Schinckel.net

That title pretty much sums it up. If you have an SMB server mounted, and you put the Mac to sleep, then the server is no longer mounted when you wake it up. Windows XP does not have this problem. Windows XP also mounts all servers it can find, removing the need for hacks like creating a mount script and putting it into your LoginItems.

We spent the first part of the first day back at school watching a short video about a Chicago Fishmonger where they throw the fish around, and have heaps of fun. We had to relate that back to our own employment within a school. I’m not sure some of the members of my group took it completely seriously. The best thing we came up with was Curriculum is a Fish. Make of that what you will. iTunes: Take The Long Way Home from the album “Sunday 8pm” by Faithless

I know how fantastic QE (the original, US version) is. I even watch it sometimes. And we are all waiting for the Australian version. Waiting to see just how many episodes they play before they pull the plug. For those Naracoortians watching who don’t get real TV, or aren’t aware, Ty Henschke, the fashion one, is an ex-Naracoorte boy. And I think we all knew he was gay back in high school, didn’t we…

Boing Boing: LA train wreck: the copycat effect:

Coleman describes the “copycat effect” as “what happens when the media makes an event into a ‘hot death story’ and then via behavior contagion, more deaths, suicides, murders, and more occur in a regularly predictive cycle.”

South Australia actually has a pretty nice ‘code of conduct’ where media outlets (by-and-large) do not report on suicides in general, and youth suicides in particular, since there is a definite copycat effect. And then the Advertiser went and put front page images of when a student at a particular high school killed himself, at school.

New Scientist Breaking News - Spherical robot provides rolling security cover: A spherical roving robot designed to detect and report intruders… Does it unfurl and stand up like those cool robots in the newer star wars movies?

Monkeys Pay to See Female Monkey Bottoms: …male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey’s bottoms… Isn’t science great!

<rant> With the advent of two ’new’ features to web-browsing/internet use, the idea of hyperlinks in web pages opening up in a new window is truly evil. Tabbed browsing is a godsend to users like me, who like to have a whole series of pages open at once. Being able to have the whole shebang in one window, and just choose between them as they load is magnificent. Probably more important in terms of alteration to browsing is the development of RSS news-readers, and the saturation of RSS feeds amongst web-sites and blogs. What annoys me now, since with every news site I read being viewed initially in NewsFire, and then in Camino if I want to read more, (I wish they would all have full text feeds, though!), I only ever look at one item at a time in Camino. That is, I don’t look at front pages of news sites. So when I click on a link, I want the page I’m viewing to be replaced by the link I’m clicking on. If I didn’t, I’d Command-Click on the link, and open it in a background tab. Yet some sites: such as MacDailyNews, and others, still insist on off-site links opening in a new window. And when I click on one of these links, I have to close the window it opened in, and then Command-Click on the link again. It’s really starting to annoy me! </rant>

Maybe I’ll just remove these sites from my feeds list…which is getting too long, anyway!

If you have installed SubEthaEdit and the command line tool, see, you can configure --help | see and SubEthaEdit will load up the piped text!

I had noticed my iMac 1.25 GHx slowing down. Here’s what sped it up most:

• Getting more RAM. I upgraded from 256 Mb to 768 Mb. Applications loaded faster, particularly when lots of them were already running. Especially noticeable when other users were still logged in.
• Cleaned Application cache. Using System Optimizer X I was able to do this, which while it makes each application pop up a dialog the first time it is run via a double-click on a document, fixes corruption in the Application Cache, enabling applications to load much faster. This includes the Finder, so it only takes seconds (instead of minutes) to log in.
• Update executable library prebindings. Since this too was done with SOX, I wasn’t able to tell which of these two made the biggest difference.

No, I’m not affiliated with SOX, and apparently it’s possible to do just about everything here with CLI commands, I just don’t know what they are yet…

I have a few aliases and functions running in my ~/.profile, and some of them run MacOSX applications - for instance I like to edit files in SubEthaEdit, but I like to just use the word edit as the command to start the process. This is all well and good, until I’m remotely accessing a command line only, and try to edit a text file. If I’m logged into the Mac, up pops SubEthaEdit, and if I’m not logged in, I see kCGErrorRangeCheck : Window Server communications from outside of session allowed for root and console user only INIT_Processeses(), could not establish the default connection to the WindowServer.Abort trap Not much fun at all. So I wrote a function that will run the right program if I am remotely logged in. I found that Terminal sets the environment variable TERM_PROGRAM to 'Apple_Terminal'.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

function edit
{
  if test `echo $TERM_PROGRAM` == 'Apple_Terminal' ; then
      open -a 'SubEthaEdit.app' "$*" &
  else
      pico "$*"
  fi
}

So far so good. But when I exit pico from my other terminal, I see an error of: -bash: test: ==: unary operator expected What’s happening is that the echo $TERM_PROGRAM is displaying "" (empty string) which test doesn’t like on the left hand side of a “==”. So the first lines of my ~/.profile are now:

1
2
3

if test `echo $TERM_PROGRAM""1` == '1' ; then
 export TERM_PROGRAM='Unknown'
fi

This took me a while to twig to - for ages I was just happy to have the error appear! The only issue with this is if I telnet from my imac (where the variable is set) into the same machine - you then lose the ability to automatically run the graphical programs set up in the functions. The other programs I use differently according to where I am are:

• appswitch - use as a replacement for ps, kill, and to show/hide running programs.
• SubEthaEdit - use as edit, and sedit (edit as Super User).
• openman - a new window for each man page, allowing them to stay open while I keep working.

I also have a function called browse, that opens the current (or supplied) directory in the Finder. I’d love to be able to tell Windows Explorer to open this, but this would require some heavy duty inter-machine communication.