Schinckel.net

After my last post, I has kinda bummed when the same thing happened again. Luckily, the same process fixed it, but I really don’t know why it occurred to begin with. I think the same fault was fixed by fsck, so that might have something to do with it.

Anyway, I took some snaps this time.

I wasn’t able to take a shot of the initial boot screen (ironically, it caused my phone to crash. Twice).

This second one shows how the text is now overwriting the green corruption. Sorry about the blurriness, but if you look carefully you may notice that the file with the incorrect block count is pcscd.pub, or something. This appears to be the file /var/run/pcscd.run, but I don’t really know what this does.

Something almost bad happened to my MacBook Pro today.

I’d been using the machine all day, on and off, on both battery and power. I showed some code to a lecturer, and then closed my laptop and moved to another lecture theatre. It was there that, after about half an hour, when I was bored, I decided to open my laptop and check my email.

Screen was black. I’ve had some issues with the graphics card not always working properly (it’s related to a garbage display when scrolling issue), so I thought that might have reappeared. I don’t remember why, but I pressed the power button. I wasn’t expecting anything (if the display was disabled, then at most I should get a beep).

The screen came on (or, as I later figured out, the whole machine came on), but the display was overlaid with a pink pixelated pattern. Initially I thought something was odd, and I force-restarted it, since it didn’t appear to be responding.

The next time it booted up, it had the same pattern. Leaving it a little longer, I noticed that it displayed the grey screen with the darker apple logo, and the spinner underneath. After about a minute, it had a kernel panic.

Restarting it always had the same result. Zapping the PRAM, resetting the SMC, booting off a system DVD all had the same result.

I even tried swapping out the RAM, but nothing looked to fix it.

Finally, I tried booting up in safe mode. ⌘S will do this, and when this kicked in, the screen turned black, as expected. The areas that were pink now turned green. I got to a command prompt, but when I typed “exit” to continue booting, it seemed to hang on the WindowServer loading. (I must confess I restarted quite early, since I wasn’t having any keyboard response, even though it may not respond at this point).

Same deal for Verbose mode (⌘V). Stuck at WindowServer.

Rebooting again in Safe mode, I did an fsck -fy. About halfway through this I noticed that the text that was appearing was overwriting the green graphics glitches. When it completed (and it did find one error), I restarted, and the machine appears to be back to normal.

I wouldn’t have lost much data (I do have backups), but I would have lost work time. Or blogging time, or whatever!

Postscript: Interestingly, checking the panic.log shows me that it was WindowServer that was causing the panic. I don’t know why, but I hope it ceases to occur!

Yes, I think I have the Curse of Competence.

Having to program in Java is a real eye-opener. It’s really not something I enjoy, mainly because I know there are better ways to do just about everything other than “the Java way”.

Take visibility, for instance. You can declare attributes and methods as private, protected or public. But if you have two objects of a particular class, they can access each others private variables. How fucking crazy is that? I mean, something is hardly private is a different object can still access it!

Another place where visibility is fucked up is in terms of methods and availability of these. If I have a class that is not defined as a public class, and I have an instance of this class, I can find out what it’s declared methods are. But I cannot invoke them, even if they are public!

I’ve got a project where I have to build a parser, and evaluate expressions. Sometimes there is a statement that can affect the state of the afore-mentioned object (which is in turn a sub-class of JFrame).

One of the statements is to resize the JFrame, which I can do by using the .setSize() method on this object. However, I cannot declare my own methods, even as public ones, and then call then from the client class.

Seriously, this is shit. All I want to do is basically pass a message to this object, and there’s no way for me to do so without changing the visibility of the class. I have a reference to the fucking object, I just can’t really do much with it.

Yeah. Thanks a Fucking lot, Drop Box. Next time, before you decide to quit the Finder, maybe check I’m not copying a heap of files somewhere.

Fail.

Since I got my laptop, I no longer need to use either the same password for everything, or the same ‘head’, and contextual ‘tails’ for each site. (For instance, a head of ‘foobar’ and a tail like ‘macosxhints’ results in a password of ‘foobarmacosxhints’ for the MacOS X Hints website).

Instead, I can rest assured that I can type any random sequence of characters into the password box, and have the keychain remember them. It has the side effect that I don’t use Firefox, only Safari (or Camino, which also accesses the Keychain, like a good OS X application should).

It gets even better when you use something like QuickPass, which lives in the menu bar, and every time you need a password, it generates a whole stack of random ones for you:

Note, that since I didn’t actually choose any of these, they aren’t used for any of my passwords. Selecting one puts it into the clipboard, which is the only real security issue. If someone else got access to my clipboard, then they could see my password.

Since no one else gets hold of my laptop at all, then I’m fairly secure.

I will not use any other password storage system, since not only does it save my web passwords, but passwords for dozens of other applications too. Ecto stores it’s passwords for blogs there. Airport Utility stores passwords for the wireless routers I manage, as well as WPA keys for networks I use. These passwords are all secured (with the keychain protected by my login password), and yet I don’t need to copy-paste them, since the application(s) that need access are granted access on a need-to-know basis by the system.

I think this is one of the best features of the OS. No longer do I need to remember passwords, nor store them in a text file. As long as the browser I use accesses keychain, then I have all of my web passwords available in each browser.

So, the idea of Gorilla Password doesn’t appeal to me at all. Not least that I don’t have to use other machines (other than one unix system, which I only use at Uni, and then only store one password on, to access the Uni learning web-app), but the fact it doesn’t use system-provided services. That’s one of the main issues of cross-platforminess.

I have, courtesy of MkConsole, the data from some of my log files displayed on my desktop. This is really useful, as I notice stuff that gets logged there.

