I’m slowly wrapping my head around git, which is no mean feat coming from hg, after subversion, and cvs back in the day. Toward that end I’ve been searching for a decent cheat sheet, and so far this is my favorite.
For only $11,000 you can spend 75 days in Alaska. If only I were 22 and had a free summer. Oh, and eleven grand to spare.
Early this morning my little website out here on the long tail of the power curve that is the Internet passed 50,000 unique visits since December 2005. That’s when I started using Mint to track activity on my site full time. Compared to the major websites and weblogs 50,000 unique visits in a little over five years is truly a small number. I suspect sites like Daring Fireball or Kottke generate more than double that per day. Still for me, 50,000 is a huge number.
Thank you to every one who has ever visited zanshin.net.
All of these events were found on Wikipedia by searching for the numerical year, and then scrolling to the month of May on the summary page that resulted.
May 1961 - Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space aboard Mercury-Redstone 3. Had the flight taken place on its original scheduled date of March 6, 1961, Shepard would have been the first man in space.
May 1962 - Twelve East Germans escape via a tunnel under the Berlin Wall.
May 1963 - Thousands of African Americans, many of them children, are arrested while protesting segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor later unleashes fire hoses and police dogs on the demonstrators.
May 1964 - John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz run the first program written in BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), an easy to learn high level programming language which they have created. BASIC is eventually included on many computers and even some games consoles.
May 1965 - Forty men burn their draft cards at the University of California, Berkeley, and a coffin is marched to the Berkeley Draft Board.
May 1966 - The Communist Party of China issues the ‘May 16 Notice’, marking the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
May 1967 - Tennessee Governor Ellington repeals the “Monkey Law” (officially the Butler Act; see the Scopes Trial).
May 1968 - The Beatles announce the creation of Apple Records in a New York press conference.
May 1969 - An American teenager known as ‘Robert R.’ dies in St. Louis, Missouri, of a baffling medical condition. In 1984 it will be identified as the first confirmed case of HIV/AIDS in North America.
May 1970 - Kent State shootings: Four students at Kent State University in Ohio are killed and 9 wounded by Ohio State National Guardsmen, at a protest against the incursion into Cambodia.
May 1971 - The birth of Bangladesh is declared by the government in exile, in territory formerly part of Pakistan.
May 1972 - The Watergate first break-in, the “Ameritas dinner”, fails.
May 1973 - A 71-day standoff between federal authorities and American Indian Movement activists who were occupying the Pine Ridge Reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, ends with the surrender of the militants.
May 1974 - Dublin and Monaghan bombings: The Protestant terrorist group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), explode numerous bombs in Dublin and Monaghan, in the Republic Of Ireland. The attacks kill 33 civilians and wound almost 300, which is the highest number of casualties in any single day during “The Troubles”.
May 1975 - Junko Tabei becomes the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
May 1976 - Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction is found hanging in an apparent suicide, in her Stuttgart-Stammheim prison cell.
May 1977 - Star Wars opens in cinemas and subsequently becomes the then-highest grossing film of all time.
May 1978 - A bomb explodes in the security section of Northwestern University, wounding a security guard (the first Unabomber attack).
May 1979 - Counting in the previous day’s British general election shows that the Conservatives have won and Margaret Thatcher becomes the country’s first female prime minister.
May 1980 - Mount St. Helens erupts in Washington, killing 57 and causing US$3 billion in damage.
May 1981 - A jury of architects and sculptors unanimously selects Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial from 1,421 other entries.
May 1982 - Cal Ripken, Jr. plays the first of what eventually becomes his record-breaking streak of 2,632 consecutive Major League Baseball games.
May 1983 - Stern Magazine publishes the “Hitler Diaries” (which are later found to be forgeries).
May 1984 - The Soviet Union announces that it will boycott the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California.
May 1985 - .S. President Ronald Reagan joins German Chancellor Helmut Kohl for a controversial funeral service at a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, which includes the graves of 59 elite S.S. troops from World War II.
May 1986 - Hands Across America: At least 5,000,000 people form a human chain from New York City to Long Beach, California, to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness.
May 1987 - Nineteen year-old West German pilot Mathias Rust evades Soviet air defenses and lands a private plane on Red Square in Moscow. He is immediately detained (released on August 3, 1988).
