In Nerd Angst I mentioned briefly that I need to think up a suitable name for the new laptop due to arrive sometime Friday. Being a nerd through-and-through this is actually a more significant undertaking that you might otherwise suspect.
Until I got my PowerBook I had never named a computer. Upon seeing it and using it for the first time I immediately thought it should be called Eeyore. The Winne-the-Pooh books are still among my favorites more than four decades after my parents first read them to me. I always identified with Eeyore, and while a sleek new Apple laptop is hardly a donkey with a tacked tail, the name fit.
With the beginnings of a theme at work here my subsequent computers and external hard drives have been named from the Winne-the-Pooh universe. I’ve got a USB key named Piglet, and two older machines called Kanga and Roo. The IBM ThinkPad I bought 4 years ago is called Tigger. For a time the iMac was called 100AcreWoods, but names that start with numbers don’t always play well with others, so it was renamed Rivendell.
The problem with the Pooh universe is the rather limited number of character names. The Tolkien universe on the other hand is littered with names. Unfortunately many of them are hard to spell and harder still to pronounce. I actually use Tolkien names for my work supplied desktop and laptop, Palantir and Orthanc respectively. (Yes, it would make more sense to name the desktop tower after the tower and the portable laptop after the far-seeing stone, but I wasn’t thinking clearly when I choose the names. Renaming isn’t easy as there are static IP addressing issues involved.)
I read once about using the Periodic Table of the Elements as computer names, and leveraging the atomic number as the final octet of the IP address. But that would mean moving away from DHCP assigned IP addressing on our home network, and renaming computers here to take full advantage of the system.
One former employer used rivers (e.g., Orinoco and Danube) for development servers and planets for production servers (e.g., Mars and Jupiter). My current employer uses Jedi character names from Wookiepedia for servers. Although they are moving away from that creative scheme and toward one like dev-ome-as1. Which is functional but not really what I’m looking for.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) uses Request for Comments (a form of memo) to capture ideas and standards. There is a RFC on computer names, that offers many guidelines but no real answers.
(Every time I mention guidelines I am reminded of the first Pirate movie, and the phrase, “Welcome to the Black Pearl.” Hmmm….)
I’ve got until Friday to solve this mental exercise. Well, actually longer than that as the name doesn’t have to be set immediately. Decisions, decisions, decisions.
If I were to coin a phrase about buy consumer electronics it would be, “don’t watch the price after completing your purchase.” Usually, over time, the price of consumer electronics goes down, or, if the item is already at its lowest sustainable price, the features or extras go up for the same price.
Personal computers, both desktop and laptop, have razor thin margins. Manufacturer suggested list prices barely cover the cost of components and assembly. Prices may drop a little once in a while, but more often than not, speedier processors or more memory or larger hard drives are made available for the same price point. All of which means there’s no good time to buy a new laptop if you are going to be upset by a newer, sleeker, faster one being released after your purchase. Whether it is six months later or six days later, it is going to happen.
Buying a new computer also has a bit of the popular “washed the car yesterday so it is raining today” cause and effect pattern. On Saturday I purchased a new computer, so naturally the Apple Store is currently “down” today while it is being updated. Rumors indicate new plastic MacBooks, new iMac minis, new iMacs, and maybe a surprise. I know that the MacBook Pro I just bought will sooner (rather than later) be upgraded. I’m okay with that.
I just hope that it’s not today.
The new MacBook Pro has been ordered. It’s status is still “not yet shipped” more than 48 hours after the order was completed, apparently ordering on a Saturday has disadvantages. However, I can make good use of the waiting time by preparing for how to transferring nearly 90 GB of data and applications from my PowerBook to the new MacBook Pro.
Apple provides a migration assistant that will let you transfer user accounts, files, folders, applications, and your Library folder. Moving all my stuff in one fell swoop would be the easiest in terms of decision making for me, however it would move the cruft as well as the cream to the new hard drive. For example, there’s stuff on the PowerBook from my last full-time Windows machine, circa 2001. Plus I tend to download and experiment with all kinds of applications, many of which fall into disuse quickly. There’s no real need to move all of that clutter to a new machine.
Option two would be to start using the MacBook Pro and only install applications as I use them, or data only when I need it. Doing it incrementally would minimize the amount of cruft that was blindly copied to the new machine, but it would stretch out the transition period considerably.
The third option would be to identify those programs I use on a daily basis, and those files/folders I want immediately, and transfer those in one marathon session to get things up and running. Then over time as I discover infrequently used applications or forgotten but still necessary data, transfer them.
After creating a user account on the new machine (need to think up a good name for the machine), use Dropbox to transfer my Safari bookmarks and address book entries. Configure Apple Mail to read my Gmail accounts via IMAP, and my domain accounts. With 35,000 messages in GMail this will synchronize for a long time.
Many months ago, when I was running out of room on the current 100 GB hard drive I backed up all the television shows I had purchased from iTunes. I am very tempted to copy my iTunes library across as is, import the back up and call it good. I am also tempted to re-rip my music collection, paying more attention to bit rates, and complete tags. I have a second copy of my music on my work computer, which is where I do most of my listening, so a delay here wouldn’t be the end of the world. One thing I do need to figure out is how to synchronize my 30 GB iPod with the new laptop.
iPhoto is a great tool for my pictures, but the 867 MHz processor in my old PowerBook is overwhelmed by my relatively small 4000 image library. I am looking forward to transferring to a new, faster machine, and to a newer version of iPhoto.
With pictures in place, and music either copied directly across or being slowly re-ripped it’ll be time for third-party applications.
I am a huge fan of Adium, so this software will be installed right away. I’ve been running the nightly build for several months now with no problems at all. My current favorite message theme is “Twitterrific” with the Geeky list layout. And I use the “iPhone Dark Mini” message theme; I’ll have to download and install both of these extras along with Adium.
I’ve been a staunch Twitterrific user since it was released. My only complaint is a lack of multiple computer synchronization support. TweetDeck and Tweetie provide options for this (built-in and via Dropbox respectively) so I may switch for a while and see how I like the competition.
Quicksilver has been an integral part of my Mac experience for as long as it has been available. I’ve tried Spotlight and Google’s QuickSearchBox as replacements on a couple of occasions, mostly since development on Quicksilver has ceased. I haven’t decided if I’ll use the new machine as an excuse to leave Quicksilver once and for all or not. Several years of ingrained user experience expectation has a lot of inertia to overcome, new machine or not.
TextMate is my all-time favorite editor so it will be quickly installed on the new machine. Along with the PlasticCodeWrap theme. Since I’m making more use of Mercurial for source version control I’ll be adding the hg bundle as well.
Some of my code is still housed in a local Subversion repository, so that’ll be transferred next.
I make good use of MAMP for local testing of web sites, so a fresh install of that come next. Once MAMP is up and running I’ll need to download and install WordPress and establish its database in MySQL.
My /usr/local directory is filled with all sorts of software goodness. Junit, Maven, Subversion, Ant, JBoss, Scala, et cetera. These are all strong candidates for the wait and transfer as needed category.
When I purchased the PowerBook, and its sibling 17-inch iMac G4, I bought a license to Microsoft Office for OS X. Coming from a Windows environment, and being a heavy user of Word and Excel, I wanted to have those tools available on the (then) new platform. I still use Word and Excel these days, but I also use Google Docs and OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. Rather than continue with the now seven-year-old copy of Office, or springing for a new copy, I am planning on installing OpenOffice and existing in the open source world for my office productivity tools.
Believe it or not my aging PowerBook was capable of virtualization. I’ve had a copy of VirtualPC running a Windows 2000 guest OS for several years. It’s slow and cumbersome, but it does work. On my work-supplied Mac Pro and MacBook Pro I run both VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox. For my personal use at home I am planning on using VirtualBox.
This initial batch of transfers and installations will enable my email, chat, and twitter communication channels, my web browsing favorites, programming editor, and interface enhancements. I’ll also have my pictures and either a plan for re-ripping music, or the music itself. I’ll be able to install a guest OS or two through virtualization, and I’ll have word processing and spreadsheet support. Should be enough to get me through a day or two.
