[music | Chicane - Andromeda]

Saturday we did some strawberry picking, 9lbs for like $18 at Lull Farm's field in Milford.

Sunday, I headed up to Dunbarton to help out with this monster Sun e450. It was trapped in my friend's car because he didn't have anyone to help him move it into his house, haha. At my suggestion we pulled out everything that was modular before trying to get the stupid thing out of the car and up a flight of stairs to his room. From there it was a simple matter of giving it a serial console, with the null modem adaptor I didn't bring, so we had to drop the $9 at the Shack.

Then just feed it CD after CD. He only let me get 3/5 of the way through before giving up. I think it's going to be for sale, any takers? Sucker. My only comment was that it would probably cost him a fortune to make the Boy Scouts take it away from him next spring. In our town they only charged $20 "per computer", but I'm pretty sure they'd make an exception in his case and charge by the pound like with all other electronics.

Someday, we'll live in The Future, I swear it.

Last year I bought OmniGraffle 4 Pro, I really, really like that app, and it makes using Visio seem like self torture. Now only if the formats were open all the way around...

The thing that has held me back with OmniGraffle is the lack of stencils. Graffletopia does a great job, but I find myself using the Apple or Dell (mixed with the Sun, Netapp, etc) stencils that aren't really representative of my hardware, and I feel that it just doesn't seem that professional when I hand my boss a network or rack diagram that has all this disparate hardware that doesn't match anything we actually own. I have a lot of Visio stencils, some of which DO work in Omnigraffle using their preferred import method: Make a new drawing in Visio, drop your objects on there, save it as an xml drawing, and import that into OmniGraffle. The problem is that for a huge percentage of stencil sets, you get an error that you can't load the EMF data and get a grey rectangle or munged object.

Many people have been recommending blowing the objects way up in Visio and using a screenshot, or exporting the document from Visio as a PNG or some such. This will get you your objects, but they'll be raster images and you will lose both detail and the ability to scale them. What makes Visio and Omnigraffle (and PDFs, and Illustrator) work so well is that your objects are vector images and are scalable in all directions while maintaining quality.

To import those objects which don't convert properly, I've started using the following method, which isn't perfect, but the objects do come across, and you don't have to rasterize them.

I am using:
Visio 2002 in a Windows XP VM
Illustrator CS3
Omnigraffle 5 Pro

Go into Visio, create a document and populate it with some of the objects you want to convert. I've found that if I really load this up, it doesn't work so well. Save this document as .emf or .wmf (enhanced metafile or windows metafile). Oddly I've found that CS3 doesn't like the .ai files saved out from Visio 2002. YMMV. This would obviously be the preferred way to move files around, assuming it works.

Open the saved file in Illustrator on the Mac. You may have to ungroup/regroup your object and sub-objects. When you're ready, cut and paste your object from Illustrator into Omnigraffle using CMD-C and CMD-V. Dragging them from one app to the other didn't seem to work exactly as I would have expected.

Now, in Omnigraffle, click the gear icon in the Stencils panel and select "new stencil". This will open up a canvas that you can copy your new object into after whatever tweaking you want to do. In Omnigraffle 4, this is done with the Stencils menu instead.

There should be simpler ways to do this, but I haven't found any that produce results of the same quality with as few steps. I've found that you can use OpenOffice or NeoOffice to open the emf/wmf files, and then follow the same steps to import the objects, but it seems the NeoOffice rasterizes the files, so while it does work, you lose some detail. I'm also looking for other methods. Inkscape does a great job of opening and editing PDF documents, but doesn't seem to save in any vector format that can be loaded by Omnigraffle (mainly saves in SVG variants). Omnigraffle claims to be able to open PDFs, but I haven't had good luck with that in the Real World.

If I find an easier way to get quality stencils from Visio into Omni, I will update the page. In either case, I'll add screenshots soon enough.

I also wouldn't blindly upload any stencils you create to Graffletopia without running by them or the original stencil distributor, as that would almost certainly put you and Graffletopia both in hot legal water.

[music | The Pixies - Break My Body]

If you'll remember back a few months, I lost a toenail after catching a drunken pit guy at Rev. Horton Heat. In today's installment, it's a fingernail.

Today I was putting some switches in a rack, and was putting in cage nuts the un-safe way. With a screwdriver instead of a cage nut tool. Here's what the aftermath of that can look like unless you're more careful than I am.

I'm putting pictures behind here for people who are queasy:

Thanks boingboing.

Here is video and a couple of scanned articles by James Leatham. He made a great SciFi short in 1981 using an Apple II for special effects. The long and short of it is that since the Apple didn't have the horsepower to produce the actual animations he wanted, he set it up to render still images and control a stop motion video setup.

