m06orama - nerdly musings from Winnipeg

launchd: This program is not meant to be run directly.

2011-11-27T10:57:00.001-08:00

Periodically I export my bookmarks into my ~/Sites/bm folder. One problem I had was that neither Firefox nor Google Chrome set permissions to 644 on the files they export. This means Apache can't read them from my "userdir". In order to be able to browse them I need to periodically turn on the "r" bits on the files in that directory.

On Linux, and on OSX in the past I used cron to do it, like this:

crontab -e

# This is ~/mcook/.crontab

#
# Format used in /etc/crontab:
#
# minute hour mday month wday who command
#
# Format used in ~/.crontab:
#
# minute hour mday month wday command
#
# NOTE: Use TAB to separate entries!
#

0 * * * * cd ~/Sites/bm;chmod +r *;logger mcook Running chmod +r star in ~/Sites/bm chmod at 0 minutes of the hour

15 * * * * cd ~/Sites/bm;chmod +r *;logger mcook Running chmod +r star in ~/Sites/bm chmod at 15 minutes of the hour

30 * * * * cd ~/Sites/bm;chmod +r *;logger mcook Running chmod +r star in ~/Sites/bm chmod at 30 minutes of the hour

45 * * * * cd ~/Sites/bm;chmod +r *;logger mcook Running chmod +r star in ~/Sites/bm chmod at 45 minutes of the hour

OSX Lion still seems to have cron turned on by default but Apple would prefer me to use launchd, so I decided to take the plunge and learn about it.

In the process, I was trying to run a shell script using launchd and I coded myself up a .plist following an example that used the <ProgramArguments> array.

[My example would go here but I lost it].

However, when I tried to load it I would get:

launchd: This program is not meant to be run directly.

After a lot of web-searching I found a suggestion that in some cases you have to use <Program>.

I changed my .plist accordingly, and now it works.

So, if you get "launchctl: this program is not meant to be run directly." you might try putting the shell script's name in the <Program> key, rather than using the first element of the <ProgramArguments> array in your plist.

See http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man5/launchd.plist.5.html and http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man3/execvp.3.html#//apple_ref/doc/man/3/execvp

2011-11-27

Too many bookmarks

2011-11-27T10:19:00.001-08:00

I have LOTS of bookmarks in three different browsers. I use Safari, Firefox, and Google Chrome. I have given up trying to synch bookmarks between them. To help me find a bookmark from, say, "How to hyperlink Table of Contents in LibreOffice", I reached a certain inelegant solution.

I may provide a more detailed write-up later, but here we go with the short version.

Periodically I export my bookmarks into my ~/Sites/bm folder. To search through these quickly I wrote a short AppleScript program to pop-up a dialog, get a single search argument, and then call a shell script to do the heavy lifting.

My script does an mdfind for Bookmarks in ~/Sites/bm, pipes them to xargs and grep which looks for matches to the search argument. It uses grep again to select only lines containing "href=", sorts them, writes them to a temporary file, and finally opens that file in my default browser.

This tool works great to help me to find that interesting article I bookmarked three years ago on how to fry a penguin or something.

One other problem I had was that neither Firefox nor Google Chrome set permissions to 644 on the files they export. This means Apache can't read them from my "userdir". In order to be able to browse them I need to periodically turn on the "r" bits on the files in that directory.

In the past I used cron to do it, but Apple seems to prefer me to launchd, and so I decided to take the plunge and learn about it. More of that later.

Mord-wangling and weople-potching, not in a flock of bats

2011-11-27T10:16:00.001-08:00

I was looking for the answer to a question the other day.

After a lot of "wearch-ing" or "sweb-ing"I found the answer.

I love "mord-wangling", don't you?

I love "weople potching" as well, and I frequently leave my car in the "larking pot" at my "flock of bats" in order to do so.

Groovy Dock Tweaks in OSX Lion

2011-11-26T17:33:00.001-08:00

I found these tips on the web at Ask.com and they're great.

How to create Dock icons for Recent Applications, Documents and Favourite Volumes and Items:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'

killall Dock

Enter that big long command all on one line.

Here's how it looks:

Try it! You'll like it!

How to make Dock icons be Translucent for Hidden Applications:

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES

killall Dock

Here's how this looks:

Follow the links to read Tom Nelson's posts in full:

http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/qt/dockrecentitem.htm

http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/qt/Translucent-Dock-Icons.htm

-

Stuff I always forget - Hyperlink Table of Contents in LibreOffice

2011-11-26T17:30:00.001-08:00

How to Assign Hyperlinks to Entries in a Table of Contents in LibreOffice (and OpenOffice).

You can assign a cross-reference as a hyperlink to entries in a table of contents.

Right-click in the table of contents, and then choose Edit Index/Table.
Click the Entries tab.
In the Level list click the heading level that you want to assign hyperlinks to.
In the Structure area, click in the box in front of E#, and then click Hyperlink.
Click in the box behind the E, and then click Hyperlink.
Repeat for each heading level that you want to create hyperlinks for, or click the All button to apply the formatting to all levels.

Inspiration and Investigation

2011-11-19T13:44:00.001-08:00

I've always been fascinated by fonts, and I found this recent article in The NewYork Times very interesting. Following a link mentioned in the article I found Thomas Rhiel's web site, and I decided to refresh my understanding of web page design by deconstructing his web page to see how it worked.

Since imitation is supposedly the best form of flattery I took a shot at making up my own resume web page using his files as a model. The result is not very good. Amongst other things I learned that I don't seem to have very much to say for myself recently.

I guess I need to branch out my activities.

My old boring resume is here.

He sed, she sed (Or: Missing atom:link with rel="self")

2011-11-17T13:14:00.001-08:00

So I had this problem. I had this goofy RSS feed on my web site at http://skyprod.net but most RSS readers no longer showed any articles for it. It used to work but not any more.

I ran my original feed through http:/feedvalidator.org and it showed up a bunch of errors and warnings such as not having a self-referring Atom link for the feed itself, and not having <guid> tags. Who knew? Not me.

Then I found a wonderful free RSS feed editor called FeedMe that runs on OSX 10.7.2 "Lion".

FeedMe!
"Geekstuffs from The Nowhere Man"

I took a look at it and I found it uses various new-to-me RSS tags in the feed code, as well as an unusual Apple XML name space for use with iTunes.

It turns out the reason most RSS aggregators and feed readers would not show any articles for my original feed is that neither the original feed nor the articles referred to in it had changed since January 2011, which is a very long time in the world and time and space* of RSS articles. The real reason for this is that I have better things to do than sit around updating RSS articles.

However, in the modern spirit of things, I decided that the world SHOULD see my RSS articles, and so decided to write a Bash script to "uniquify" them by inserting current date and time values into <pubdate> and <guid> tags through the use of a feed template.

Here is my new feed template file.

Being able to automate this process depended upon being able to use sed to change only the first occurrence of a given string in a copy of the template. This is because my feed contains several <item> sections. Not only must the feed contain a valid RFC 822 <pubdate> such as Thu, 17 Nov 2011 03:20:05 CST, but also each <item> within the feed must contain a unique guid.

Normally, in the guid for each item, isPermalink defaults to true, when the guid would contain a unique URL to the article (for example http://my.website.com/2011/11/17/article-name), but I noticed that FeedMe uses isPermalink="false" instead and sets the guid value to the current time in milliseconds, thus establishing a permanently unique non-recurring timestamp for each item like this:

<guid ispermalink="false">${nowms}</guid>

It was easy to use date to create the string for pubdate, which really only requires adding a comma after the day. I decided to cannibalize an old Perl script in order to get the current time in milliseconds:

nowms=$( perl -MTime::HiRes -e 'print int(1000 *
Time::HiRes::gettimeofday),"\n"' )

Figuring out the rest was easy. Apart from how to use sed, that is. I puzzled over that for a while.

It turned out the trick with sed was to iteratively use a statement like this:

sed "1,/template_value/s/template_value/${nowms}/" infile > outfile

This is invoked with a new ${nowms} timestamp value for each item in the feed, so that each item in each new version of the feed gets a unique time stamp put in its guid tag. By way of further explanatione, the sed invocation works like this:

1,/template_value/ .. tells sed to change the first occurrence only
s/template_value/${nowms}/ .. tells sed to change the first string to the second

Here is the complete Bash script for download. Here it is again in text form. It's not very pretty but it works. I'm already working on a better version that will be parameter-driven, and I will update this post in due course.

You can find the XML source for my original feed here. The current feed is here. The XML source for the current feed is here. The source for the feed template file is here.

* New acronym: WATAS (world and time and space), can be used conversationally to refer to the world and time and space of something, for example: "WATAS is the matter with you?" This is not to be confused with WTAAS (World Trade Advanced Administrative System) the old IBM internal order, equipment and inventory business system that I used to work on back in the '70s.

Unemployed again! (Relieved, dismayed, hopeful and delighted)

2011-11-16T01:54:00.001-08:00

Well, Her Majesty's back-room folks did a bang-up job with their new web site that went live at the end of August. As a result of carefully-orchestrated propaganda ("Use the web site or else"), based on various management samples, web site traffic was up 60% and call volumes down 2,000 a day. Now let's say an agent might normally take 50 calls a day. You can see where I am going with this. Whu'oh! We need to lose 40 agents!

So, after several weeks of explaining to web-duffers how to do their thing, and then a week mostly sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, I was actually relieved to hear that my term of employment would be curtailed. Hooray! No more web-duffers! Boo-hoo! Goodbye extra moulah!

As the boo-hooh boomer custodian of The Cook Millions I am somewhat dismayed by this turn of events, but I am also hopeful of finding a new source of discretionary income soon. One door closes and another one does something else, they say. Don't let it hit you on the way out.

Slow far, slow good. Since Convergys Winnipeg closed it's doors in March 2010, a new job has turned up about every three months, and I have worked about 33 weeks in the span of 83. Is this the life of Riley or what?

