out and clean the carpet in our living room/dining room, office, and stairs. I had heard their commercials on KGO-AM-810 (Gene Burns does their spots often) and we were intrigued by their purported zero-residue cleaning method.

Everything looks very clean. We are especially happy that they got out a bunch of stains in the office that seem to have come from the casters on our office chair (today, we went to Staples and bought a chairmat to hopefully prevent that in the future).

They told us they could not clean an orange stain in the corner of the living room and I am not surprised. That came from me going a bit overboard a few months back with that spray can foam insulation stuff. I was trying to seal some little gaps that I thought were a little drafty and I underestimated the ability of this foam to expand an incredible amount and then attach itself to carpet fibers and then achieve diamond-like hardness. At the time, I tried various carpet cleaners and scrubbed until my arms were tired - I tried just about everything short of a flame thrower I think. So while it would’ve been nice if Zerorez were able to steam that bitch out, I’m not too surprised that they couldn’t and I give them credit for fessing up to it in the debriefing.

So we were pretty pleased with Zerorez.

Coastal Electronic Technologies Basic Lockpick 3

Posted: September 26th, 2008, 5:47am MYT by Marc

Well, my Coastal Electronic Technologies Basic Lockpick 3 arrived today and I have to say that the experience has turned out to be much better than I had feared.

First off, if you’re not familiar with this device, it’s a $99 device that unlocks various features of the Denso navigation units while in motion, in various Toyota and Lexus vehicles. These units have an annoying feature that they monitor your speed and they refuse to allow you to do various operations while the vehicle is in motion. This is ostensibly a safety feature to prevent drivers from getting distracted, but it’s also tremendously short-sighted as it completely ignores the fact that a passenger may want to use the unit. Not having destination entry is particularly annoying. The fact is I’m with my wife most of the time that I’m driving the car. The main time I drive alone is for commuting to work and in that case I know where I’m going and don’t need navigation assistance. The navigation unit is most useful when we’re somewhere unfamiliar, like on vacation, and it’s a pain in the butt to not be able to enter a destination while in motion.

So I’ve long wanted to try the Lockpick 3, but I had some trepidation and resisted it for a while.

Why? Well, my research online seemed to indicate that Coastal tended to take a very long time to ship items and that their customer service was very unresponsive. Their web site certainly does not inspire confidence, as it looks very amateurish and not often updated. Recently, I had read about folks having some better experiences and I am tired of not having destination entry while in motion in my 2008 Prius.

Well I didn’t really try to utilize Coastal’s customer service, but they did ship the device promptly. I ordered the device on Sept. 16, got a UPS tracking number on Sept. 17, and received the device today, Sept. 25 via UPS Ground. Not bad at all.

The device came in simple packaging and the box also had instructions and a small bag of Jelly Bellies. The instructions looked simpler than I had imagined and so I went ahead and had at it.

It was easy. The nav unit in my Toyota Prius 2008 is under the driver’s seat. I grabbed a flashlight and pushed the seat back and removed the connector to the nav unit, pressing down a bit on the tab on top of the connector so that it slid out. Then plug that connector into one end of the Lockpick and plug the other end of the Lockpick into the nav unit. Start up the car and wait about 20 seconds for the nav unit to reload firmware. Then I went for a drive and noted that the destination entry screen has a new pin icon in the top left. By default, destination entry is still grayed out while in motion but pressing and holding the pin icon for a second or two causes the destination entry to unlock. After you’re done entering a destination, it automatically locks again. This is actually an important feature, because the Lockpick works by making the nav unit think that the vehicle’s speed is zero. The nav unit uses a combination of GPS and that vehicle’s speed to determine position. So when the Lockpick is unlocking, the nav unit is not getting the proper speed input and so the nav unit’s impression of where you are drifts off. After destination entry is complete, the nav unit now gets the proper speed and it takes a minute or two for the nav unit to get its bearings. At some point, the nav unit showed me on the map as essentially driving through the bike trail around the corner from us (an all-green area on the map)! It took the nav unit a minute or two to get the right location. I hope that this doesn’t turn out to be too big of a problem in practice.

So all in all, I’m pretty pleased.

Word Up! iPhone game now available from iTunes App Store

Posted: September 19th, 2008, 2:23am MYT by Marc

It took 9 days for Apple to approve it, but now my Word Up! iPhone word game is available on the iPhone App Store.

If you like the app and would like to write a review about it, that would be much appreciated.

Screenshots
Word Up! for iPhone

iPhone Application List

OS X 10.5.5

Posted: September 16th, 2008, 2:23pm MYT by Marc

You can now grab OS X 10.5.5 from Software Update.

What does it have? From [support.apple.com]:

General

Includes recent Apple security updates.
Addresses stability issues with video playback, processor core idling, and remote disc sharing for MacBook Air.
Addresses an issue in which some Macs could unexpectedly power on at the same time each day.
Resolves a stability issue in TextEdit that could be found when accessing the color palette.
Improves Spotlight indexing performance.
Fixes an issue in which contacts might not sync properly with PalmOS-based devices.
Improves iPhone sync reliability with iCal and Address Book.
Includes improvements to Active Directory (see this article for more information).
Improves Speech Dictionary.
Fixes Kerberos authentication issues for Mac OS X 10.5 clients that connect to certain Samba servers, such as Mac OS X Server version 10.4.
Includes extensive graphics enhancements.

Address Book

Addresses stability issues that may occur when creating a Smart Group.
Resolves a printing issue with address cards containing information that spans more than one page.

Disk Utility and Directory Utility

Improves reliability when rebuilding a software mirror RAID volume in Disk Utility.
Improves reliability of server status displayed in Directory Utility.

iCal

Updates iCal to more accurately handle repeating events.
Improves performance when choosing meeting attendees.
Resolves an issue in which the “Refresh All” option may be dimmed (”grayed out”) in the contextual menu for certain calendars.
Fixes issues with read-only calendars.
Addresses an issue that prevents an invitee from moving an event to a different calendar.
Resolves an issue with syncing published calendars.

Mail

Addresses performance issues related to displaying IMAP messages.
Resolves an issue with SMTP settings for AIM, Compuserve, Hanmail, Yahoo!, and Time Warner Road Runner email accounts.
Addresses stability issues that may occur when dragging a file to the Mail icon in the Dock.
Addresses an issue with the “Organized by Thread” view in which the date does not appear when the thread is collapsed.
Resolves an issue in which RSS feeds could temporarily disappear from the sidebar.
Improves Mail robustness when sending messages.
Improves reliability when saving drafts that have attachments.

MobileMe

Improves overall sync reliability.
Improves Back to My Mac reliability.

Time Machine

Improves Time Machine reliability with Time Capsule.
Addresses performance issues that may affect initial and in-progress backups.
Fixes an issue in which an incorrect alert message could appear stating that a backup volume does not have enough free space.
Time Machine can now back up iPhone backups that are on your Mac, as well as other items in (~/Library/Application Support).

Not working

Posted: September 12th, 2008, 3:33am MYT by Marc

It’s nice not having a job.

I quit VMware. Not my cup of tea.

People ask me what my new job is. I answer that I don’t know and people react with either horror or an envious smile. The fact is, it’s a pain to interview while you’re at another job. And you don’t have much time to devote to your job search - one of the most life-impacting decisions you can make.
And besides, there is an abundance of jobs out there right now.

The only problem is that I had hoped that not working would be relaxing and so far it’s been too full for my taste with interviews and phone calls. I’m getting a little wary of talking about my history and wanting to look ahead to the future.

Updated my Treo 680 to software 2.11

Posted: July 10th, 2008, 1:08am MYT by Marc

Finally got around to installing the 2.11 update released in December. The coolest new addition is the instant messaging application which allows you to connect to Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft IM networks.

I haven’t played with it enough to come to any conclusion on whether stability is any better (my phone often reboots when I answer it!) or if the Web browser is any smarter (it doesn’t seem to be very good about using its cache).

Software development quote of the day

Posted: June 7th, 2008, 9:11am MYT by Marc

Spotted at [www.holub.com]:

“Excessive or irrational schedules are probably the single most destructive influence in all of software.”

-Caspers Jones

links for 2008-05-31

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 9:30pm MYT by Marc

freshmeat.net: Project details for Extended Python Debugger More complete than pdb.py. Supports a “restart” command, disassembly, stack traces that give better information for exec statements, and stepping over “defs”. Tries to follow gdb’s commands unless there is good reason not to. (tags: python debug)

links for 2008-05-28

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 9:31pm MYT by Marc

Welcome to OpenC++ OpenC++ is C++ frontend library (lexer+parser+DOM/MOP) and source-to-source translator. OpenC++ enables development of C++ language tools, extensions, domain specific compiler optimizations and runtime metaobject protocols. (tags: c++ parser)

links for 2008-05-24

Posted: May 24th, 2008, 9:30pm MYT by Marc

Linuxart » Blog Archive » Super-useful inputrc (tags: bash inputrc)

Python ternary operator

Posted: May 19th, 2008, 9:56am MYT by Marc

Today’s Python discovery:

Python doesn’t have the C style ?: ternary operator (e.g.: cond ? valueIfTrue : valueIfFalse).

But as of Python 2.5 it has a ternary operator with its own syntax: value_when_true if condition else value_when_false

For example:

>>> 'a' if 1 == 1 else 'b'
'a'
>>> 'a' if 1 == 0 else 'b'
'b'

This is actually clearer and more Pythonic than that ?:

Unfortunately, for Python versions < 2.5, you don’t have this. I’ve seen people use: (condition and [value_when_true] or [value_when_false])[0]

IMHO, this is clever - in a bad way. Yuck. Personally, I think I’d rather just do:


def if_cond_val1_else_val2(cond, val1, val2):
   if cond: return val1
   else: return val2

This adds 3 lines to your program (or 1 if you stick it in a module that you import from your programs) and won’t cause your colleagues to hate you.

Song from the Bank of America Commercial

Posted: May 11th, 2008, 2:32pm MYT by Marc

A recent B of A commercial has a female acoustic singer/songwriter song, which sounds very similar to Shawn Colvin to me, but alas, it’s not Shawn Colvin.

It’s “Merry-Go-Round” by Antje Duvekot

links for 2008-05-09

Posted: May 9th, 2008, 9:30pm MYT by Marc

Macworld | First Look: VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 (tags: vmware fusion macosx)

Pole smoking

Posted: May 1st, 2008, 12:48pm MYT by Marc

I wonder if the manufacturers of this have heard of the term “pole smoking“:

links for 2008-04-29

Posted: April 29th, 2008, 9:30pm MYT by Marc

C++ Gotchas: Avoiding Common Problems in Coding and Design - (tags: C++)

links for 2008-04-28

Posted: April 28th, 2008, 9:31pm MYT by Marc

Linkers and Loaders (tags: linker programming book)

New MacBook Pro Firmware

Posted: April 23rd, 2008, 11:39am MYT by Marc

MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.5.1 just popped up in Software Update:

After installing and rebooting:

BZFlag

Posted: April 22nd, 2008, 2:13pm MYT by Marc

I saw BZFlag on freshmeat tonight and decided to give it a try. Wow, total bloodbath. Kind of a fun game but would be more fun if I could routinely last for more than 10 seconds and maybe have a positive score.

WordPress 2.5

Posted: April 3rd, 2008, 5:40am MYT by Marc

This blog is now running WordPress 2.5. Haven’t played with it too much. First impression, the new look of the admin screen is pretty ugly to me.

Frequent Quicksilver crashes?

Posted: April 2nd, 2008, 11:57pm MYT by Marc

Lately, Quicksilver has been quietly dying very often and I’m constantly restarting it. I suppose I should try reinstalling and/or deleting my preferences, but before I do that, I was wondering if anyone else was seeing this.

Interestingly, I’ve also noticed that the “check for updates” functionality always fails to connect to the server. I’ve wondered if this and the crash are related (e.g.: Quicksilver dying when it attempts to do an automatic check), but that’s just pure speculation.

Here’s a snippet from the last crash log that got dumpd in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter

Process:         Quicksilver [1566]
Path:            /Applications/Quicksilver.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicksilver
Identifier:      com.blacktree.Quicksilver
Version:         Î²53 (3814)
Code Type:       X86 (Native)
Parent Process:  launchd [87]

Date/Time:       2008-04-01 11:27:29.302 -0700
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.5.2 (9C7010)
Report Version:  6

Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)
Exception Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at 0×0000000000000000
Crashed Thread:  4

Alarm monitoring

Posted: March 30th, 2008, 4:06am MYT by Marc

There’s been sporadic crime in our area. We decided to add a monitoring service to our existing alarm equipment for $31/month.

Thoughts on the Apogee Duet

Posted: March 13th, 2008, 1:02pm MYT by Marc

My Apogee Duet Firewire audio interface arrived.

Thoughts:

It looks great. It’s bigger than I thought it would be, but still a nice size. With it’s simple controls and silver, rounded body, it looks right at home with my MacBook Pro.
Ease of set up. No problems. Downloaded the latest software package from Apogee’s site, installed it, rebooted, and then plugged in the Duet. A dialog came right up asking whether to use it as the default audio device and Logic Express found it with no problems either.
Ease of use. I worried about it only having one knob, but it seems like that’s all I need. Pressing the knob toggle between the two inputs and the outputs which is quick and easy. Having meters and clip indicators on the unit is really nice when adjusting levels. Another nice feature is that adjustments on the unit are mirrored in a transparent popup on the Mac display, which is a nice touch.
Sound. Very pleased. Being the pessimist that I am and not being a person with “golden ears”, I wasn’t expecting to hear anything really noticeable, but I was pleasantly surprised. The most noticeable thing was the lack of apparent noise when there’s no signal and listening with headphones. It’s so dead quiet that I wondered several times if it was still in the signal path. And music played through it sounds great too.
Crashes. Unfortunately, OS X did crash once when I plugged it in, but in fairness, this is almost certainly Apple’s fault, since it also happened with a PreSonus Firebox (see this post) (and I’ve seen reports of it happening with the Inspire 1394 as well). C’mon Apple - fix this. This is OS X; not Windows. This reminds me of Windows 98 crashing on Bill Gates when he plugged in a scanner at Comdex 1998.

Logic bug: Creating Apple Loops from a region

Posted: March 9th, 2008, 2:54pm MYT by Marc

While following the exercise “Creating Blue Apple Loops” on page 262 of “Logic Pro 8 and Logic Express 8″ by David Nahmani, I was running into some trouble.

1. Open Logic project file: “07 New Day”.
2. Drag the Marquee tool (Command-click tool) over the High Arpeggio region from bar 5 to bar 7. Verify that before releasing the mouse button, the help tag reads “5 1 1 1 7 1 1 1″, indicating that Marquee selection goes from bar 5 to bar 7 and is thus 2 bars in length.
3. Click the Marquee selection with the Pointer tool to create a new region that should be exactly 2 bars in length.
4. In the Arrange area’s local menu bar, choose Region > Add to Apple Loops Library.

Expected Results:
The dialog should offer the choice of “Loop” or “One-shot”.

Actual Results:
The choice of “Loop” or “One-shot” is grayed out.

According to the book and [docs.info.apple.com], this graying out is a symptom of having a region that is not a whole number of bars in length, but this region seems to be exactly 2 bars in length as far as I can tell.

I posted about this on the Logic Pro Help forums (run by Mr. Nahmani; not Apple) and Mr. Nahmani kindly pointed me to an earlier thread that explains the problem and how to work around it. Basically, the bug is that the help tag is indicating that the region is 2 bars in length, when in fact, it’s actually a bit shorter. The remedy is to tweak the region a bit to make it shorter and then to make it exactly 2 bars in length.

I hope this helps other folks who run into this problem. And I hope Apple fixes this bug.

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Finished “Logic Pro 8 and Logic Express 8″ book

Posted: March 5th, 2008, 1:21am MYT by Marc

I had been working through the exercises in “Logic Pro 8 and Logic Express 8″ by David Nahmani lately, mostly while on the shuttle bus to and from work (and yesterday on the VTA light rail on the way to SD West). I completed the last lesson last night, which involved adding music and sound effects to a video.

The book is excellent and I learned a lot about using Logic from it. Now that I’m done with this book, I’m going to buy “Logic Pro 8: Beyond the Basics” by David Dvorin and work through that.

While on the topic of Logic, I should mention that the author of the book, David Nahmani, has some nice Logic forums at [www.logicprohelp.com]

SD West 2008

Posted: March 4th, 2008, 12:58am MYT by Marc

This week I’m at SD West 2008. I’m hoping to learn a few things about C++, especially C++0x and Boost.

Freeganism

Posted: February 28th, 2008, 10:48am MYT by Marc

My wife was watching an Oprah show about this so I looked it upon on good ol’ Wikipedia.

Wow, these people make vegans look like ultra-right-wingers.

[en.wikipedia.org]

Dumpster diving - freegan awesome.

Permalink for 'Marc_Abramowitz/2008/02/28/Musician%e2%80%99s_Friend___Save_up_to__150_until_March_4'

Musician’s Friend - Save up to $150 until March 4

Posted: February 28th, 2008, 5:06am MYT by Marc

Buying an Apogee Duet

Posted: February 27th, 2008, 2:18pm MYT by Marc

I think I’m going to buy the Apogee Duet as my Firewire audio interface:

I’m going to try to use a 10% off code from GuitarCenter.com even though Apogee doesn’t seem to be on the allowed brands list:

WordPress 2.3.2

Posted: December 31st, 2007, 4:17am MYT by Marc

You had me at “security fixes”.

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.2

Permalink for 'Marc_Abramowitz/2007/12/29/Perl___%e2%80%995.10%e2%80%b2______%e2%80%9d__%e2%80%9d______Operator_s________amusing_'

Perl->{’5.10′} += (”//” && > Operator[s])? =~ /amusing/

Posted: December 29th, 2007, 4:55am MYT by Marc

A snippet from the latest freshmeat.net announcement of Perl 5.10 that landed in my email inbox:

This version includes a new smart match operator, a switch statement,
the // defined-or operator, regular expression improvements, and
other language changes…

Funny, I was just thinking that what Perl needs most is more operators…

Possible fix for MacBook [Pro] keyboard unresponsiveness bug

Posted: December 19th, 2007, 3:06pm MYT by Marc

I have a MacBook Pro and the keyboard unresponsiveness bug is pretty annoying.

Just noticed that a new update from Apple popped up in the Software Update tool:

Crossing my fingers…

VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 now available

Posted: December 12th, 2007, 7:06am MYT by Marc

[biz.yahoo.com]

Darcs 2

Posted: December 12th, 2007, 2:21am MYT by Marc

Chris pointed out that Darcs 2 is available for testing:

[wiki.darcs.net]

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Finished “Practical Perforce”

Posted: December 7th, 2007, 2:32am MYT by Marc

The day before yesterday I finished reading “Practical Perforce” (by Laura Wingerd, from O’Reilly books). I liked it more than I thought I would. My first impressions of Perforce, hadn’t been that favorable, mostly because of its unusual paradigm of keeping track of client workspaces, which can lead to a lot of unintuitive behavior. Reading the book helped solidify my understanding of Perforce’s view of the world and demonstrated that Perforce can be a very powerful tool. For sure there are warts, like the sometimes strange syntax of the p4 integrate command and a section that was downright humorous, showing how simple it is to back out a change, using 7 commands piped through various sed filters (in fairness, backing out changes in CVS is also complicated and actually much worse because CVS doesn’t have changelists - I wonder if any version control system has bothered to actually make the simplest of tasks actually simple. At work we have a p4 wrapper command, written in Perl, that adds a backout command, but I wonder why Perforce doesn’t build this simple feature in?).

The best part of the book for me was the later chapters, where the book describes the bigger picture of managing branches in shrink-wrap and Web development software shops. A lot of the material in these last few chapters is about general SCM and branching methodology and is largely independent of what version control system you’re using, though naturally this book concentrates on the application of this methodology with Perforce.

links for 2007-12-03

Posted: December 3rd, 2007, 9:18pm MYT by Marc

Prius Projects This dude has done a bunch of crazy stuff to his 2002 Prius (tags: prius hacks)
NSLU2-Linux - HowTo / ChangePasswordsFromTheCommandLine browse How to prevent Unslung from losing your passwd changes on every reboot (tags: nslu2)

links for 2007-12-02

Posted: December 2nd, 2007, 9:18pm MYT by Marc

[edward.oconnor.cx] bare bones SOAP support for Emacs (tags: emacs lisp elisp soap)
Optimizing Page Load Time - die.net (tags: performance web browser http)

More on my broken S-presso

Posted: November 30th, 2007, 2:45am MYT by Marc

I mentioned a few days ago that my Asus S-presso PC quit working.

Last night, I opened up and did a bit of surgery in a failed attempt to revive it. I had been thinking that the power supply died, since none of the fans spin up. However, when I opened it up, I could see that the Power LED on the motherboard lights up when the power supply is plugged in. So the power supply is not completely dead, though it’s still possible that it’s not supplying all of the various voltages that a modern PC needs. Or it could be that the power supply is fine and the motherboard is the culprit. I unplugged and reseated various connections including the two connections from the power supply to the motherboard and I also pulled the massive CPU heat sink/fan off and made sure that the Pentium 4 processor wasn’t a molten mass of silicon before cleaning up tons of dust in the fan and heat sink and reinstalling it. No fried processors or capacitors that I could see or smell, so I put it back together and stuck it in the garage for the time being.

My thought is that I may not even need this little Linux PC anymore, since I have:

Samsung ML-2571N networked laser printer - I no longer need a server to expose my printer to the network.
Linksys NSLU2 (running Unslung) - Provides access to my external hard drives and provide miscellaneous server niceties like acting as an SSH proxy and firefly/mt-daapd (iTunes server) and byrequest (TiVo HMO server) if I so choose. Basically a tiny little Linux server that takes up almost no space and uses a fraction of the power of a bona fide PC.
DreamHost web hosting account - Hosts this web site and also hosts a Subversion repository that I use for a few miscellaneous things.
MacBook Pro - Since I have VMware Fusion (and 4 GB of RAM), I can do just about any miscellaneous playing around on this machine - Mac stuff, Windows stuff, Linux stuff, FreeBSD stuff.

So my thought is that there’s not too much point in trying too hard to resurrect this little Linux box or buying a new rig to replace it. In fact, by not having this box, I could save a bit of electricity and improve aesthetics by getting rid of the long, ugly Ethernet cable that is running around the room (never got around to running it under the carpet). So perhaps I’ll just sell this PC for parts.

SSH through an HTTP proxy

Posted: November 29th, 2007, 2:50am MYT by Marc

To SSH (OpenSSH) through an HTTP proxy, you can use the ProxyCommand config option with one of several programs that know how to talk to an HTTP proxy using the HTTP CONNECT method. The one I use is called corkscrew and it works equally well on Linux and Cygwin.

Something like this will do the trick to let you connect through an HTTP proxy to a home server that has an sshd running on port 1234.

Host home
	User            	marc
	HostName        	dns.home.org
	Port            	1234
	ServerAliveInterval 	30
	ProxyCommand    	/usr/bin/corkscrew proxy.corporation.com 3128 %h %p

Once you have one host that you can connect to through the proxy, you can even use that host to get to other hosts.

Host webhost
	User            	marc
	HostName        	dns.webhost.com
	ServerAliveInterval 	30
	ProxyCommand    	/usr/bin/ssh home nc -w 600 %h %p

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Hacking OS X’s Python dbhash and bsddb modules to work

Posted: November 29th, 2007, 2:48am MYT by Marc

By default on my Leopard system, the dbhash and bsddb Python modules cannot be loaded.

marc@hyperion:~$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Oct  5 2007, 21:08:09)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import dbhash
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5
        /lib/python2.5/dbhash.py", line 5, in <module>
    import bsddb
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5
        /lib/python2.5/bsddb/__init__.py", line 51, in <module>
    import _bsddb
ImportError: No module named _bsddb

I managed to get it to work though by installing bsddb3 from the pybsddb site and hacking the file /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5:

marc@hyperion:~$ diff -u dbhash.py.orig dbhash.py
--- dbhash.py.orig      2007-11-28 10:16:33.000000000 -0800
+++ dbhash.py   2007-11-28 10:36:52.000000000 -0800
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@

 import sys
 try:
-    import bsddb
+    import bsddb3 as bsddb
 except ImportError:
     # prevent a second import of this module from spuriously succeeding
     del sys.modules[__name__]

Here’s the patch.

Now it works:

marc@hyperion:~$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Oct  5 2007, 21:08:09)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import dbhash
>>> dir(dbhash)
['__all__', '__builtins__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__name__', 'bsddb',

'error', 'open', 'sys']

links for 2007-11-28

Posted: November 28th, 2007, 9:18pm MYT by Marc

Apple - Support - Discussions - Keyboard randomly stops working after … A super-annoying bug that causes MacBook Pro keyboards to occasionally freeze. Mine has started doing this every now and then. (tags: apple mac osx bug)
Usingmac.com - Leopard Tweaking - Terminal Codes Several nice hacks, including one that will get rid of that dang transparent menu bar (tags: leopard mac osx)

Emacs: Writing to read-only files

Posted: November 28th, 2007, 4:29pm MYT by Marc

Just found this little gem regarding read-only buffers in Emacs:

A buffer visiting a write-protected file is normally read-only. Here, the purpose is to inform the user that editing the buffer with the aim of saving it in the file may be futile or undesirable. The user who wants to change the buffer text despite this can do so after clearing the read-only flag with C-x C-q.

This is cool, because Perforce makes files read-only by default (to encourage you to open them before you edit them, though you can do this after the fact if you’re careful) and because I’ve been making the files for my web site read-only as a small measure to deter site defacement. I had been using vim for editing my web site files because w! can write to read-only files, but now it looks like I have a convenient way to use Emacs as well.

Shuttle bus breakdown

Posted: November 28th, 2007, 2:31pm MYT by Marc

I take a shuttle bus to work every day that I can.

Today our bus broke down right by the interchange between highways 85 and 280. Luckily another bus was nearby and was able to pick us up around 15 minutes later or so.

The buses seem to have a pretty fair amount of mechanical problems. Not too long ago, another bus breakdown made the bus more than 30 minutes late to pick us up at the light rail station and we all took our cars that day. A few weeks before that, there was a mechanical problem with the bus just after it picked us up and we had to wait for another bus to come out.

So that’s at least 3 mechanical problems there and I’ve only been working here since early August.

The bus works well most of the time, though, and is very convenient when it does.

Finished The Rise of Endymion and the Hyperion series

Posted: November 27th, 2007, 3:42pm MYT by Marc

A few nights ago I finished reading The Rise of Endymion and thus, the entire 4-book Hyperion series.

Total # of books read: 4
Total # of pages read: 2336

That’s a lot of pages and if that scares you, then I might suggest reading only the first two books. The first two books comprise one cohesive story and the second two books comprise another story which is related to the story in the first two books, but largely independent and different (the events of the second two books occur hundreds of years after the events in the first two books and with mostly different characters). The first two books were more enjoyable to me then the latter two (and also shorter!). This is not to stay that the latter two books were not enjoyable - they are. However, if you read them looking for answers to the mysteries in the earlier books, you might be disappointed in the end. In fact, some earlier explanations get a bit muddier and there are some new mysteries, some which are explained well and others which aren’t. In particular, the origins of the enigmatic Shrike seem a bit different in the latter two books and never get satisfactorily explained, IMHO. Also, the first two books are more pure science fiction, whereas the latter two get a lot more into mysticism and “quantum love” and a sort of sci-fi spin on some of the ideas of Buddhism. Some elements of the first two books like an oft-mentioned future war between deities get ignored. I did still enjoy the latter two books, so if you have the time, go ahead and read all four books.

Book	# of pages (paperback)
Hyperion	512
The Fall of Hyperion	528
Endymion	576
The Rise of Endymion	720

links for 2007-11-26

Posted: November 26th, 2007, 9:18pm MYT by Marc

HOWTO set up Juniper Network Connect VPN on Ubuntu Dapper - Ubuntu Forums (tags: vpn ubuntu linux juniper)
Haskell hacking: No monadic headaches: multi-core concurrency is easy in Haskell Compares concurrent code in Erlang and Haskell (tags: haskell concurrency erlang)
Good Math, Bad Math: Haskell tutorial (tags: haskell tutorial monads)

S-presso dead

Posted: November 25th, 2007, 4:06am MYT by Marc

My little Asus S-presso small-form-factor PC that was running Ubuntu is dead.

Fans don’t even spin when I try to power it up. I suspect that the power supply burned out.

Darcs for OS X Leopard

Posted: November 24th, 2007, 4:31am MYT by Marc

I had been trying unsuccessfully for several days to install Darcs via MacPorts and Fink, but both seem to have trouble with the prerequisite GHC on OS X 10.5 (Leopard). However, I did find a very nice installer package for Darcs here that worked like a charm for me.

Legal day

Posted: November 20th, 2007, 3:51pm MYT by Marc

Today was a legal sort of day. I had to report for jury duty and spend the afternoon in a courtroom for jury selection. Then this evening, I completed online traffic school for a speeding ticket that I got in September.

Incidentally, jury duty is not over. I have to report to the courthouse again tomorrow at 8:30 am for continued jury selection.

Finished The 4400 Season 2

Posted: November 20th, 2007, 3:45pm MYT by Marc

A few of us have been getting together on occasion to watch the sci-fi show The 4400 (on DVDs from Netflix). It doesn’t seem to be a hugely popular show, but it’s actually quite good. It’s the tale of what happens when 4400 people who disappeared over the course of several decades suddenly reappear together in a field, delivered by a mysterious ball of light. The 4400 haven’t aged a day, are totally unaware of where they’ve been, and are beginning to show interesting abilities (a la Heroes).

Last night, Nicole and I fired up our new popcorn popper for the first time and watched the last episode of Season Two (and a few special features on the single DVD for that episode). It did not disappoint - some good cliffhangers. Looking forward to Season 3…

Mac OS X Screenshot Secrets

Posted: November 19th, 2007, 4:52am MYT by Marc

On OS X, taking a screenshot is not as easy as pressing PrtScn (Print Screen). Well it’s easy to do, but it’s not easy to remember and thus I present these shortcut keys from O’Reilly’s Mac OS X Screenshot Secrets:

Key Combination	Result
Command+Shift+3	Capture entire screen and save as a file
Command+Control+Shift+3	Capture entire screen and copy to the clipboard
Command+Shift+4	Capture dragged area and save as a file
Command+Control+Shift+4	Capture dragged area and copy to the clipboard
Command+Shift+4 then Space bar	Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and save as a file
Command+Control+Shift+4 then Space bar	Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and copy to the clipboard

Just added these to my Mac OS X Switch Guide page, which has various OS X tips, especially suited for new converts from the world of Windows.

Ubuntu repository problem resolved

Posted: November 19th, 2007, 4:26am MYT by Marc

The previously mentioned Ubuntu repository problem seems to have resolved itself. I am finally able to upgrade my Samba packages.

Ubuntu mirror troubles

Posted: November 17th, 2007, 1:02pm MYT by Marc

This has been happening all day every time I attempt to do apt-get dist-upgrade:

The following packages will be upgraded:
  libsmbclient samba samba-common smbclient smbfs
5 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 11.0MB of archives. After unpacking 4096B will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]
Writing extended state information... Done
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main smbfs 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main smbclient 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main samba 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main samba-common 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main libsmbclient 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
E: Failed to fetch

http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/s/samba/smbfs_3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3_i386.deb:

403 Forbidden

links for 2007-11-16

Posted: November 16th, 2007, 9:18pm MYT by Marc

Apple - Support - Discussions - X11 in Leopard … Discussion thread on X11 in Leopard with links to updates and info on getting Gimp and Inkscape working (tags: mac osx x11 leopard gimp inkscape)
Leopard and X11 - The macosxhints Forums Apple’s X11 Frequently Asked Questions in Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) - a thread on macosxhints.com forums (tags: x11 leopard mac osx faq)
X.Org Wiki - XDarwin Updated Xquartz binaries are available for Leopard; installing the latest of these will fix some issues discovered in Xquartz since Mac OS X 10.5 was released. (tags: x11 leopard osx mac)

Bookcase

Posted: November 16th, 2007, 5:43am MYT by Marc

This is the “bookcase” that was issued to me (and many of my colleagues) at work.

As you can see, it’s not very practical, especially with the height of the shelves, which makes it impossible to fully utilize the space without resorting to stacking and the overall height makes it too tall to fit under my standard-issue cubicle desk, pretty much forcing it to be in the one particular spot where it partially blocks my whiteboard.

In general, the new building and the cubicles are very nice, but the bookcases I think missed the mark.

MacBook Pro

Posted: November 14th, 2007, 3:08pm MYT by Marc

My new MacBook Pro arrived yesterday. I expected that it was going to come with Leopard pre-installed, but instead it came with Tiger and a Leopard DVD. Perhaps this is better in case there are enough bugs and incompatibilities, that I’d rather use Tiger until Leopard matures a bit. I have installed Leopard and haven’t played with any of the new features like Spaces or Time Machine, but I have run into a minor problem or two with X11.app.

links for 2007-11-13

Posted: November 13th, 2007, 9:18pm MYT by Marc

The Flash Blog » Running Flash in the Vista Sidebar! Since Vista gadgets are essentially just HTML and JavaScript there is no reason that you can’t include other browser technologies such as Flash and Flex. (tags: vista flash gadget windows flex)

links for 2007-11-11

Posted: November 11th, 2007, 9:18pm MYT by Marc

Ready Lisp for OS X Leopard | Lisp, Mac OS X, Emacs | New Artisans LLC Ready Lisp packages an ANSI Common Lisp environment for Mac OS X users as a single application bundle. It repackages and configures the following components: Aquamacs Emacs, SBCL Common Lisp, the SLIME Lisp IDE, and more. (tags: lisp osx mac)

The Fall of Hyperion

Posted: October 8th, 2007, 2:38pm MYT by Marc

Back in May, I read Hyperion, the first book in a renowned 4-part sci-fi series from Dan Simmons (official site).

This weekend, I finished The Fall of Hyperion. This book continues the story of the Shrike pilgrims from the first book and a few other characters, including the John Keats cybrid, as the interstellar war escalates and the universe goes to hell in a handbasket.

This book doesn’t have the pilgrim stories of the first; it’s more linear, if you can call it that. There are lots of parallel stories, farcasting, worlds within worlds, and time travel to make it plenty interesting. Most of the mysteries of the first book get explained though some of the explanations are so mind-bending, that you will probably have a bunch of new questions. Luckily, there are two more books…

Speaking of the other two books, not wanting to forget too much and lose momentum, I picked up the next book in the series, Endymion, at a book store in Santa Cruz today. I already have the fourth book, The Rise of Endymion, as a friend of mine dug his hardcover version out of his garage and lent it to me.

Interestingly, I noticed that Dan Simmons has a web site and he mentions that a movie is in the works:

Yes, Virginia, there is a Hyperion movie in the works. It has been optioned by a top-notch studio, is slated to be directed by a top-name director, and already has the involvement of a top-flight movie star. Screenwriters have been attached to the project and a first draft screenplay is expected soon.

I’m looking forward to that!

Gregarius » Items by Marc

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