Something or Nothing

2009-08-19T03:26:00.002-05:00

Love my Mac... one annoyance is if you have an NTFS partition in use for Bootcamp (to run Windows on the Mac), it will be mounted every time the system boots. I don't really need it mounted, it's just clutter that I eject anyway.

Thankfully since OS X is Unix, it's really easy to avoid.

Open or create the file /etc/fstab (with sudo), then paste in the line:

LABEL=BOOTCAMP  none    ntfs    rw,noauto       0       0

Change the text after the = to be whatever your drive is, although I'm not sure it supports spaces (maybe in quotes).

After that when you reboot the drive will not be mounted, however you can still mount it yourself with the disk utility.

2009-08-06T22:04:00.001-05:00

I've started a MobileMe trial, to see what it's all about. So far I think it's pretty sweet, works outstanding outside of the web interface. The website is nice, but that's not how I get to things. Gmail is great on the website, but it's very weird through IMAP. Definitely a lot of hoops to jump through. Google Calendar and Contacts work outstanding with the iPhone, but there's no good way to sync them with the system... there is a way, but it's unreliable. MobileMe fixes all of that, works great on the Mac and iPhone and probably a PC, and also on the website... though not as good on there. Still, I'm happy with it.

2009-07-05T09:09:00.002-05:00

Getting Gmail and IMAP working right with the Mac Mail.app is a lot easier than I had originally thought, once I discovered a neat, slightly hidden function.

To make Mail.app use [Gmail]/Trash for the trash folder, and thus move deleted emails there (instead of them being lost in the ether and staying in All Mail forever) click on [Gmail]/Trash then the Mailbox menu and Use This Mailbox For > Trash. Do the same thing with Sent, Drafts etc. Way easy!

Got it...

2009-07-03T08:16:00.005-05:00

2009-06-28T01:14:00.000-05:00

Going back home from Utah soon. Been a long month, lots of fun though. I miss home, but I think I will miss this place too.

2009-06-25T06:50:00.002-05:00

Seriously considering the purchase of a 15 inch Macbook Pro in the near future - with the student discount (and hey, I'll also get a free iPod Touch... will probably sell it). My three year old Thinkpad is feeling it's age. I get lots of freezes and overheating issues. It's fine for email and general use, but I tend to work it harder than it can handle. I fell in love with OS X again playing with it a few days in a row at the Apple store. Also think it will be much more useful with a better understanding of the terminal and Unix in general.

I don't know if I'll sell the Thinkpad on ebay or something, maybe give it to someone who could use it for the basics.

Tonight I upgraded my iPhone ot iPhone OS 3.0. I had been holding off since I am currently away from home, and thus the computer that I sync the phone with. I opened up iTunes in VirtualBox and managed to get most of the process going. Was just about done when the system overheated and restarted, so the whole process started over again. Unfortunately the old iPhone backup was also deleted. Not a really big issue. I manually reinstalled all the apps (and managed to fix an annoying issue where iPhone refused to log into my iTunes account), set up contacts to sync with Gmail again, and now am only missing my music and ringtones which I won't be able to get until I get home. Thankfully that's not too far away.

In other news, Adult Swim has the weirdest cartoons in the world.

2009-06-07T13:00:00.002-05:00

Gmail's IMAP implementation is very weird. Following their default instructions you will end up with a ton of messages in All Mail, as they are never being deleted, only "hidden". This is a behavior I don't want. when I delete a message I want it put in trash, where I can look and see if I need it for a little bit and it goes away after a longer while.

To do this in Thunderbird you have to change your Account Settings. In Server Settings you have to choose "Move it to the Trash Folder" in the when I delete a message field. You also have to quit thunderbird and modify the configuration to tell it that the trash folder is [Gmail]/Trash. This article says how to change the name.

2009-05-29T23:48:00.003-05:00

Ran into some problems synchronizing my music folder from Linux to Windows with rsync or Unison. The problem is sort of how Banshee names folders, but more how Windows supports them. In Linux a folder can end in a period, Banshee names a folder for the band t.a.t.u. to be t.a.t.u. NTFS does support directories that end in a period, but Windows does not (there are other Windowsisms that cripple NTFS too, sadly). Anyway, using rsync and Unison, the folders would be created in Windows but could not be written to, or easily deleted (since Windows can't reference them to be deleted!).