May 1988 - Soviet war in Afghanistan: After more than 8 years of fighting, the Red Army begins withdrawing from Afghanistan.
May 1989 - The first crack in the Iron Curtain: Hungary dismantles 150 miles (240 km) of barbed wire fencing along the border with Austria.
May 1990 - The World Health Organization removes homosexuality from its list of diseases.
May 1991 - Queen Elizabeth II becomes the first British monarch to address the United States Congress.
May 1992 - STS-49: Space Shuttle Endeavour lands safely after a successful maiden voyage.
May 1993 - Juan Carlos Wasmosy becomes the first democratically elected President of Paraguay in nearly 40 years.
May 1994 - Illinois executes serial killer John Wayne Gacy by lethal injection for the murder of 33 young men and boys.
May 1995 - U.S. President Bill Clinton indefinitely closes part of the street in front of the White House, Pennsylvania Avenue, to vehicular traffic in response to the Oklahoma City bombing.
May 1996 - Everest disaster: A sudden storm engulfs Mount Everest with several climbing teams high on the mountain, leaving 8 dead. By the end of the month, at least 4 other climbers die in the worst season of fatalities on the mountain to date.
May 1997 - U.S. President Bill Clinton issues a formal apology to the surviving victims of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male and their families.
May 1998 - The first euro coins are minted in Pessac, France. Because the final specifications for the coins were not finished in 1998, they will have to be melted and minted again in 1999.
May 1999 - Microsoft releases Windows 98 (Second Edition) (from 1998).
May 2000 - The billionth living person in India is born.
May 2001 - Space tourist Dennis Tito returns to Earth aboard Soyuz TM-31. (Soyuz TM-32 is left docked at the International Space Station as a new lifeboat.)
May 2002 - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter arrives in Cuba for a 5-day visit with Fidel Castro, becoming the first U.S. President, in or out of office, to visit the island since Castro’s 1959 revolution.
May 2003 - U. S. president George W. Bush lands on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, where he gives a speech announcing the end of major combat in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. A banner behind him declares “Mission Accomplished”.
May 2004 - Massachusetts legalizes same-sex marriage, in compliance with a ruling from the state’s Supreme Judicial Court (Goodridge v. Department of Public Health).
May 2005 - Kuwaiti women are granted the right to vote.
May 2006 - Human Genome Project publishes the last chromosome sequence, in Nature.
May 2007 - The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and the Moscow Patriarchate re-unite after 80 years of schism.
May 2008 - Over 69,000 are killed in central south-west China by the Wenchuan quake, an earthquake measuring 7.9 Moment magnitude scale. The epicenter is 90 kilometers (55 miles) west-northwest of the provincial capital Chengdu, Sichuan province.
May 2009 - North Korea announces that it has conducted a second successful nuclear test in the province of North Hamgyong. The United Nations Security Council condemns the reported test.
May 2010 - Scientists conducting the Neanderthal genome project announce that they have sequenced enough of the Neanderthal genome to suggest that Neanderthals and humans may have interbred.
May 2011 - Osama bin Laden was shot and killed inside a secured private residential compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by U.S. Navy SEALs in a covert operation orchestrated and authorized by U.S. President Barack Obama.
At the beginning of the year I bought a stationary trainer for my bicycle with the hopes of using it to regain some lost conditioning and perhaps lose a few pounds of weight. For the past two weeks I’ve been very diligent about riding it and, in spite of it being the most boring activity on earth, I’m pleased with how it’s working out.
Today the weather here was spectacular, with a high near 75º, so when I arrived home from work my goal was to ride outside instead of inside. There are some differences.
The inside of our garage is nicely sheltered from the wind. However, while you don’t have to battle its resistance, you aren’t cooled off by it either. Riding inside on a stationary trainer is hot, sweaty work, even in a 40º garage. Riding outside you are constantly aware of the wind. The only wind that truly helps is a tail wind. Cross winds aren’t any fun, and head winds are absolutely no fun. Regardless, wind is fresh air and wonderfully rejuvenating.
Outside you can coast, perhaps the single best thing about bicycling - the effortless gliding along, covering ground for free. Inside coasting is also known as stopping. And further referred to as, “Oh, God, I have to start again.”
Of course all the coasting that goes on outside means you aren’t working, and, if your goal is improved fitness, you aren’t moving toward that at all. Inside, since every pedal stroke is required, you are constantly working.
Hills may be the outside equivalent of coasting inside. With the added thrill of not falling over when you reach your lowest climbing speed. Of course the upside to hills are their downsides. See “Coasting” above.
Since we don’t own any dogs I don’t have to contend with them on my trainer rides. Truth be told I haven’t had to deal with them on the few outdoor rides I’ve had here either, but the potential is there.
Our neighborhood has marked bicycle lanes and there are walking/bicycle trails around town, so the car situation is better rather than worse. There are still a few yahoos who think you shouldn’t be on their road but thankfully they are few and far between. The only cars to contend with in our garage are parked, and the driver’s are nice people.
As I mentioned before, riding on the trainer is a constant activity. There is no coasting and therefore no let up. I feel I get a better workout on the trainer than I do on an outdoor ride. It’s too easy to loaf outside, and there are traffic lights, stop signs, and other delays that make it very difficult to maintain a good work out tempo. Once it is light later in the evening, and consistently warmer, I can make some longer rides that will be good work outs. For now I’ll use the trainer to get into shape and rides outside for fun.
Over the weekend I needed to charge my iPad as it had gotten down to about 5% battery life. Normally when I plug it into the computer the iPad screen shows that it is syncing, and when I go to iTunes on the computer I can see the device listed in the left-hand sidebar. Not this time. iPhoto started, since there are pictures on the iPad, but iTunes was ignorant of the iPad’s presence.
Over the next couple of days I tried several times to sync the iPad with no success. It charged okay, but it wouldn’t sync. My iPod Nano synced just fine however. Curious.
Several Google searches lead me to this, Device Not Recognized knowledge base article on the Apple Support site. After following all of the directions short of completely removing iTunes from my computer the iPad would still not synchronize. Completely removing iTunes seemed like a really drastic step, and one I was reluctant to try.
Today when Software Update indicated there was a new version of iTunes I thought maybe that would fix things. Unfortunately it did not. So this evening I followed all the steps in Removing iTunes from Mac OS X. When I got to the second half of the instructions, after restarting and emptying the trash, I discovered that instead of one copy of the com.apple.iTunes.plist, I had about two dozen copies, each with a slightly different number appended to the end of the file name. Obviously this plist had become corrupted and was the root of the problem.
Once all the files had be moved to the trash and then deleted I downloaded the newest version of iTunes and installed it. The moment of truth came when I started iTunes for the first time - would it be smart enough to recognize my existing library, playlists, ratings, and play counts. Yes, it was smart enough.
And even better, my iPad once again synchronizes with iTunes. I have no idea how things got broken, but I am glad they are working once again.
Last Saturday Sibylle’s brand new Toshiba laptop started acting funny. First would lock up anytime the computer went to sleep, and then it stopped recognizing USB devices. It also stopped recognizing SD Cards. Not good things.
My bag of Windows tricks has diminished as I don’t work on or use a Windows machine any more. We tried several things with no success, including using the most recent restore point. Thursday evening I called Toshiba support and worked with a very helpful and patient woman named Karen. She verified the problem and we tried a couple of things to fix the machine.
Deleting a registry file didn’t help, nor did running a Windows “fix it” routine downloaded from the Microsoft site. In the end she said our only option was to run the recovery process and reset the machine to its factory state. The problem with this option is that it means the drive will be formatted and all data on it lost. We bought her machine the last week of January so there isn’t a lot of new data on there, but we didn’t want to lose any of it.
Normally I’d plug a USB hard drive into her machine and back up files that way. Only the USB part of the Toshiba isn’t working. A quick survey of the files created or modified after the purchase date on her machine revealed a number of photos and videos that might be elsewhere on a SD Card or other computer, but wanting to be safe we wanted to back them up. The sum total of these files is 21 GB. Five DVDs worth. Hm. Fortunately we have a network drive and the network is still working on the Toshiba.
I started the proces of copying files to the network drive and we went to bed.
Friday morning the copying process had completed and I was able to verify that the files were safely on the network drive. However not from the Toshiba. This morning I was unable to view network attached devices from the Toshiba. Using another computer I verified that the copy operation had completed and I started the restore process. Instead of using the DVDs I had made (all 4 of them) the technician told me how to run a restore using the partition on the hard drive. By restarting (at least this model of Toshiba) while holding the zero key (0) down you can trigger the restore function. After saying yes to a dire warning about formatting the drive and losing all data contained on it, the process started. The Toshiba representative had warned me that based on hard drive size it could take 1 to 2 hours for this process to complete. I starte it about 6:15 am this morning and by 7:30 I was adding a new account to the machine.
