Inspired by I-57

I apparently have unusual hearing. Ever since i was a kid, I could hear a very high pitched tone in most malls, which I always assumed was just the noise of the security systems bouncing arround the rafters. I notice it less now, but it’s still there, and it still annoys me. Heck, I can tell you if a tube tv is on anywhere in the building i’m in usually, I can hear the flyback transformer or something.

Enter those media frenzy stories about kids and their secret ring tones, that adults can’t hear…. although i’m 37 and have no problem hearing them.

The times ran a graphic that shows the usual ages you can hear these frequencies, and you can test some various frequencies here. I’m getting a little older. I can’t really hear the 18hz tone any more, but I can tell you if there’s one playing or not (it’s like a pressure in my ears when it’s on). I guess that means my body is 13 years older than my calendar age?

For bloggy goodness, here’s a memegraphic.

Created by Train Horns

Under the windows cmd shell, there’s a command start that “does the right thing”. Give it a file, it’ll launch the right app and open it. Give it a directory, you get an explorer window there.

This doesn’t exist under cygwin’s shells, which is a PITA.

Here’s a zsh function to do the same thing. Put it in your .zshrc and call open FILE or open DIR.

open()
{
    if (( ${#argv} == 0 )); then
                    targetDir="."
    else
      targetDir=$1
    fi
    /cygdrive/c/windows/explorer.exe /e,`cygpath -w "$targetDir"`
}

We hosted the family for thanksgiving, which was fun.

We did the turkey in a fryer (saf-t-fryer from lowes, it’s a little pricy but it had a lot of safety features). We learned a few things (”if your fryer has a thermal cutoff, do not run the flame too hot, or it will over-protectively shut down the flame”). It’s got a very low center of gravity, and doesn’t want to tip, which was part of why i bought this one. After dinner, while the oil was cooling, we got a first hand example of how well designed it is– a possum crawled up the side, over the top, was hanging on one edge, and lapping at the used oil. Didn’t tip. Wish we had a picture of it.

The turkey came out great. I’ll have to get the name of the butcher from Leah, they were great and very reasonably priced (about $2.70/lb). We used this marinade and it came out GREAT. Turkey was super tender, the skin was awesome, and the meat was all very tasty.

All in all, definitely a repeat, I think.

Perhaps I am the only person that this applies to, but in case not:

I store all my music, mp3s and m4us, on a network share. We do this because my wife and I share an iTunes account, the server’s backed up, etc, etc. Now we both can get to our tunes.

For some reason, though, my mac will eventually time out the SMB share to my fileserver. When iTunes starts up, it will look for the music in my library, and it won’t be there, and 99.5% of my music is unavailable, and iTunes puts an exclamation mark next to it.

I used to man up, mount the share, and tell iTunes to play every song on the share. Apparently, this is not required, and the solution is obvious–

Quit iTunes. Mount share. Start iTunes. All your music is “back”.

I’m a doofus for not thinking of that.

I tend to prefer unix-like environments, which means I love mac as a desktop and linux as a server os.

But I’m at a new job, and my desktop and laptop are Windows. Here’s a short list of things I’ve done to make windows more unixy for me. Apologies in advance to the people who wrote these programs– I’m not comparing your awesome programs to someone else’s because I think you’re derivitive, I’m doing it because it quickly helps a Mac user understand the value.

• Cygwin is a unix-like environment that runs inside of windows. Under there, you can compile most unix applications, run (native) perl, python, whatever. It’s good. It’s free. Once you have this, you have native open ssh, etc.
• While you’re at it, change the default cygwin shortcut to point to a batch file that contains the following, it’s a much nicer shell than the default windows dosbox
  [+]View Code BASH

  @echo off   C: chdir C:\cygwin\bin   rem bash --login -i rxvt -bg black -fg green -geometry 80x48 -e bash--login -i &

• Rocketdock is a nice mac-like dock. Just like on the mac, it supports things like minimize-to-dock, cute hover animiations, etc. It also has “live” images of what minimized windows look like. Nicer in many respects than the XP taskbar, and similar to the Vista one.
• Launchy is a quicksilver-like hotkey launcher. It’s very, very nice. Hit alt-space and type “word” to launch Microsoft Word, etc. Speeds up application launching immensely.

Tonight, for some reason, I couldn’t sync my iphone on my macbook pro. There were a lot of upgrades recently for me (latest itunes, finally got arround to installing 10.5.5, etc) which could have been the issue, but the error itself was wildly unhelpful.

Fortunately, on the apple support forums, someone named neil had the quick fix: itunes apparently barfs if ANY file it wants to look at is locked (an old apple-ism that should be removed from the filesystem, post haste).

Anyway, the fix is a snap. Open the Script Editor in the /Applications/AppleScript/ folder and run the following:

tell application "Finder"
set locked of every item of entire contents of folder "Music:iTunes" of home to false
end tell

Once that’s pasted in, click the run button. If you still have troubles syncing, replace the Music:iTunes path with Music, and perhaps also Photos.

The original thread on the apple support forums is here.

The network printer component of the MFC-7820N is easy in leopard– it’s detected by the mDNS (bonjour), and the drivers are preinstalled. Everything there should be smooth sailing.

However, we wanted this printer partly because it’s a network scanner, as well. Getting the network scanner component working under Leopard turned out to have a slight trick.

First, install the drivers:

1. Go to the brother download site
2. choose Drivers -> Mac OS/X 10.5 -> English then hit submit
3. Install this driver, it’s the scanner TWAIN driver. It’s universal too
4. This driver will make you reboot. Whee.
5. Go back to the download site, and this time, do Utilities -> Mac OS/X 10.5 -> English
6. Install the provided “Remote Setup Software”

Now, here’s the fun trick. Open your hard drive, and go to the folder /Library/Printers/Brother/Utilities/DeviceSelector. In this dir is a program called DeviceSelector . Run it.

Tell the DeviceSelector (and the scanner driver) to “Specify your machine by address”, and enter the IP address of your printer. (Mine was preset to specify by ‘name’, which is using mDNS).

From there, I could now scan through the control center applet or in a standard Twain app, like Image Capture in the /Applications folder.

I type a lot, so not hurty wrists is a big thing for me. I’ve been very very happy with the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 Keyboard (available for as low as $30 from time to time, and sometimes on sale that low at Staples or whatever). And it works awesome with the Mac, too.

The best part of it is not just the split design, but that it’s also tilted backwards at a negative angle, which is perfect for people like me who are lazy and have never learned to keep your palms UP, but instead put them on the rest.

One drawback though is that the plastic piece that keeps it at that wedge eventually breaks, it’s got three small plastic spots where it attaches and those have snapped over time (nearly 2 years now, I think). The keyboard still works awesomely, it’s just the slope that was gone.

So, rather than dump the keyboard, I did some digging and found the VersaTech Keyboard Wedge, which is a piece of thick, tough foam cut at a 10degree angle, and big enough for the keyboard. It’s a little pricy ($40 bucks shipped, more than a replacement keyboard) but this foam isn’t going anywhere, and my keyboard is nice and negatively sloped again.

This wedge would also work well with your existing keyboard, giving it a perfect negative slope, if you don’t want to buy the MS product for some reason.

For reasons I don’t understand, if you’re running linux inside of Parallels on a mac, you can’t just add a usb flash drive and have it recognized.

However, you CAN make it work, you just have to work at it.

Here’s what works for me:

1. Create a new vm, point it at a knoppix cd.
2. Edit the USB controller settings and make sure it is NOT autocapturing devices
3. WITHOUT Parallels running, insert the usb stick.
4. Open the finder. If the usb stick is mounted, unmount it. It won’t work with it mounted.
5. Start your VM. At the knoppix prompt, enter “knoppix irqpoll”. You can add other settings, like “lang=us 2″
6. Let it boot
7. Now, pull down the devices menu, go to the usb sub menu, and capture your memory stick
8. Wait. Linux will auto discover the stick. it will throw out some errors about irq9 being ignored, and then capture the stick as a scsi device
9. Now you can use it as you want.

We use NoCat extensively, and we have peak usages of > 1100 users actively logged in at the same time, with another good 3000 or so people actively using wireless and holding a dhcp lease.

We recently started experiencing slowdowns, where it would take minutes for NoCat gateways to actually return a page (status, capture, actually authenticate and redirect, etc). This was caused by a simple mistake in their child reaping, documented below.

It’s important to note that in a captive portal solution, the gateway is MUCH busier than the number of authenticated users suggests; authenticated users usually don’t impact the cpu much (they’re just permit rules in the underlying firewall). It’s unauthenticated users who hammer the system. Every weather widget, RSS request, twitter status update, etc, etc that’s happening automatically on port 80 is being captured (silently) by the gateway. So we need to be sure our forking is smart.

The root cause of the slowdown was that it was reaping children using the wait() call. wait() is a blocking call. This means that the software, if it had any children forked out, would block until a child (any child) exited, and then processing would continue. The server would fork off enough threads to handle any children waiting, and then come back and block again for a child to exit. This is ok at low loads, but not good when you’re at high loads (or there’s a packet loss problem, common in wireless, causing a thread to run slow, etc).

The fix: Change wait() to waitpid(-1,NOHANG). Now, it’s non blocking. Performance is much, much better.

--- Gateway.pm  (revision 667)
+++ Gateway.pm  (working copy)
@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@
 use IO::Socket;
 use IO::Select;
 use IO::Pipe;
+use POSIX ":sys_wait_h";
 use NoCat qw( PERMIT DENY PUBLIC MEMBER OWNER LOGIN ANY );
 use vars qw( @ISA @REQUIRED @EXPORT_OK *FILE );
 use strict;
@@ -93,6 +94,7 @@
     my $self   = shift;
     my $kids   = 0;
     my $hup = 0;
+    my $childPid;
 
     return unless $self->bind_socket;
 
@@ -143,10 +145,10 @@
         }
 
        # See if any kids have expired, reap zombies
-       if ( $kids ) {
-           1 until ( wait == -1 );
-           $kids = 0;
-       }
+        do {
+            $childPid = waitpid(-1, WNOHANG);
+           $kids-- if $childPid>0;
+        } until $childPid<=0;
 
     } # loop forever
 }

It’s that time again for me, where I upgrade the home file server and re-purpose some old hard drives. And with the upcoming Time Machine backup program in the upcoming MacOS X 10.5, an external 300GB drive makes a lot of sense here.

But, oddly, Disk Utility won’t format the darn thing. The drive was on a linux server, and it sees it, lets me configure the partition, but then it hangs forever, not apparently doing anything.

Some searching turned up this excellent article , or actually, the second comment. It describes the exact problem, and points out that you can format the drive nearly instantly in windows with the MacDrive tool from MediaFour .

Download the trial version and install it, it does the trick (limited to 5 days though). I did this in Parallels, actually. If you want to do it this way, force-quit your hung Disk Utility window, then remove and reconnect the drive. Start Parrallels, install the software, then click on the little usb icon in the bottom left corner of your window and capture your external drive (listed as “PATA IDE Bridge” for me). Then run MacDrive, format it (took 60s), release the drive from the usb tab and it should be mounted in your finder already.

The price is not even unreasonable, $50 or $20 for an upgrade. I see old versions on ebay for as low as $1 if you want to be legal.

For the longest time, I depended on .zshrc on the target machine to set the title in my (xterm|iTerm) window title. This has one drawback– if the target host doesn’t have my .zshrc (or support zsh), no title. And this bit me nastily the other day when I did something in the wrong window.

Enter this new .zshrc function, which works by setting the xterm title sequence:

alias ssh="sshWithTitle";
 
function sshWithTitle(){
    local newTitle=$1
    print -Pn "\e]0;$newTitle \a"
    \ssh $*
 
}
 
alias telnet="telnetWithTitle";
function telnetWithTitle(){
    local newTitle=$1
    print -Pn "\e]0;$newTitle \a"
    \telnet $*
}

### set title block
HOSTTITLE=${(%):-%n@%m}
TITLE=$HOSTTITLE
 
# make sure we're in an xterm!
case $TERM in (xterm*|rxvt|screen)
    precmd () { print -Pn "\e]0;$TITLE \a" }
    preexec () { print -Pn "\e]0;$TITLE \a" }
    ;;
esac
 
function title (){
   if (( ${#argv} == 0 )); then
            TITLE=$HOSTTITLE
            return
   fi
   TITLE=$*
}
#### end set-title-block

And to think I’ve been cleaning with crazy stuff like chemicals and oranges when I could have been using parsley.

Update 12/15/06: You might check out the new Parallels Transporter beta, http://forum.parallels.com/thread5999.html It looks like this will do all the below, but without the ftp
server in the middle?

Please note that you absolutely require at least Parallels build 1940 to run G4U.

1. On your new mac, go to the Accounts control panel and create a user named “install”. Give it a password. You’ll need this account later.
2. While you’re in the control panels, go to Sharing and enable the FTP server.
3. On your OLD mac:
4. download the g4u (”ghost for unix”) iso at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-1.17.iso.zip . Unzip
5. Fire up your Virtual PC, and capture the above ISO in your CDrom. Reboot if neccessary so that you boot off of it.
6. Make a note of how large this disk image is.
7. When you get a prompt, you want to copy your disk to your new server. Assuming you have one disk and one partition on this disk, use something like uploaddisk yournewmacip diskimage.gz wd0 .
8. wd0 is the name that g4u knows your first disk as.
9. diskimage.gz is the name your disk will be saved as on your new mac
10. Wait until the disk is entirely copied. At this point you can close your virtual pc program.
11. Now, go to your NEW mac
12. Download the g4u (”ghost for unix”) iso at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-1.17.iso.zip . Unzip
13. Fire up Parallels and create a new guest OS. Give it a hard drive at least as large as what the Virutal PC guest had
14. Boot your new GuestOS. Capture the G4U iso, and reboot the guest if necessary to boot it.
15. When it’s finished booting, run the following command to download and unpack your disk image: slurpdisk localhost diskimage.gz
16. Wait for this to finish.
17. Uncapture the cd rom, and reboot your GuestOS.
18. Go to your sharing control panel, and turn off FTP
19. Go to your accounts panel, and delete the install account

At this point, you should have a working copy of your original Guest OS.

For more information, please see the G4U home page at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

So, we bought a (small) entertainment center, just 39″ wide, exactly as wide as our 42″ diagonal tv. It’s similar to this but less wide.
So, when we set it up, it has enough room for the big AV reciever, and for the Comcast moto 6412 DVR (and the soon-to-be-ours tivo series 3), dvd player, and everything else. It fits in the corner. It’s nice. But it’s very poorly venelated (read: none. Two small holes in back for cables, and not even holes in the center support/divider for cables left to right.

So when we set things up, our awesome (not) Moto DVR, which doesn’t even have a fan, immediately started overheating, which caused it to start mis-digitizing shows. When watching, the output would be screwy, and worse the audio would drop out for 3-5 seconds at a time. Very not cool.
So here’s the fix, and it’s not very expensive. Buy some very quiet 120mm case fans, a dc power adapter, rewire slightly, cut some holes, and you have a super silent but cool entertainment center.