The short itself rules. I love the Space Buccaneer guy who sounds like he's from from Maine. I love the hair. You have to wait until 15:21 for the best part though.

The CSSManager is meant to allow access to certain functions of the Cisco CSS series load-balancers to less trusted (non network-engineer) staff without opening the CSS up to too much risk of misconfiguration. Currently it allows web users to suspend and activate Services in bulk quickly and safely. There are also value-added features such as "locking" servers so someone can't accidently activate a server that was suspended for a reason, comments are also useful, especially when used in conjunction with CSSPump to give context to a suspended or down server.

The first public release is right here. It should install and run fairly easily. If the Expect script gets something it doesn't like, it will simply freeze. This is again because of the target audience. If, after initial deployment, this tool doesn't complete its tasks properly, something is likely wrong with either the CSS or your route to it, and a network person should be looking at things, so I don't want it to gloss over failures.

It is very easy to make your CSS (inadvertently) write brand new config with this tool, as with anything that has the possibility of removing your entire load balanced server farm from the internet, it should be thoroughly tested before deployment.

Since my exit, stage left from VistaPrint earlier this year, I've been running my site at 1and1, with no real complaints, except that their VMs only offer Fedora Core 4, which is ages and ages old. I've been running UW-IMAP since then, and I've had some complaints. I believe those complaints might be client relate, but they might not, so I decided to try out some different servers. My only real complaint is that when running multiple clients against the same message store, they get out of sync.

Here's an example. I have two "main machines", a Mac Pro and a MacBook both running Mail.app on Leopard. If I leave the Pro running with Mail open and sorting, and go away and run the MacBook, any folders that the Pro sorts first don't get updated unless I click on them. Basically, it seems as if either Mail.app doesn't check every folder every time it updates, or UW isn't updating clients correctly. I have "Use IDLE" checked on the Macs, and I do belive UW supports IDLE, so it should push.

I've tried Thunderbird, but it annoys me in other ways. It doesn't, as of 2.0.0.9, sort by received date. It will sort by date, but it's whatever date the sender sets, which can be way wrong. There is a setting for it, "mailnews_use_received_date" in the equivalent of about:config, but it doesn't seem to do anything. You can also sort by message received ID, but that doesn't work when you're sorting mail to different folders.

So I was helping a friend with his 1and1 VM install and decided to mix things up a little. He has the same FC4 install that I do, and he'd gotten rid of most of their (now unsupported) Plesk install. I killed the rest of the default stuff, installed and configured Postfix, and went to decide on a server for IMAPs. I tried 'em all. I ended up in a fight between Dovecot and UW. UW didn't seem to want to deal, but Dovecot in the RPM version they support for FC4 (0.99) has some real problems with Mail.app. I ended up in giving him the same situation as me, UW-IMAP and hope it works.

I tried Cyrus and Courier, but neither of them met my requirement for "easy to deal with" and I dumped them both. It was at this time that I started thinking "Gee, I should either get a new VM and put Exchange or Zimbra on it", I hear exchange is a fine IMAP implementation, and they probably have 10x the developers of any of the Big 5 IMAP servers. Of course Exchange must be a weird mix of SQL guys, IIS guys (SMTP transport), IMAP guys and MAPI guys. I don't care, it seems to work. I might do an MSDN install of Exchange on W2k3 to see how it works, and if it works, give it my $39/month from 1and1 so I never have to think about mail again.

I just can't believe people still have to think about this shit. It's been a clear decade since MS came out with a Brainless Mail Transfer Agent under the Exchange banner (and it was relatively stable) and end-users didn't have think about their MTA anymore. I chalk this up to petty bickering and bitching within the IMAP community. The UW guy hates the Courier guy, and thus embraces the Cyrus guy even though he has the same gaping holes as everyone else. It's a huge mess.

I'm back on UW, I compiled and installed UW on my friends machine after giving up on Dovecot because of the Mail.app issues and the fact that newer versions of Dovecot wouldn't complile.

I never want to have to think about my email, come on Open Source Community, help me out here.

For some time, I've been annoyed by Mail.app not checking all folders every time it checks mail. My situation is that I have an IMAP server at a colo, a Mac Pro at home usually with Mail.app running and more importantly, running its filters, and a MacBook running Mail.app that I take with me to work or wherever.

The problem is that as mail comes in and gets filtered by the Pro, the laptop continues to check mail every minute. However it does not "see" messages that get filtered off. So if Dave sends me mail and it goes to the Dave folder, the only way I notice it is if I manually click that folder, which isn't happening.

So how do you fix it? I know there is probably a way, but I've not found an official answer to this in the months I've been looking, so here's what I've got that actually works.

Hit the Mailbox menu and select New Smart Folder. Use "Message is not in mailbox" rules if you don't want to check things like your spam folder (I have my spam stored on the server so if something gets filtered, I see it. Also make a rule to specify "Message Type" as "Mail" so it excludes any RSS feeds you have.

This should hit every folder you have, and when it does, it will actually "touch" that folder, and make the unread message count for that folder update. So what I've done was just collapse the "Smart Mailboxes" in Mail, and I'll probably forget that thing exists, since the unread message counts are now correct.

Woo, yay Apple. My life clearly isn't complicated enough. I'll update this with screenshots later, this is kind of a draft so I remember what I did.

[music | Public Image Ltd. - Same Old Story]

I think this machine defines the fine line between "Apple Fan" and "Apple Fanatic", so here are some first thoughts on the Macbook Air in disorganized bullet-point fashion:

• The very thing keeping from an iPhone (one of the biggies), that it turns into a $400 doorstop because you can't replace the battery, carries over to laptops now, x5.
• External CD/DVDs suck, since you have to carry them all the time. 90% of the time you don't need one, until you find yourself in a motel room in Dumpwater, FL at 3am with the word "FUCK" breaking out in hives across your forehead
• No wired ethernet? Next. Actually, here's a good point, my MacBook, and others around me, can't get DHCP on my office's wireless LAN, PCs work fine, but I have to be plugged in until I can be bothered to figure out why.
• I would constantly feel as if I was going to hammer my fingers through the machine into my desk while typing, and actually might
• I don't trust my iPod hard drive to hold my music. Why would I trust one to hold every damn important file I own in the world? Backup schemes are great until you're on the road for 3 weeks and the drive dies on the plane. While waiting a couple hours for some Genius to hand me a new drive for my Pro, I watched them non-chalantly toss dead iPods on a pile and hand a new one to whatever quivering-with-rage customer and move on to the next dead iPod.
• So that means you have to spend an extra grand to buy the 16GB downgrade to solid state. neat. To be honest, I've had my 30GB iPod for a couple years, and it hasn't died, yet. But I don't rely on it either, Murphy isn't gunning for me yet

That's the bad, what about the AWESOME?

• LED Display, this could be really, really nice. Time will tell but things are going the right way
• This one's been overlooked by everyone I've seen discuss the device, which isn't many people: If the only CD/DVD is USB2, and you can presumably reload the OS, that means Apple now has firmware that will let you boot from USB2 devices. I would love to see this back-ported so I can use Bootcamp this way on the Mac Pro and macbook I already have.
• 802.11n, as long as the firmware on this can be updated if there's a change before it gets ratified, awesome. If you have to take it in, that sucks.

In short, the next person who says I should just go drop for one of these is going to get my "Old and Clunky" MacBook across the head. "There, see, if that was a MacBook Air, you'd be in a whole lot less pain, and my laptop would be in a thousand pieces on the floor, so it would be lose-lose, now go screw, and get a bandaid for god's sake".

[music | Leaether Strip - What If (Beats on classic mix)]

The Amarok discussion usually comes as a result of a wider discussion/flamewar about the "little things" that bug the shit out of me a year after dropping SuSE for OSX as my home desktop. I used Linux as my desktop for about 8 years, and before that for more "traditional" server type applications. I've had a Linux desktop since Redhat 4.1, but it didn't replace Windows completely until about 1999. That gives me a different perspective on how a computer Should Just Work. My definition of that is skewed by things like uptime and standards compliance. I have no idea what the Standard Uptime is for a Windows desktop machine. My Windows desktops have always stayed up for months and months, because they do nothing except run Outlook and specialty business software that I couldn't get to work under Wine.

So from that perspective, OSX is not particularly stable. The only time I ever rebooted my linux machines was when either the power went out or I was upgrading SuSE. Aside from that, they Just Worked. I don't count things like upgrading KDE as a reboot, because it was just an X11 restart, ctrl-alt-backspace, new DE starts, no reboot. Leopard is more stable for me than Tiger was, especially in terms of returning from standby on the laptop. However in terms of applications "beachballing" and having to force-quit things, well that kind of thing rarely happened to me in SuSE. I'd probably kill Firefox every couple of weeks because something screws up or its footprint was too huge. I have to force-quit Safari every day or two (no SIMBL or other wackiness anymore until I figure out why this is).

Here's a quick list with some detail about what really bugs me, and what I really like in OSX:

I get asked a lot why I hate iTunes and what's so much better about Amarok. This is about Amarok 1.4.7, since there is no good way to run Amarok 2 yet. When I can get any copy of Amarok 2 to load a track and play it, either via the KDE4 Live CDs or from RangerRick's KDE on OSX native project, I'll give it a spin.

Here's a quick list of beefs with iTunes: