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Girl Friday for Target Disk

Target disk mode is the greatest thing since sliced bread — connect two Macs with a FireWire cable, reboot one while holding the T key, and its hard drive appears on the desktop of the other, ready for data transfer. When I got the iMac a couple of weeks ago, decided to do my usual Carbon Copy Cloner stuff and blast a fully loaded OS and set of apps onto it (not sourced from my old Mac), then use target disk mode to load all of my user data on top of that. The process worked, but took a while and involved some pain (not worth going into).

Turns out, I’m lame.

Because I cloned it without ever booting it to “factory defaults” first, I never saw the new Setup Assistant Apple has apparently started shipping with all new Macs. Could have saved myself a few hours. When Amy’s Mini arrived yesterday, the Assistant appeared before the Desktop loaded — “Have an old Mac? Want to copy all your apps, user data and settings over? Plug in a FW cable, restart the old Mac with the T key down, and go have a smoke.” Well, it didn’t say that exactly, but something like it. Setup Assistant is basically a user-friendly intelligent wrapper around target disk mode. A Girl Friday for Mac migrations.

An hour later, the Mini was a nearly exact clone of her old machine – new OS and system apps, old user data, previously installed apps, and settings. Everything works flawlessly.

The Mini is even better IRL than pictured. Silent, small, fast, cheap, and beautifully designed. Apple hit one out of the park. It’s hard to get Amy excited about technology (she was talking about the plants in our yard while I was opening the carton), but after a morning using it, she’s totally in love with this box. And we have finally achieved a minor goal we set several months ago – a silent home office (it’s incredible how much noise two older PowerMacs can generate, and how that drone can get on your nerves in a subtle, background-y sort of way over time). The difference is night and day.

Music: His Name Is Alive :: Smooth
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Too Gay to Function

Interesting case of 3rd-level irony: In Longview, Washington, a school had a “Make your own T-shirt day.” One openly gay student took a lime-green tee, drew rainbows on it with magic marker, and inscribed the chest with the words “Too gay to function” (apparently lifted from the movie “Mean Girls”). The school sent him home for inappropriate dress, claiming the shirt was offensive to homosexuals. So credit is due to the school for being concerned about expression of potentially homophobic sentiments. But the student was openly gay!

“It’s quite aggravating,” he said. “I can’t wear my shirt because it’s discriminating against gays. … Why would I discriminate against myself?”

So, first of all, excellent shirt, dude. Second of all, what happens to rules and guidelines meant to protect people or groups from discrimination when those people or groups co-opt the very language from which the rules are meant to protect them? Replace “gay” with a racial slur and you see the problem. Funny story on the surface, but it does raise interesting questions.

Music: Cachao (Israel Lopez) :: Club Social do Marianao
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Collision Course

Excellent new weblog by J-School student Marcus Wohlsen on the general theme of man and nature — evolution/creation, Huygens, mudslide, Tsunami vs. Rwanda in the public consciousness… Should be a good site to follow.

In the same way, Creationists believe we exist categorically apart from our ape ancestors — and therefore the entire process of natural selection itself. Which makes Creationists a ripe constituency for an administration that tries to bend the rules of ecology to its will as a matter of policy. Since we run the show, how could nature ever bite us back?

Aside: Heard a commentator on Air America today making the point that when Creationists call Evolution an “unproven theory,” they’re cherry-picking one unproven theory from so many in science. Gravity, quantum mechanics, etc. are all unproven theories. Much if not most of science is “unproven theory,” but still strong enough to get work done with, to do an adequate or excellent job of explaining the world around us. In other words, it’s valid to point out that we need to be careful about distinguishing fact from theory, but when ID-ers use this as a reason to put warning labels on textbooks, one has to ask why they choose to warn about evolution rather than any other “unproven theory.” The only explanation is that the “unproven theory” argument is yet another smokescreen, an attempt to legitimize their real agenda.

I actually know Marcus from a previous life – he went to school with Chris Tweney of Strata Lucida — Chris and I worked together at Ziff-Davis in Boston in the early-mid 90s. Went to a Martin, Medeski and Wood show in Boston with him once, never saw him again until he showed up at my office door a few months ago. Full circle (or semi-circle, or something).

Collision Course is running on SquareSpace, a next-gen online blogging/general-purpose CMS space I hadn’t heard of until now – looks promising.

Music: Rufus Thomas :: Sophisticated Sissy
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Amy Sold a Print!

InflammationCongratulations to Amy for selling one of her photographic prints to a pair of Norwegian art collectors. Inflammation is a 30″x40″ (mural-size) image of a rotten banana — immense and grotesque, bursting at the seams with the fullness of its own decay. Kind of grim, but beautiful in a dark sort of way. Amy’s a master printer, but hasn’t had her hands in the chemicals since she became pregnant with Miles a few years ago. This was one of a pair of major works she’s sold in the past few years, what with her hands full being a mommy. Now itching to start creating new work. As Miles enters preschool before long, I look forward to hearing the click of shutters around the house again, to seeing her creative side in full blossom – one of the reasons I fell in love with her to begin with.

The woman who purchased “Inflammation” is an anesthesiologist. Go figure.

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VirtualPC

When I bought the new iMac last week, also got a copy of VirtualPC with Windows XP — a complete Windows machine running in emulation in an OS X window. Don’t need Windows access often, except to verify that a site I’m working on isn’t too broken in Windows. But when I do, I have to haul an old laptop out of the garage, clutter up the desk, wait a year for it to boot… VirtualPC is a bit of a dog, as expected — a lot of math to turn all the bits inside out, but this machine has 2GB of memory, and VirtualPC really isn’t that bad. It actually boots faster than that laptop does, so there.

Odd – you can copy/paste between operating systems, but you have to toggle between Ctrl-C in Windows and Cmd-C on the Mac side. Kind of like standing with one leg in one country and the other in a…

Funny – literally five minutes after launching it for the first time, got a call from a client needing to know how to configure Outlook Express to work with the birdhouse mail server. “Funny you should ask,” I said, firing up OE in a VM while choking back tears (of laughter, joy, disgust).

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GeoTrust Certificate

Of course, my launch of the new birdhouse webmail system happened to conveniently coincide with the expiration of the demo security certificate that ships with CommuniGate, so users were getting confusing certificate notices from their browsers. Time to tackle certificates.

CGP provides an interface to generate a private key, which can the be submitted as a PEM-formatted token to an authority, or to OpenSSL. First tried generating a self-signed ticket from OpenSSL, but that of course still means that users get bothered by confusing “Warning: Self-signed certificate. Are you sure?” messages. In fact, IE on the Mac throws an alert that says “Communications will not be encrypted.” I’m not sure that’s actually true (if true, why doesn’t any other browser tell you that? A self-signed certificate should in no way affect whether communications are encrypted).

But I wanted these warnings to go away, so submitted my key to GeoTrust through a gateway provided by EV1 Servers. For some reason, certificates purchased that way are one-third the price of certificates purchased through GeoTrust directly.

A rather involved back-and-forth process of automated emails, answering questions on a web site, and recording my voice into their system through an automated telephone call-back system — actually very impressive identity authentication — and 15 minutes later received a certificate. Plopped it into the cert field in CommuniGate, and all browser warnings immediately disappeared on the webmail system.

Music: Liz Phair :: Uncle Alvarez
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Puff of Smoke

Walk into my office, an acrid smell fills the air. Like burning hair, if that hair was puddled with lots of “product.” With even more chemical goodness.

“Is that smell coming from outside?” I ask.

“Not sure. Kind of weird. My Mac just blinked out while I was working, but I’m not sure if the smell is related.”

The Mac is still alive. Responds to keypresses, hard-switches down OK. I open the case. No smell inside, but it’s definitely getting more rank in the room. Heading toward toxic levels. I step back, and as I do, a beam of sunlight glances across the top of her monitor, over the vent holes. A stream of blue smoke is rising up from the monitor case.

“We have to get this thing out of here,” I say. I lean over to unplug it and the smell is choking. Like roasting weenies, if those weenies were made of polyethylene and industrial solvents. Hold my breath, squint my eyes, unplug, haul it outside. The smoking continues. I feel slightly nauseated.

Two hours later, a residual acridity still hangs in the air. Office mate says she wasn’t able to eat lunch. Funny how things reveal what they’re made of when they die.

Music: Urban Species :: The Experience
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Wrong Side of the Train

Dude sitting across the aisle from me as the train rolls out of the station. Suddenly looks around, gets a worried look on his face. Stands up and moves across the aisle to sit down facing me. Looks me in the eye and says “Whew! I had sat down on the wrong side of the train!”

I heart Berkeley.

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nofollow

If an href tag includes the rel="nofollow" attribute, well-behaved search engines won’t follow the links they represent when spidering. So if there was a way to automatically modify the links that comment spammers leave in comments, their chief goal — raising their standings in the search engines — would be deflated.

SixApart has just released the nofolllow plugin, which scans incoming comments and adds rel="nofollow" to each embedded link automatically. Normal users are not affected — they can still click the links. But the simple presence of links to spammer’s sites will do nothing whatsoever for their GoogleRanks.

The downside, as I see it, is that for this to be effective, it must be intalled in the majority of weblogs. Spammers need to understand that their campaigns are flaccid, and that won’t be true until most of the world is using a solution like this.

Just installed nofollow at birdhouse and at the J-School.

Music: African Head Charge :: Far Away Chant