Fiddler’s Bid
Thursday, 7 November 2002, 6:18 pm
Last night we strolled off to The Powerhouse for a performance by Scottish — or rather Shetland Islands — group Fiddler’s Bid
These six guys and a girl are a fairly traditional folk group — four fiddles, piano, bass and rhythm guitar, with occasional harp and viola — with a pleasant mix of older tunes and their own pieces. The intertwining but quite distinct voices of the four fiddles soared and swooped gloriously, while the rhythm section provided an unusually subtle and supple foundation.
One thing that came through clearly was an expression of a culture and heritage quite distinct from that of mainland Scotland. You can hear in their set the voices of skorries and selkies, the slap of waves on the side of a boat, and the mad jigging of the trows. It was obvious for these musicians that the folk tradition is not a shrivelled dead thing under glass, but an ongoing thread of activity stretching from time past beyond memory and continuing on into the hazy future.
A grand night indeed.
Much too much too much.
Monday, 4 November 2002, 7:21 pm
One of these days, in my copious spare time, I must sit down and write out a list of everything that I’ve been
meaning to do. Such as write out a to-do list. That’s been the problem for a while, I think: my to-do list has
grown faster than I can do. And many of the items on it have not 
been simple things to do, but grand sweeping reconstructions, the whole
bringing-order-forth-from-chaos sort of deal. All of which can lead to a certain feeling of never actually
getting anything done, despite the furious activity.
I’ve been considering some sort of outliner. Until I realised that’s actually replacing one sort of list with another sort of list. So. I’m going to expunge the to-do list. Obliterate it. Scrape the wax, and return to a tabula rasa. Instead, I’ll make a simple list of projects, in a folder called “Projects”, with sub-folders if I have snippets and wisps of resources and references. Then my to-do list can revert to being a handful of things to do in the next few days. Buy milk, change the kitty-litter tray. Separate the seas and the earth. Excuse me while I note that down on my Palm’s to-do list.
On another matter, I noticed that Apple have rather cheekily put up a page listing all the CSS bugs in Micro$oft Internet Explorer. Handy reference, that, and explains one or two things I’d puzzled over. It must be about time to see what’s happening with Opera. I played with the latest beta, and it’s starting to look like a decent alternative. Off I go…
Rant Of The Day IV — Godot Redux
Tuesday, 22 October 2002, 5:31 pm
The one thing you can say about Bjelke-Petersen is that he made the trains run on time. These days, on the Brisbane suburban network, Queensland Rail treats timetables as guidelines, mere whymsical hints of when the train will creep away from the platform.
Take the 4:16 from Roma Street. 4:27, 4:21, the occasional 4:20 if the driver is feeling frisky, but never 4:16. Not once. So, a hint to ArchDuke President-for-life where-are-the-cameras Beattie. One step to encouraging Brisbane to abandon its 4.7 cars/household habit is to make the trains run on time. Everything else you do will be forgiven and in time forgotten.
On another matter: Nick insists that the rather startling review of Semicolon is not the result of his offer to the reporter to not sleep with her.
Expunging Daemons…
Saturday, 19 October 2002, 3:24 pm
A quick glance at /System/Library/StartupItems/Sendmail/Sendmail reveals an obvious bug (which I will, indeed, mention to Apple: the sendmail startup script launches two daemons, but only kills of one of them on stop or restart. I’ve gone back in time and altered the TickleSendmail script described below to take care of that little problem.
Thinking is in progress…
Friday, 18 October 2002, 8:15 pm
Hmm. There may be still something funny going on with sendmail. I just noticed that the Sendmail startup script doesn’t shut down both sendmail processes. Stay tuned.