In the end I had to enable SMB sharing on Ubuntu and share the music folder, then use Allway Sync to copy them over. Now the t.a.t.u. folder is like T9128~1 but at least the files inside are readable by the Zune software.

A neat thing about those period files. You CAN create and delete them through the command line. You have to prefix the file name with \\?, so you could create \\?\c:\Users\SOMEONE\Desktop\Annoying.txt. and it would be stuck probably the whole time they had the computer.

2009-05-26T21:02:00.003-05:00

Cox DNS servers are a little annoying. If a page is not found, and it's not found in Yahoo's marketing search(?) it takes you to a Cox "enhanced error" page. People around the internet are quite angry about it.

What I don't get is why they don't bother reading the link that says "Can I opt-out?" - When you click it it gives you directions to use unencumbered DNS servers, which are 68.105.28.13 and 68.105.29.13. You have to set static DNS, but it's the same thing you would have to do to use OpenDNS or something else (things which are possibly slower).

2009-05-26T20:05:00.003-05:00

My current Firefox extensions / add-ons (because I'm bound to forget). I have deleted previous posts saying the same, as I really write these for my own benefit later on (like, when I forget to backup my profile and reinstall).

Adblock Plus
Delicious Bookmarks
FireGPG
NoScript
Read it Later
Personas for Firefox

Thunderbird extensions (installed from the Ubuntu repos)

Enigmail
DispMUA
Traybiff

2009-05-26T04:45:00.001-05:00

Oh yeah. We got a Wii. It's awesome and addictive.

I got Zelda, but have yet to even put it in. Have been playing Harvest Moon almost nonstop.

I got online and got a used copy of Animal Crossing for ~$20. Don't need the voice as I don't plan on being social, and don't know anyone who plays Animal Crossing. I have a feeling it will also be a surprise addiction like HM.

Sold my PS2 and a bunch of PS2 games. All the classic RPGs. I like the stories but never have time or patience to play them through.

2009-05-26T04:28:00.001-05:00

Other than Brady, I don't know anybody who keeps a blog and updates regularly. Such a change from back in the day.

BTW, reading random archives on here is an interesting look into myself. Even more odd is remembering events I posted about, but not many.

2009-05-26T04:03:00.002-05:00

I should get another external drive. For backups. No need to be enormous, less than 500GB would fit everything from this system.

2009-05-26T03:50:00.004-05:00

It's early. I woke up and can't get back to sleep. At first it was thinking of my PT test later today, now it's just musing. Classic style, like High School or something. I miss how simple things were, yet I was naive and didn't really realize it. I didn't realize a lot of things back then. I wish I knew then what I know now, or at least had the confidence I profess to have now (really, I do have more, but I am still pretty reserved socially). I guess I'm a little thoughtful when I can't sleep.

I miss home too. Not being dependent, just the area. And the people. I've known people back home for years, people here for less than three guaranteed. It does mean something. I wonder how I'm living differently within the multi-verse. Which me has the coolest life?

I have a decision coming up in 2011, affecting 2012. Do I stay in the military and go home. If I go home, I will have the new GI Bill which will pay for education from zero to a bachelors at a state college (plus housing, books, etc). I would probably do PSU, just because it's close, but maybe OSU would be a better fit? Will I even get out? Hard to say at this point. I know getting an education and working would be very interesting, especially if I was able to get into a cool area, but my decisions don't only affect myself.

Maybe I'll just move to Iceland, where Sigur Rós will drift over the glaciers.

Music

2009-05-18T00:32:00.003-05:00

Been doing a lot of playing with Music in Linux. I am moving all of my music over to Linux, where I will manage the library with Banshee, which supports iTunes-like file and folder renaming. I will be using rsync to keep the music files updated on my Windows box (which syncs with iPhone and Zune), and my media center, which will be playing music with MPD.

Speaking of mpd, I just got it set up and must say it is the awesome. I can have it playing music with no other programs running, and control the daemon with something like Ario, Sonata, ncmpc, or my favorite on the media center, MPoD (for iPhone/iTouch). What's nice about mpd is that since it's a server and the controllers are clients, I'm not really limited to how many clients can be connected unless I choose to limit it. They can all connect at once and get the same information, just like this screenshot:

2009-05-10T11:43:00.002-05:00

Been pretty busy in computerland recently. I started using Ubuntu on pretty much all my computers, with much success. I wish I would have began using it earlier. I have also been pretty active in the community, including getting my name in some packages and changelogs that have made it into the next release. There is a bit of pride in that, of course.

I began using the program BackinTime for incremental backups on my Linux machines. Currently I just back my home folder to a /Backup directory, as it's more for if I mess up something. The current version is not in Debian or Ubuntu, I have put an updated package in my PPA. I use it to take an hourly snapshot of my entire home directory on my devel box. Right now the entire snapshot directory takes up 16.3 MB and the snapshots themselves are generally tiny. BackinTime uses hardlinks to point to unchanged files, so the size stays very low.

Init script foo!

2009-04-28T09:04:00.003-05:00

I've finally discovered the/a correct way to manage init/rc scripts in Debian/Ubuntu, while not doing it by hand. I had thought it was through update-rc.d, but apparently that is meant to be used by packages only.

sysv-rc-conf is a pretty powerful application that lets you manage allyour init scripts for all the runlevels. Also available is sysvconfig,but I prefer the first one.

2009-04-12T14:37:00.002-05:00

Interesting piece of trivia I would never have known. The often mocked filesystem navigator from Jurassic Park ("This is a Unix system, I know this!") actually exists and was used. It is called fsn and was made by SGI for IRIX.

Not only that, there is an Open Source edition in OpenGL called File System Visualizer (FSV).

2009-04-11T20:28:00.002-05:00

Apparently way too much gets saved when you restore an iPhone from backup. The process gets very messed up when you reflash a jailbroken phone back to the real firmware. Lots of icons hidden still, and contacts set up with nonexistant ringtones. I'm choosing to put it back to scratch, I will syncronize contacts and calendar again with Google.

Got tired of jailbreak causing some odd bugs, like the occasional forced reboot followed by the phone saying it needed restores through itunes followed by "Phone activated".

2009-04-10T15:17:00.004-05:00

Enabling the Thinkpad middle click scrolling in Ubuntu (or another system using the evdev driver) requires a different process than I referenced before. It's still very easy though, it takes adding the following to

/etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi

<match key="info.product" string="TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint">
 <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">true</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">2</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.XAxisMapping" type="string">6 7</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.YAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.ZAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">true</merge>
</match>

2009-03-29T21:02:00.001-05:00

Podrunner is the best podcast in the world for someone like me who cannot keep a pace.

I am going to begin the interval course that I just discovered when looking through his website. Hopefully it will help me improve my run time and endurance.

2009-03-24T00:06:00.003-05:00

I take my programming perfectionism too far, but I love it. I'm taking up C++ again and using the pretty good "C++ Primer Plus Fifth Edition" by Stephen Prata as a guide. I'm only in chapter two and "only know how" to do functions, assign variables, and do basic IO. I remember enough to do loops and if then else from when I did C++ in high school though. It means little projects get a little more advanced, like the clock project:

// time.cpp -- display current time using a separate function

#include <iostream>
using std::cout;
void clock(int, int);

int main()
{
        using std::cin;
        cout << "Enter the number of hours: ";
        int hours;
        cin >> hours;
        cout << "Enter the number of minutes: ";
        int minutes;
        cin >> minutes;
        clock(hours, minutes);

        return 0;
}

void clock(int hours, int minutes)
{
        using std::endl;
        cout << "Time: " << hours << ":";
        if ( minutes <= 9 )
        {
                cout << "0";
        };
        
        cout << minutes << endl;

        return;
}

The example didn't have you take into account the output if a number was less than 10, which would normally display something like 1:9, which doesn't look as good. So with an if it becomes 1:09.

I find this to be a lot of fun, it's the first time I've gotten into separate functions and returning values. My High School C++ class just had us doing things in main.

Another:

// distance.cpp -- Convert light years to AU

#include <iostream>
double work(double);

int main()
{
        using std::cout;
        using std::cin;
        using std::endl;

        cout << "Enter the number of light years: ";
        double l_years;
        cin >> l_years;
        double au = work(l_years);
        cout << l_years << " light years = " << au << " astronomical units." << 
endl;

        return 0;
}

double work(double distance)
{
        distance = distance * 63240;

        return distance;
}

2009-03-23T19:19:00.001-05:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GNOME_applications

Very useful page for finding the "Gnome version" of some kind of application. "If I want a desktop integrated image viewer, what package would I insall?" Oh, Eye of Gnome! Useful if you're using something like G/funtoo and build gnome using gnome-light.

iPhone update

2009-03-17T13:57:00.000-05:00

New iPhone OS (3.0) will be released this summer. There was a preview event today for developers. Here are a few new features, I'm sure I've missed some:

-Purchase content from within an app (book store, subscription, etc)
-Peer to peer connectivity (multiplayer games with nearby people), uses bluetooth, also supports accessories
-OS can talk to accessories (control speaker EQ, change FM transmitter frequency, etc)
-True push notification
-Background apps still unsupported
-Copy and Paste!
-Mail multiple photos in one message, without having to open photo pane multiple times (select multiple photos)
-All of apple's key apps support landscape (like Mail!)
-Stereo bluetooth support (wireless stereo headphones are a go!)
-Search within applications (search for specific mail message), Spotlight from springboard able to search across all supported applications (more than just Apple apps supported)
-Data teathering supported in OS, assume will be enabled when carriers give go ahead
-NO New Hardware, 3G still top of the line
-Voice recorder application
-SMS, now Messaging application supports MMS, forwarding and deleting individual messages. MMS can send photos, recorded voice messages, address book entries etc.

Assuming iPhone dev team does not manage to snag a developer beta, I will probably upgrade just for the features, I can deal with a delayed re-jailbreak... I think. Upgrade will be free for iPhone 3G and original iPhone. Not all features supported on original iPhone, such as stereo bluetooth. iTouch will cost $9.95.

2009-02-27T19:26:00.002-06:00

I generally don't like installing Gnome in Gentoo using the "gnome" package, I hate having all the extra crud that comes along with it (like epiphany, which I never use).

I had never thought to use the --tree option to portage, but it is amazingly useful in this case. The output of the command is like this:

[ebuild  N    ] gnome-base/gnome-2.24.1  USE="cdr dvdr -accessibility -cups -esd -ldap -mono"
[ebuild  N    ]  gnome-extra/deskbar-applet-2.24.3  USE="-eds -spell -test"
[ebuild  N    ]   dev-python/dbus-python-0.83.0-r1  USE="-test"
[ebuild  N    ]    dev-python/pyrex-0.9.8.5  USE="-examples"
[ebuild  N    ]  app-editors/gedit-2.24.3  USE="python -doc -spell -xattr"
[ebuild  N    ]   dev-python/pygtksourceview-2.4.0  USE="-debug -doc"
[ebuild  N    ]  gnome-extra/gnome-system-monitor-2.24.4
[ebuild  N    ]   dev-cpp/gtkmm-2.14.3  USE="-accessibility -debug -doc -examples -test"
[ebuild  N    ]    dev-cpp/pangomm-2.14.1  USE="-debug -doc"
[ebuild  N    ]     dev-cpp/glibmm-2.18.1  USE="-debug -doc -examples"
[ebuild  N    ]      dev-libs/libsigc++-2.2.3  USE="-debug -doc -test"

Kind of jumbled, but the places where it indents mean a lot. "gnome" is a meta package, it is nothing on its own but drags in all the packages needed for a full gnome install, only it doesn't pull them all in, each package also pulls in its dependencies. This means if you run only a pretend, it will list everything it would install, including the dependencies. Not very nice if you're trying to keep a bare minimum world file. So in this case, everything indented just once is the dependency of "gnome", and thus is what you would tell it to install. Anything indented farther will be pulled in anyway.