Since I am not overly gifted with tolerance for web-duffers, nor even for plain old-fashioned sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, I am also delighted. I shall not miss the "corporate culture" one little bit, and now I can catch up on my reading, dick around with my new Mac Mini and OSX Lion all I want, stay up late, sleep in, and go for long walks in the fine Winnipeg fall weather. How'd ya like them apples? OK, so I may have to cut down on groceries, eating out, and other entertainments. For example, no more dropping $150 at Chapters' book store on a whim! Yes to eating less and getting a lot more exercise! Overall, this is very good for me.

P.S. My new Mac Mini is the base $599 model with Intel i5 2.3 GHz processor, 2GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive, and Intel HD Graphics 3000. I went straight ahead and self-installed 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM for only another $59, and now the beast runs like a train. Who needs a fancy graphics adapter and 2.5 Ghz processor for an extra $200? Not me.

Re-entering the workforce. Again! Quack!

2011-08-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

I have not written here for more than two months having being fully engaged in somnolence, lassitude and decrepitude.

Now, having responded to the call of My Sovereign, after two weeks training at a secret location not a million miles from the center of Manitoba's civic jewel, I learned on Friday that I am not only certifiable but also apparently certified to execute certain secret tasks on Her Majesty's behalf. Because of the nature of my mission, no actual piece of paper can be provided in the form of, well, an actual certificate. Secret means secret.

Though Her Majesty cannot be over-generous, while disaster roils the stock markets of the world, this bodes well for a limited technical reprieve if not actual regeneration of The Cook Millions, beleaguered and embattled as they have been by events of the century to date, as well as the one before it.

As the custodian of said TCM, and having forgotten to buy Apple stock in 2001, I am always encouraged when an opportunity presents itself to somewhat repair the ship of state, which is now sadly downsized from a rather large and ostentatious ocean-going luxury yacht to, well, a circular yellow flotation device in the form of a cartoon duck.

I shall write further as my secret duties allow.

Getting an iPhone

2011-06-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

My tax bill this year was once again rather big since I withdrew savings to cover my extravagant lifestyle. Having mostly paid my tax bill - ironically enough by getting a job at the local tax centre for 10 weeks - I finally gave in to a bad case of what I have to call "iPhone envy" and last Monday week I bopped down to my local MTS Connect place to score.

I went to the store at Grant Park here in Winnipeg, walked in and spoke to a nice young lady. Unlike most wireless phone sales agents she did not project that she thought I was lonely, pathetic, scary, crazy, a loser, bothersome, question-demented, or whatever. In fact, she was just totally nice, professional and helpful, and she got my business.

MTS have a great "Free Wireless" program. If you already have 3 of their products at full price - TV, Internet and home phone in my case - you get a $43.50 bundling credit applied to your monthly bill. I signed up for the basic iPhone plan for 36 months: 1GB cellular data (3G), 250MB tethered data usage, 240 weekday minutes, unlimited text messaging, and unlimited local calling to and from any 5 people of my choice - any provider, mobile or landline. This costs $44.99 a month plus $10 for Call Display and Voicemail and a $3.50 Network Fee (total $58.49, $14.99 after credit). I was already paying $15 a month for my old Nokia Pay-As-You-Go phone that can't do data at all!

All I had to do was pony up $159.99 for the subsidized 16GB phone (32GB sets you back $269.99), $40 for Activation, and buy a case. I got a black Otter Defender case at $69.99, making my total purchase $257.54 with taxes. Now, an iPod Touch 8GB costs $249.99, and I had been thinking about buying one for the longest time, but now I have got one with double the capacity, plus it includes a free wireless smart phone and plan! I think my Scottish forebears would say this was a good thing.

After getting the beast home, I spent many hours setting it up.

More of which perhaps later,

I'll read the fine documenataion

2011-02-13T01:19:00.000-08:00

Working on my Ubuntu 10.4 Apache web server to check everything's OK after a recent move. One of my favourite scripts is the Uploader. It's a great piece of Perl code that I use to upload files to my server from far away. I have used it for a long time.

Just so I can monitor uploads, I modified the script to send me an e-mail whenever it's used. This used to go great thru sendmail.pm and your actual sendmail program, now all of a sudden I find messages are not being transferred. Imagine my surprise to learn that sendmail is now Exim. Who knew?

Then I started to read the Exim documentation at http://www.exim-new-users.co.uk/content/view/130/1/, and I quote ...

Start Here - If you're new to Exim

If you are new to Exim the following section is for you.

We cover the basic requirements and responsibilities for running your own mailservere...

Running a mail server is no easy task. Being a responsible mail server administrator or postmaster requires a LOT of time, effort and knowledge.

Before building your server it is worth asking your self a few questions:
Why do I want my own mailserver?

To improve my existing E-mail system or to learn a new skill are both good answers.

Becuase my distribution came with one or to be able to tell my friends I have my own mailserver are both bad answers.

Do I really need my own mail server?

If you only have a few users and limited IT resources you may find it more cost effective and a better use of your time and money to seek the professional services of others. If you are simply doing this to save time and money, this could end up costing you your sanity.

Do I have the time a skill s required to maintain a mailserver?

Setting up a mail server properly is HARD. Keeping it running against a constant stream of spam and viruses can be a NIGHTMARE. You can't just setup your system once then forget about it (Well you can, but you wont make many friends).

Will I take responsibility for keeping my mailserver safe and secure?

The Internet is a hostile place, malicious individuals can make a living from spam, viruses, trojans, key-loggers and malware. The responsibility for running a mail server is ongoing,

Where will I go for help?

If your answer is - Ask somebody else to fix it for me, please click here:

http://www.gmail.com

If your answer is - I'm keen to learn new skills and I'll ltake responsibility for this myself and read the fine documenataion before asking silly questions, then click here, and here:

http://www.exim-new-users.co.uk/content/blogcategory/22/34/

http://www.exim.org/eximwiki/MailingListEtiquette

The purpose of this was to make sure that time wasters and freeloaders understand that runnig a mailserver requires some time and effort, but also brings great rewards. We can teach you, but only if you want to learn.

If your still here - Welcome to the Exim community.

Need I say more about the fine quality of the documentation?

Anyhoo, I looked up Exim's Debian readme file, ran the configurator to define my ISP's SMTP server as a "smarthost" and now all is well. I think.

Untitled #2

2011-02-05T17:34:00.000-08:00

eyelid hole inspection in progress all day sat as sloth continues
midwest ei participants protest high cherry garcia prices
pencil pushers go on strike for reduced glumness and boredom
alien texters cause major airwaves meltdown
this will be our last communi- .. click!

TELUS all about it!

2011-02-02T16:32:00.000-08:00

Jessica: Hi. I'm a live TELUS product specialist. Is there anything that I can help you with?Jessica: Just type your question below.You: I'm looking into getting an iphone or android or blackberry. right now looking into clear choice voice+date $50 p/m/ plan.Jessica: Thank you for considering TELUS.Jessica: Are you looking to add another phone or replace your existing one?You: new phone - right now i just have an old mts PAYG fone - it doesn't do web any moreJessica: I'd be happy to assist you with a phone and plan selection.Jessica: Before we continue, a Visa, Mastercard, or American Express credit card is required to process your order online.Jessica: Do you have one ready to get your order processed and delivered as soon as possible?You: yepJessica: Great!Jessica: Let's continue then.Jessica: We have blackberry plans for $45 for the blackberry and Voice and data plans for the IPhone for $50.You: ok - dp you have iphones availabale in manitoba?Jessica: Yes, we do. The Iphone 3G is available but the IPhone 4 is on backorder and may take longer to ship.You: i can't see iPhones on your web site hereJessica: Please click on the "Phones and Devices" Tab.Jessica: Clcik on the Iphone option next to the smart phones.You: Not there at http://www.telusmobility.com/en/MB/phones/index.shtmlJessica: Let me check for a moment.Jessica: Oh, I apologize but Manitoba's site is undergoing construction. We are still planning to add the IPhone category to your site. I recommend that you check again next week.Jessica: Is there anything else I can help you with today?You: no - but thanks 4 your help - have a nice evening - bye!Jessica: Thank you for visiting TELUS. It has been a pleasure assisting you.Jessica: Please feel free to chat with us again.Jessica: Have a great evening!

It turns out that on March 31st 2011 MTS are about to launch their spiffy new HSPA+ wireless network which will support all sorts of spiffy new devices. Meanwhile prices seem to be dropping on older CDMA-only stock items, like the Motorola Milestone A854 Android 2.1 which dropped from $175 to $80 in the last week. I don't know which other vendors use the MTS network, but I heard Virgin and Koodoo. Not sure about Telus. Either way, it's time for me to stick with my vintage 2003 Nokia 2275, which is so old it's no longer supported by MTS's "Mobile Web", but at least their PAYG plan includes Voicemail and Call Display.

ereader and ebooks on OSX 10.4 PPC

2011-01-23T12:41:00.000-08:00

Re. popular thread "Does anyone know WHEN the powerPC will be supported for ereader?" at the Barnes and Noble web site, see this copy of my post today about fun times I have had reading, editing and creating various sorts of e-book on OSX 10.4 PPC.

TAKE BACK INDOLENCE

2011-01-22T16:56:00.001-08:00

TAKE BACK INDOLENCE! DECLARE SUNDAY 23RD JANUARY 2011 WORLD'S FIRST DO NOT USE THE INTERNET DAY!

Winnipeg Werewolf Wants Disposable Income

2011-01-19T12:09:00.001-08:00

Aoooww! I knew it was a full moon again when I woke up this morning and found the palms of my hands covered in a luxuriant growth of hair. It's a good job I don't have a girlfriend. She'd've freaked right out. I think. Or maybe she'd find it a turn-on. Woof-woof!

The phone rang several times. My phone company is upgrading their voicemail service. I wonder if they are going to upgrade the cost as well.

Then my dentist's office called to ask me to confirm my appointment tomorrow to get my FREE WARRANTY REPLACEMENT METAL CROWN installed. You betcha! Aoooww!

Then a East Indian-sounding gentleman called about my PC. He said it's running slow. I told him it wasn't. He rang off. He must've been disappointed. Or perhaps he was checking up on me.

I applied for 3 more jobs today. That makes 4 so far this week, 11 in the last two weeks, 21 so far this month. Will that do? I'd sure like to get something going soon with that "disposable income"...

Facebook Blues

2011-01-18T15:17:00.000-08:00

When asked why he had signed up on Facebook, the suspect replied: "Curiosity".

When asked why he had so many friends on Facebook, the suspect replied: "It was peer pressure, honest".

"So if all your friends decided to jump down a hole you'd follow them, would you?", scolded the officer.

"What, like that girl who followed the rabbit, you mean? I don't know anybody called Alice."

Outside the street made the sounds of traffic and light rain.

"And what's with all this make up and that stupid hat you're wearing?", the officer asked again.

Hi my name's Mike and I'm calling on behalf of... Click!

2010-12-05T22:50:00.000-08:00

So after being gainfully unemployed for another period of about 3 months, at the end of October I got offered a job doing outbound telephone sales. This was something I had been hoping to avoid but since some yahoo creased the side of my car back in July I'd been thinking about getting a new paint job.

The new gig in Winnipeg's crumbling downtown Exchange District was very strange. We got eight days paid product and sales training before starting on the phones. The sales training involved product reviews, competition, scripts to follow, lots of role playing, how to get the customer's attention and personalize the call, how to handle objections and rebuttals, and finally how to deliver the "1-2-3 Punch!" to close. Ugh! In 27.5 years at that li'l ol' computer company U-No-Hoo I managed to escape sales training completely. Ever since I had a summer job trying to sell Tominey's ice cream off a truck back in St.Albans I had this conviction that I'm definitely not a born salesman, plus I have this troublesome aversion to BS, as result of which - when exposed to it - I get all squirly and will start swearing a lot. An old girl friend once referred to this as my "Tourette's syndrome". I like think of it more as a perfectly natural and reasonable reaction to toxic stimuli.

I still didn't get a flu shot this year, and everybody in our class got sick from Day 1. It started with the instructor, who was like a grown up Princess Jasmine, her self-admitted childhood heroine. Of East Indian descent, she is very tall and striking not least of all because of her clothes, like black leotard pants with a low cut top. Blimey! She is tall and full-figured, and I found her very intimidating. Indeed, just looking at her made me feel guilty. I am old enough to be her Grandpa! Anyhoo, as we finished up our third week on the phones, we were all getting better from our colds or else we already left. There were only 10 left out of a class of 23 the last time I checked.

The first week was cold calls to former customers and folks who never had our client's products at all. We would try to get them to switch and sign up for product packages at about 55% of regular price. The "hook" was supposed to be showing them how much money we can save them in the promotional period: either six months or a full year. Most agents seemed to do at least 400 calls a shift and there were about 64 agents. We had a sales per hour target and it was quite small, by which I mean a number less than one.

At the start of every shift we would get about a 1/2 hour motivational/informational session from the folks who run the place, including a strange "Marketing type" lady called Candace who dressed like Cruella De Ville from "101 Dalmations". For example she'd have a white faux ermine jacket over black pencil pants, or a black jacket covered in sequins, and always equally bad hair dyed ash-blonde, not even cut properly, short at the back and long in front, and otherwise all over the place.

We got a low hourly wage plus commission per sale. Different incentives were offered every day. For example, on Thursdays we played Bingo! for cash prizes based on numbers of sales. If you did something special you might get a voucher for $5 or $10. In my whole 6 weeks there I got one voucher but I never found out what it was for. We worked afternoons and evenings four days a week and all day Saturday which was supposed to be the best day for sales. I still don't understand that at all. Surely most working stiffs are way too busy on Saturdays driving their mini-vans to big box stores and suchlike. And why do people answer the phone when they are sleeping, eating, cooking dinner, watching a movie or you-know-what? I almost never answer my phone, but then I don't have a family let alone any friends.

It was all rather pathetic because of the poor quality of the phone lists. We worked different lists all the time. The management types would hype each new list, like "I know we can be very successful with this new list, so let's go out there and make some money!". But most calls would be an immediate hangup or else you would get the answering machine. If you did get a real person, they would mostly be hostile or not interested, if not actually dead ("Mr. X passed away in 1991"), geriatric, employed by a competitor, on a contract, or - most embarrassing - if they had the client's products already.

Often the decision maker is out of the residence and we would arrange for a call back. We would each call 200 to 300 numbers a shift. The actual dialing was automated. The machine that did that would often go into slowdown or else crash completely, as often as three times in seven days. When that would happen we would all have to log out while it was fixed. Twice the network went down completely, like having no DNS.

When we were calling it would be fast and brutal and you could get abused often. People can be so mean! Also grumpy, snarky, sarcastic, tricky, or even just plain rude, but then we were disturbing them at home. The bosses would rush about making sure potential sales were closed properly before being handed off to the order entry team. A scoreboard was kept. The top sellers were able to repeat, like getting 9 sales in a shift to my one, but everybody had bad days when they got 0.

Pay arrived promptly from my staffing agency but the Account Manager there got kind of mad at me when I went home early sick once, plus I took a 1/2 day to attend an interview.

That's about all I can say about that right now. I didn't mention the cost of parking downtown, the absent state of cleanliness, or the fact that we do not have keys to the bathroom, which drives the ladies from my class totally nuts.

I guess getting some other job training would be a good thing. I heard you can get the government to cover quite a bit of it but one might have to pay some fees up front, and I guess you also have to complete the course. Better check the state of my piggy bank. I could become a truck driver, carpenter, cook, accounting type, or heaven knows what. Grey power!

It's certainly true that not working can get to be a bad habit, especially when living alone. Having a job does afford one a certain structure. I don't like this one but I'll try to stick with it if I can stand it. My car's being fixed and they're taking forever to do it. Meanwhile I have a rental and insurance will only pay part of it. I need the extra dough.

Since getting laid off in March I cut back a lot on beer (totally), food, magazines, books, eating out and going to the movies. There's not much left to cut in the expense department now other than tobacco, TV, Internet, car and rent. I guess I could move to the woods and live in a little A-frame hut like Ted Kozynsky. Good thing I don't feel angry at the system. I bought some bus tickets but I haven't tried them out yet. Old habits die hard.

Mac Start Button Redux

2010-10-17T00:42:00.000-07:00

Way back in 2007 I wrote MacStart, an Applescript program to scan the program folders on my Mac Mini PPC OSX 10.4.11 and pop up a list of applications with a single mouse click.

I've used MacStart quite a lot and recently I packaged MacStart Version 1.3.2 with some improvements.

Here's what it looks like:

As you can see I have a spiffy-looking MacStart icon in my Dock and on the Desktop, plus you can see the program selection menu showing all of my applications.

MacStart runs fast. Go here to download the MacStart.1.3.2.dmg file and try it out for yourself. Don't forget to grok the README file first! You may need to recompile the script for your system.

Work At Home!

2010-10-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

So I spent a while getting my 2007 Acer T180 Win Vista SP1 ready to do some testing to see if it would qualify for a "Work At Home" job offered by a former employer.

I must've spent hours shopping for one of the recommended USB headsets. I ended up with a Cyber Acoustics AC-850 USB headset $44.99 from the Staples store down on Pembina Highway. It's supposed to work with Vista and OSX 10.4. Altho' the packaging doesn't also say Windows 7, OSX 10.5, or even OSX 10.6, I assume none of these will be a problem if I ever get there.

After finding out how to open the plastic bubble packaging without destroying it, I could plug in the headset. I had to set the right recording and sound devices in Vista's Control Panel, and experiment with the recording and playback volume levels. It took me six attempts at doing a test sound recording before I was able to hear the sound of my own voice. After not working with Windows for a good while, I must be getting slow. The headset seemed to pass Haupage's online voice quality tests, altho' only with moderate scores using MTS's "Lightning" DSL plan:

- Link speeds to Jacksonville, Fla.: 2.63 Mbps download / 0.72 upload / ping 105 ms
- Voice quality testing scores to Cincinnati: 3.1 for high voice quality, score for conserved bandwidth 4.1.

I had already decided to skip Vista SP2 for the PC tests. I spent more time checking my AVG Free Anti-Virus was updated, checking Windows firewall settings, setting a trusted site in IE7 (I know, I know), and finally doing Permits in Windows Defender before the PC tests would run successfully.

Finally, my equipment seemed to have passed all the tests, and I moved on to Apply for a position. Too bad. There aren't any. They must have already been filled.

Mmmm! MVS!

2010-05-25T02:27:00.000-07:00

So there I was reminiscing with a former call center colleague about the "good old days" when 1MB of RAM was considered very large and computers were the size of a whole room, plus they had to have a big Leibert box nearby, with a water chiller in the next room and a condenser on the roof.

I was so overcome with nostalgia that just the other day I reinstalled Turnkey MVS under Ubuntu and even dusted off some assembler programs and got them working. You gotta love JCL!

Giving freebies

2010-05-18T19:00:00.000-07:00

I love it when people find out what I do for a living and then they immediately say s.t. like "maybe you could come round and fix my computer for me". Were they just waiting to meet someone like me that they could ask? How long has the problem needed attention? Usually I find that if I say "Well, it's $150 an hour, minimum four hours" they change the subject.

Reaching out

2010-04-15T19:17:00.000-07:00

Having been "let go" from "mah call senner jeobyh" at the end of March, I disappeared into some kinda pipe full of trips to the beer store and examination of finances, punctuated by lots of sleeping, several nightmares, online job application sessions, and so on. Life is never boring.

Three weeks into this Hell, my buddy Andrew sent me a "How are you?" and it prompted me to set up a Google group http://groups.google.com/group/chn-survivors which I shall dutifully moderate. Here's what I wrote back:

Since leaving on 23rd March I got seriously drunk several times, slept a great deal and even tried to get some exercise.

Mostly I get up around noon, drive up to Notre Dame and McPhillips [here in Winnipeg] and have lunch at the new Young's (Chinese) supermarket there. You can get a 3-selection combo for $4.99, or dim-sum for $3.49 per tray. It's good, and the store is like Aladdin's cave! After that, I try to take a walk before picking up cigarettes and beer.

Since December I put out 22 job applications, mostly in March/April, and mostly for Help Desk/Call center type of stuff, but basically just about anything I figure I "could do" or that looks interesting. I'm staying away from jobs that require me to be able to lift heavy weights, for example Fedex, also from anything that seems to be sales orientated or looks like a scam.

I had a total of five callbacks: one we decided I don't know their application well enough, one I argued with the headhunter 'cos she wanted me to start before the client can run all their checks (which would wreck your EI claim), one from a headhunter who wanted to talk about my resume and what I might like to do but he seems to have gone AWOL since (What did I say?), one from an agronomist who it turns out was really looking for a hot shot programmer, one from a call center where they want me to go in for interview next Tuesday. So, thus far I have got 3 in-person interviews out of 22 applications.

Mainly I'm going thru workopolis.com (search for jobs in Winnipeg, MB) or jobbank.gc.ca. Other sites I check every few days are mbjobs.ca and monster.ca. I hate working on resumes but by now I worked it over 3 times. If you can stand to do it, it seems best to customize your resume and cover letter for each online application,

I am now at a sort of "tipping point" where I have to start to raid savings to pay bills. Also, expect new credit to be hard to get these days.

Other than that, I watched WAY too much TV, reinstalled some tech writing tools on my Mac, did a small amount of Spring cleaning, and checked out my wardrobe (nothing fits any more). I also had a few "synchronistic" meetings with acquaintances on the street, talked to my accountant, went to a social at The Pyramid last Saturday, and won a $250 pre-paid Mastercard with MTS. How did they know I needed the money?

And so it goes ...

2010-04-01T02:05:00.000-07:00

Ya, so I got MONA the Mac Mini back from MacHelper (http://machelper.com) a few weeks back. All good except they didn't set up the primary Admin user as requested ("michael" instead of "mcook").

They didn't install Xcode or X11 either, but then I hadn't asked them to. Having restored my .tar backups and installed the latest version of Open Office I was off and flying.

Just in time to get unemployed from "mah cawull senner jeyobh" on March 26th. Now it can be told. After 17 weeks notice it was a huge relief to finally get out of there. No more "Thuh Innerneyut is deowwnh", "My wireless doesn't work", and so on. I'd been there six years and almost three months. It was good in parts while it lasted. After starting at $10.00 CAN hourly I was up to $12.51, which is almost good money hereabouts, where you can drive up to Young's Supermarket and get a 1+3 combo lunch for only $4.99, or catch a matinee at Cinema City for only $1.50.

So now, at the tender age of 63, I am back on the job market. Alas, I still have bills to pay, a car loan and other "debts no honest man can pay", to quote Bruce Springsteen. Various options present themselves: for example I could move to Goa, Nigeria or Vietnam and become "Misstah Kurtz". Then there is the "clothes on the beach" option, or the "nuclear option" where I liquidate all my savings and kill all my debts and live like a student for the rest of my life. Getting another job almost seems like less hassle. I am thinking about outside work. Maybe do some driving or work as a car jockey or something. On the other hand I have all these other skills and experience and maybe I can dust all that off and get a "real job".

After doing phone tech support for a while, it's odd how your mind gets to working certain grooves. One time I found myself waking up at 3 a.m. saying "Thanks for calling Home Networking", and I have had dreams about things like Windows 7 not working with Citrix, and the folks who call you up from the bar 'cos their credit card machine has stopped working (check with your Point of Sale vendor about what to do in this situation).

A lady invited me to meet her but I slept right through the call. It's funny how different lines accumulate, such as : "I want you to rescue me", "I want you to come and feed me chicken soup","I want you to move in with me", "I feel like committing ..."

The other day a different lady invited me to go to a meeting at an hotel. Would I like to learn how to make money by working at home? I checked out my wardrobe and nothing much seemed to fit any more, but I went any way. Well dressed or not, I can make pretty lively small talk, and this is The West after all. In short order several different people asked me where I come from, how long have I been in the country, where do I work and so on. One guy asked me if I was well-known Winnipeg criminal lawyer (I'm not, we just share the same name), also that I shouldn't apply for a job at the car wash as I might be the wrong color (looking over his shoulder and sneering at a visible minority group nearby). The main speaker started by popping some pills and saying "Drugs!" while washing them down with an energy drink. It was all downhill from there on. For example, I didn't know that the world is run by seven families. Who'd'a thunk it? They must be totally stressed. It was a lackluster crowd, and my bum went to sleep after an hour of the speaker's repetition, so I got up and left, and was embarrassingly enough actually chased to the door by my inviter. Whew! for a moment there I thought I might get kidnapped. At least parking was free.

"European passport holders"

2010-02-01T14:49:00.000-08:00

So, this cat Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was "murdered by a professional criminal gang which followed him to [Dubai]", according to police there.

Well, it seems like he was a pretty bad dude himself , but "anybody's death diminishes me ", and as a soon-to-be unemployed 63-year old I don't take kindly to being diminished, so here goes ...

I'm amazed at how many people call each other "brother" these days. To me, a brother would be a male child born of the same mother. For example, I was my sister's brother until she died, but my mother only had two kids, so I never had a "brother". Geddit? I ain't got no "brother" in this world, and I never did have one neither. You ain't my freakin' brother, Dude!

It's all so emotional. All this obligatory rhetoric about brothers and sisters in the media. How they scream "Revenge!"

On the other hand (from the BBC): "Dubai police chief Dhahi Khalfan Tamim also fuelled speculation of Israeli involvement: 'I cannot rule out the possibility of Mossad [Israeli secret service] involvement in the assassination of Mabhouh,' he told al-Jazeera television."

Yeah, but maybe the spastic lady down my corridor here in Winnipeg did it. I didn't see her for several days. Maybe she did JFK and Patrice Lumumba and Olaf Palme too. What a cover! But who can be REALLY SURE?

Please can we all get along for a freakin' change?

Mac mini redux

2010-01-13T17:01:00.000-08:00

So, December 13th, my Mac Mini G4 (late 2005) started to give weird XML error messages in the Console log from both iCal and Safari. Then it started running slow, and every minute and a half it would clock an IO error on the hard drive.

I couldn't run the install CD to do Apple diagnostics 'cos the CD-RW/DVD-R Combo drive was also shot. No easy fix with canned air this time!

A few weeks later, I did an OSX re-install over the network using TFTP and NFS from my Linux box. (Feel free to ask me how: it took a while to research it and set it up.) Same problem though.

Evetually, having broken the Combo connector on the I/O riser card, I gave up DIY repairs and took the beast to MacHelper.

Three weeks of anxiety later, and they just called me and gave me a price: $263 CAN for a new riser card, plus new Apple Combo drive, plus warranty replacement of 160GB Seagate hard drive.

I said "Yes".

Wot? Me a whistle blower?

2009-10-27T01:29:00.000-07:00

We had a small debate at work yesterday about folks who come in sick despite the general health warning to stay at home if suffering "flu-like symptoms".

H1N1 flu having been declared a national emergency in the US, the the guidance - at least the guidance from CDC - was recently updated to recommend staying away for 7 days or until at least 24 hours after fever has subsided. Here in Canada we do not have a "national emergency" declared as such, and the Public Health Agency of Canada says

Contagiousness

More research is being done on how long a person can be infectious (be able to spread the virus to others), but it is believed that this period is for one day before the onset of symptoms and continues for approximately seven days after symptoms have started.The time it takes between being infected and experiencing symptoms is between two and seven days.

Treatment

If you get flu-like symptoms and are otherwise healthy, you should stay home to recover. If your symptoms worsen or you experience difficulty breathing or serious shortness of breath, it is important to seek medical attention.

This is all very well (no pun intended), but where I work most people have already used up their quota of "Personal Days" for the year. This is paid time off you can take at short notice for being sick, going to see the doctor or dentist, going to a funerals, etc. Otherwise we work to a schedule set three weeks in advance.

Also, many of my co-workers depend entirely on their call center income (between $10 and $15 an hour) and simply can't afford to take time off. Added to which absences count against your "scorecard", which among other things may determine which hours you get scheduled. You get 1/4 of a point against you for being more than 4 minutes late, 1 point if you take a whole day off (2 points if you don't call in), and if you accumulate 12 points your job is on the line. Now, do I need to mention the bus service? We operate 7/24, and this is not Stockholm.

No doubt those worthy HR folks are wondering what they should do. Well, how about not awarding points for absence if you can get a doctor's note during the flu season? Otherwise people are actually under pressure to show up anyway. Who's gonna send them home?

Wot? Me a whistle-blower? Who knew?

Alas! I am my mother's son.

Duh? **3

2009-10-21T01:45:00.000-07:00

Well, today - in a fit of hyper-cleanliness - I managed to vacuum up my 4GB SanDisk thumb drive, and now I am going to have to disassemble my old Hoover "K" series, and delve into the contents of the bag in order to retrieve it. I'm sure it will still work tho'.

Another "Duh?": on my Mac Mini OSX 10.4.11 /var/log/daily.out shows /etc/daily running TWICE daily. It seems that in /etc/periodic/daily there is a file 500.daily.applesaved as well as just 500.daily . Who knew? Shouldn't Apple's Software Update fix that for me? (I already know the answer: this was DONE by the OSX 10.4.11 update!).

Meanwhile, "Mah cawull senner jeobyeh" seems like it's finally about to fold. They closed the cafeteria a week ago, so now you have to "brown-bag" it. This saves me a bundle and I am losing weight fast. I volunteered for the "Early Termination Fee", but it turns out that is something else.

Right now we are STILL working on my "Average Handle Time". Our department does what is allegedly paid support for folks who lease wireless equipment from us. As in: "I'm very sorry, but having your OWN router disqualifies you." Despite being "Tier 2" (which means that customers can't call us directly), we are supposed to achieve an average of 825 seconds for each call. Yeah, right!

"Hi my name is Gwen: I am 64 years old and partly deaf and NONE of my FOUR wireless PC's can connect. No I don't know my WEP key or my wireless network name. What version of Windows am I running ? I don't know. What do I do to bring up the list of available wireless networks? Oh, I just click on Internet Explorer. Oh yes, we did have a power outage last night."

Need I say more?

Rosh Hashana

2009-09-19T10:09:00.000-07:00

I am from East Scottish coal mining stock and my family background is Presbyterian, but it did not include much in the way of traditional religious observance. Most of my uncles were card-carrying Communists, strictly about christenings, weddings, and funerals. The word "God" was mentioned quite a lot, but rarely in a prayerful context. Our family bible was most often used as a missile. Alas!

So it was with mixed feelings that just now at noon I heard three long sounds, and realized it was one of my neighbours sounding a shofar. It's good to know there are still folks out there who follow their traditions.

I wish everybody "Shana Tova Umetukah" -- "A Good and Sweet Year."

Com-freakin-tastic

2009-09-17T02:28:00.000-07:00

So this lady calls me up at work. She spoke to FOUR previous agents. We soon figured out that her computer wasn't plugged in to her modem. We plugged it in, I reset the modem, and she rebooted her PC. Then she was back online.

FOUR previous agents?

Am I good, or what?

Death Panel for Mama

2009-09-17T01:49:00.000-07:00

It was late October, 2004. The phone rang about 15:00. I had the day off from my call center job. I was sitting in my skivvies at my computer, drinking beer and reading the news.

Ma had been in care since the Spring of 1998. She'd been a teacher all her life, and her monthly income was about 850 pounds (UKL). She had 16,000 pounds net worth including whatever was left of my father's savings. She enjoyed robust good health 1981-1998, but then she got a UTI, the drugs for which upset her stomach, and she started living on just tea and biscuits.

Getting weak, she started to fall down a lot, and every time she'd fetch up in the hospital she'd go completely nuts. And I do mean psychotic. Later, a social worker told me she'd been self-medicating with uppers and downers including Valium. She had been getting prescriptions from four different doctors. It did not seem that surprising to me that whenever she was cut off she'd go crazy. They call that "dementia".

When Ma went into managed care in 1998 her income went up by 60% due to all the subsidies she was now eligible to receive. Hertfordshire Social Services didn't touch her savings, but if she had owned a house she would have lost it.

Fast forward to 2004. The doctor came on the line from the hospital in Hemel Hempstead.

"If your mother goes into cardiac arrest, what should we do?"

"Well, she's been a regular customer of yours for the last six years and she's always telling people that she doesn't want to live any longer. I think we should just let her go".

That was the end of that.

In Memoriam: Bob Collens

2009-05-28T22:53:00.000-07:00

Bob Collens (Robert John Collens, 12/31/1947-5/24/2009) was a man I got to know and spend some time with in 2007. He introduced himself to me one day and before long we were talking about common interests and experiences we had. Bob only had partial use of a car at the time and used to spend a lot of time alone. We used to go out driving to various parks in the Winnipeg area, eat out, and go to movies and stuff. Along the way, we shared each other's life stories, quite a few laughs, and we talked about an astonishingly wide range of subjects including: cars, computers, fear, our families, hydrogen cars, politics, recovery, religion, terror, therapy, the women in our lives, and much else. Bob was a gentle friend and support.

After a while all friendships change and I didn't see Bob at all in the last year or so. It was with much sadness I heard he had passed away after a short illness. Due to my own failure to keep in touch, I never got to say goodbye.

My best memories of Bob are:

The way he stuck his hand out to greet me the first time he introduced himself. I would never have done that myself.

Watching the amazed look on his face as he fed the chickadees at Bird's Hill Park on a winter's afternoon. He got five landings on his hand, and I got one.

Car shopping with Bob: we looked at everything on four wheels.

Bob eating a chocolate eclair from DeLuca's.

Bob holding my vacuum cleaner and responding to my calls for "Suction!" when I was cleaning my Mac Mini to upgrade the memory.

Bob reacting to various things, including chickadees, chocolate eclairs, ice cream, and driving my car.

Bob being thoughtful and pensive.

Rest in peace, Bob.

You can see some pictures of Bob on this slideshow.

I never said she stole my money

2009-04-27T01:26:00.000-07:00

Re. This article in the NY Times

'For example, the sentence “I never said she stole my money” can have seven different meanings depending on which word is stressed.'

Are you freakin' kiddin' me?

Get over it: life is already WAY too complicated.

For a start, it means: “I never said she stole my money”

Or, you can emphasise as follows:

I never said she stole my money
I never said she stole my money
I never said she stole my money
I never said she stole my money
I never said she stole my money
I never said she stole my money
I never said she stole my money

But are these guys messed up, or what?

For example, what about: I never said she stole my money? They can't count: we're up to nine variations already.

And consider the au contraire case: "My assistant always refused to mention in her e-mails that I had given him the Lamborghini."

You get the idea. What really is "emphasis"?

It seems that one man's "emphasis" is another man's denial.

Remember that when you are next in court.

In the country of the blind

2008-11-08T02:26:00.000-08:00

You are in the call center. You are on your own. Just you, a headset, a phone, a computer, and the clock.

The phone rings.

"Thuh Inner-nayt is de-uh-own"

"No it isn't. Just restart your modem and your router. See?"

The phone rings again.

"I forgot my WEB KEY".

"Let me show you how to sign into your router to get your key."

"Why do we have to go through all this? Why can't you just tell me my WEB KEY"

"Because it's only stored on your router".

"What's a router?"

Education starts with knowing that you don't know the answer to something, then asking a question, then listening to what you get back, and so on.

It helps if you have attention span and you can read and are able to follow up on the answers that you receive.

In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

Why do we have to restart routers?

2008-07-12T23:58:00.000-07:00

1) Most retail or ISP "home networking" routers are built to a low, low price, and you only get what you pay for.

2) The router OS usually does not include (e.g.) a cron job to reboot regularly to force automatic cleanup of queues, etc. Some customers would like this, but it might be considered disruptive, so it's avoided.

3) Even if the manufacturer's power supply is robust, they are often mismatched, whether by ISP techs or home owners, and this causes all sorts of problems including overheating and frequent router resets.

4) [Name of ISP withheld] guidance is NOT to plug an integral modem/router into a power bar or surge protector if possible, since this is supposed to help avoid the problem of the router resetting itself to factory defaults due to a "power surge" (supposedly caused by: lightning, "storm surge", brown-out, or power cut). This mainly affects wireless clients, since customization (SSID, WEP or WPA) gets lost, and you end up with a house full of "wireless orphans".

Rightly or wrongly, many High Speed Internet customers seem to be under the impression that their service is supposed to be up and available ALL the time. Looking at their monthly tariffs (often $50 per month or higher) this is not unreasonable, whereas - in practice - most residential Internet equipment (modems and routers) is subject to various additional upstream issues including line breaks, cable head end restarts, upstream router restarts, name server switching (?), and all sorts of other issues I don't even know about. In this environment, having to restart FIRST the modem, and THEN the router cleans up more than 50% of all "can't connect" scenarios, and - these days - you often do NOT have to restart the computers as well.

This simple information is not known by the majority of consumers, especially those whose own sense of "entitlement" gives them the mindset to get on the phone and be sarcastic (or worse) at the first sign of any disruption to their (residential) service, "because I work from home", etc. Arguably, MOST router restarts are requested by ISP tech support folks while trying to do basic cleanup as a prelude to other troubleshooting.

I have some sympathy for folks who happen to live "in a bad spot" in terms of their chosen Internet provider's infrastructure. They just seem to go apoplectic after a while if problems continue.

In conclusion, consumers deserve better, and the industry (both ISPs and router manufacturers) should be providing it.

See http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=612415&cid=24170151
Why do we have to restart routers? by cooker47 (1096599) on Sunday July 13, @02:00AM (#24170151)

Weirder and weirder

2008-06-04T22:49:00.000-07:00

Ya, so I got ten days of vacazione from "mah cawull senner jeyohb". I went on a 3-day spree, and then realized that altho' the economy is not my fault, my own personal economy is down to me. Uh-oh! I hate having to be responsible.

Mac Mini - replace hard drive / unable to read DVDs

2008-05-15T22:31:00.000-07:00

On my late 2005 Mac Mini G4 1.5Ghz I just replaced my original 80GB Seagate drive after Disk Utility failed multiple times to repair "Invalid node structure".

After installing a new 160 GB Seagate ST9160281A (5 years warranty, $112 Canadian), and booting from my Tiger Install disk, I found that Disk Utility would also not see the new drive. I took everything apart again (I love that cracking sound when you open the case) and found that the corner of one of those pieces of yellow tape had fallen off the Airport cable and a corner of it was caught in the ATA slot on the motherboard where the riser fits.

So, I carefully removed the tape and swabbed the riser contacts with a Q-Tip moistened in alcohol mouthwash. After drying, I put it all back together again and this time it worked.

In reassembly, I also noticed that there was still a bit of wiggle room, a little gap where the drive connector plugs into the riser, so I applied a judicious bit of extra finger pressure to the back of the riser in order to make sure it was seated properly and the gap minimized.

Also about reassembly, after reinstalling the Mac Mini's case, DVDs would not eject. The reason for this was that I had an alignment problem after incorrectly mounting the Airport device on the front right hand corner of the DVD drive.

I referred to http://www.smashsworld.com/2005/01/mac-mini-complete-technical.php and the excellent document http://str.smashsworld.com/?mac_mini.pdf. This clearly showed me that the Airport card is supposed to be mounted on the notched plastic clip at the BACK right-hand corner of the case.

I had not been able to mount DVDs at all before starting the work, so to start with I could not even boot up the install disk to run Disk Utility, but that was resolved easily enough after removing the case. After cleaning the Mac Mini inside with lots of canned air and then vacuuming, I carefully squirted a few extra shots of canned air through the mouth of the DVD drive, and then it was working again.

Mah cawull senner jeeyobh

2008-04-21T00:18:00.000-07:00

Apparently "Mah cawull senner jeeyobh" may be in danger of disappearing due to the high Canadian dollar.

Well, that and some capitalists who want to maintain a given cashflow.

Despite recent financial upsets, the still-rising price of oil, and now - who woulda thunk it? - food shortages, it seems as if some folks still think they are just naturally entitled to have a whole lot of stuff most people will never be able to afford.

Could this be a portent that those ugly old "argyments for So-shee-liz-um" are about to come back?

Hey, maybe they'll improve the school system so much it'll put me out of a job?

What a scary thought! I might have to scrimp and save, or even ... FIND A REAL JOB!

HEEEEEEEEELP!!!

Fings Like Wot I Believe, Eh?

2008-04-06T22:42:00.000-07:00

Fings like wot I believe, eh? Not many in number, but stuff I try to live by. In no particular order:

You are what you eat, so be careful where you eat and always wash your hands.
The glass is always half full and half empty at the same time.
"What goes around comes around."
Life is tough and then you die, but the universe goes on forever.
"It's better to sleep on things beforehand than to lie awake about them afterwards."
You can't take it with you, and it doesn't matter anyway.
"The world is charged with the grandeur of God."

Um, that's all I can think of today.

"Most seamless" and "very unique"

2008-03-19T09:47:00.000-07:00

I was reading this article about Macs and anti-virus when this VMWare ad popped up:

VMware Fusion. The most seamless way to run Windows on your Mac. Backed by nearly a decade of proven virtualization technology. Try VMware Fusion today for free, or order online for only $79.

Well, duh? Sorry, Mr.VMWare Copywriter, either something is seamless or it's not. Which means for something to be "most seamless" is meaningless. Which means your advertisement is counter-productive. So there. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Even better, check this out.

This is just like all those vapid people who talk about other vapid people as being "very unique". Sorry, vapid people everywhere, either a person or a thing is unique ("the only one of its kind") or it isn't. I am unique, and so are you, but you are also vapid and misusing the English language. See here.

People like that should be made to write out one hundred times "I am unique and I will never be 'very unique' and neither will any other person or thing that is the only one of its kind, and as well as that nothing can be 'most seamless' it can only be 'seamless' or 'not seamless'. Maybe one day I will learn this and not give the impression that I am a vapid person who does not know the English language".

I have spoken.

Ice Gog / Bureaucratic Lunacy / Disassembling Flash on OSX

2008-03-06T00:00:00.001-08:00

Ya, so recently Environment Canada changed the appearance of their weather pages. They used to look like this:

As a side note, please be aware of the new meterological phenomenon "Ice gog", which occurs when angry ice demons six miles high rise from beneath the frozen waters of Lake Winnipeg.

But I digress; EC weather pages now look like this:

As you can see the icons used for the moon are especially pretty. The only problem is that they never change. For example, tonight 6th March 2008, the web site shows the moon waxing about the first quarter, but in fact there is no moon.

I sent a note to EC about this a few weeks back and got a short reply saying their web site was not intended to show this information, and suggesting I should go look at stardate.org which is run by McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas at Austin.

Now, I know they have mariners in Texas 'cos I remember that old song about Galveston. But here in Canada, we are surrounded by ocean on three sides, as well as which the name of the country itself means "The Land of A Thousand Lakes", and all Canadian males are addicted to fishing from an early age. Need I say more? But to find out the phase of the moon I have to go look at a web site in Austin?

Anyway, I did so and I found out lots about the moon and it's phases and different calendars and stuff. Also, to grab some actual pictures of the moon phases I decided to find out how to extract them from a Flash file. This was a crazy, mad, lunatic adventure all of itself. Here are the notes I made for your delectation and delight.

Snowstorm in Winnipeg

2008-03-03T02:04:00.000-08:00

Winter is nearly over but we are still in the deep freeze. I took this real short video clip off of my balcony on Saturday, six floors up looking West over the Assiniboine River.

Configuring a Netgear WRG614 router with OSX

2008-03-03T00:07:00.000-08:00

Hey, a blog craves content, and nobody ever seems to read my blog except me, so "WTF". This entry is based on my post at http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=5084100#post5084100 .

I had a caller today who was trying to set up a NetGear WRG614 router for use with his new ISP, a well-known cable company.

We power-cycled his modem and the router, and then signed in to the WRG614 at 192.168.0.1 using default username and password admin/password.

We went through router setup, selected the automatic/use DHCP option with no login (required for his ISP's "Broadband connection that is always on").

Along the way the router asked a question about MAC address and we went with the default setting ("No", I think).

Thereafter he eventually got a valid WAN IP address, but we could not launch a regular browser session and get to the WWW. We kept getting sent back to the router setup dialog. This happened on two machines. He also kept getting a message during router setup, something like "your computer is now being managed by the address 192.168.0.2".

Despite my advice my caller kept running router setup on both Macs and he kept getting the same results, so eventually I let him go after giving him Netgear's phone number (1-888-NETGEAR). However, after the call was ended it struck me that maybe the router setup was trying to do a "MAC address clone" thing when the mysterious "MAC address .. Default" option was selected in the setup dialog. This would explain why he kept getting the "your computer is now being managed ..." message for the same LAN IP address on each of the two different Macs.

We didn't try doing the router configuration with the WAN port on the router NOT plugged in to the modem, as was suggested by "aeronaut" in the thread way back on 2006-06-03.

I'll try to give the guy a call back tomorrow to see if he was able to resolve the issue.

Wireless Zero Configuration Or Not?

2008-01-29T21:24:00.000-08:00

Wireless Zero Configuration (WZC) is a Windows XP service that you can use to manage wireless network connections. It's pretty easy to use, but a lot of laptop PCs and OEM wireless network adapters still come with other software provided by their manufacturers. So which should you use?

Well, prior to Windows XP there was no choice and you HAD to use the card manufacturer's software. Now you can often find yourself using "WZC" with XP automatically, whereas sometimes an XP laptop with builtin wireless may be set up to use wireless configuration software from Broadcom, Atheros or Intel (whoever manufactured the wireless chip), a lot of Dell laptops come set up to use Dell's own Wireless LAN card Utility, and Lenovo or IBM ThinkPads may use IBM Access Connections, arguably the Roll-Royce of connection solutions for the professional road warrior. After market, if you install an add-on wireless network adapter from Belkin, Netgear, Linksys, or SMC you will usually end up with the card manufacturer's software installed by default. In every case, the software does a similar job, but the details differ.

There is always a means provided to scan for a list of available wireless networks and to specify connection parameters. Usually all need to know is your network name and your WPA passphrase or your WEP key. Third party wireless configuration software often includes additional controls to turn builtin wireless on or off, perhaps to select or deselect WZC, screens for creating, editing, and saving connection profiles (something WZC does automatically), and even a screens to manage different sets of networking and security profiles for use in various locations such as home, office, school, and so on.

Which software you should use for Windows XP wireless configuration is almost a religious issue for some technical support folks, and this can be very confusing for typical users who sometimes may be caught in the middle. Some techies will always tell you to use WZC because it's easy for them to have everyone use the same solution. This approach is great for both of you if it works, but often it does not and that depends on your equipment. One problem you can run into is that the tech support agent gets you connected one time using WZC, but after a reboot the connection doesn't work anymore. Profiles have to be saved and changes have to stay in place which ever approach you use. Other tech support folks can take a more conservative approach and they may recommend that you use whatever software came with your wireless equipment and not change it. You are stuck in the middle. What should you do?

Well, for a start don't let some pimply-faced kid from your ISP's support department tell you how to configure your expensive computer over the phone. After five minutes he will be gone, leaving you with the results of your decision. How much did you spend on your wireless computer anyway, and how badly do you want it to work for you? The best thing you can do for yourself is spend a few minutes learning how your own particular computer is set up and how to use the wireless connection software provided by the manufacturer. If possible you should get the sales agent to show you this in the store, and make him spend time with you to answer any questions you may have. How do you turn the wireless on? How do you make a connection? You should make a decision not to change the way your computer is set up and to be prepared to stick with it. The worst thing that can happen is that your ISP technical support folks ask you to call your computer manufacturer for support.

It helps a great deal to read about wireless networking on the World Wide Web. Do not expect that your wireless connection is always going to work flawlessly. Do expect that it will stop working for you at an inconvenient time. Be prepared to connect through a wire if your wireless connection stops working for whatever reason. Buy an Ethernet patch cord and carry it with your laptop computer at all times. Get one at least twelve feet long for use in most situations. Do not rely on your ISP's technical support folks to keep your computer running for you. Do read as much as you can of the support information your computer manufacturer has made available with your computer and also at their web site.

As for other operating systems, remember that Windows XP came out in 2001. All of the above is really yesterday's news. With both Windows Vista and Mac OSX you have no choice but to use the wireless configuration tools provided by the computer manufacturer. Does this sound familiar? The different flavours of Linux still have some catching up to do, which is another reason to use the software provided by the computer manufacturer, whether it be OLPC, Dell, HP, or whoever.

May all your connections be secure, and your signal strength excellent!

Eeek! Aaargh! Where's the AdSense in that? (Occupation: Yes)

2008-01-27T22:46:00.000-08:00

Eeek! Aaargh! Overcome with a sudden fit of I-don't-know-what I recently responded to Blogger's invitation and now I have advertising on this page. Look! There it is! A real advertisment! Why, in theory I could even get paid real money for this! Or at least real pennies!

But hardly anybody ever seems to visit my blog, which - as I wrote recently - seems to be a pointless exercise other than as a means to enable me to know what it means to "have a blog", frustrated novelist, geek, and nerdly philosopher that I am. There must be one of those "Grasshopper stories" in there. Like having some very fit but very old Chinese geezer saying to you: "To know what blog is, first you must begin, O Grasshopper! Then you will learn the secret!"

Actually, I did notice that I get quite a few hits for my "Man of Letters" image here, which file is served from my Apache2 web server at home. God bless all the folks at DynDNS.org. (By the way, the photograph was taken by a lady formerly of my acquaintance while I was sitting in the cafeteria at the National Gallery in Ottawa, reading the Comics page from The Globe and Mail on a Saturday in 1998. Not that you really wanted to know that.)

I am an avid reader of my web server logs. They show me that folks do searches here at www.blogger.com for other bloggers in Manitoba, or where the profile includes "Occupation: Yes", and so on. Meanwhile, out on The Great Wide Internet, other folks searching for quotations visit my collection of Dicta, or they look for instructions on how to daisy chain two routers together, or configure their wireless, and stuff.