It’s less useful when applications write more stuff to the system logs than is strictly necessary. For instance:

That’s just a small segment of the issue, but it clearly shows that the latest release of AdiumX, 1.3.1 is dumping two lines to the console or system log every minute.

For google, the logfile data that is coming out is:

> 11/09/08 6:41:18 PM [0x0-0x48048].com.adiumX.adiumX[828] INFO cmdproc.c:98:show_debug_cmd() S: 000: QNG 42  
> 11/09/08 6:41:37 PM [0x0-0x48048].com.adiumX.adiumX[828] INFO cmdproc.c:98:show_debug_cmd() C: 000: OUT  

Time to go without IM for a little while.

Might get more work done anyway. But only if I kill Twitterific too, I suspect.

I’ve downloaded iTunes 8, mainly because I was a bit interested in Genius. More from a technical perspective than anything else right now, although it may end up replacing Party Shuffle (especially since lately I’ve been skipping tracks lots…)

So, I’ve heard mixed reports about it so far - that it doesn’t work with Classical music, for instance. I can verify that it does, for instance Canon in D major brings up a selection of other classical music. I can’t vouch for how good a job it does, since I’m still somewhat of a naïve listener of classical music.

I do think it’s funny that the Beatles cannot be used for Genius, but for Badly Drawn Boy, it seems to do a pretty good job of choosing similar music. I’m not sure how much is Genre-based, since I have fairly well genre-d tracks.

As for the new UI - I don’t mind it too much. I do miss the view that had the album art and tracks grouped by album, since that was the main view I used, except for when in Party Shuffle.

The Genius Sidebar annoys me a little that it is trying to get me to buy stuff - I think it’s just a rebadging of the Mini store, which I didn’t use anyway. Thankfully, you can turn this off. At least Apple got it right with the explicit asking of permission this time before sending your iTunes library data back to the mothership.

You need two items of software, TortoiseSVN and Putty. Make sure you get the Putty that has all of the extra tools, you’ll need puttygen at the very least.

Once you have installed Putty, open up the main putty.exe program. The installer put a shortcut on my desktop, yours may not have:

In the window that appears, enter lofty.infoeng.flinders.edu.au into the Host Name box:

Then, enter lofty into the Saved Sessions box, and click Save. This will save you a little bit of typing later on.

Now, select the Data item from the left tree-view (you may need to expand Connection first). Enter your Flinders CSEM/InfoEng password into the indicated box.

Click back into the Session tab, and click Save again. Now click Open.

A new window will appear, which will ask you for your InfoEng password. You’ll need to enter it just this one time.

What we need to do is create a private/public key pair. One of these will live on lofty, the other on your local computer.

Before we do that, create the correct location to store this on lofty:

mkdir .ssh

Note that there is a dot before the ssh!

Now issue the command:

ssh-keygen -b 1024 -t rsa

Use the default location: ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Use an empty passphrase, and you’ll need to press enter twice. It then saves the file into this location, and creates a public key as well.

Enter the .ssh directory, and type in the following command. (Even if you already have keys in the file it copies them to, it will still be safe!):

cat id_rsa.pub >> authorized_keys

This copies the public key into the authorized_keys file, appending it to the file if it already exists.

We now need to get the private key onto your home machine. The easiest way is to type in:

cat id_rsa

and copy and paste the text into a new Text Document. Rename this to something sensible (id_rsa again is a good choice). Don’t ever let anyone else access this file, as if they do, they can get into your InfoEng account!

Now, run puttygen.exe. Click on Load, and select the file you just created in Notepad. You may need to turn on “All Files” in the file chooser. You’ll now need to save the private key. It’s a good idea to use the same filename, but with the ppk extension.

Now run another instance of putty.exe.

Click on the lofty Saved Session, and press Load. Then choose the SSH/Auth option, as shown.

Use the Browse… button to select your keyfile. (The one with a .ppk extension, not the one you created first).

Before you click Open, go back to the Session page and click Save again. Otherwise your selection of the keyfile will not be saved next time you try to connect (but it will work this time).

Finally, click Open to test the connection. You should log in without having to enter your password.

That’s all of the Putty stuff we need to do. You can’t uninstall it, and it’s worth keeping around in case you need to SSH into the Uni machines again. When you do, it’s almost the same as opening a Command Shell on the Solaris machines, so you can do most of your work from home.

If you haven’t, install TortoiseSVN now.

Go to the directory that you want to keep your local copy of the SVN repository in. Right-click and select SVN Checkout… from the menu.

The only things you’ll need to change are the URL, and possibly the last component of the Checkout directory. It’s currently called SVN, but you can call this last bit whatever you want.

Press OK. It will, in a fairly short amount of time, get all of the data.

The contents of the directory you checked out now have Badges, showing if they are up-to-date, Modified, or so on. I’ve created a Sandbox directory for you to play around in, but the good thing about SVN and other systems is that you can’t really break anything. Someone can always revert any changes you have made if you break a file, even if you accidentally delete it. It’s obviously better if you don’t but don’t stress if you do.

You’ll want to play around to see how to add files to the repository, and commit any changes you do make. Please make sure you Commit changes regularly, and Update often too. You may find that you have to Merge changes if two of us have modified a file at around the same time - there is a program called TortoiseMerge that you can use to do this. I’d really encourage you to play around and do this (you can even checkout two versions of the repository to your hard disk and make changes to the same file in each one, and they try to commit, just to see how it works).

Aargh! I don’t seem to be able to get past the wp-login.php page. It keeps redirecting to there.

I am logged in, and using the correct password, but I can’t get through to the admin pages.

I can post entries via ecto, too!

Update: ck has a fix: http://ckon.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/fix-for-wordpress-26-cant-login/