Sendmail And The Single Mac
Thursday, 17 October 2002, 8:24 PM
There are several very good articles that have been published about getting sendmail working under OS X 10.2 (aka Jaguar). Among these are Dana Dawson’s How to Enable Local UNIX Mail in Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), and the series of articles by James Davidson at the O’Reilly MacDevCenter, particularly the eponymous Configuring sendmail on Jaguar. These outstanding resources are perfect for anyone wanting to get sendmail on a Mac that’s permanently connected to a network, or to the Internet, but I found that they didn’t have a solution for my requirement: the ability to send mail via Mail.app from one account to another on the same Mac, and to send mail to and from shell scripts and daemons.
Before I upgraded to Jaguar, I had this working perfectly based on various articles published in late 2001 and early 2002. That method required various obscure tweaks to the Netinfo database, hand-editing sendmail.cf, and playing around with directory permissions. In hindsight it was more or less inevitable that the solution would stop working when I upgraded — minimising the number of hacks is one way to follow the Law of Least Astonishment. To this end, I wanted a solution that involved a minimum of obscure tweaks.
The solution I’ve come up with follows the same general pattern as other solutions:
- Edit /etc/hostconfig to make sendmail start at boot;
- Setup a POP or IMAP server to provide a way for Mail.app to get mail to and from sendmail;
- Stop sendmail complaining about the Mac having a group-writable root directory;
- Make sure sendmail can figure out the local host name and IP address;
- Setup an account in Mail.app.
Getting sendmail to start at boot is essentially trivial: launch Terminal.app and edit /etc/hostconfig as the super user (I’m going to assume, from here on, that if you want to do any of this stuff, you know how to use sudo, the Unix shell, and some sort of text editor like vi or pico). You want to change the line that says
MAILSERVER=-NO-
to read
MAILSERVER=-YES-
I won’t talk about how to get a POP or IMAP server up and running. The Dawson article describes how to get the free qpopper POP server from Qualcomm working, and the Davidson article explains how to set up an IMAP client. I ran up qpopper, which affects the way that the Mail.app account is set up. If an IMAP service is installed, the notes below on setting up Mail.app are irrelevant, and you’re on your own.
It used to be that sendmail had more security holes than Windows. Fortunately all known holes have been plugged in recent versions, as long as you don’t monkey with the configuration too much, or explicitly reopen the holes. Unfortunately this means that sendmail is incredibly paranoid and picky about it’s runtime environment. Two aspects of this are a major impediment to getting it up and running under Jaguar. Firstly, sendmail won’t start if certain directories have write permissions granted to the group. The other problem is that sendmail desperately wants to know where it is running, and where it’s getting requests for service from. While painful, this is a Very Good Thing, as by default the only people who can use the service to send mail are those you explicitly allow. Which means that evil scum-sucking spam merchants cannot use your Mac to relay junk mail while you’e on-line. Fixing the directory permissions behaviour is trivial, but the other behaviour proves to be incredibly tricky.
In order to alter the configuration of sendmail, you need to do the following from Terminal.app as the super user:
cd /usr/share/sendmail/conf/cf
cp generic-darwin.mc local.mc
You now need to edit local.mc to add the following three lines at the bottom:
FEATURE(`use_cw_file’)dnl
define(`confDONT_BLAME_SENDMAIL’,`GroupWritableDirPathSafe’)dnl
define(`confHOSTS_FILE’,`/etc/hosts’)dnl
When that is done, you use the m4 macro processor to build the configuration file
m4 ../m4/cf.m4 local.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf.new
cd /etc/mail
mv sendmail.cf sendmail.cf.old
mv sendmail.cf.new sendmail.cf
Something, somewhere, makes it very difficult for sendmail to figure out where requests are coming from when you try to talk to it after making the changes above and rebooting. At this stage I did all my testing from the command line in Terminal.app:
date | mail -v robert
The -v flag gives a verbose trace of what the mail program is getting back from sendmail, and shows pretty quickly if things are working or not. It’s also worth watching the /var/log/mail.log logfile. What I could see happening by the time I’d done all this was that sendmail either could not figure out where the requests were coming from, or knew where they were coming on and flatly refused to allow that source to relay mail. The last part is pretty easy to sort out by editing the file /etc/mail/local-host-names. This file is a simple list of hardwired places sendmail trusts because they are “local”. Each place is on a separate line, and is either an IP address or a hostname. It seems that there is something funny happening with Rendezvous: in the Sharing Preference Panel, I’d specified the Computer Name as something like “MyMac”, and accepted the default Rendezvous Name “MyMac.local”. As far as sendmail is concerned, it keeps getting requests for service from MyMac.local. Thus, I told it that was a local host by making /etc/mail/local-host-names contain:
MyMac.local.