It turns out that once you have signed up for AdSense you can put ads on any web site you want to as long you meet Google's content guidelines. I went a little crazy myself - well, crazier than usual - and pasted ads on various pages in the HintsAndTips and HowTo sections of my web site.

So far I didn't actually bother to complete the tax and payment information for my AdSense account, but - given my perpetual state of anxiety - I'm already wondering if I might get busted by "The Google Content Guidelines Police" for putting ads on pages showing Airport or Windows Device Manager configuration screens. I should hope not, but who can tell.

When all's said and done, I'm not sure that having this advertising is really "A Good Thing". It does rather bring down the tone of my web site and I've noticed that at least some visitors seems to stop dead at the first page that shows an ad. Now where's the AdSense in that?

I shall report to you what unfolds if I am allowed to post again from prison.

Help! Help! I can't see any wireless networks! (My laptop has builtin wireless).

2008-01-25T20:17:00.000-08:00

Probable cause No.1

The built-in wireless switch on your laptop is turned off. Look very carefully all over the computer for a physical switch or an alternate Function key setting marked "wireless" or "WLAN" or with a little icon that looks like a radio tower or a lollipop radiating waves or a flame or light bulb on top of a triangle. How come there's no international standard for these icons anyway?

To get alternate Function key settings you have to hit the Function or "Fn" key plus the F key. These settings usually work like a toggle: you hit the switch once to turn the wireless on, hit again to turn it off. On a some computers it may have three states: "On" "Off" and "Power savings mode". If you can't find such a switch, try looking for an icon in the lower right hand corner of the screen that when you right-mouse click on it gives you an option to enable or disable your radio.

Usually the built-in wireless network adapter on a laptop computer is associated with a light that comes on when the adapter is powered on. The built-in wireless adapter can get turned off by accident, or by computer Power Management trying to save battery time. Again, sometimes there may be three states, for example "Light is off", "Light is orange", and "Light is blue", corresponding to "On" "Off" and "Power savings mode" settings as above.

You can also try turning off your computer and then turning it back on after 10 seconds. This causes the computer to run through it's Power-On Self Test (POST) procedures, which reinitializes all the hardware and software from the Basic Input Output System (BIOS) on up.

Probable cause No.2

There really aren't any wireless networks broadcasting in range OR the signal is being blocked. First, try power-cycling your modem AND your wireless router AND your computer in that order, each about a minute apart. Usually the wireless router is the weakest link in the chain and very often it just needs a restart.

Otherwise, you may be in a big "wireless shadow area" or inside some sort of a Faraday cage that is blocking wireless signals. Try moving to another area. For example, if you are in a basement try climbing upstairs. If you are in a corner room, try moving to a different one. If you are in a bathroom, try outside the bathroom.

If you are inside a bank vault or some other kind of a metal box such as a freezer, an elevator, a car, truck or locomotive, or a multi-storey car park or any other kind of steel frame construction, try outside. If you are in a swimming pool or a large fish tank, try outside. If you are still indoors, try outside. If you are on a hiking trail in the wilderness, return to the nearest town and retry.

Probable cause No.3

Your wireless network adapter is powered on but it is still not working properly. Try uninstalling the device driver or the device, then turn the computer off and then back on, and try re-installing the device. If necessary, power-cycle the computer once more.

Improbable causes

Somebody just let off a nuclear bomb and all consumer electronics have been totally fried by the radiation.
Sun spots.
You have fallen into a black hole.

Strange Dream #2 - IT department rock stars

2008-01-20T21:49:00.000-08:00

I got home from work this aft. and the guy in the apartment next door had his loud friends over again, which always seems to involve lots of loud talk and whooping and coughing while watching some dreadful macho game on TV. I get the impression some drinking might be going on, but I can't imagine why everybody should be coughing so much, or can I? O such dreadful thoughts! Excuse me while I bang my head against the wall in penance.

Anyhoo, after a shift at "mah cawull senner jeyobe" I like to inspect my eyelids for holes. I just plug in my super new Bose Active Earplugs - well, not really - and then I deep-breathe my way off to Dreamland for a few hours. These last couple of days it's minus 40 Centigrade outside what with a high wind from the North and I don't even bother to take off my street clothes. Might as well be comfy in bed, I always say.

Tonight I dreamed I was back in my old corporate suit again and I was meeting with folks from several accounts including my next door neighbour, oddly enough, and we were talking about doing a big project to analyze their web logs in some super-dooper new way that would actually turn their IT departments into profit centers and get them all introduced to new and powerful friends so their careers could all just really take off, along with getting lots of lucrative stock options and stuff - hey, it was just a dream, right? Anyway, I had started to get all evangelical about these prospects when my next door neighbour hands me a note and asks me to go talk to his barmaid downstairs and fetch more beer, a request which I respectfully decline as we are nearing the end of the meeting and I want to be there for the finish when I have yet to deliver my outstanding deal-clinching closing speech.

I woke up shortly after this with the feeling that somewhere along the way I have at last learned not to do trivial things for other people when Great Things Are At Stake, as well as to now be able to talk such amazing blarney as would - at least temporarily - well, charm a motley bunch of low level IT department types into thinking they could get stock options and become sort of IT rock stars in this life. Who knew?

Well, it was a nice dream while it lasted, and I sure can dream that I talk such a good game!

Strange Dream #1 - testing a new heads up display for the infantry

2008-01-20T21:44:00.000-08:00

I was back with my old corporate employer and somehow we got a new contract to work on this fancy-schmancy "heads up display" type military application thingy for infantrymen. It turned out I was the test subject. I ran like a greyhound across the test range which was cunningly designed to look just like a civic center with floral gardens in the middle of roundabouts and stately white marble buildings and stuff. I was doing fine until right at the end when all the other folks on the test range converged on me and started using me for target practice. That's when I woke up.

Thinks: "Blogging is a real waste of time"

2007-12-20T04:06:00.000-08:00

Jeez, I can't believe I wrote that last post - why do I care about blogging? Er, how about like I feel I should know about these things? After all, I do describe myself as a nerd. Plus you've got to have some content.

Grumble, grumble re. "Free iTunes Downloads"

2007-12-20T03:46:00.000-08:00

iGoogle's default home page includes a "Free iTunes Downloads" widget, but you can't actually get the downloads unless you are in the US and have an account at the US iTunes store. Otherwise you just get bounced back to the store in your own country, and no free downloads for you!

Someone else who was having the same problem commented that non-US users were being "duped" and sent on an "eChase". Ha!

I posted the following in knee-jerk response mode, but then I thought better of it as I don't want to end my days as a political prisoner in some Arctic gulag after the "Empire of Good" annexes Canada in the interests of National Security and "defending the American way of life".

Okay, so I have an overactive imagination. But here goes anyway:-

"So 'duped' was how I was feeling eh? Not very pleasant, but at least now I have a name for it.

"I slurpose there must be some complicated legal weasel why these things are only free in the "Empire of Good", and so I won't write a snotty letter to Mr.Apple about that just yet.

"Meanwhile, um, didn't I this 'Free iTunes Downloads' Blogger widget thingy as a part of the standard iGoogle 'home tab', or did I just imagine that?

"Maybe Mr.iGoogle will take note and provide more useful 'regional alternative' default setups, such as 'Free American Joke Downloads' here in Canada, for example."

My stummick apres ... (a poem)

2007-12-18T21:09:00.000-08:00

My stummick apres ...

here there is a mighty great wind and
i think my stummick just moved to Hyderabad

At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star

2007-12-18T20:34:00.000-08:00

M.I.T. physics professor Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, has emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to his global classroom created to spread knowledge through cyberspace. Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/education/19physics.html?hp

Giving freebies ("I'm trying to run a business here")

2007-11-14T22:52:00.000-08:00

I love it when people find out what I do for a living and then they immediately say s.t. like "Maybe you could come round and fix my computer for me". Were they just waiting to meet someone like me that they could ask? And how long has the problem needed attention anyway?

One time I installed a router for a friend. Afterwards his wife still kept trying to use dial-up, got nowhere fast, and then got very upset, saying "This is my business" (a.k.a. "I'm trying to run a business here"), and him insisting "It never worked" rather vehemently (wrong).

After that we just weren't friends any more....

We get the same thing all the time where I work now servicing residential Internet subscribers. Some days it seems like everybody is on the way to their first million....

Um, Mac-crackin' and several other rash things

2007-08-31T02:42:00.000-07:00

Um, well, in the process of having two weeks "offa mah cawull senner jeyobe" here in sleepy old Winnipeg, I decided to do several rash things.

First rash thing I did was I went out and got a 1GB RAM chip for my Mac Mini and did brain surgery on my living room table after lunch last Monday. My buddy Bob played the role of nurse, holding my putty knife when I wasn't prying open the case, and responding to my calls for "Suction!" by turning on my vacuum cleaner. Does this sounds strange? Two old geezers in an apartment, one doing brain surgery on a computer and the other turning on a vaccum cleaner. Am I having an acid flashback or what?

Man, you sure do get a lot of dirt in all those little openings around the bottom of a Mac Mini, tho' it was actually pretty easy to do the upgrade. The hardest part about the "case cracking" is getting the cover back on square round the back, kind of like when you give yourself a haircut with the clippers, doncha know.

This great rashness was a follow-up to putting 2GB RAM extra in my Acer AMD 3800+ along with a Seagate 230GB hard drive. The main rash thing about that was how much it cost. Like $320 including the Mac. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with a 230GB hard drive, but maybe my old Content Management project will revitalize itself some day.

Meantime, with 1GB RAM, OSX runs much better and I can leave open all the windows I want. I'm kinda lazy that way. Over in England we leave windows open all the time. Maybe close 'em if it gets frosty some night. You get the idea.

I installed Vista under Innotek's VirtualBox 1.4 on my Acer and it runs well. It's true what they say. For virtualization, all you need is a chunk of memory and a $499 Vista Business license. Whoops! Darn! There went my air fare to the Bahamas! Now THAT'S what I call rash!

Since then, while on a trip to Winkler, I invented a new telephone which is bio-degradable, edible, and renewable. It's made out of corn, which should go down big with the farmers round here.