For the past seven years my primary day-to-day computer has been a Titanium PowerBook G4. In a word this laptop has been outstanding. Except for a faulty CD drive early in its life, I have had no mechanical difficulty with this machine. I replaced the original hard drive with a new 100 GB model about 4 years ago; the original 40 GB drive has continued to perform faithful service in a USB/FireWire enclosure. I bumped the memory up from its original 256 MB to the maximum 1 GB. I’m still using the original battery, and the AirCard I added weeks after getting the machine. In short it has been a phenomenal machine, well worth every penny of it’s $2500 cost.
This morning I purchased a new 15" MacBook Pro, a uni-body model with considerably more oomph in the CPU cycles, RAM, and battery life areas. Oh, and the ability to run the newest operating system, Snow Leopard. There will no doubt be several entries about the new machine once it arrives, but I wanted to do a straight up technical specification comparison now, just for grins.
Solid-state trackpad provides precise cursor control; supports tap, double-tap, and drag capabilities
Multi-Touch trackpad for precise cursor control; supports two-finger scrolling, pinch, rotate, swipe, three-finger swipe, four-finger swipe, tap, double-tap, and drag capabilities
Proceed with this how-to with caution and a good backup…
In order to synchronize your Apple AddressBook using Dropbox you need to have Dropbox installed on all the computers you wish to sync, and you need to have some comfort running commands in Terminal. This synchronization is relatively easy to accomplish, but missing a step or mistyping a command could leave you without ready access to your address book. Make backups and follow the steps carefully and you should be okay.
Get a copy of Dropbox if you haven’t already. It’s an amazingly useful tool that gives you 2 GB of storage on the “cloud” for free. With clients for Linux, Windows, and Mac operating systems, I use it every day. The installation and setup is well explained on the Dropbox site so I won’t cover that here.
With Dropbox installed on each machine you wish to sync you need to prepare and backup your AddressBook. To prepare my Address Book I combined all my addresses into a single address book. This combined address book is the one I pushed to Dropbox. But before that I made backups of all my address books. Under File | Export you’ll find the Address Book Archive… option.
Once your backups are completed, you are ready to move the combined Address Book to Dropbox. To do this you will use the Terminal application located in the Applications | Utilities folder. Make sure that you have quit Address Book before doing these commands. Also, these commands assume your Dropbox is located in your home folder. If you placed it elsewhere, you’ll have to adjust the Dropbox path accordingly.
$ mv ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook ~/Dropbox/$ ln -s ~/Dropbox/AddressBook ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBookWith AddressBook working on the first machine it is time to setup the other machine or machines. Since you combined the AddressBook already, all you need to do is move the AddressBook directory from ~/Library/Application \Support and add a symbolic link to the Dropbox location. Again use the Terminal to issue these commands:
$ cd
$ mkdir backups
$ mv ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook/ ~/backups
$ ln -s ~/Dropbox/AddressBook/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBookRepeat the Forth step for each machine you want to share your Address Book with.
Address Book wasn’t written with multiple copies accessing a single, shared set of data in mind. I haven’t experimented with having the Address Book application open on more than one machine at the same time. I would expect this to cause errors and possible data corruption. I rarely have Address Book open at all, usually only to update an address or add or remove people. If your usage paradigm is different than mine and you have Address Book open all the time, you may need to be prepared to restore from the backups you made.
Today’s announcement that President Barack Obama has been named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner no doubt shocked many people, including President Obama. In a way this award is borrowed from the future. It represents what I hope will be the Obama administration’s legacy.
When I was active in the dojo we used to tell karate-ka something when they had been awarded a new rank. We used to say, “this rank does not represent how good you are but rather how good you can be.”
Mr. Obama, the Nobel prize represents our hope, America’s hope, the world’s hope, that you can be that good. That you can create an atmosphere of openness and cooperation and brotherhood in America and across the world. You presented yourself on the American politica stage and said, “I can lead. I can make a difference to America and the world.” America heard you and has given you the chance to lead. The world has heard you and is waiting for you to mend old ills and forge new beginnings.
The Nobel Peace prize is the world’s way of saying, “We, too, believe. We, too, want hope, want change, want peace.”
This prize is not how good you are or have been until now. This prize is how good we hope, and need, you to be.
Earlier this evening, while not paying close enough attention to what I was doing, I managed to delete some semi-important files on my desktop at work. The error happened because I was remotely logged in via the command line and wasn’t paying attention to which machine I was actually working against. My error is recoverable but it gives me new respect for the working environment system administrators live in day in and day out.
