Bye-Bye Linux

As of 20 seconds ago, the linux server that hosted betips and that crunched static HTML files for kissthisguy and that hosted our home samba / ftp server was shut down for good. 94 days uptime. shutdown -h now. It’s all happening on OS X now. Moof!

While I was at it, decided that the annoyance:revenue ratio of the ads on betips was just too high, and removed all the ads. I was only making about $3/month from them. Pathetic. From now on, betips is a free public service again.

Finished moving Amy over to OS X yesterday, and so far she’s clam-happy. This will ensure that our child grows up in a Microsoft-free environment. Of course, Amy is already warning me about getting any bright ideas about pint-sized mice and setting examples that it’s good to sit at the box for hours-on-end fiddling. I think she’s right. But can I stop?

Spent the day creating lesson plans for the web applications / php / mysql class I’m going to be teaching in a few weeks.

iDVD

Burned my first DVD with iDVD tonight. Paula wanted a hard copy of the Los Platanos footage for posterity, so finally fired it up. Threw Sad Planet on there too. Like iMovie, the software is very primitive and shows its limitations quickly, but it’s also very easy to get good results out of it without having to rtfm. That accursed Apple logo in the corner bugs me, but fortunately it’s only in the main menu, not on the video clips themselves.

Log Cruncher

Spent the last couple of days writing an apache log cruncher in PHP. Scans a dir for the oldest log (so it doesn’t try and work on the one apache is currently writing to), crunches it with analog, which outputs machine-readable report.dat, which is passed to ReportMagic, which makes lots of pretty graphs and charts, zips, archives, and deletes the original log, creates a date-stamped folder in the intranet’s logs dir, moves the latest batch of reports to that dir, and creates a new link on the intranet’s Traffic page connecting to the new report. The whole thing gets run by TaskScheduler weekly.

Update: analog was discontinued back in 2010. Here is a list of the current
10 Best Log Management Tools.

RedirectMatch

Spent too much time today trying to get mod_rewrite to behave. The problem was simple enough, but I just couldn’t get reliable behaviour out of it. Thought I needed it because straight Redirect doesn’t do regex. Then found RedirectMatch, which is exactly that – redirects with pattern matching. Is this httpd’s best-kept secret?

What I hate is that when you’re reading complicated docs and examples on something like mod_rewrite, nobody ever puts a line in there: “By the way, if you’re like 99% of people, you’ll probably find that RedirectMatch accomplishes the same thing but much more easily.” Nope. Nerds gotta do it the hard way or it doesn’t count.

Tales of a BeOS Refugee

The piece I wrote for osnews.com came out today. 15,000 words on the experience of a BeOS user migrating to OS X. Got slashdotted later in the day. Mail is rolling on, most of it supportive. I got a few things wrong, as always, but overall the response has been pretty good – still waiting for the flames to start – I was pretty harsh on Windows, Linux and pre-X Mac OS. In fact, reading again, I sound like I hate everything, impossible to satisfy. Nope – I just think we won’t get perfection from anyone if we don’t demand it.

OSX Eats Itself

19 days of sweet uptime on the OS box, then we have to go and have a five-second power outage today. After reboot, most of my apps won’t launch. The dock icons just bounce eternally. Try to Force Quit and they won’t quit. App launching is stuck in limbo.

Reboot in single user mode and run fsck -y. One small error found, but that doesn’t fix the problem. Try to reinstall X 10.1 but it won’t let me – says it can’t find a valid OS X installation. Which is ridiculous because the OS will still boot.

Call Apple Support for the first time. Friendly and patient, but I felt like I knew more about OSX than the rep did, and I’ve only been using for a couple months. He suggested installing over again back from OSX and going through the upgrades, which is what I was hoping to avoid.

So install OS X. Install OS X.1. Then do all the online software updates to get back to X.1.1. Some of the downloadable updates are upwards of 10MBs. I’ve already done these – aren’t they cached somewhere? Why do I have to download them all again?

Problem solved, but there goes half my Saturday. As if there weren’t other things I wanted to be working on today.

Lessons:

1) HFS+ needs journaling badly.
2) Apple Support ain’t that helpful. Could have gotten better answers for free online.
3) HFS+ needs journaling badly.

20 Year Usenet Archive

This is pretty amazing. Amazing that there’s finally a near-complete and total usenet archive for the first time, and amazing to see some of this old stuff. I remember some of these posts and scandals, but not most of them. Got a kick out of the first usenet post from an AOL account – I helped to beta test that service. That message mentioned the fact that CompuServe (CIS) was just starting an Internet gateway. At the time, none of the proprietary services had connections to the net – AOL, CIS, and Prodigy were all self-contained universes. I remember when my CIS ID (CompuServe was command-line only at the time) — 72241,1777 — suddenly got access to the rest of the world and I became 72241.1777@compuserve.com . Everything opened up at once. A few months later, CompuServe got a GUI. Saw the Mosaic browser for the first time later that year. Everything was happening so fast…

Canonical Errors

In the ID3v1 spec (see end of document), the genre “psychedelic” is misspelled as “psychadelic.” Which means it’s misspelled in the id3ren tool I recompiled for BeOS, which means that RipEnc has probably created tens of thousands of misspelled attributes on people’s BeOS systems over the years. I could have recompiled it with it spelled correctly, but didn’t want to affect compatibility with other tools on that genre. I should have done it anyway. Now the misspelling shows up in a screenshot that’s going to end up in my BeOS/OSX piece on osnews.com on Monday. And I’ll look like an idiot, even though that institutionalized misspelling has been bugging me for years. I wouldn’t have thought of it except that mneptok spotted it and called me on the carpet for it.

How much of history is mistakes compounded by time and propagation?