1. Aquire 2 quiet PC case fans. I bought a pair of these nexus 120mm fans (22db) and they are QUIET. The only move about 30CFM, but if you have one blowing in and one blowing out you’re silent and replacing “all” the air in your EC every minute. $28
2. Buy 4 120mm cast fan grills. two for each fan, inside and out. Frys has them or buy them from any pc supply joint, including the above. $10
3. You’ll need bolts and nuts. Make sure they’re at least 2″ long and fit through the fan. Get some washers too. $3 at Lowes.
4. Buy a 12V power supply that puts out at least .6a. I went with this one from radio shack, which already has an adaptaplug end. I picked the adjustable voltage because I was worried about possible noise, but this turned out not to be an issue. Much cheaper online than in the stores. $18
5. 2 Adaptaplug ends, 2 extension cords, and a Y splitter (which I only found on ebay). Actually, buy all of this on ebay you can. Ebay got me parts for $2 ea, as opposed to 7 or 8ea at the store or online. ~~$15 total

Installing

1. When you get all of this, strip the ends off the fan and wire in the adaptaplug ends (you want the red and black wires, ignore the yellow and cut it short). Test that the fan works before you try to install it. Use the Y and the extension cords to run the cable into your entertainment center. Wrap the connections up well with electrical tape or even better, heat shrink tubing.
2. Cut two holes in the back of your entertainment center, up high (or high and low), about 4.2″ in diameter, using a fan cover as a template. Be careful to make sure there’s enough cardboard arround the sides to hold the screws up!
3. Drill holes through the carboard at the four corners using your 120mm fan grill as the guide again. Make sure the bit is larger than your bolts! You’ll need it to work the bolts arround a little to get into the fans.
4. Mounting:

 outside                                 cardboard back        inside
(bolt) (washer) (fan grill)               |                 (fan) (fan grill) (bolt)

5. Tighten everything as tight as possible to prevent noise. Be sure you install one fan to blow in, and one fan to blow out.
6. Then, if you have a partition in your entertainment center, drill 2.5″ holes (using a hole driller) in 4 appropriate places (in mine, 2 up top, 2 below) so that there is airflow left and right without compromising the structural integrity. You can also use these holes for cabling from side to side w/o going out the back. Paint the wood black (or color with a sharpie!) so that the holes aren’t obvious from outside the cabinet.
7. Plug in the fans, they should both spin. You won’t notice a lot of airflow, but there should be some. Some is all you need.
8. Put your entertainment hardware back, close the doors, and enjoy. My entertainment center with doors closed is cool, and the DVR is barely warmer than room temp now.

To give you an idea of how quiet it was, with the tv off, my wife didn’t know I installed the fans until I told her.
Note: I initially tried to buy AC powered fans which supposedly were only 32db. When I got them, they were loud. When I installed them, they were LOUD LOUD, way too loud to keep installed. I think part of the problem was not only that they’re louder than 32db (manufacturer exaggeration?) but also if you’re putting too much air into a small area, the cardboard back on most modern diy furniture will act like a speaker diagphram. And these were 70cfm fans! I’d suggest skipping the AC

Ok, i’ve been bad, and haven’t updated.

Short version is: Cast is off. Kara is ultra happy, crawling and sitting and playing. Parents are still playing catchup on sleep and work.

Everyone, though, is much happier. Thanks to everyone who supported us last for the last month!

Found in a comment on version tracker that will (finally) let you set your delete key on your mac to send backspace (important to me because routers don’t do terminal types as well as they should) and reposting it here to share:

End your delete-should-backspace woes when using Vim remotely with iTerm by adding one simple keyboard mapping. Go to iTerm preferences, Profiles, Keyboard, choose Profile=Global, add this mapping…

Key: delete
Action: send hex code
Hex code: 0×08

Tell your bookmarks to use the Global keyboard setting.

In addition to the whole cast thing, kara has a cold. I’m sure she got it either at her naming party or at my cousin’s daughter’s birthday party, but in any case, sniffles and caughing up phlegm.

On the good side, today was the first day of full time help. Shanyee is the sister of a friend of Leah’s, and a friend in her own right. Between Shanyee’s help, and her daughter’s (kara LOVES kids, and was just enthralled) today wasn’t so bad.

Until bedtime. We started the bedtime ritual a little early, because she was much more tired than usual, with the short naps due to the cold. This went well until she suddenly started inconsolably. And I mean inconsolably. For almost 40 minutes, she was screaming and screaming and crying, and we’d try something, and she’d suck her fingers for a moment and then return to crying.

We even called the peds right before they called and all they could suggest is sending us an ambulance to ride to the hospital. We decided to wait a half hour and if she hadn’t settled down by the time the tylenol had kicked in, we’d call back and do it.
Fortunately, we had left the bedroom by this time, and leah was outside bouncing kara arround and singing, and she finally after 15 minutes let out a string of burps. Gas. We were afraid we’d have go to the hospital to crack the cast off because we thought she was in pain from pinching or something and it was “just” gas.

As always, Leah’s the hero.

No matter how hard we try, we can’t seem to remember that because she can’t MOVE none of her body processes are working again. It’s like having a newborn again except you can’t put her on her back.

sigh.

Saturday morning, my wife fell down on the stairs while carrying Kara down after a nap. Leah is fine, but while she was able to mostly cushion Kara, the wierd angle everyone toppled at caused kara to bang her knee on the stairs.

After some initial crying, we thought everything was ok, and peds visits both sat and sunday gave us doctors opinions of “probably everything is ok, but let’s be careful and take an xray”. Kara was a little sensitive if we bent the leg, and she was definitely not taking weight on it, and she was kinda crawling without using that leg, but the toes and feet were moving and stuff and so everyone involved including doctors said it was probably just a painful bruise of some kind.,

Unfortunately, the xray monday showed that her femur is broken. It’s a very “small” break, close to hairline, but femur breaks are bad.

Kara is now in a half body cast, starting at above her waist and covering both her legs, the ok one halfway and the not ok one down and covering everything but her toes. We haven’t even figured out how to prop her upright, and that’ll be fun.

The “good” news is that at Kara’s age, it usually only takes about 30 days for this type of fracture to heal. The bad news is that, really, this is going to be an unpleasant month for Kara and thus for us. She’s effectively as helpless as a newborn, except she’s as advanced as a 8mo old, just started crawling last weekend (!) and needs to be kept involved, active, and happy.
So 30 days started monday, aug 7. If we’re lucky, our anniversary present this year will be a daughter who can sit in a chair again.

I enjoy a national brand of tea, but it costs about $1/bottle. Very very yummy, but that gets expensive. And since one of my techniques for managing hyperactivity is a non stop stream of flavor (pop right now) I’d like to stop buying and drinking so much soda, it’s not great for you, and I don’t relish explaining to my daughter some day why mom and dad drink a lot of pop but she can’t have any.
So, here, below, I present the following recipie (cribbed and modified from various sources online, and tested for my tastes) for a nice strong diet lemon tea.

Ahead of time: buy one bag of granular splenda (the big bag cost me $8.99 at jewel), and one large container of Lemon juice from concentrate (the generic 1 qt at Jewel cost $2.99). Also buy a box of Lipton tea bags (the yellow box black tea, the one that’s “orange pekoe and pekoe cut black tea”).
Bring 3 quarts of water to a high boil in a covered pan then take it off the fire and move to another burner. Put 5 Lipton tea bags (use 7 if decaf) in the water, and re cover. Let sit for an hour.

After 1 hour, pour into a large pitcher. Add 3/4 cup of splenda, and 1/2 cup lemon juice. Mix well and chill.

After it’s chilled, taste.

By my count (I forgot to note the cost of the tea), this works out to about $1.15 per 3 quarts of tea, or roughly .14 c per 12 oz container. Given that I drink about 6-8 12 oz cans of soda a work day, that’s a savings of almost $9/day for me over switching to pre packaged tea.