MyMac.local
I also tried assigning a fixed IP address in the 192.168.x.x range, but sendmail still kept believing the local host was called MyMac.local. There is something profoundly weird going on with name resolution somewhere at the intersection of the BSD networking layer and Rendezvous. I’m hoping that the just-published “Mac OS X for Unix Geeks” will shed some light when I pick it up in a week or so. The weirdness is thus: while making all these changes, I’d been bouncing sendmail repeatedly using
/System/Library/StartupItems/Sendmail/Sendmail restart
After setting up local-host-names, everything was working brilliantly — until I restarted my Mac, and sendmail decided it had no idea where MyMac.local was, or (I suspect) where it was itself. I mucked around for at least 30 hours trying to resolve this, before giving up in disgust and putting in a hack. By the way, one thing I tried was putting the Rendezvous name in /etc/hosts. Don’t do this, it is a Very Bad Thing which resulted in profoundly bizarre behaviour of everything, including user accounts apparently disappearing. It seemed to horribly confuse the various magic daemons which go such a long way to making sure that appropriate magic happens in the BSD depths when you press the throbbing Aqua button. I cannot repeat this enough: minimize the amount of manual hacking you do down at that layer.
In the end, I decided that sendmail is probably starting up too early when the Mac boots. Apple tweaked the boot behaviour significantly with Jaguar, and it’s fairly aggressive about running startup jobs in parallel. I suspect that when sendmail starts up, it looks at the current operating environment, and mis-configures itself for the runtime environment you see after you’ve logged in. My hack was to put a little startup script in /Library/StartupItems to call the sendmail restart command. The following two files go in /Library/StartupItems/TickleSendmail.
The first is named StartupParameters.plist:
{
Description = "Tickle Sendmail";
Provides = ("TickleSendmail");
OrderPreference = "Last";
Uses = ("SMTP", "Network", "NetInfo", "DirectoryServices");
Messages =
{
start = "Starting TickleSendmail";
stop = "Stopping TickleSendmail";
};
}
and the shell script is named TickleSendmail:
#!/bin/sh
. /etc/rc.common
APPNAME=${0##*/}
LOGFIL=/var/log/$APPNAME.log
ConsoleMessage "$APPNAME Begins"
# ask sendmail to stop
/System/Library/StartupItems/Sendmail/Sendmail stop
# tell the things the Sendmail script doesnt stop to stop
for PID in $(ps -ax | awk ’/sendmail/ {if ($0 !~ /grep/) print $1}’)
do
kill -TERM $PID
done
# tell sendmail to restart
/System/Library/StartupItems/Sendmail/Sendmail start
ConsoleMessage "$APPNAME Ends"
exit 0
You also should have a Resources directory containing (at least) an English.lproj subdirectory. Have a poke around in other startup items directories to find one to copy. If enough people are interested in this, and ask nicely, I’ll go nuts and turn this into an installable package.
Only two things are left to do. Number one is to put a .forward file in home directory of root, so that mail from the system will get forwarded to my account. I could also go nuts and set up mail aliases, but it’s not worth the effort for my purposes. I also suspect that I can make this all a bit more secure than it currently is, but again, it’s currently not completely worthwhile. I’m intending to try to get a cable connection fairly soon, and will fairly significantly alter this configuration then. Meanwhile, you need a POP account set up in Mail.app to allow sending and receiving mail.
You need to create a new Mail.app account. Call it whatever you like (I named mine “Unix Mail”.), and the account type specified as POP (if you’ve set up an IMAP server, you’re on your own). The Email Address is yourname@localhost, Full Name is whatever you like, and Incoming Mail Server is localhost. Set the User Name to yourname, and the Password is your normal login password. Of course you could probably set up the POP server to not require authentication, which removes the need for you to alter this password when you change your login password. The Outgoing Mail Server is localhost. I’ve set the Authentication for this (under Options) to None. One day I’ll tighten this up and get it going via SSL.
Under the Advanced tab, I ticked “Remove copy from server after retrieving a message” and specified “Right Away”. This will stop mail mounting up in /var/mail, which is a Good Thing.
There you have it. If you need help, feel free to ask, but I must warn you that I’m definitely no expert in the realm of network or sendmail configuration. This solution is, I repeat, only really suitable for Macs that stand alone, and connect to the internet via some sort of dialup account. I feel that it is the simplest possible solution I could come up with (yet) to allow simple exchange of mail between accounts on a stand alone Mac. I hope that it works for you, but your mileage may vary! In the long term, I’ll probably tweak this configuration, and turn this long monologue into a fully fleshed out how-to document. Feel free to email me lots of coffee.
With a Thousand Elephants
Wednesday, 16 October 2002, 10:24 AM
A good number of people are popping by this site and saying “hello” after seeing my gratuitious self promotion
in a .Mac forum about Homepage web sites. Hi, welcome, have fun.
Be nice to your
neighbours, commit acts of surreal inanity, and watch the full moon rising over water at least once before you
shuffle off your mortal coil.
I’m stuck at home today with a head cold, or hay fever, which threatens to make my sinuses explode, and leaves me with little ability to glue two cogent thoughts together. So rather than spend time in my apparently unending battle with sendmail, I thought I’d take the time to add at least one of the promised elephants. The other 999 are left to the reader’s imagination.
For several weeks I have been planning to sit down and write a description of how to get sendmail working under Jaguar without too much hacking about of the out-of-the-box configuration. I had sendmail working nicely under 10.1.x, but it stopped working under Jaguar, for any number of reasons, but mainly because I’d had to tweak too many things to get it working. The only problem is: I’m having trouble getting it working the way I want it to. Thinking is in progress.
Rant Of The Day III
Tuesday, 8 October 2002, 6:00:00 PM
It frustrates me that very few people understand how mind-numbingly tiring the act of programming can be. It looks so easy: sitting around, typing at a keyboard, occasionally pausing while a compile grinds through. What is not evident is that the programmer is, mentally, performing a feat akin to juggling cats. Exploding cats. While wearing boxing gloves, and blindfolded. One or two hours of that is ok, but eight hours? No thanks. By the time I add a bit of time off for lunch, and close to an hour of commuting on either end, my days are stretching out to eleven hours. It’s not uncommon for me to arrive home as exhausted as though I had carried Luciano Pavarotti down to the floor of the Grand Canyon and back. Without the benefit of it being good exercise. Those of you who know me personally: now do you understand my frequent utterance, “I’m getting too old for this”?
You Must Remember This
Saturday, Sat, 5 October 2002, 9:51:36 AM
You can never be too rich, or have too much RAM. If anyone asks my advice when buying a computer, I tell them that. I tell it to myself. And every time I buy a computer, I find six months later I should have bought more RAM. I trotted down the street to buy 128Mb the other day. RAM is so fatuously cheap at the moment that I left the store with 512Mb (thanks to some very good salesmanship on the part of Alex from Infinite Systems). Five minutes after installing it and rebooting, I’m smacking my forehead in full Homer Simpson mode: one of the best ways to speed up the performance of a Unix based system like OS X is to add memory. The jump in performance after going from 128Mb to 640Mb is like getting a new machine. So, gentle reader, if you’e running OS X, and think it’s slow, now is the time to rush out and buy RAM while it’s cheap. Trust me.
Rant Of The Day II
Wednesday, 2 October 2002, 6:15:17 PM
I wish Apple would slow down. Actually, I wish for a few weeks holiday, on a beach, with a laptop, so that I can catch up with this mad rush of toys they’re pushing out.
I get this “digital hub” thing. As a marketing logo, it works pretty well, and leads to nice looking glossy brochures. But it really sucks at explaining what’s going on. Most people look at the brochures and say “I don’t have an iPod or digital video camera, and there’s no OS X driver for my scanner. Oh, and I don’t want to pay $US99 for .Mac” This is valid and true. What the glossy brochures and marketroids aren’t showing is this big invisible thumb smearing the boundaries between the desktop, the internet and all those gizmos. This is a Very Cool Thing. Exciting Times Are Upon Us. A Golden Age Approaches.
“Wait!” you shriek, “that’s what Micro$oft are trying to do.” You’re right, gentle reader. None of these ideas are new. There are three big differences between MS and Apple here:
- Apple are building everything on a base of open, public standards, rather than trying to subvert and own them;
- In .Mac, Apple may have come up with a software subscription scheme that works;
- Steve Jobs wears cooler glasses than Bill Gates.
You may have expected me to say that Windows is a putrescent blight while OS X makes your hair strong, glossy and tangle free. This is self evident, and does not need restating. You may have expected me to claim that Apple’s applications don’t suck. This is not true, all software sucks, apart from BBedit. In general, Apple software merely sucks less than most.
There is an exception. I know that version 1.x software always needs improvement. I don’t mind that, because I know that a pretty good 1.x will grow up into a 2.x that rocks my world (unless it’s from Micro$oft). I’ve got to say, though, that iCal has me worried. It’s pretty, functional, and the ability to share calendars around in an IETF standard format is seriously cool and geeky. Heck, I could even knock out a seriously crufty awk script to mess with the calendar files. My God it’s slow though. More than 3 entries, and when you start or stop it, all the streetlights go dim. Somebody has really stuffed up performance-wise iCal seriously sucks. On a scale of 1 to 10, it goes all the way up to 11. Waiting for it to open and close is like hanging around hoping to be run over by a glacier. At least there will be a 1.1 out soon…
Here endeth today’s rant.
Addendum — 7:50 PM
I read a tip somewhere that if iCal was running slowly, try creating a new empty calendar, move everything into that calendar, throw the other calendars away, then recreate them and copy them back. It seems to work. I’ve been keeping an eye on the underlying files in ~/Library/Calendars, and had noticed that the files there get updated frequently, and that they were initially (that is to say, after I’d imported them from my Palm Desktop) quite large. This leads me to suspect that the Palm export process includes a lot of junk that iCal isn’t interested in, and that iCal does some fairly naive processing of the files. Given that the files are simply text files formatted according to RFC 2445, if iCal is mucking around trying to keep the data sorted in date entry, or something equally silly, the performance problems are not too suprising. You have to wonder whether they got some summer-holiday interns to write some of the code.
Rant Of The Day
Wednesday, 25 September 2002, 5:12:27 PM
At certain times of the year in Brisbane, such as Spring and Autumn, the drivers of the electric trains forget to take off their wooly jumpers. As the ambient temperature rises to the point where the tracks start to melt, they maintain their personal comfort by adjusting the air conditioning in the train to Antarctic levels. When the doors wheeze open at each stop, specially trained guards leap aboard with pry bars to lever frozen commuters off their seats.
The truly excruciating part is when some elephantine lard-ass decides to sit beside you. In this age of user-pays economic rationalism, why aren’t passengers charged by the number of seats they occupy. Not only would it ensure that those of us who give up more than half of our seats to the horizontally embarrased are not subsidising said seats, it would encourage these bloated blimps to lose weight. Nothing quite equals the torture which ensues when some vast lump waddles down the aisle and wedges their oleaginous bulk into the seat, leaving you crushed and smeared against the window, unable to move, a jagged pile of broken limbs and twisted backs, slowly freezing from the air conditioning.
Here endeth today’s rant.
Jaguar, starting to purr
Thursday, September 12, 2002 5:08 pm
My suspicions about the changes in startup behaviour and their effect on RunCron have been confirmed: in the abscence of any reason to believe that a StartupItems job depends on other StartupItems, Jaguar is a little too enthusiastic about starting things early. In other words, it doesn’t respect the OrderPreference tag in the plist. In order to make sure RunCron had access to all the resources it needed, it was necessary to explicitly list the StartupItems it depends on:
{
Description = "Housekeeping Launcher";
Provides = ("RunCron");
OrderPreference = "Last";
Requires = ("Core Services", "NetInfo", "DirectoryServices");
Uses = ("System Log", "SMTP");
Messages =
{
start = "Starting RunCron";
stop = "Stopping RunCron";
};
}
I also rejigged the script to make it a bit more standard, to use resources in the /etc/rc.common shell script, and to not bother launching the cron jobs in the background. I just had a thought as well: this approach will do strange things if cron launches the cleanup jobs on it’s own. It looks as though, by default, that doesn’t happen, so all is well with the world.
Jaguar
Wednesday, September 11, 2002 8:14 pm
If I don’t sit down and get this written right now, it will never get written. The past four or five days have been technologically more complicated and busy than I expected. Despite all my years of experience with computers, I keep forgetting rule number one: everything costs more and takes longer. I sat down last Friday evening to upgrade to 10.2 — Jaguar — armed with copious notes gleaned from web logs and journal articles, detailing the experience of other folk. Which is just as well, because otherwise I think I would have gotten into an awful mess.
Before I say anything more, I’ll mention that Jaguar rocks. It also rolls, and makes my day. Seriously, this is one seriously good upgrade, and really moves OS X into the realms of not-beta. My experience of it so far is that it is unambiguously faster, and all the minor user interface alterations are definite enhancements. There’s been a lot written about various major application upgrades — Sherlock 3, iChat, iTunes 3, I won’t bore you raving about them. Three things I’ve found that I haven’t seen many raves about: Keychain Access finally has a proper user interface, and is scriptable again; Preview swings when fed multiple page PDF documents; and Backup has gained most of the enhancements users have asked for.
I’m not completely sure how much use I’ll get out of iChat. For me it’s a kind of fun toy, and I’ve popped into the “Jaguar” chat room a few times this week, but its not likely to be a major communications medium for me as long as we have a dialup connection. Apple are really doing a good job of getting solid applications out and into the hands of users. They fumbled the PR ball with the initial handling of pricing for Jaguar and .Mac, but some of the promises they made about upcoming software are bearing fruit, and they’ve started to pop out additional benefits for .Mac subscribers. It’s almost as though they’re finally in a position to redirect some of the software engineering effort that went into OS X into other areas of the enterprise. Exciting stuff. DNA would have loved it.
The upgrade itself went reasonably well. Michael Frake’s article and this blog give really good coverage of the “clean install” process, where the installer carefully moves a lot of things sideways before doing a fresh install. One thing it is supposed to do is move users back into place after a clean install. I should have guessed something was a bit odd when I did the install, as the checkbox to turn that process on was greyed out. Thus everything was preserved, but after the install finished, I discovered I had to recreate the users, and reconfigure my internet connection settings. That got a bit exciting, as I couldn’t remember the password — it was stored in Keychain, which I couldn’t initially get up, because the user hadn’t been recreated… Anyway, more through luck than planning, I created the users in the same order I had done on the initial installation, so the new users got the same underlying user and group IDs. It was a fairly straight forward exercise, although mind numbingly tedious, to enable the ’root’ account, and move applications and user folders back into place. The ditto command line tool was very useful through this, as it made cloning directories and their contents trivial, if very dull. In the end, even if it was a pain in the neck, this method gave me the chance to be selective about what preference and other files got moved back into place.
There has been a lot of reports of people having problems after upgrade. Reading them, it sounds like most of them are either because a clean install was not done, or because people have installed all sorts of odd hacks which upset their systems. Applying Occam’s Razor, I seem to have avoided most hassles. I had a few difficulties with iMovie 2.1.1 — the previous iMovie 2.1 was left behind in a sub-folder in Applications, and all the plugins were under their. It took a little bit of tinkering and reading to figure out that the plugins now needed to go in ~/Library/iMovie/Plug-Ins, and then to figure out which bits needed to be moved. I also found that Virex was quite confused, and needed to be removed and reinstalled before it could figure out where it’s data files were. It’s possible that was something that I neglected to recover from the archived previous system location.
The thing which gave me the most grief — and still has some niggling errors — was the RunCron shell script I’d set up to run once a day when the system was booted. In part it was because I was trying to get sendmail working again. I’d referenced Dana Dawson’s article which described enabling sendmail and the free Qpopper POP3 server from Qualcomm. Dana’s article contains a number of workarounds for sendmail’s weirdness with domain name resolution, from the point of view of a system with a static IP address on a small LAN. I tried modifiying the setup there for my dialup situation, and everything came horribly unstuck. I don’t know whether it was a firewall problem or a DNS problem, but the situation degenerated to the point where I could not communicate at all. In the end I backtracked a long way, and adopted Chris Stone’s original ideas from the O’Reilly articles he wrote in January 2002. As it stands, I’ve told sendmail to use the local /etc/hosts for domain name resolution, and set up the ’sendmail’ location in the netinfo database telling sendmail to use sendmail.cf for it’s configuration. This works for me. I’ll get around to writing up this configuration properly in a few days, once I sort out some of the other glitches. It’s pretty obvious that I need to read and grok the man pages for some of the underlying network and configuration daemons, as they’re not operating in quite the way I thought they were. In the middle of all of this, I’m not completely certain that Brian Hill’s Brickhouse firewall may not have closed all ports down in some bizarre way. For the time being I’ll use the inbuilt firewall configuration Preference panel, which seems more than adequate.
RunCron is still playing up a bit. I think that the changes that Apple have made to the handling of StartupItems to reduce serialization of jobs may be causing RunCron to start a lot earlier than it should. In theory it is supposed to run last, but at the moment I haven’t configured it’s plist to spell out what services it depends on. Thinking is in progress.
What other things did I mean to write about. Hmm. For a start, grab a copy of the HTML color swatch that Travis Cripps has put together — if you do web authoring stuff, you’ll find it mind-bogglingly useful. Another mind-bending trip can be obtained from the site of Ray Kurzweill (yes, that Ray Kurzweill) — serious articles about seriously complicated visions of the future — well worth the trip. Ken Bereskin’s one of the product managers for OS X, and is running a blog full of juicy goodness, as is Max OS X Hints. Adam Wilt has set up a site which contains everything you need to know about digital video.
I’m off now to play with iCal, and with Alchemy Deluxe. Life is good.
Let’s try that again, again...
Wednesday, 4 September 2002 6:12 PM
My tax return returned today. I had neglected to put a zero in a box. All the boxes above which were to be added to fill in the empty box had zeros in them, but the missing zero in the total confused the ATO. Can you hear me grinding my teeth?
Wheels in motion
Tuesday, 3 September 2002 5:28:11
Progress, or at least movement, on all fronts. What has been going on recently? Apart from Jennifer dropping over to have some preliminary measurements for a fancy gown, a very busy Saturday gardening with Ciaran — it didn’t tire him out, as intended, but it certainly exhausted me — Steve and Fran expressing an interest in playing dress-up with Sable Rose at next year’s BMF, and generally creating technological chaos from order? All sorts of things, including rather too much time playing with Medal of Honour.
I attended an Apple show-and-tell yesterday — where I picked up a copy of OS X 10.2, with a free t-shirt thrown in — which was rather more interesting than a similar event almost exactly one year ago, but not for the obvious reasons. I will admit to being suitably impressed by the jaw-dropping performance of the latest G4 boxes. And I was really impressed by a demonstration of the power of BlueTooth — provided that enough hardware vendors get in on the act, this is potentially a paradigm-altering technology. What was really interesting was the crowd, in two respects. To begin with, it was much larger than last year, and had an obviously broader demographic spread. When presenters asked people to put their hands up if they were (in essence) potential switchers from the PC platform to Mac, easily 15%-20% responded.
The other striking response was when the presenters tried to determine how many people in the audience owned digital still and video cameras. The proportion was startling low (or at least the proportion prepared to put their hands up). This is a bit odd, because historically Australia has always been gadget mad — if it’s new and affordable, Australians will buy it. Maybe the price of consumer electronics has finally gotten too high here? Interesting to think about in light of Apple’s digital hub strategy.
Anyway, I must move on. I have a picnic to organise, dinner to eat, and mail to send. Oh, and I might watch the video again. Didn’t I mention that Jin Wong has sent a copy of the film that he put together earlier this year? There in the credits “Medieval Consultant: Robert Hook”.
Lights, Action, Etc.
Tuesday, 20 August 2002 8:42:32 AM
Last Sunday the boys and I got together to do a small photo shoot. I wanted to get some good shots of my military hose/doublet ensemble, and some shots of training that I could use for the Sable Rose gallery. Rather generously, Robert brought a digital video camera with him, so we shot about 25 minutes of footage with that as well.
My plan was — and still is — to put some very small QuickTime movies in the gallery of techniques from Talhoffer. Robert sent the camera home with me. I’d had my fingers crossed that my memory served me correctly and that I did indeed have a suitable FireWire cable stashed in my big-box-of-technical-bits. In less than ten minutes I’d cranked up iMovie, figured out how to connect the camera to both the Mac and to power so the batteries would recharge, and slurped all the footage down ready for editing. Amazing stuff. Next step: burn the raw footage onto a CD-ROM as Quicktime movie. I’d already figured out that I couldn’t fit the raw DV files onto a DVD — they came to about 4.8Gb, and a formatted DVD will fit about 4.2Gb — so I thought that CD-ROM would be the easiest way to get a copy of the footage to Chris. Robert can have the footage back on the camera’s tape.
Poke around the menus in iMovie. Select the export to Quicktime function. Look at the options, dislike all of them, and select the “Expert” mode. At that point, I fell off the chair, stunned by the complexity. I realised it was time to hit the book shops. My first instinct, as always, was to see what O’Reilly had, which reminded me that David Pogue had written a “Missing Manual” on iMovie which had received good reviews. Monday lunchtime, I was out trolling the shelves of bricks-and-mortar stores. Much to my surprise, McGill’s didn’t have it in stock. Fortunately one of the big chain bookstores did.
Over three days, I read the book cover-to-cover. If you have any interest in iMovie, I can strongly recommend the book to you. As well as being written in Pogue’s usual relaxed, conversational, and eminently readable style, it meets the usual standards of O’Reilly books in being concise, accurate and exactly what you need to know. I just wish I’d read it before we shot any footage. At least I’ll be better prepared next time. Easily half the book is devoted to basic principles of film making and editing, and it is worth reading for that alone.
It will be a few weeks before the snippets of film show up in the gallery. I need to concentrate on getting some of the existing still shots up. It has been a fairly technical few weeks, really. I’m getting close to the end of that run of activity, though, and to getting back into sewing and so forth.
I finally bit the bullet and paid for the .Mac subscription. I’m not thrilled about the price, but it is nice to have a simple Backup program, and the Virex virus scanning tool. Being the technical type, the first thing I did was find out how to run it as root via cron. The GUI interface will be useful from time to time, but it will be the command line version, running weekly in the background, that I rely on.
