Freaky and somewhat beautiful, totally obsessive, but just strangge enough to justify itself, 2004: The Stupid Version — a short film about iPods by David Wellington and Adrian Peters (mneptok points out that the film is apparently called simply “iPods”). Walking SF streets tonight, looking at all the iPod Minis dangling from necks, all the “Life is Random” bus stop posters, perhaps the film is not so far off the mark. Other films by the pair here, but not as good.
Mac Mini 2U
So… how long before someone sticks four Mac minis in a 2U rack for a cheap $2k server cluster? (e.g. web, mail, dns, and sftp). Just a dynamite little box for sysadmins. Amy’s jazzed – ordering one for her tonight; she’ll attach it to the Studio Display I’m using now, and I’ll switch to 20″ iMac. Two machines for what a PowerMac would have cost. More KoolAid!
Music: Circle Jerks :: Product of My Environment
Money’s Worth
After more than a decade of hard-core devotion, mneptok is starting to question his Mac allegiance. Yep, Linux just keeps getting better as a desktop OS, and yes, you can save money on hardware, but I’m not about to give up iTunes, FinalCut, or Entourage. We pay a premium to use Macs, and IMO, we get much more than our money’s worth.
Music: The Fiery Furnaces :: Blueberry Boat
Notes on Griffin PowerMate
Received a birthday gift from baald and Col a few nights ago — a Griffin PowerMate. I’ve lusted after this tech objet d’art et function ever since they came out, but had never gotten around to trying one out. In a nutshell, the PowerMate is a USB-connected dial for your Mac. An assist for controlling system or application volume, scrolling web pages, emails, documents, scrubbing video or audio, etc.
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Which G5 Whispers Better?
We’re considering our first new Macs in years for the home office. Both of us have fallen in love with the new iMacs, but I’m still inclined toward the expandability of the PowerMac — I’ve got a stack of external drives on my desk that I’d love to mount in the case. One of our goals is to eliminate or greatly reduce the constant hum of computers around here, but I’m not coming up with much concrete info on the relative noise levels generated by these two (aside from trying to listen closely in a store crowded with people and machines). Sent a question for publication to MacSlash last night and they’re running it. Will be interesting to see results from the field.
Music: Kahil El’Zabars The Ritual :: Ocean Deep
AirPort Over Ethernet, Dustbath
The AirPort Express has worked as advertised — when it works. Trouble with our house is that the layout forces WiFi signal to pass through the fridge/stove and through a dense wall. The reception light on the AX has always blinked, indicating that it’s out of range even though it’s less than 50′ from my Mac. It worked, but picking up the cordless phone or using the microwave would cut the tunes. With a tot in the house, we use the microwave a lot. Finally decided to run ethernet cable under the house and hardwire the damn thing.
Drilled a hole between the baseboard and the wall similar to how the phone cord is wired, but hit a joist and didn’t have a long enough bit to go all the way down (hole’s okay, barely noticeable). Plan B: Remove cover plate from the adjacent wall socket, drill just next to the box, and put a hole in the cover plate to match. Pushed 50′ of CAT-5 into the hole, put on old clothes and knee pads, and ventured into the crawlspace. Here’s where it gets fun.
Our office was built after the rest of the house, and has its own foundation. Turns out the main crawlspace doesn’t offer access to the space under the office (hereafter referred to as “the crypt of shacker”). The only access is from a tiny opening under the deck. Shimmying Navy Seal-style on mildewy ground, rocks under belly, dark. A hole in the main foundation opened up to the crypt. Trouble is, we had central heat installed when we moved in, and the opening was mostly filled by a 12″ conduit, leaving a space just about large enough for a cat. I’m somewhat larger than a cat. Exhaled all my air, arms forward, and pushed forward with my toes, praying I wouldn’t get stuck. Came close to backing out, lungs squished, elbows munged, but got through, shimmied forward up to the wall… only to find that the cable wasn’t there waiting for me. Apparently bunched up against the same joist I had hit with the drill. Backed out to startling daylight.
Back in the office, went to pull the cable back out… and it was caught, apparently tangled inside. Tug, cajole, sweet-talk, nothing worked. Finally had to cut it off. Now there’s 50′ of CAT-5 permanently entombed in our office wall. It was then I came up with Plan C: use the heating duct itself! Pushed aside some flashing with a screwdriver, and bingo — I could see dirt. Spooled in more cable, then back into the crypt of shacker. Upside down, threading a tangle of wire wherever I could, no reasonable way to hold or position the flashlight, hair full of damp dust, sweating like a boar, finally through to the main crawlspace and finally up through a pre-existing hole in the floor behind the stereo.
Terminator crimping time — I never get it right the first time. Finally the router registered that it saw something on the other end. Went to reconfigure the AX… only to find that the Setup Assistant wouldn’t run without the now-removed Aiport card installed. The documentation only covers working with wireless networks. Later found the answer to using AX over Ethernet: Use the Aiport Admin utility, not the Express Setup. Go to the Airport tab, click Base Station Options, and check “Airport over Ethernet.” Joy to the world.
Another 30-minute project turned into half a day. All good projects are that way. Gorgeous day, too. Except for the view from the crypt.
Music: The Meters :: Ease Back
Peace and Love
I finally got my wish.
Despite being used for nearly two hours per day for the past couple of years, being thrown from my bike in the accident, dropped to concrete on several other occasions, used by Miles as a very small stool to reach the bathroom sink and other ignominious fates, my first-generation iPod simply would not die. The jog-wheel has been popping off lately, revealing dirt in the works, the battery has been charging down quickly, and the face-plate is badly scuffed. Lately I’ve been wishing it would just die, so I could justify a new one, but the damn thing apparently thought it was better to burn out than to fade away.
It finally stopped booting last week. Riding to work in silence was more jarring than expected. At the Apple store this morning, the girl who assisted me announced that her name was “Boots.” That’s a good name. She went into the back room to get a 20GB 4th-gen iPod and returned empty-handed. She stood before me and pronounced, “Umm… peace and love, but we’re out of stock.”
Peace and love? I’m all for it! But, what was behind the Lenon/Ono sentiment? Was she anticipating a violent, non-love reaction when I learned the truth? Did she think I was going to smack her just for being out of stock? Seeking to pre-emptively diffuse my inevitable rage with a prayer for world peace and a global bed-in? Boots! It’s OK! I understand! I dig the sentiment, but I wasn’t going to holler, really.
It all turned out for the best. After another trip to the stock-room, she found one in an opened box, with a 10% discount. I’m in heaven. Coincidentally, the Airport Express arrived yesterday, so the living room is wirelessly wired now as well. AE works perfectly, but sits on the edge of good reception — the status light blinks perennially yellow, but the audio signal is solid — no drop-outs until we run the microwave, at which point the music pauses (I don’t mean the signal drops out; iTunes actually stops moving until the signal is clear again; amazing).
Speaking of peace and love, where was it at the Democratic National Convention? Lots of rousing speeches, but the DNC was militaristic from top to bottom. Must be the price of admission back into the white house, but still found myself wishing we were watching Kucinich instead. Here’s some more peace and love from your friends at Halliburton.
Music: Holly Golightly :: A Length Of Pipe
My Lame Powers of Prediction
In January 2003, I predicted that major browsers would have RSS readers built into them within six months, which would have put the first release of such a feature at around July 2003. Obviously, that didn’t happen. At WWDC today, Apple unveiled the major features in Tiger (OS X 10.4). Among them is an integrated RSS reader for Safari. That puts my prediction off by a year. Except that Tiger won’t be out until 2005, so make that 18 months. My crystal ball must have been hit by a stray neutrino.
A few readers have written me over the past week speculating about whether HFS+Finder in Tiger would more closely resemble BeOS’ spectacular BFS+Tracker combination, given that Dominic and Pavel have been working at Apple for the past year and a half. The answer is… sort of. Spotlight is going after metadata in a big way, and is making system-wide, instantaneous search on any type of heterogenous data seamless. The “Keywords” feature may or may not be similar to BFS’ Attributes. The key to making Spotlight as fast and flexible as BFS+Tracker will be, for me, whether attributes, er, keywords, are 100% customizable into arbitrary metadata forms, whether the metadata indexing is fast, automatic and efficient, and whether Apple finally releases a complete cousin to Be’s incredibly powerful FileTypes panel.
Also cool in Tiger: The very slick Dashboard (did Apple purchase Konfabulator?), full videoconferencing in iChat, and a powerful-looking scripting front-end called Automator. Oh, I wouldn’t mind a 30-inch aluminum-encrusted display, either.
Update: The Register confirms that Apple didn’t buy Konfabulator – they pulled a Watson on it (thanks Michael). I got a kick out of one of the propaganda posters Apple apparently has out at the WWDC: “Redmond, start your photocopiers.” Which is especially ironic given all the copying that Cupertino is apparently doing.
Music: Pat Kelly :: I Wish It Would Rain
How To Kill a Windows Network
ORA blog: The new and improved directory services integration in Panther Server make it almost effortless to bind a Mac server or client to a Windows Active Directory system. So effortless, in fact, that with two clicks and a splash of ignorance, I broke an entire network. Here’s how.
Music: Modest Mouse :: Perfect Disguise
Panther Server, DBD Hair-Pulling
Spent the better part of last week at work wrestling with an upgrade of Jaguar Server to Panther Server. There were a lot of things we wanted out of Panther — the honed Active Directory integration and overhauled mail server chiefly among them. The upgrade seemingly went fine, and we were back online in an hour. Then I hear from one of our Movable Type users that they’re getting errors trying to post stories. Hmm… the installation can’t seem to find the DBD::mysql module. It’s still there, I can see it. Reinstall the DBD package to be sure. Installs successfully, but problem persists. Compile Bundle::DBI and DBD::mysql from CPAN — the latter fails. Start doing research — I’m not the only one with this problem — some wonky interaction between multi-CPU threading, the version of perl installed with Panther Server, and the module in question.
Over the next few days, tried every possible trick I could think of or find reference to, but no joy. Editing bugs out of perl’s Config.pm, tweaking the makefile, changing environment variables. What tanned my hide was the fact that all of this worked perfectly before the upgrade. Some small bug buried somewhere in the bowels of perl or the OS wasting days of my time.
Finally ran out of options and decided to do a clean install rather than the upgrade, which meant recreating users and shares, updating databases, etc. Everything I had hoped to avoid. But after the clean install, three tweaks to the makefile and one to Config.pm convinced DBD::mysql to compile cleanly, and MT came back online.
Nothing is as simple as it seems. Nothing.
Music: Gong :: Est-ce que je suis