Caught in Apple restart hell

Caught in Apple restart hell: Oh, and if you think I have something against Apple, no I don’t. But my computer, a 17-inch MacBookPro, has already been in the shop twice. My son’s MacBookPro 15-inch has been in the shop twice and has a dead USB port now so both of our machines need to go back into the shop.

What’s ironic is lots of other computer companies would LOVE to give me free stuff (I don’t take it) but Apple is the only company that’s never raised a PR finger to help me. Instead I feel so honored to spend my money on this crap. Why? Just to have a shiny machine?

Well, sorry. The shine is wearing off. Screw you Apple.

[I really wish he hadn’t mixed these two issues… that of him having problems and the lack of PR love. The second issue shouldn’t even be brought up, especially in this context, as it makes it seem like the problem is that Apple’s given him no free stuff. Now, as far as problems are concerned, there’s nothing more frustrating than a dead machine for most of us who live on one machine and don’t have a shelf full of replacements. So I feel his pain as Apple’s theme of “It just works” can be annoying, since it doesn’t always, and despite an OK track record things still things do go wrong for everyone at times. I wish Apple didn’t claim this, since it isn’t true, but still, the issues here got mixed beyond my ability to parse them. ]
Source: Scobleizer – Microsoft Geek Blogger

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

Proper Gmail IMAP for iPhone and Apple Mail

Proper Gmail IMAP for iPhone and Apple Mail:

Much more complete setup instructions than Google’s own. By mapping Apple Mail’s special folders (Drafts, Trash, Spam) to Gmail’s built-in special folders, the “right thing” just happens. E.g., all of your sent mail goes into the same Sent Mail mailbox, whether you sent it from Mail on your Mac, MobileMail on your iPhone, or Gmail’s web interface.

[Soon, very soon…]
Source: Daring Fireball

Ajax, Browsers, Running Out of Time

Ajax, Browsers, Running Out of Time:Help is on the way, in the form of bytecode interpreters and vm’s for Safari and Mozilla, though the future of IE is still cloudy (still, there is a plan to bring Tamarin to IE). But if the new Browser version don’t arrive quickly enough, or if they don’t fully solve the problem of browsers crashing once an hour, then a mass migration to Opera may be the best we can hope for. At worst, content and application producers will opt for more stable non-Ajax alternatives such as Flash or Silverlight.
[I’m no so heavy a user of my browser under most conditions. I find apps that connect to the web either as services or as app specific browsers are a more compelling experience, and so many of the “web apps” I use run locally on my desktop while I have my home environment. But I can see the problem and work hard as coder to minimize the problem, would be nice if the lower level stuff made this easier and less leak prone.]
Source: Ajaxian

DSL book Work In Progress

DSL book Work In Progress: Updated web site: Over the last few months (actually many months),
I’ve been working on a book on Domain Specific Languages. I’m
now at the point where I think it’s worth pushing out my work in
progress. This page will keep you informed on where things are
(and there’s an atom feed too). Rather than drop it all out in
one huge dollop, I shall release what I have so far in bits over the
next few weeks. Once I’m caught up I’ll release material as I’m
writing it. [Cool.]
Source: Martin Fowler

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*

Owning your namespace

Owning your namespace: But WebCite has a different, and very special, mission. It’s for scholarly and professional authors whose articles are themselves persistently linkable by way of Digital Object Identifiers. Increasingly those articles cite more ephemeral things, like blog entries. Using a WebCite bookmarklet, these authors can produce URLs that point to archived copies of web pages. Think Wayback Machine, but you can ask to have an item archived and be sure that it will be.[Interesting.]
Source: Jon’s Radio