The files I deleted where the public and private key pair that uniquely identify my work desktop, and the list of public keys my work desktop has added to its authorized keys list. No real harm done except that now when I try to remotely login to that computer I have to enter the password. I decided to start over and document the process so I can perform it again in the future, if need be.
Generate a key pair on each machine you regularly use. In my case I have two work computers, a desktop called Palantir and a laptop called Orthanc, and two personal computers, both laptops, called Eeyore and Tigger. On Unix based systems run the ssh-keygen command to create a new public and private key pair. Like this:
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/mhn/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /Users/mhn/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /Users/mhn/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.$ cp id_rsa.pub machineName.pubNext I copied the public keys from each machine into a folder in my Dropbox:
$ cp .pub ~/Dropbox/public_keys/$ scp machineName.pub you@othermahince.com:~/.sshOnce you have the key files on the remote machine or in your Dropbox, ssh (secure shell) into that machine and change to the .ssh directory.
$ ssh you@remoteMachine.com
Password:
$ cd .ssh$ touch authorized_keys$ cat machineName.pub >> authorized_keysThere is no step four. You’re done.
I also used the named public key files to allow password-less access to my bitbucket account.
NB: These steps worked for me. You should probably read more about ssh keys, scp, and ssh before attempting to follow them. Especially if you’ve never done this before.
Like a lot of bloggers I tend to write erratically and about topics that are of interest to me. Sometimes my topics strike a chord with the blog reading public and I generate lots of page views and gain new regular readers. Toward that end I am experimenting with a suggestion service.
Click on the “Suggestions?” tab which is hopefully visibly at the bottom left of my site, and fill in the form with any topic that you’d like me to write about. I can’t guarantee that I’ll write about every suggestion I receive, but I will write about those that seem to be popular or that strike a chord with me.
For those of you who are interested, I’m using Skribit to provide this suggestion service.
My first Internet email account was with AOL around March 1993. This was soon followed by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) account in late 1994. In February 1996 I acquired this domain and had my first domain email address. I still have that address, although I don’t use it actively any more. Like a lot of Internet nerds I have been collecting email accounts ever since.
Between Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail, and several domains, I think I’ve had as many as 11 or 12 accounts active at one time, not counting various employer supplied accounts. The oldest of these dates back to 1996 and it was heavily used for USENET postings, and appeared proudly in my email signature for years, before doing that was a guaranteed way to increase your incoming spam numbers.
It saddens me in a way that the three oldest active email accounts I have, all belonging to this domain, get nothing but spam these days. Thousands and thousands of spams each day. When Google Mail started allowing you to read other accounts I set up a proxy account with GMail that reads these three old accounts, and I consume the proxy account via IMAP. It’s been a couple of years since I set the proxy up, with the intention of monitoring the old accounts for someone who hadn’t gotten the message about my GMail address.
In the past week the number of spam has suddenly increased dramatically, and I am ready to throw in the towel. I am ready to delete the oldest of my email accounts. Which is surprisingly hard to do. I own the domain and can always recreate them, but, like having a domain that will be 14 years old in a few months, having an email address that is that old pleases me. I feel bad enough for having abandoned it to the vagaries of spam for so long, deleting it now feels like adding insult to injury.
Still, it must be done. The torrent of spam isn’t going to stop and I’m ready to have much less of it in my life. GMail hides spam away without my having to do anything, deleting these accounts frees me from having to keep the digital dikes shored up and functioning. Not only will I reduce the influx of negativity into my life, I’ll reduce the amount of time and effort spent wading around in that muck.
These steps will install PostgreSQL in /usr/local.
To stop a server running in the background you can type:
/usr/local/pgsql/bin/pg_ctl stop$ su postgres
Password:
bash-3.2$ cd
bash-3.2$ pwd
/usr/local/pgsql
bash-3.2$ createdb testdb
bash-3.2$bash-3.2$ psql testdb
psql (8.4.0)
Type "help" for help.
testdb=#The postgres user account will appear in the fast user switching (FUS) list and as an account on the login screen. To hide the account on the login screen run the following command:
To unhide all accounts: