Interrupt Driven tag:interrupt-driven.com,2011://8 2011-08-12T19:53:33Z Movable Type 3.35 Testing - please ignore tag:interrupt-driven.com,2011://8.1590 2011-08-12T19:52:34Z 2011-08-12T19:53:33Z Just testing to see if a move to a new server went okay (not like anyone reads this blog anyway).... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ Just testing to see if a move to a new server went okay (not like anyone reads this blog anyway).

]]> Challenger tag:interrupt-driven.com,2011://8.1495 2011-01-28T19:06:06Z 2011-01-28T19:44:41Z I was, like most of my generation, raised on the power of science and engineering to achieve amazing things, and grew up with an idea of America that was largely based on my sense that once we put our minds... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ I was, like most of my generation, raised on the power of science and engineering to achieve amazing things, and grew up with an idea of America that was largely based on my sense that once we put our minds (and wallets) to something, nothing could keep us from getting it done. As I got older, and read about the men and women of the space race, the threat posed by the Soviets, and America's response, I felt a kind of pride in the way that sound engineering and guts defined us as a nation, and kept that feeling for much of my life.

Even in the disillusioned days after 9/11, when the idiots that had always been there came out of the woodwork with their ridiculous "power of pride" bumper stickers and flag decals, I could reassure myself that despite the jingoism and feeble understanding of world politics (and America's role in them, good and shameful) we were still a country who held a special place, whose dedication to breaking through the chains of history was sacrosanct.

I may not hold with the mass of neoconservatives in the matter of the necessity of religious belief for moral soundness, and think government has done a number of great things (though alongside a number of really stupid ones), but undeniably one of the great ones is the act of putting men, American men, on the moon and in space and sending craft to the other planets and moons. I had a telescope when I was a kid, and I remember looking at the tiny crescent of Venus, the craters of the moon, distant Jupiter with its moons and Saturn with its rings. Knowing that we had sent things to those places and that they sent data and images back for science was somehow enough to keep out the creeping feeling of how small that meant we were, I was.

But on a cold day in January 1986, twenty five years ago today, I was sitting in a hallway waiting for Mrs. Thomas to unlock the classrom where we were going to watch the shuttle launch after lunch, and my friend Josh, who was an affable if somewhat goofy kid, came up to me and asked me what was up, and just to screw with his head a bit I said "didn't you hear? The shuttle blew up!" Of course, I didn't know about it yet. It hadn't happened yet. He was terribly upset and I felt bad about things, but then along came Mrs. Thomas and we went into class as usual.

And I soon watched in horror as the first real disaster of my life unfolded, my faith in science and technology started to waver and crack, and I learned that while equations are still part of a perfect world, O-rings and frost and bureaucracy and other big little things can tear a hole in the sky and fill it with smoke and dead astronauts.

At this point, all I can say is that there's a bit of that pride still there, knowing that even after Challenger was lost, and then Columbia, there are still those who are willing to throw themselves into the sky strapped to giant pillars of fire, so that we might not all be bound to scratch out our meager lives on this swirling oblate spheroid we call home.

]]> Not sure what this says about my brain tag:interrupt-driven.com,2010://8.1474 2010-11-19T18:51:27Z 2010-11-23T00:04:36Z I spend much of my day looking at, and for, patterns. Whether they be patterns that match hostnames, like I create as part of my antispam project, Enemieslist, or patterns in email traffic, or patterns in many other arenas, one... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ I spend much of my day looking at, and for, patterns. Whether they be patterns that match hostnames, like I create as part of my antispam project, Enemieslist, or patterns in email traffic, or patterns in many other arenas, one thing you have to watch out for is being misled by false clues.

In the ongoing effort to classify naming conventions, I've learned a lot about the culture and terminology of networking. A token 'bri' may refer for example to 'Basic Rate Interface', and implies that the host is an ISDN link. 'ppp' may mean dialup, and hence normally dynamically assigned hosts, but it may also mean statically assigned hosts over Ethernet (pppoe, usually). But the mere presence of a certain token isn't always sufficient to signify what you expect it would normally; for example, 'client' in some contexts is roughly equivalent to 'user' (dynamic) and in others means 'customer', more in the sense of 'business class customer'. So I struggle with the varied conventions and limitations of Google Translate and do the best I can do.

