Pile of Dross

So I think my iBook may be having hardware issues, Leopard installs dumped out at various points. After reboots its had difficulty finding the airport and the sound device from time to time, and I’m pretty sure that some of the sizes reported by files are wrong (Anyone else’s /Library/iTunes/iTunes Plug-ins/Quartz Composer Visualiser.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Quart Composer Visualizer ~150GB in size?).

My XBox 360 has been locking up on occasion.

And my hot water tank appears to have sprung a leak.

Bah.

• It won’t do automated backups if the power cord isn’t plugged in or the disk isn’t mounted
• Its picky about mount points, so if you’ve switched from wired to wireless (or vice versa) with out unmounting, check that the backup disk is mounted in the expected directory under /Volumes
• sudo lsof -p gives some idea of what its actually poking at
• backupd-helper can be run from a terminal to force a backup now if your Time Machine dock icon doesn’t seem to do anything

Oh and complete unrelated (because I’m not using the unsupported network backup feature, not at all, whatever gave you that idea) netatalk on debian doesn’t work with Leopard, as Leopard is picky about the authentication.

Just had a jarring UI experience with removing a prefpane for an installed application. You need to ctrl-click on the thing to bring up a link to remove the prefpane. Why the heck aren’t these things draggable to the Trashcan? That’s the default metaphor for “I’m done with this now” for Applications, disk images, cds, ipods, network connections and files – why not prefpanes. Bah.

Crikey, its been a while.

I’m sitting here waiting for my preload of Half-Life Episode 2 and Portal to complete. (BTW as I’ve been a sucker and bought the Orange box, that means I’ll shortly have HL2 and HL2 Episode 1 codes to give away, so if anyone want them let me know). I’ve managed to wangle my way onto a workshop in Edinburgh in Mid November. In other sort of work stuff, my boss has said that he doesn’t mind me getting an Apple as a work laptop, which is great except what do I do with this iBook? And do I wait for Leopard?

As my iBook isn’t owned by work, I’m slightly leery about connecting it to work systems – so when at work I connect through the public wireless network and I don’t use VPN either. Which means that I’ve got a growing collection of ssh tunnels to get to the internal pages I need to see. Up until now I’d never gone much further than that, but with my resolution to use Textmate more there was an obvious direction – mounting my work unix account home directory on my Mac using FUSE and sshfs, which is shockingly easy – download some packages from the macfuse page, restart, configure and its done.

Though I have discovered why Apple is adding widescreen displays to everything – it so that there’s enough room for all the little menu items – when Firefox is the active application there’s only room for 1 more icon and that’s only because I turned off displaying the bluetooth status.

When I first got my iBook I bought a license for TextMate shortly afterwards. however it has always been somewhat under used – until now. Doing the digital equivalent of searching for loose change down the back of the sofa, I found a 15ukp gift certificate from Amazon that had been caught by SpamAssassin, so I put it towards a copy of TextMate Power Editing for the Mac.

Now one of the cool features of TextMate is that it installs an InputManager that allows you to open the text in editable text areas in other applications in TextMate for editing, however this only really work with Cocoa applications – native Mac OS X applications typically – so it works in Safari but not Firefox (Though Safari might be out of luck in the near future if the rumours turn out to be true). As I prefer Firefox to Safari, the next question to ask is there a Cocoa version of Firefox that would work? Well yes there is, 2 actually – Camino and the alpha release of Firefox 3; however neither worked properly for me.

So, thwarted in that angle of attack, the next avenue to explore is “Is it possible to simulate this behaviour in Firefox”, and indeed it is : Mozex is an addon for firefox that allows you to use external programs for various actions in Firefox – editing text areas being one, simply enter the path to the TextMate command line binary and set a key combination.

I’ve also added the GetBundle and the MediaWiki bundles to TextMate – the first to make it easier to add the second.

So I’ve been using the setup described in Pile of Dross » Using iTunes to play tracks from an iPod it doesn’t manage for a while now and it works quite well; however I do have 2 gripes with it.

1. You can’t create on the fly playlists.
2. Too many things to do in sequence – connect Ipod, start IpodDisk, Start Firefly.

While googling for an answer to the first I found a partial answer to the second :

Do Something When is a bit of software that makes it easy to start applications when drives are mounted. I’ve set it up to start IpodDisk when my ipod is connected to my iBook, removing the need to go searching in my Apps folder for IpodDisk, Firefly has an icon in the status bar so is less of a hassle to start.
I’ve also set up DSW to start up SuperDuper! whenever I mount the backup directory over the network – I have occasional pangs of guilt about how infrequently I backup the laptop.

I suspect that if I poked into Automator and Applescript, these would have been fairly trivial to do myself, but DSW wraps it up in a convenient package.

I’m still looking for ways to satisfy my first gripe, all the solutions I found basically involved streaming the shared tracks onto the local disk and playing them from there. This may be the only way to do it, but it bothers me in some undefinable fashion – it just seems wrong, its entirely possible to make random interactive selections, so why isn’t it possible to queue these selections up?

For a while now I’ve been using IPodDisk to access the music tracks on my ipod (managed from my windows PC) from my iBook, to play them through iTunes. However this gets irritating when I buy new cds and rip them to my ipod, as I have to add the new albums manually into my iBooks’s iTunes library. At home, my ripped tracks are stored on a linux server’s filesystem which is samba shared with the windows box. The linux box runs mt-daapd (now called FireFly Media Server apparently) allowing my iBook to access tracks remotely, and it has the nice feature of periodically rescanning for additions, so I wondered if I could do something similar for when I’m away from home – a daap server running on my iBook serving tracks locally to iTunes.

I started initially looking at mt-daapd but didn’t immediately see any dmg packages for Mac OS X and I didn’t want to install Fink – the documented way to do it, so I looked around for alternatives and found Tangerine however it required Mono which caused sufficent load to make using my iBook painful.

Further googling lead to the Nighty mt-daapd build page which does have dmg packages. Installing the latest release at the time (Firefly-svn-1450) worked perfectly after I changed the path to the Artists directory of my Ipod disk. Another benefit to FireFly over Tangerine is a Status icon to turn it on and off.

Laws of system adminning

As soon as you’ve understood the procedure for one upgrade a superceding upgrade will come out.

As soon as you’ve finished an extended downtime for one of your critical systems for which any downtime is frowned upon, a software update will come out for it.

Last night, in a fit of insomnia , I created an account at Last.fm. In the cold, clear but slightly rain spattered, light of day. I’m not sure I’ll use it that much – mostly I listen to my ipod which gets connected to a computer whenever I buy a new album – i.e. very infrequently. I have setup an itunes server on one of my linux systems, shockingly easy it was with mt-daapd, but still don’t tend to have music playing that often. We shall see.