The existance of Gallery2wiki gives me even more incentive to look at moving my personal website to MediaWiki. I’ll have to get my head around MediaWiki one of these upcoming days and just move my site to it. It shouldn’t be a big deal.
On Friday I came home from work and rather unexpectedly found the box containing my new monitor, a Dell 2005FPW, sitting on the front porch. This wasn’t supposed to be delivered until Monday, and it had a light dusting of snow on it, so I brought it inside to warm up. I let the monitor sit until today (well, Saturday) and after getting home from visiting
Today while out and about I also purchased my first tank of gas for the new car and got a first car wash. I’ll get a better handle on this number after a few more tanks and a bit more mixed driving, too. I also grabbed some photos of the car outdoors and in the daylight (photo gallery retired), both in an unwashed state and after getting it all cleaned up.
Oh, one last thing? Those two monitors that I want to sell? They can be seen in this photo and are a pair of IBM P260 displays with perfectly flat (vertically and horizontally) Sony tubes. They are really, really nice, and after doing a bit of research into market price, I’m going to ask for US$200 for the pair. So, if you want them, let me know and I can bring them to you or whatever. They work quite well. Also, please note that the color is off in the photo I linked to because I figured the white balance based on the room and the lights currently in there, not on the displays. So they will naturally look a bit off. But, yeah. $200. Not bad at all.
Hrm, now I think I’ll go start thinking about bed. It’s getting late.
Well, I got my new monitor today. For some reason Dell has chosen to put a DVI-D connector on the monitor, not a full DVI-I. (See Wikipedia’s DVI entry for more info) on their monitor, meaning that I have four extra pins to contend with. Uggh! Why couldn’t Dell just use the DVI-I connector and ignore the analog bits?
I think my best route is to simply break the four extra pins off of the cable. They aren’t needed, anyway.
UPDATE: Fuck. After removing the four extra pins from the DVI-I cable, I have realized that the wide, flat pin on a DVI-I connector is wider than the one on a DVI-D cable. Uggh. So now I need to order a 15′ DVI-D cable in order to use my new monitor properly. Poo.
UPDATE 2: Ahh, it’s working now. I just needed to operate on the cable. Woo! Better than waiting a few days for a new one.
[Cross posted to
Does anyone here know how to have OS X (10.4.3) do the equivilent of a ‘diskutil repairVolume’ on reboot, before the OS is up? I’ve got a machine I don’t (currently) have physical access to which needs the root disk repaired so I can’t boot the install CD and run the check that way.
Also, anyone remember the issue with rsyncing to external volumes that I’ve been incessantly complaining about? I’m now thinking that I’ve got an issue with the source data, which was somehow manifesting itself in errors with rsync being unable to find destination files after they were written. There’s some weird inconsistancy here. Or maybe I was reading the rsync errors backwards? Hrm.
Anyway, any idea how to make diskutil do my bidding? I know how I’d do it under Windows, but OS X doesn’t seem to support this here…
[Cross posted to
Hey everyone, I just thought you’d want to know that it’s possible to compile the version of rsync that ships with 10.4.3 (found here) on OpenBSD 3.8 (x86) with the Apple patch that enables extended attributes.
To compile it, just grab the 2.6.3 version from Apple, apply the patch, do a ./configure –enable-ea-support, and compile it. I know it’s a bit behind the 2.3.6 version which ships with OpenBSD 3.8, but it does work.
With this I’m able to back up the HFS+ volumes on my Macs to an OpenBSD box and preserve resource forks. Woo!
Look:
$ ls -als
total 150696
4 drwxr-xr-x 2 c0nsumer c0nsumer 512 Nov 3 14:01 .
4 drwx------ 3 c0nsumer c0nsumer 512 Nov 3 14:00 ..
28 -rw-r--r-- 1 c0nsumer c0nsumer 12292 Sep 10 02:08 .DS_Store
4 -r-------- 1 c0nsumer c0nsumer 82 Sep 10 02:08 ._.DS_Store
44416 -rw-r--r-- 1 c0nsumer c0nsumer 22710505 Aug 23 11:34 01_PolkaMegamix.m4a
[...]
$
This is one of the coolest pieces of software I’ve played with in a while. It’s the bit from Tron, and it answers questions when you click on it.
[Cross posted from
Well, I guess I’ll be the first to complain about 10.4.3 here.
#1 — The Mail.app problem I complained about before (and submitted a bug report to Apple on) has not been fixed.
#2 — Despite adding more RAW support, the Coolpix 5400’s RAW (NEF) files remain unsupported. This is supported by dcraw so Apple has no excuse for not making it work. This too has been submitted as a bug back in April or May.
#3 — While Safari has gained the ability to render the ACID2 browser test I have been able to make it break. I visit the ACID2 test page itself, then after the rendering is complete I spin the ball on my mouse (a Mighty Mouse, in this case) and the face breaks and scrolls even though there is no scroll bar. Here is a screenshot of the problem.
#4 — The out-of-the-blue failing of my attempt to rsync lots of data to an external drive continues to fail as follows:
Documents/iChats/Erika Alpert on 2005-09-09 at 23.57.ichat
3500 100% 18.99kB/s 0:00:00 (6610, 10.0% of 185201)
rsync: fstat failed: No such file or directory (2)
❚
Then after being sent a break:
^Crsync error: received SIGUSR1 or SIGINT (code 20) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-20/rsync/rsync.c(231) rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 103 bytes: phase "unknown" [generator]: Broken pipe (32) rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-20/rsync/io.c(909) mercury:~ c0nsumer$
This hasn’t yet been reported to Apple as an official bug report yet because I don’t have a standard test case for it yet. However, it worked under 10.3.9 just fine. Unfortunately this is the bug I can’t work around, because even copying data to the external drives with Finder fails in the same manner.
So, Apple… Drop the ball much?
Okay, a moment for me to bitch about the Mozilla people:
Who the hell makes an application which supports SOCKS as a proxy type, but doesn’t provide the option for name lookups to be done via the proxy? Both Thunderbird and Firefox have been this way forever, and only a Mozilla nightly properly presents this option.
Maybe the only people who use SOCKS these days are kiddies bouncing through open proxies? Or maybe the only users of SOCKS are on weirdly configured networks which will resolve any name, but only provide connections out through a single box?
Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.
You heard it here first, kiddies… MS05-044 through MS05-052 have been released. Go patch your computers.
Well, the iPod camera connector is a lot smarter than I originally thought. After a bunch of poking around with a multimeter, it appears to do the following:
– Pass the USB GND, DATA+, and DATA- signals straight through to the dock connector.
– Bump up the +3.3VDC that the iPod provides on dock pin 18 to +5VDC in order to power the camera / memory card reader that is attached. (This, along with the disk access, explains the horrible battery life experienced when using the reader.)
– Somehow flip pin 21 to a value (10k? — perhaps in the presence of power?) which indicates that a photo adapter is connected. I was unable to establish this value.
Also, the connector is glued shut, so I’m unable to open it without trashing it. I guess I’ll take it back as soon as I get confirmation that the external hard drive memory card reader device that I’m looking at is shipping to me.
< sigh >
Yet another disappointment… It’s too bad I just spent $24 on ten iPod dock connectors. I hope they come in handy for other things…
Any friends want custom car adapters? Like, iPod dock to tape deck or car charger or something?