personal

File sharing OS X Leopard (10.5.1)

It seems like some other folks (Hi Dave!) had some trouble with file sharing on Leopard, and so did I. I thought I would just write up what I learned, and maybe it’ll help someone else.

In System Preferences -> Sharing -> File Sharing, I added the disk I wanted to access. I looked at the default permissions and decided they’d work for me. Next, I clicked on the Options… button and clicked on Share files and folders using AFP, which was not selected by default (at least in my case). I clicked on Done.

Next, I went to the other machine that I wanted to aces the newly shared disk, and selected command-k, which has long been the Finder’s place for mounting network volumes, and browsed to what I wanted, and everything seems to work.

I had also set the Finder preference to show the disk on the desktop, but I’m not sure that’s necessary, it just felt all home-like to this old Mac user.

Anyway, with that out of the way, here’s the problem… the consolidation of prefs, removal of NetInfo, or whatever improvements were generated by the update are a good thing one there own. But if there is no clear path for older users, if expected behavior is not defaulted for upgrades, than how is someone supposed to know that buried in a optional sheet is stuff that’s been standard for ages? Now I’m sure that various combinations of stuff probably caused this stuff to be set the way I expected, but there was no magic playing for my wife’s iMac, so it comes at some surprise to me that this stuff wouldn’t work out of the box.

The flip side I guess, was how easy screen sharing was out of the box… for me anyway. I’ll bet others have different stories though based on the trouble I had getting something as easy as file sharing going. Something that should “just work” didn’t, and while it doesn’t annoy as much as it does Scoble, or Dave, who had the annoyance of having an app he relies on break (no doubt as he has already noted, a portent of things to come for that app sadly), it still is not what I expect from my Mac experience either.

DOT to Install Sleek New Bike Parking Shelters

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: DOT to Install Sleek New Bike Parking Shelters: While the NYPD, Parks Department, MTA, unnamed authorities and, of course, bike thieves, busily clip locks and cart off New Yorkers’ bicycles in great number, the Department of Transportation is making sure that not only do bike commuters have a classy spot to park outdoors, but their tushies won’t get wet when it rains. Next month, cyclists will be happy to see the first of many new public bike-parking shelters popping up near transit hubs throughout the city. Word has it there was a bit of flexibility built in to the Cemusa bus shelter contract and DOT decided to get a bit creative and try this out.[It’s about time…]
Source: StreetsBlog

Ruby stuffs

Two things worth noting:

def something(x = 0)
  ...
end

doesn’t ensure that x is set to a value of zero, because the method could be called with nil [something(nil)] so to ensure a default value of zero even in the face a call with nil

def something(x = 0)
  x ||= 0
  ...
end

would do the trick.

The second is that when adding text and an object’s property

x = 'some string'
y = x + something.description

that if something.description is nil, the addition will fail, but if you interpolate ala

x = 'some string'
y = x + "#{something.description}"

something.description evaluates to empty string and therefore won’t fail.

Two subtle regressions our tests caught today when refactoring, but were not easy to see in the code.
Onward!

ZFS and The Holy Grail of Storage

ZFS and The Holy Grail of Storage:

I’ve wanted that for years, but I’ve largely dismissed it as a pipe dream, because it doesn’t fit cleanly into the drive/RAID/LVM/filesystem model that everything uses. The only thing that I’ve seen that even comes close is Drobo, and it’s supposedly fairly slow and really just too “magic” for me to trust.

[Even this isn’t what I really want… although the Drobo seems nice. I want the same sort of thing, but I want to two pools… one for the time machine backups and one for the “live boot image” type backup. I admit that in some cases that might be overkill, but not for business related stuff. I admit that it wouldn’t take long because of the “virtual nature” of so many apps to go from blank machine or disk to up and running (all my code is in repositories, schedule, mail and stuff is on the web etc., but still) but I keep a fairly up to date back up anyway, because if the failure occurs near a deadline (and doesn’t it always? Praise Murphy!) I don’t really want to be mucking about with that, I just want to get things done. Anyway, having two per machine would make it easy to have both, and having one hardware device that could do that or more would make it easier to manage. In the meantime the individual hard drives are piling up… I should add that a pair of Drobo’s per machine seems costly to me… Other suggestions?]
Source: *scottstuff*

The $8 billion story/scam or Gift cards are for chumps

The $8 billion story/scam: Last year, more than $8,000,000,000 was wasted on these cards. Not in the value spent, but in fees and breakage. When you give a card, if it doesn’t get used, someone ends up keeping your money, and it’s not the recipient. People spent more than eight billion dollars for nothing… buying a product that isn’t as good as cash.

If I were a creative non-profit, I’d start marketing alternative gift cards. They would consist of PDF files you could print out and hand over to people when you give them cash. It could say,

“Merry Christmas. Here’s your present, go spend it on what you really want. AND, just to make sure we’re in the right holiday spirit, I made a donation in your name to Aworthycause.”

Stories come and go. It’s up to marketers to spread the good ones.

[Right on! Spread the meme: Gift cards are for chumps!]
Source: Seth’s Blog

Ask 37signals: Is formal education important?

Ask 37signals: Is formal education important?: What we care about is intelligence, curiosity, passion, character, motivation, taste, intuition, writing skills, and the ability to make smart value judgements. A few of these qualities may benefit from exposure to higher education, but we feel most of them are better learned through practical experience. Further, we don’t believe taste can be taught—you either got it or you don’t. We believe taste is one of the most important qualities in anyone we hire. [Amen.]
Source: SIGNAL VS. NOISE

MIT sues Frank Gehry

MIT sues Frank Gehry: stata-center.jpgI don’t know much about this developing story, but it’s interesting on its face… M.I.T. Sues Architect Frank Gehry – New York Times (and here’s a longer piece in the NYT):

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing renowned architect Frank Gehry, alleging serious design flaws in the Stata Center, a building celebrated for its unconventional walls and radical angles.

The school asserts that the center, completed in spring 2004, has persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold growing on its brick exterior. It says accumulations of snow and ice have fallen dangerously from window boxes and other areas of its roofs, blocking emergency exits and causing damage.

Maybe unfair, but one interpretation: award-winning “radical” designs aren’t great if they can’t keep snow off the emergency exit.

[There are all sorts of stories about famous architects and there rejoinders to complaints about leaky roofs… Frank Lloyd Wright they claim told one client who was complaining about a roof leak dripping on his chair to move his chair. Another comment was that you wouldn’t know it was a roof if it didn’t leak. It’s simple really, it’s just a question of priority. If you want something that amazes by its design and look it’s going to require trying new materials and techniques. If you’re trying to build stuff you haven’t built before, there is going to be a learning curve, and unexpected results. It’s the same thing that makes so many software projects “grow”, or “late”, or “overbudget”. Stick with stuff that’s been done many times before and it won’t leak or drop melting ice in front of doorways. But it won’t inspire or delight except in its utility. Fine if that’s what you want, but you don’t hire Gehry for that.]
Source: Good Experience Blog

Joho the Blog: What’s unspoken between us

Blue Hydrangea

Like the green that cakes in a pot of paint,
these leaves are dry, dull and rough
behind this billow of blooms whose blue
is not their own but reflected from far away
in a mirror dimmed by tears and vague,
as if it wished them to disappear again
the way, in old blue writing paper,
yellow shows, then violet and gray;

a washed-out color as in children's clothes
which, no longer worn, no more can happen to:
how much it makes you feel a small life's brevity.

But suddenly the blue shines quite renewed
within one cluster, and we can see
a touching blue rejoice before the green.

Rainer Maria Rilke
William H. Gass, trans.

Joho the Blog: What’s unspoken between us: Look at how much isn’t said in that line. We wash clothes, and they become more our own as they lose their color. That’s something we know implicitly. We know that clothes need washing.

The next line makes explicit that Rilke is thinking of clothing folded and put away for a child who has grown. Rilke is giving us increasing degrees of explicitness. Poet has to get this right. [Ambient, unspoken knowledge has been an ongoing exploration of mine for many years. More… “Hyperlinks are the opposite of information. They enrich, rather than reduce. Open-ended, decentralized, messy… all the things databases of info are not. Most of all, they are social…”]

Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian Computing

Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian Computing: This isn’t working. We’ve been stuck for years, the backlog never goes away, and we fight the same old fights with a new generation of management. The Enterprise is too complex, too turbulent, too confused, to be a fruitful place to study the craft of software. We don’t know when it’s right. Yes, we sometimes know when it’s wrong, when we can’t even deliver the software. But what is success? Praise from a self-interested manager? An incremental improvement in corporate throughput? A pile of surveys filled in by our students? A nice writeup in The Journal?

I propose that enterprise software is a hard problem that we can understand only after we solve an easier case, one that lies close to hand. Before we can tackle the enterprise, we need to write software for people. Not software for everyone, but software for you and for me. [Awesome piece. Not to be missed.]

We accidentally marketed ourselves into a corner

We accidentally marketed ourselves into a corner: First, I’d figure out how to teach parents to understand what really matters and what doesn’t about time spent in high school and the choice of a college. Second, I’d push for every selective college to share one application and do a draft similar to the one they do for medical residencies. Every applicant ranks the schools they’d like to attend, in order. Every school considers all the applications, grabs the students they’d love to have in priority order, puts the rest into the “good enough” pile and lets a computer sort em all out as pareto optimally as possible. At least kids will go into their twenties correctly blaming a computer instead of mistakenly blaming themselves. [I thinking about a lot of these isues as we search for Noah’s second school (that’s right, second school and he’s 2.5 years old. Don’t get me started… sigh.]
Source: Seth’s Blog