Other than that I mostly slept and ate and rode my bike and watched a few movies.

Last rash thing I did was work on my web server on the Acer. I wanted to know why http://skyprod.net was getting so many hits on an old document about installing and configuring a Linksys WUSB54G wireless adapter on Windows XP. It turns out from my Apache2 logs that I am getting a lot of referrals from Google searches! Who'd'a thunk it? The only problem is the document in question is one I wrut back in 2004 to help me in "mah cawull senner jeyobe", and it's kind of out-of-date since Service Pack 2 and so on. So, I made it over (VERY rash) and added a few dire warnings like "You CAN damage your computer", etc. Anyhoo, now my Apache2 web server's running on Ubuntu Feisty x86_64, AND I get referrals AND the document's sort of a bit more up-to-date too. Owzaaaaat?!

The thing about being all Open Sourcey - or Openly Saucy - or should that be Open Sorcery - I'm sure it's also VERY, VERY rash - is that you have to use Open Office instead of MS Word and it takes a while to figure out how to do things like hyperlink the entries in your document's table of contents. Awwwwgh! Now THAT's what I call COUNTER-INTUITIVE! Give me good old Microsoft Word 2000 any day!

Um, well at least I still have a four-day long weekend before I go back to work.

Tears for KDE

2007-08-06T19:23:00.000-07:00

Ya, so I read something recently about Linus Torvalds and his views on Gnome. As I recall he was deploring the dumbing down of the interface and was quoted as saying s.t. like "Why don't they just install KDE?" So I did.

Ooops! Big mistake! Hundreds of new applications all over my Ubuntu Feisty Gnome Applications menus, all starting with the letter "K". Ugh! I thought that "K" was a breakfast cereal, or something to do with camping or White Supremacy or cheap cars or something.

So, anyway, I just cleaned up all that mess, and now I can carry on to do whatever it was that I was thinking of doing before I got myself into being sidetracked. Except of course that now I can't remember what it was.

Anyhoo-ha, I did start KDE one time, but I found the look and feel of it quite unpalatable. After blowing my cookies, I did try to start services-admin, user-admin, network-admin and time-admin, and whaddya know, they all worked! Once. Then they stopped working again, and went back to their usual catatonic state.

Upon restarting Gnome there was a tantalizing moment when network-admin actually showed me it's panels. But then I clicked on the "Hosts" tab and it froze again. What a tease! "Plus ca change", I always say. Maybe Linus was thinking about these applets?

But who really needs applets that actually work? After all, everybody knows that appearance is the only thing that's really important these days. For those who have a big pipe and nothing else to do, below is a screenshot of my customized Gnome desktop. You will notice how crisp and clean and uncluttered it looks, and how pleasing it is to the eye. You will no doubt also notice that I am using Red Hat's Liberation fonts and Mac OSX's house icon for my home folder, as well as Beryl Session Manager and a tweaked version of Emerald's "Slatehorn Red" default theme for my window decorations. Gosh, it's handsome!

Time out - Mac Start button - Ubuntu x86_64

2007-07-31T19:59:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a while since my last post.

After a lot of AppleScript adventuring I finally got my "Start Button for OSX" project to a stage at which I felt I could abandon it gracefully. You can find the results here.

Back in March I decided not to build my own PC to run Vista and instead I saved about $400 (for equivalent spec.) by buying a new Acer Aspire T180 desktop that included Vista Home Premium Edition and nVidia GeForce 6100 graphics. I spent the money I saved on a 22" LG L226WT LCD monitor, good for my eyes.

I soon got bored taking screenshots of Vista to refer to at work, and I decided to try Linux again for the first time since Red Hat 7.3, which I figure must be six or seven years ago. I love my two Macs and OSX has been a real treat, so at least all that time I never went into UNIX-withdrawal.

After checking out a few "distros" I decided to try Ubuntu Feisty, mainly because it's wholesomely popular these days and they have happy colours on their web site. I installed the amd_64 version using their "Live CD". Since then I've been having a lot of fun, but also quite a few problems:

Third-party video driver installation was hardly intuitive and the fact that I had to do it myself was not a good start.
The Ubuntu forums are great and by now I'm almost up to a free cup of coffee or something.
Once I had my nVidia card working properly a co-worker told me about Beryl and I love it. Neither OSX or Windows Vista can do all those things so well yet.
Getting Adobe Flash to work was a pain, mostly just doing the research.
I installed ntfs-config so I can read/write freely to my Vista NTFS partitions. This was easy and very satisfying. But why doesn't this also work "out of the box"?
The standard Linux fonts are awful, making web sites like The New York Times look particularly revolting in Firefox. Fortunately Red Hat has made their "Liberation" True Type fonts available for free, and after a little tweaking my Linux desktop and Firefox look almost as pretty and easy to read as OSX and Safari, or Vista and IE7.
Getting Samba to work both ways with OSX was not straightforward, and I still can't browse and mount "Windows file shares" by computer name from Linux. I have to use IP addresses instead.
I can't run my Linksys WUSB54G V1 wireless adapter because there is no 64-bit driver to use with ndiswrapper. I tried using the native Prism 54 drivers and firmware and after lots research and fiddling I actually got the card to work but only for a short time. Oh, the tears of running a 64-bit operating system!
I then embarked on the adventure of trying to get Prism 54 to work better, but first I had to learn how to use git and the mysteries of Debian kernel packaging. Eventually I did get a Linux 2.6.22 kernel compiled and running, but it took a while. For example, I had to try no less than three different tools to get an initrd image that would boot. Only Yaird worked.
I found there are still many irritating bugs in Gnome, such as several system administration applets not working. Services-admin, network-admin, users-admin, and setting the clock all have known bugs and are simply unusable. Not being able to browse and mount "Windows" shares by name is related. What's the point of having the applets in Gnome at all if they don't work reliably? These are known bugs that have been around for a while, which is disappointing, and I can't see Linux being successful as a mainstream alternative to Windows or OSX while such problems persist.
While experimenting to work around the "services-admin" problem I somehow managed to trash Gnome altogether and I was not able to resuscitate it by uninstalling/reinstalling packages using Aptitude.

So now I have reinstalled Ubuntu Feisty Desktop x86_64 and I'm going back through all the above, as well as re-installing Apache2 and MySQL so that machine can run my home web server and host my by-now-almost-forgotten "Content Management Project".

That's it for now. Maybe more details later.

Automator workflows and AppleScripts for Finder

2007-03-01T02:21:00.000-08:00

Today's adventure was working with some simple Automator Workflows and AppleScripts to help Finder tasks in OSX.

FILE LOCATIONS

First it's useful to remind ourselves where these objects go:

- User workflows go in ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder.
- System workflows are in /Library/Application Support/Apple/Automator/Applications/Finder.
- User scripts go in /Library/Scripts/Applications/Finder.
- System scripts are in /Library/Scripts.

Various useful scripts can be found in these subfolders:

- Finder Scripts
- Folder Action Scripts
- Folder Actions
- Navigation Scripts

HOW TO MAKE A "START BUTTON" FOR OSX - really simple version

A copy of "New Applications Window.scpt" from /Library/Scripts/Navigation Scripts/ was moved to ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder and then compiled and saved as "New Applications Window.app".

An alias of this was then renamed to "Start" and placed on the desktop. Here is the script:


   tell application "Finder"
       activate
       open folder "Applications" of the startup disk
   end tell

HOW TO CLOSE ALL FINDER WINDOWS

Another useful script is this one to close all Finder windows:


   tell application "Finder"
       close every information window
       {}
       close every window
       {}
   end tell

To run your scripts, first you use the AppleScript Utility to enable the option "Show Script Menu in menu bar" for AppleScript. Then when you are in Finder you will get a drop-down context-sensitive menu which includes the system scripts as well as Finder scripts you have created yourself.

USING APPLESCRIPTS IN AUTOMATOR

Useful additional Finder workflows can be created by simply copying some of the sample AppleScripts into Automator "Run Applescript" workflow objects.

Once tested in Automator and saved, your workflows have to be manually moved to ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder, but then they are available as additional actions when you are in Finder. To access them, you press the Control key and click mouse button 1 in a Finder Window (ylou can also use mouse button 2 if you have it). You can then click on "Automator" to see a list of workflows you have created.

I created workflows to open my Home, Documents, and Applications folders, together with others to create a new text file, to create a new sub-folder, and to provide an easy-to-use Finder navigation menu. The last one used "Open Special Folder.scpt" from /Library/Scripts/Navigation Scripts.

Enjoy!

what the heck is a content manager anyway?

2007-02-28T16:44:00.000-08:00

What the heck is a content manager anyway and why do I need one?

For some reason I installed Plone on my Mac Mini today. It eats resources. I was thinking "Zope!" but the INSTALL.TXT file said to upgrade Python to 2.4, OSX only having 2.2. I tried to update to Python 2.4 using Fink Commander but it only had 2.3.

Then I stumbled across Plone in the UNIX section of Apple's "OSX Downloads" web page. It includes Zope AND Python 2.4.9. Wow! Twenty minutes later I was signing into my Plone Portal. Very slowly. Then I got to take a look at it. What was I thinking?!

Still, after copying my 4GB of images to the Mac, I found using OSX Finder's "Smart Folders" useful to be able to browse without having to import all the images into my old version of iPhoto.

But I still don't know what I'm doing.

working on it

2007-02-26T22:02:00.000-08:00

Well my images alone are 4GB. I want to consolidate this with all the other stuff I have lying around. My idea is to make it all easy to navigate and work on. For example to pick out an old movie and work on it, the same with sound files, pieces of writing, and so on. Slow far, slow good. Right now I'm copying the images as a zip file over to my Mac Mini from my Windows XP machine.

all that stuff

2007-02-25T23:23:00.000-08:00

Trying to get a handle on several years worth of data accumulated on 7 different PCs since I bought my first 30286 back in 1989. I'd just gotten back from a long trip and my life was about to change forever.

Volume-wise, most of the information is images. The volume really racked up when I bought my Canon Powershot A80 back in the fall of 2004. The rest consists of documents, programs, music and websites.