I was at Syracuse University, in the strange hinterlands between a BA in commercial design (unfinished) and a BA in Religious Studies (completed 1992, with minor in Philosophy and concentration in Cognitive Science), and it was winter. I don't recall the year, whether late 1989 or early 1990, but I had by then had a whirlwind relationship (cooled by then) with a girl from New Hampshire who now had a boyfriend in Worcester, Mass. I also had a good friend from high school who was attending Anna Maria College, a Catholic school north of the city, with the extra irony that he was more or less a scion of a lapsed Jew from New Jersey, so when she asked if I wanted to share the drive and expenses, I jumped at the chance.

I'll call her Ellen, for the sake of having a name to hang on her. I'll call him Mike, because that was his name. Ellen and I drove from Syracuse to Worcester, old friends by then, talking and laughing and driving in silence as the gray skies threatened and probably listening to music from time to time, though I forget what. We got to Worcester, she dropped me off with a promise to pick me up in two days, and Mike signed me in at the door.

The weather was all mid-winter gray promising to turn to white, so we were a bit concerned about being stranded, but Mike assured me that they had both food and plentiful if not top-quality libations so we shrugged and waved as Ellen drove off with the car to meet with the boy who we would much later protect her from, jealous and abusive and wrong, but that's a different story.

So for now, Mike and I just got started with the introductions, it being a fairly small school and me being a sort of novelty (or oddity, or both, depending on your perspective). Remember, I was a religious studies student, or was to soon be one, so this was in some eyes a natural setting - among the children of the deeply religious observant Catholics of Massachusetts. But the problem was I was of what my major professor called "the unchurched", and a pretty staunch unbeliever at that point, with an ax to grind against the whole science-denying edifice of the bureaucracy and the wide-eyed ignorance of the flock. And Mike knew this, but it didn't bother him, and half of the folks he introduced me to were pretty blasé about the whole thing, so we got along well, planned the snowstorm party, and got to chatting.

I don't recall what they called the punch they made in that trashcan, but I do recall it involved enough Mauna Loa and cheap, clear spirits to be a clear violation of both the spirit and the letter of the law and of the bylaws of the institution responsible for our safety, and I also recall that it was pretty good considering.

I have a vague recollection of a conversation about truth with a kid who earnestly pressed a handmade cassette recording of Toad the Wet Sprocket's Bread and Circus into my hands, and urged me to listen. I shook my head at a girl who hoped one day to help mentally disturbed children with "art therapy", which as far as I could understand was designed to make them forget they were depressed, or autistic, or manic, or schizoid, or whatever, for as long as she could make them draw archetypes with blunt drawing instruments, poorly. She was, of course, nearly passed out and having her hair held as she barfed into a small dorm room trash can. If I recall correctly, she was also diabetic. And, apparently, an optimist.

I also met a small, quiet, cute girl whose name I have long since forgotten, who was also betting on therapeutics as a career, only her approach involved music. I knew a bit about art, or thought I did, if nothing much about music, other than that it involved more mathematics than I had, and the really good stuff touched something deep inside.

We did get socked in that night, with drifts of snow flying into the foyer of the entrance hall every time someone went out to play and throw snowballs or whatever they were doing. And Ellen stayed in town with her boy, and I stayed in lockup with Mike and the rest of them, and I had to sleep somewhere. The music therapist and I had struck up a conversation, sharing a disdain for the "crayon girl" and her ideas, and sharing a love of music as a way to shape mood and thought and perspective.

There not being many places to stay, I stayed with her that night. My intentions were noble, and we just slept in the same bed, occasionally waking to share a thought or to look out on the dark skies with their swirling flakes in the streetlights' glare. She, I think, was shocked to find me honorable, maybe even disappointed, though I'd hazard a guess relief was more likely. She played her music, and I listened. I didn't have any music, except for the tape Earnest had pressed into my hands, so we both listened to that, in the hush that snowstorms can bring, and in the morning when the snow had died down and the sleepless plows had done their work, and Ellen could get through, I left the girl with a hug and Mike with a silent nod of thanks, and got on the road.

I asked if Ellen minded if we listened to the Toad tape again, and she said no, and so we listened all the way back to Syracuse, flipping the tape over and over again. I got back to school, and bought the CD, and Pale, and later Fear and the others. And each reminded me of that night in Worcester, though other memories were layered atop as I went through subsequent romances and failed romances. And each tracked me as I grew a little, and as they grew, and as their music grew. And I remember being surprised to find how young Glen Phillips was when we had such insights and turned them into words.

But in the two- and three-degrees of separation and scanning lists of friends of friends from long ago I had not yet befriended there, because I left twenty years ago and hardly looked back after college Freshman year summer, if even then, I found a memory; not necessarily a proud memory, to be sure, but a memory worth sharing.

I grew up in eastern Maine, with an elder neighbor as best friend and constant companion who ended up going to a different high school; we had no high school in the tiny old farming town turned bedroom community I was from, so we got to pick where we'd go from the nearby choices. Most went to Brewer, the larger town to the north, some south to Bucksport, some to Bangor and John Bapst (an old Catholic school gone secular). Steve went to Bapst. So I continued my tradition, forged in the crucible of gifted and talented programs and being a non-native in a state where it matters and being lousy at basketball in a state where little else matters in the winter, of being on a sort of fringe, a tendency to live between two worlds. I went to Brewer, and Steve went to Bapst, and so I had friends in both worlds but a home in neither.

And with friends in two worlds, you didn't tend to form deep connections; few friends but many acquaintances as you were taken into and then out of circles of closer friends; it was how I met Laura. To be honest, the specifics aren't clear now, twenty years later, but I was a friend of a friend and Laura needed a prom date, and I had a car. A blue and silver 1967 Mustang coupe with a tiny straight-six 200 and an extra leaf in the rear springs, so it didn't matter. The car looked good, and I liked to think I looked good in it, and she looked good in her dress, and so we went to the prom.

There was supposed to be a party in Bar Harbor afterwards, but as it wasn't my circle of friends, and she wasn't sure where it was either, we drove around Mount Desert Island for a few hours and eventually pulled over to sleep by the side of the road and be eaten by black flies and mosquitos. And I'm sure she thought I was, and I'm sure I was, a cad. I know we never talked much after that. Not much of a prom, anyway. I hope she had better.

But we'd changed out of our dress clothes before driving down to the Island, and when we got to Sand Beach (a misnomer, it's paved in tiny shells and shell fragments that stick to your skin and are hard to wash off even under pressure) we got to see that wonder of night beaches: bioluminescence. Every wave that crashed sent rolls of bluish-green static splashing around everywhere, giving the cloudy night a diffuse glow. We staggered out onto the beach to watch, and ran into a bunch of very drunk, and very wet, and fairly cold, Quebecois girls, one of whom grabbed and held me tight for just a moment, muttering in that broad, flat French of the north, before running off into the distance and the long flights of stairs that led to the parking lot far above.

And I don't know if she remembers that night, God knows she smelled like she'd had enough to drink to forget most everything else, but it has stayed with me, for twenty years of moving on and away, more vividly than so much else. Maybe it's because I don't have pictures, or movies, or anything but the soft light of the surf and the chill of a shivering body and the scratch of the shell-covered beach, to recall.

So, thanks, Merlin, and thanks, Laura, and thanks, anonymous Quebecois girl on the beach, and thanks to all the creatures of the sea who died and were reborn in the light of the surf so that I could see a glimpse of a face as she bumped into me and then ran by.

The benefits are obvious: it's a bit cheaper than ordering out, takes about the same amount of time as waiting for delivery, or faster if we don't do fancy stuff like grilled chicken sausage, etc. for toppings. And we're shooting for the goal of reproducing a "white pizza" we used to get when we were in Syracuse, about which more later.

This weekend, it was grilled chicken sausage, feta and broccoli:

A couple weekends ago, it was proscuttio and ricotta:

The dough is best suited to thin crust style, which is fine. Anyway, yum! (Note: these pics are of the pre-oven pizzas, "cooked" pics are up on my Flickr photostream.)

diskutil addToRAID member [nameofdisktoadd] [nameofraiddisk]

Fortunately, this seems to have worked, and it only takes a billion hours for the RAID set to rebuild.

I also have a couple of smaller Lacie "Porsche" disks, both of which were once parts of two separate RAID arrays, until I noticed they were really hot when stacked and so did our cat, Mara, who likes to sleep on warm things. So, I lost one of each disk when she jumped off the stack for fear of being beaten bodily about the head and neck for using our remote backup system and music library as an electric blanket. Live and learn.

The problem is that the 160GB disks were in a RAID, and then the RAID only had the one disk. I kept it in the RAID, figuring it was less risky than deleting the RAID and just using it as a single disk. When I upgraded to Leopard, and went to go update my RAIDs to version 2, I had a change of heart and deleted the RAID set that contained the remaining 160GB disk. Sadly, the result seems to have been that OS X doesn't recognize the drive, which naturally contains all of my iTunes library, some digital photos, and the like.

When I go to mount the drive, in Disk Utility, it tells me to run First Aid, but the buttons are greyed out and non-functional (though the microscope icon that says "Verify" does work, but it fails with "Unrecognized Filesystem" error). It says it's an "Apple_Boot_Raid" partition, so it's likely that removing the RAID screwed something up in a big way. I could see if I can get the old companion disk to mount, in hopes that it still remembers it was part of that RAID set, long enough to get the other disk to rebuild... I have the music on a spare drive, anyway. I'll lose some pics, but I already lost most of the pics in a previous crash, so it can't suck that much more.

ANyway, the shine is really starting to wear off Leopard. Time Machine? Great. But Spaces isn't as good as Virtual Desktop Pro, the Terminal is astonishing me by apparently breeding Window settings like rabbits for no good reason, and now this.

I've been using OS X since the first public beta, back when it was simply too slooow, because the idea of a beautiful Unix system on my lovely Pismo laptop was too much to pass up. I'd originally set the Pismo up to triple-boot MacOS 9, OS X beta, and Yellow Dog Linux, but I found after a few weeks that I never wanted to boot into Linux, and while MacOS 9 felt insanely fast after a few days in OS X beta, I missed the Terminal too much to go back into 9 very often. I'm that kind of geek - I generally type what I want the box to do.

So, with all that in mind, I figured I'd review some of the ways in which I'd customized my OS X install in previous releases, and how Leopard makes some of those customizations obsolete, some less useful, how it makes up for it, how it fails, and so forth.

I've used DragThing for years as a Dock supplement (since even before there was a "Dock"), and still find it useful if only to allow arbitrary keyboard shortcuts to launch ssh sessions to specific remote hosts, or to launch applications like certain browsers for testing or simply in order to have a browser without a history and with Javascript and Java disabled, etc. I'll probably keep DragThing, but at some point next year will likely ditch it for Quicksilver, if I can get over the insanity of it all. Oddly, for someone who is keyboard driven, I've never quite been able to like Quicksilver, but I saw this video a few weeks ago and it really impressed me into trying it again.

Stacks strikes me as the sort of useless UI enhancement that I will never, ever use. But I hardly ever use files in the traditional MacOS sense of "icons on a desktop", I read my mail in mutt on the remote server via Terminal window, etc.

I have loved virtual desktops since the old Open Look Virtual Window Manager days, and so I shelled out some cash for CodeTek Virtual Desktop Pro when it became clear that I needed more than one desktop; I'd used other products for MacOS 9 and older, before that, though none of their names stick with me (maybe VirtualDesktop? heh).

Spaces obsoletes CVDP completely, with the caveat that it'd be nice to be able to name your Spaces, and the jarring default "slide" transition is still just that: extremely jarring to me. But hey, it's just a pager. For the most part, I want it to be invisible, and it succeeds on that count. One place where it fails is if I am in a Terminal on one Space and a form in Firefox in another, I can't switch between them so as to copy and paste without losing focus in the form field in Firefox. That's just stupid. I want to switch between applications, not places, I just want the applications to live in those different places so they're not distracting me.

I don't know why, but Firefox still hasn't figured out that when I copy and paste a URL from a Terminal or other plain text context and it wraps, that removing the embedded newline and pasting the result is the Right Thing to Do. So, I end up still using Safari for most browsing, and Firefox for some jobs. I don't know if this is new or not, but I just noticed you can cmd-shift-arrow between Safari tabs, which is pretty cool. I just hope the virtual memory management is better in Leopard; under Tiger I eventually had to reboot every couple days because Safari uses^Wleaks memory like an Alzheimer's patient and things got sluggish when the VM crept up past 1GB, and downright sinfully slow when it broached 2GB - and this was with mods to the paging setup, so it didn't simply double the size of the new swapfiles, etc. So, I'm hopeful that Leopard is smarter about that.

I spend most of my day in Terminal, with a dozen windows open, and mostly the same configuration (three or four logged into our main server, one reading mail, the others open to various filter-related directories; one open to each of my DNSBL nameservers; one open to the occasional client server or our fileserver or firewall, etc), so Window Groups are a nice thing to have, as is the new Settings editor. I still find it slightly confusing, but I'm learning. The ability to specify keyboard shortcuts to Window Groups (now lacking, AFAIK) is a necessity, though, frankly. I hate having to use a mouse to open a few windows I'm just going to type into. Oh, and if I open three windows in a specific order, then save the workspace as a Window Group, by God, I ought to be able to use cmd-1 to go to the FIRST WINDOW, etc. Apparently, this is too much to ask for.

I'd recently discovered and fallen in love with Menufela and MegaZoomer, and had come to love the minimalism of working in a fully expanded Terminal window with no menu bar to distract, and I still have that in Leopard. No issues that I've seen, though I'm still running some apps with menus; still working on figuring out which ones I like having a menu with and which I like in minimalist mode.

I'd earlier hacked my battery and airport menubar images, but the setup has apparently changed under Leopard, which I dislike. I'll probably get around to fixing that at some point.

I make extensive use of Growl, MenuMeters, and SideNote; of these only the last is broken under Leopard, as Spaces screws with the "edge of the screen" paradigm. I'm sure I'll figure out how to make it stick to the side of all my windows eventually, though simply specifying "Every Space" in the per-app Spaces config doesn't seem to be enough.

I've already mentioned the insanity of screwing with the default behavior of decades-old Unix tools and how to fix it; I won't relive that nightmare again (shudder). Aside from that, there have been a few unpleasant or awkward surprises for someone who spends as much time in emacs as he does in a browser (often more). The default emacs in Leopard is 22.1.1, under Tiger it was 21.2.1 (IIRC); behavior in some modes has changed slightly, and others have become barely usable (e.g., cvs-mode doesn't let me check a file in using c-q anymore, it demands I use c-x vv, which is annoying; sendmail-mode simply FAILs to let me insert literal TABs, for chrissakes, which is its SOLE PURPOSE). So, there's some change that needs to happen there, but that's not Leopard's fault, and in a pinch I can use vim, I suppose. I used to be able to cmd-double-click on a URL in Terminal, and it'd take me to the site in Safari; this is slightly broken in that if I select the URL and option-click I get a contextual menu with various search options (in Spotlight, in Google, etc.), but it's cool that as long as nothing is selected option-click on a URL gives me a relatively smart "Open URL" option.

I apparently have to reinstall Parallels, but haven't gotten around to that yet, so nothing to report aside from the fact that I need to reinstall.

I'm running Time Machine, which (along with Window Groups in Terminal) was my primary reason for upgrading to Leopard; it seems to Just Work. More to report on that front after a catastrophic loss of data, I suppose. It seems absurdly simple, almost too simple, but it has to be easier than restoring from Retrospect or CarbonCopy, I suppose.

Oh, and just to round out the "fair and balanced frothing Mac/Unix fanboy" perspective, I should mention that when I upgraded my Mini at the house it couldn't recognize my wireless keyboard and mouse at first (changing batteries helped). So that was kind of annoying, but might have just been because my mouse needed stronger batts in order to be "discovered". Other than that, though, the Mini upgrade was uneventful.

So, all in all, a positive upgrade with some bumps (some ridiculously major, some minor).

UPDATE: Another slightly annoying thing: used to be when I used tab completion on a path containing a symbolic link to a directory, the trailing slash was automatically added. Now it's not, I have to hit tab twice. Minor, but when you use that as much as I do, it adds up.

I use bash as my default shell, and have since OS X Beta days, and have built out a number of libraries, customized perl, and so forth, to support my work on enemieslist. Most of these use GNU autoconf, to enable cross-platform portability and simple compilation/installation. I had done an "archive and install" upgrade, which naturally - and as expected - means I needed to install new versions of certain custom libraries, perl modules, and so forth.

Unfortunately, the upshot was that when I went to compile fresh versions for this new OS, I kept getting strange errors from GNU configure. You know, the toolset that most open source projects are written in, whose sole purpose is to work around slight (and sometimes not so slight) differences between the various *nix platforms? Yeah, well it wasn't working. At all. Just kept bailing at the stage where it tried to create libtool.

configure: creating libtool
configure: error: invalid tag name: CXX

It ostensibly seemed like a problem with libtool, or maybe sed, but it turned out to be a problem with a change in the behavior of "echo", one of those hoary old Unix programs that probably hasn't changed much at all in thirty years or more. More to the point, it's a change in order to comply with the Single Unix Specification.

It used to be that "echo -en" would suppress the addition of a newline, and enable the detection of certain special character sequences (e.g., for whitespace and other "unprintable" characters). And it's still that way in the echo built into Bash. But the echo distributed with Leopard's /bin/sh apparently just prints "-en" - breaking every piece of software that relies on GNU autoconf to compile and assumes that nobody would screw around with /bin/sh.

I found this discussion of the issue on macosxhints, and installed the bash from MacPorts, changed my shell and rebooted just to be sure; sadly, I forgot that you also have to add the shell to /etc/shells first, or you can't run a Terminal or any program that requires a shell. Oops. Chalk that one up to stupid. Fortunately, TextMate came to the rescue and I was back in business.

Or so I thought. It seems that changing my default shell didn't make any difference at all. The only thing that worked was setting COMMAND_MODE="legacy" in my /etc/bashrc, as discussed here.

Thanks, Apple. I really and truly needed to waste an entire day FAILING to reinstall all of my scripts and custom libraries so that I could WORK, over a one-line fix in an rc file.

Obviously, given that Safari sucks ass and leaks like a gig and a half of RAM if you let it sit for a day or so, I need a way to grab every window URL and title and post them to this blog periodically. Hrm.

-DBIND_8_COMPAT

on the end of the DEFS line, and voila.

(if not, read part one first, then part two.) From part two, though, which I thought was probably worth sharing:

[3] I had tried to convince Julia, my wife, to come with me to the Crimea. My first argument was that it would give her an opportunity not only to read the 23rd Psalm, but to see the 23rd Psalm. Then I suggested that it was an opportunity to experience the 23rd Psalm. And while I didn't have a chance to make the argument before I went there, it turns out that there a parts of the Valley of the Shadow of Death that are for sale, and there was an opportunity not to just to see and experience the 23rd Psalm but to own it. Who could resist? I started to think about the possibility of Valley of the Shadow of Death Time Shares. What a fantastic place for a nursing home!

The "Boring Gallery" was this collection of Web sites that had the then-standard "colored bar down left side of screen and white content area" design. Sadly, or not, it's still there, in all its boring glory. For a while, searching on my name returned this page as the first result on Lycos/AltaVista/HotBot/whatever search engine was popular in 1997...

It's amusing to poke through some of those I didn't (and won't) upload; apparently, back then, I considered O'Reilly and Associates, Argus Associates (Lou Rosenfeld did an interview for the site), Perl, Java and the Onion worthy of free advertising on my site, along with hesketh.com and the now-defunct Digital Aspect (where I worked as a consultant for a year after leaving imonics) and Integrated Technical Services, a good chunk of the old imonics IT group (with whom we shared an office).

Heh.

Oh, and to clear up any confusion: the big turd on the modem (yes, a 33.6Kbps US Robotics Sportster - the original animation I did as a "splash page" - remember those? actually had lights that lit up more or less the same way they did on the modem, and in the right order, for a dialup session) is a Buddha, in a position of extreme contemplation. I forget where I got it, but you could still get them (in albeit smaller version) from the Wireless catalog NPR puts out as of ten years ago or so. His head is in his lap. I used to call it the "anxiety Buddha", because he didn't seem too calm to me.