By 7:45 the restore process had wrapped up and I was looking at a “factory fresh” Toshiba desktop again. Complete with BestBuy App. Since then the trial versions of Norton and Microsoft Office have been removed, along with the BestBuy App, and AVG Free AntiVirus was installed. Also, a fully licensed academic version of Microsoft Office has been installed, along with Dropbox.
Still left to accomplish is reinstalling Sibylle’s Kodak camera software, WordPerfect, and iTunes. Then we’ll copy her files and documents again.
The machine appears to be working normally now. USB drives and SD Cards are recognized. Network drives are visible and accessible. When put to sleep the machine doesn’t freeze anymore. While we may never know how something got corrupted, or indeed what exactly was corrupted, restoring the machine has solved the problem. I strongly suspect that a failed attempt to add a driver for the network drive was the issue. As long as we are able to work with that drive without installing Western Digital’s software, we will.
And, I’ll be setting up a backup program on her laptop to make a nightly copy of all her data so that in the future if there are problems we don’t have to worry about finding a way to get data off the computer before restoring it.
While I wasn’t pleased to have to jump through so many hoops to get her computer working again, I was pleased with how responsive Toshiba Support was. Karen knew her stuff and was able to lead me through the steps to try and fix Sibylle’s computer. I know I don’t have that kind of patience, so I am impressed when I am its recipient.
My little corner of the Internet is fifteen today. A quick whois lookup of zanshin.net shows that this domain was first registered at 05:00:00 GMT on 1996-02-20. I did have a personal site for about a year or so prior to having a domain. I think I was one of the first private domains my Internet provider had ever set up.
There have been a lot of bytes over the modem since then.
In September 2009 I wrote a lengthy how-to describing the process I followed installing PostgreSQL 8.x on my Mac running Snow Leopard. It was an interesting experience figuring out solutions to all the obstacles along the way. The posting is one of the most popular on my site, and it has generated several emails from people looking for help with their PostgreSQL installation.
As much fun as all of this has been I have wanted an easier way to set PostgreSQL up, particularly a way that avoided the entire dscl process of creating a new user id. With brew I think I’ve found a much easier process.
Homebrew, or brew for short, is billed as the missing package manager for Mac OS X. MacPorts and Fink are the other two, perhaps more established, players in this space. Go visit their site for more information and instructions on how to get brew up and running on your system.
As with any software installation process, you are proceeding at your own risk. Mucking around with package installers and things that live in the bowels of your file system are fine activities, but not for the uninitiated. Make a good backup and proceed with caution.
With brew installed it is simple to install PostgreSQL:
$ brew install postgresqlWhen I went to initialize my first database using the new PostgreSQL installation I received an error saying the the memory request could not be satisfied. After some Googling I found out I needed to change the settings on a couple for sysctl managed attributes. Specifically kern.sysv.shmmax and kern.sysv.shmall. Here’s what I changed mine to:
$ sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmax=13421772800
kern.sysv.shmmax: 4194304
sysctl: kern.sysv.shmmax: Operation not permitted
$ sudo !!
sudo sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmax=13421772800
Password:
kern.sysv.shmmax: 4194304 -> 13421772800
$ sudo sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmall=13421772800
kern.sysv.shmall: 1024 -> 13421772800kern.sysv.shmmax=13421772800
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=32
kern.sysv.shmseg=8
kern.sysv.shmall=13421772800
There’s a construction crew making good use of today’s near 60º temperature working up the street. They are putting the stone facade on a new house four houses up the street from us. Call it five houses distance as there is an intervening street too. Like all construction crews they have a large, loud stereo going.
How loud?
Loud enough to hear, or rather feel, the incessant thump of the bass from the rap-crap they are listening to.
I will be so very glad when all the houses in this neighborhood are completed an the noise, chaos, large beeping vehicles, and mess are gone. In other words, “Get off my lawn.”
Updated: A call to the Riley County Police department has been made. They were courteous and helpful. A squad car is being sent to deal with the matter.