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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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
 }