When I'm grinding through long lists of hostnames and zooming around my XML files in emacs, I try to take breaks every so often, to keep my mind from turning to mush. One thing I've found enjoyable is to look up the various regions and locales that I find domains registered in, or hostnames containing references to. One search led me to a short page about a town in Poland, which is distinguished only by a clock tower and the fact that the town's Jews were completely exterminated by the Nazis in 1943. Must be fun to be part of the Chamber of Commerce in that town, eh?

Another search led me to a page delineating the various words, suffixes, and prefixes that English has absorbed over the years from older languages, used in place names, and their meanings ("lea" is a meadow or clearing, "holm" is an island, "hithe" a wharf, "ford" a crossing, and so on). I was familiar with many of them, just from reading over the years; others I'd had different senses of ("wich", meaning simply "place or settlement", I had been misled into thinking meant "salt works" because several early salt works were in Middlewich, Norwich, and other such - it's also possible that wick derives from Norse 'vik', or bay, because if you're going to make salt, a bay is a pretty good place to do it).

One which I hadn't known before, however, stuck with me.

It seems that "-ey" in many place names is an old reference to an island. (Think of the French "ile", for example). Anglesey, the island just off the northwest coast of Wales, is "the Angles' island"; Athelney is an island (actually, a dry area surrounded by marsh) in southwest England. Once I learned this, I couldn't keep from finding the suffix everywhere. Unfortunately, usually in exception rather than proper observation of the rule. My grandfather on my mother's side, for instance, was named Sidney (said to derive from the French St. Denis, itself a corruption and derivation of Dionysus). A friend in the antispam world has the last name Bilbrey, which is a corruption of Bilborough or Bilbury, similar to the pronunciation of Marlborough among a certain class of English (MAR-bra). And while Romney (once an island in Kent), Orkney (Norse for "seal island", from an even older Gaelic name), Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, Lindsey, and others are the result of the pairing of some other word with "-ey" and do refer to islands, most don't.

Haughey, Finney, Gaffney, Griffey, Duffy, Caughey, Sweeney and a variety of others are actually anglicized from Gaelic names that have nothing to do with islands. Some others are simply different spellings of unrelated words (Britney from Bretagne/Brittany, Stacey from the Greek Anastasia, Courtney from either Irish Gaelic "O'Curnain" or French "Curtenus", or "short nose"). Many are actually references to meadows or fields (pretty much anything that ends in "ley or "ly" or "lea" is, apparently, excepting nearly every adverb in English, of course). Godfrey is a corruption of German Gottfreid. Aubrey is Tuetonic for "King of the Elves". Cheney is an old French surname. Names ending in "-by' tend to be derived from Norse for "farmstead or small village". Surrey is derived from "Suthrige", or southern region. Disney, from the Norman D'Isigny, but I'm unsure whether the French refers to an island. Riley, which you might think would mean "rye meadow", is also derived from Irish Gaelic and means something else entirely. McCaffrey, Gaffney, Casey, Daley ditto. Kinsey is derived from "King's (or royal) victory" in Old English.

You see the point. But it's been absolutely maddening for me for some reason, and spurred me on to research every name or placename I hear that ends in a long e sound, and almost all I've looked at have been exceptions to the supposed rule. It's almost to the point where I'm feeling anxious about it, and I'm not sure why. It may be that it just seems weird to have never noticed how many English names end in a long e sound. When I was a kid one of my favorite illustrators was Aubrey Beardsley. Somehow, it never occurred to me to notice that both of his names ended in 'ey' or to wonder whether it meant anything or not. (In this case, neither is related to islands, as we saw with Aubrey above; Beardsley is apparently a "lost place", it doesn't exist today, but many people in Nottinghamshire or Leicestershire have it as a surname).

Or perhaps it's just what it portends for our ability to know where we came from, with so much of the origins of our language obscured by a simple ending with so many different corruptions and influences. I recently read The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, which was a fascinating inquiry into the people who may have spoken the language we refer to as Proto-Indo-European, actually a reconstructed idea of a language. It's really not much more than a few stems and prefixes, derived by tracking the evolution of modern languages and finding commonalities and trends in sound shifts and so forth. I was ensnared by the idea that we could reconstruct a language nobody has spoken in tens of thousands of years, just as I was chilled by the idea that one day the language of my thoughts and arguments and judgements would be gone.

