Author: paul

my existential novel

“Mother died yesterday. Or was it today?”

So runs the opening of Camus’ “l’etranger”, variously translated as “The Stranger” or “The Outsider.”

It was today, somewhere between 1 and 2 am, that my mother died. We hadn’t spoken in any meaningful way in 30 years, so we weren’t exactly close.

The best summation I have for how the past 48 hours have gone for me is that I feel bad that I don’t feel worse. After all, losing the person who brought you into the world is a milestone for most people.

I first learned she was gravely ill Friday night, about 11 pm, in a rather roundabout way: an aunt with whom I have never had a close relationship telephoned from England earlier in the day to say she wanted to speak to me personally. When the timezones permitted, she told me what was happening: cancer everywhere, no hope of recovery, thought I might want to know.

The best case was that she might last the week, but her suffering ended just a day later.

home-rolled engineering

I ended up returning my cycling computer/odometer this weekend and getting a new one. I have the Sigma BC 400, a really basic one.

It turns out the first one may have been OK, but Sigma evidently cuts corners (and costs) on the parts. The salesguy at REI mentioned that sometimes the magnets are duff, so when this one worked when I tested it, but didn’t on the bike, I simultaneously figured out how it worked and why it didn’t, if that makes sense.

I pulled a super-powerful ceramic magnet from a box I had on hand from another project (doesn’t everyone have some of these?) and lo, it worked fine. The new magnet has about the same dimensions as a hearing aid/button battery, so some packing tape to hold it in place on top of the other one (it has a fitting to clip onto a spoke) and all is well.

I’d include a URL but the folks at Sigma are so clever, their site is all Flash-driven: must have used all the cash they saved on useless magnets . . . .

The way it works is simple: the computer is about the size of digital watch and connects to a little sensor mounted on your front fork. Once you set your wheel size, the magnet passing the sensor sends a signal to the computer which then calculates speed, records distance, etc.

now with Apache2

I decided to migrate to Apache 2. No compelling reason. I noticed that a portupgrade run had done something nasty to my existing Apache 1.3 installation and decided I’d rather switch than fight.

I think it’s more responsive but it could just be that new car smell . . . I’m sure I’ll never put it to the test.

translation tool needed: pkgdb rpm database

I like rpm even less than netinfo, but FreeBSD supports it, in a way, through its Linux emulation layer.

I was trying to install KRSS and after running into the usual issues with KDE apps not being able to find the QT libraries (the most popular query in the KDE support forums), I decided to try the rpm approach.

Well, it almost worked right out of the box. I needed a symlink:

ln -s /usr/compat/linux/var/lib/rpm /var/lib

Then I discovered the insurmountable opportunity.

error: failed dependencies:
libDCOP.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libfreetype.so.6 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libGL.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libGLU.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libjpeg.so.62 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkdecore.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkdeprint.so.0 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkdesu.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkdeui.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkfile.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkhtml.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkio.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkjava.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkparts.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkssl.so.2 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libksycoca.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
liblcms.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libmng.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libpng.so.2 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libqt.so.2 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libXft.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libXrender.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1.3) is needed by krss-2.6-2.6

Obviously, I have all this stuff installed, but in my FreeBSD database (actually just a bunch of ASCII files). Some way of making rpm and the pkgdb aware of what each other is keeping track of would be a Good Thing.

samba tips for OS X

I had to figure out to make samba work on OS X today, and rather than spend any time looking for existing documents, I worked out my own solution.

I installed the fink package and got version 2.2.5 installed. As usual there was some fumbling around with smbpasswd (doesn’t exist on OS X and the fink package doesn’t create it for you). So I had to pull a make_smbpasswd script from another working samba installation to get that working.

See the MORE link below for details on all the changes.

Then I had to add some stuff to inetd.conf and services, the latter being a stanza in the netinfo database. My love for netinfo being well-documented, I made the changes my own way.

Finally, I had to add 3 lines to inetd.conf (I wonder when Apple will switch to xinetd? and if I switched, what would it wreck?).

I have more fun working with OS X than the other OSes I have worked with, even on the command line. Gotta get that iBook . . . .
Continue reading “samba tips for OS X”

simplicity as the mother of innovation

A confluence of events has me thinking about data storage. A friend dropped me a note containing a proposal I can’t talk much about other than to say it was about storage; I have also been following a thread on the Open Darwin discussion list about mounting ftp-based stores as filesystems; and last of all I somehow wiped out this laptop’s disk layout and partitioning scheme, meaning I may never be able to reboot: backing up what I have became important.

Anyway, in the course of this, as I found myself making backups of my home directory and realizing that I have appletalk/IP, samba/cifs, and nfs all running here, I was reminded that they all require different incantations to make them work. In some case they’re unidirectional: UNIX, including OS X, can share appletalk but only OS X can mount appletalk volumes, while all of them can share and mount NFS filesystems. I haven’t tested samba, though I have mounted and written to samba shares from UNIX and Windows here.

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ad0s2a 128990 42774 75898 36% /
/dev/ad0s2f 257998 532 236828 0% /tmp
/dev/ad0s2g 7179502 3322530 3282612 50% /usr
/dev/ad0s2e 257998 228222 9138 96% /var
procfs 4 4 0 100% /proc
pink:/Network/iso 11642580 7373720 4268860 63% /mnt/tmp < - NFS mount from OS X //PAUL@BLUE/PAUL 5853056 2595712 3257344 44% /mnt/smb <- samba mount from FreeBSD //PAUL@RED/PAUL 7302272 5239424 2062848 72% /mnt/red <- samba mount from FreeBSD
Wouldn't it be easier if there was a super-command (like attach?) that could automagically determine what protocols were available between host A and B and just handle the mounting of the filesystem? You could prioritize it, of course: hosts connecting from some networks might connect with appletalk or samba, while others might be offered ftp only.

OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) offers this as a feature: "Mount ftp servers directly in Finder", and here is a mention of mount_ftp and ftp.fs possibly being present in Jaguar. Get your advance orders in now . . .

KDE offers something like this but I've never used it. I may try it now to see how close I am to what they have.

a sobering sight

a house near mine was demolished today: it was old and rundown, and likely had not been lived in for years.

It took two men with an excavator less than a day to destroy the whole house and put the pieces in dumpsters (only three were needed, as far as I could tell). They were halfway through it by 12:30 and there was nothing left but a pile of bricks that had been the chimney stack and a few chunks of concrete foundation by 4 PM.

A fire would take longer and leave more remains . . . .

ouch. even website access will be down?

The Seattle Public Library – Press Release –

All Seattle Public Libraries, excluding the *Washington Talking Book & Braille Library, will close Monday, Aug. 26 through Sunday, Sept. 1 due to citywide budget cuts.
[ . . . . ]
The entire Web site will be shut down – www.spl.org will not be available. That means on-line computer sign-ups, Libraries for All information, the on-line reference service, and other features, will not be available.

Now that hurts. I’m not sure why the website needs to be down, unless they’re trying to make a point. I don’t completely disagree, but I hope it doesn’t undermine the popularity of the online web services.

the Altamont of blogging

Just Another Cultural Co-Op? / Blogging hits the mainstream, for better or worse

Blogging “punctures the self-importance of gatekeepers, ombudsmen, media critics, J-school profs and everybody else who is institutionally biased toward defending the values of monopolist daily newspapers,” says Matt Welch. “It has allowed many people to realize that the weird retired guy down the street is a better and more interesting writer than anyone on the local op-ed page.”

If this keeps up, perhaps we’ll see more and more of the trade schools that have insinuated their way into higher education wither and die.

If a broad, humanities-based education or solid life experience were good enough for the founders of this country, it should be good enough for the rest of us.

It is odd how we have moved over the past 200-300 years from producers of our own entertainment to consumers. How many people today play music or sing or write for the pleasure of it and to share with others? I’m not talking about journals and novels in progress but stuff to share after dinner. This wasn’t uncommon years ago, but with the advent of commercial media, particularly broadcast media, we have looked to others to do that for us.

Perhaps the weblog ethic will spread and more people will do their thing.
from John