]]> Reflections on Toad the Wet Sprocket tag:interrupt-driven.com,2009://8.1385 2009-12-29T23:23:43Z 2009-12-31T05:44:31Z Glen Phillips tweeted today that he was suddenly 39. I've been 39 for seven months or more now, but back when I was only twenty, or maybe nineteen, Glen Phillips and his band Toad the Wet Sprocket had already come... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ Glen Phillips tweeted today that he was suddenly 39. I've been 39 for seven months or more now, but back when I was only twenty, or maybe nineteen, Glen Phillips and his band Toad the Wet Sprocket had already come to mean a great deal to me, for reasons which hopefully will become clear forthwith.

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.

]]> Inspiration and Bioluminescence tag:interrupt-driven.com,2009://8.1292 2009-08-26T12:57:29Z 2009-08-26T14:47:15Z Prompted by Merlin's post and a too-short Advil PM-powered sleep interrupted by disruptive dreams of high school, Junior year, when Steve F. and I would ride around the hinterlands west of Bangor just before curfew in his Subaru Brat listening... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ Prompted by Merlin's post and a too-short Advil PM-powered sleep interrupted by disruptive dreams of high school, Junior year, when Steve F. and I would ride around the hinterlands west of Bangor just before curfew in his Subaru Brat listening to the Vision Quest soundtrack ("lunatic fringe... I know you're out there!") and the Kinks ("oh, the stories/have been told/of kings and days of old/but there's no England now"), I jumped onto Facebook to see if I could remember Marty's name, the kind-hearted, good-spirited Marty with the maybe hot sister, and failed.

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.

]]> Pizza! tag:interrupt-driven.com,2008://8.923 2008-02-04T17:25:28Z 2008-02-04T17:38:11Z Heather and I have been taking advantage of our local Italian market, Conti's, who sells fresh mozzarella and frozen pizza dough, and making pizza at home. The benefits are obvious: it's a bit cheaper than ordering out, takes about the... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ Heather and I have been taking advantage of our local Italian market, Conti's, who sells fresh mozzarella and frozen pizza dough, and making pizza at home.

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.)

]]> Multiple IPs on a single ethernet interface under OS X tag:interrupt-driven.com,2008://8.922 2008-01-30T22:31:25Z 2008-01-30T22:34:20Z Turns out it's easy, and you can even do it from the GUI. Just go to System Preferences:Network, select Show Network Port Configurations, and duplicate the interface you want two IPs on. Then edit the new interface's IP, et voila.... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ Turns out it's easy, and you can even do it from the GUI. Just go to System Preferences:Network, select Show Network Port Configurations, and duplicate the interface you want two IPs on. Then edit the new interface's IP, et voila. That's for Tiger, anyway. Leopard uses the "+/-" style of list item duplication, but it seems to work more or less the same way.


]]> More Leopard fun - RAID! tag:interrupt-driven.com,2008://8.913 2008-01-18T00:58:35Z 2008-01-18T01:32:40Z I have a PPC Mac Mini at the house, with which I do remote backups for the office and for various other stuff. I have two Lacie 300GB drives in a RAID, which I set up under OS X 10.4.... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ I have a PPC Mac Mini at the house, with which I do remote backups for the office and for various other stuff. I have two Lacie 300GB drives in a RAID, which I set up under OS X 10.4. I recently upgraded to Leopard, and noticed that one of the disks in the RAID had become a "Spare" rather than a full RAID slice (I'm just mirroring), so I went to go fix that in Disk Utility, which I have learned is apparently broken and stupid. If you want to tell OS X Leopard that a disk is a member of the RAID set, one would think it would be as simple as using the handy pulldown menu provided, which gives you a choice after you select a disk in the list, to modify it from a "Spare" to a "RAID Slice". Well, appearances can be deceiving, because that doesn't do anything. You have to use diskutil from the command line instead, and run

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.

]]> Some thoughts on Leopard after a couple of days tag:interrupt-driven.com,2007://8.893 2007-12-19T14:13:39Z 2007-12-20T01:40:22Z After the debacle that was Monday, I've had a chance to sit down and actually use Leopard a bit instead of cursing it roundly from all corners, and overall, I'm still pretty impressed. I'd heard it was chock full of... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ After the debacle that was Monday, I've had a chance to sit down and actually use Leopard a bit instead of cursing it roundly from all corners, and overall, I'm still pretty impressed. I'd heard it was chock full of incremental improvements, and felt more polished than previous releases of OS X, so I was eager to give it a try, and the upgrade on the Mini went fairly smoothly, so I went ahead and took the plunge on the MacBook.

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.

]]> Leopard gotcha - COMMAND_MODE="legacy" tag:interrupt-driven.com,2007://8.890 2007-12-17T23:00:56Z 2007-12-18T10:15:25Z So, I recently upgraded my MacBook to Leopard. Smooth upgrade, very few problems, and one absolutely mind-numbingly stupid "compatibility" issue that has caused me to waste an entire day, reduced to a quivering pile of helpless, angry muscle and bone,... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ So, I recently upgraded my MacBook to Leopard. Smooth upgrade, very few problems, and one absolutely mind-numbingly stupid "compatibility" issue that has caused me to waste an entire day, reduced to a quivering pile of helpless, angry muscle and bone, because the immediate result was that I could not compile anything at all.

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.

]]> Tabclearing tag:interrupt-driven.com,2007://8.861 2007-11-13T00:07:40Z 2007-11-13T16:10:14Z Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ 10 Useful Secrets the Major Airlines Don’t Want You to Know and Thermostats Can Save Energy if You Master Their Ins and Outs and Vinegar - How to cook, clean & live via vinegar.

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.

]]> BIND's Queryperf on OS X tag:interrupt-driven.com,2007://8.846 2007-10-23T19:20:04Z 2007-10-23T19:35:28Z I've found the queryperf tool from ISC's BIND contrib package to be a pretty useful tool for testing the custom DNS servers I've been developing for Enemieslist over the past few months (with help from Matt Sergeant and Brent Verner);... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ I've found the queryperf tool from ISC's BIND contrib package to be a pretty useful tool for testing the custom DNS servers I've been developing for Enemieslist over the past few months (with help from Matt Sergeant and Brent Verner); the problem is, it doesn't compile out of the tarball on OS X Tiger, because of a problem with BIND 8 compatibility. The fix is to define BIND_8_COMPAT in the Makefile generated by configure. Just slap

-DBIND_8_COMPAT

on the end of the DEFS line, and voila.

]]> Oh, hell yes. tag:interrupt-driven.com,2007://8.840 2007-10-18T21:44:33Z 2007-10-18T21:45:05Z If you'll pardon the term, that is.... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ If you'll pardon the term, that is.

]]> The Valley of the Shadow of Death Time Shares tag:interrupt-driven.com,2007://8.830 2007-10-11T20:33:23Z 2007-10-11T20:35:00Z Have you been reading the posts Errol Morris has been making in his blog on the NYT, regarding a couple of photographs of the Crimean war? (if not, read part one first, then part two.) From part two, though, which... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ Have you been reading the posts Errol Morris has been making in his blog on the NYT, regarding a couple of photographs of the Crimean war?

(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!

]]> Good times tag:interrupt-driven.com,2007://8.827 2007-10-09T22:03:50Z 2007-10-09T22:27:59Z So, I was digging around in my filesystem on the laptop here yesterday, and stumbled upon some scary artifacts of the days when I was a bit more, um, active as a blogger (before anyone knew to call it that)... Steven Champeon http://enemieslist.com/ So, I was digging around in my filesystem on the laptop here yesterday, and stumbled upon some scary artifacts of the days when I was a bit more, um, active as a blogger (before anyone knew to call it that) and had lots of fun with an ad banner rotator I wrote; I asked some friends to submit banners for their sites and built some banners for them to stick on their sites, too. I still like the "negative forces have value" tagline. I'd completely forgotten about that. How young and brash we were, how utterly convinced that we were pioneers.

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.

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