Month: July 2007

Posted by: Andy Fore in Mac OS X

Why is it that some of the essential tools that are used on a daily basis are missing from OS X?

Today I wanted to use wget and found that it was missing.

Fortunately, this is a very easy thing to fix. All you have to do is download the source code from the GNU page on the wget project, then follow the standard compile steps:

1. unpack the source
2. ./configure
3. make
4. sudo make install

Note: The compiled binary is placed in /usr/local/bin so you will need to add this to your path. This process varies depending on what shell you are using, but the default shell in 10.4.9 is bash.

Posted by: Andy Fore in Sayings

Every now and then I will utter a saying that I grew hearing or using that makes my assistants wonder.

Today I happened to use the saying If wishes were horses, beggars would ride in reference to one of my assistants wish that the timesheet process here was all done electronically instead of the paper system that we have.

She wondered where I get these things from. I thought it was a pretty common saying, but I had never actually investigated where it originated, so I went googling.

The first reference I found was from Bartleby.com which listed the meaning behind the saying according to the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy as:

If wishing could make things happen, then even the most destitute people would have everything they wanted.

While this was nice, I already knew what it meant, so I went googling some more for the origin of the phrase. It turns out that it is a line from a Mother Goose nursery rhyme, entitled If Wishes Were Horses:

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If turnips were watches, I would wear one by my side. And if “ifs” and “ands” Were pots and pans,

There’d be no work for tinkers!

Ref: apples4theteacher.com

Posted by: Andy Fore in Environmental

So according to a study commissioned by Mayor Bloomberg, the greenhouse gas emissions of New York City in 2005 was on par with all of Ireland or Portugal.

You have to love it when a city produces as much environmentally destructive elements as an entire country.

The most interesting part was the fact that it’s mostly from the buildings and not the average citizen. The claim that the mass transit system is what make the citizens less polluting.

I wonder how much less the entire U.S. would produce if we took mass transit more seriously?

Ref: Greenhouse Gas Study: 1 Percent From NYC

Posted by: Andy Fore in Photography

A nice post on Amazing Filtered Things shows a whole bunch of photos of nuclear blasts.

My favorite is the one with the observers in the foreground.

Posted by: Andy Fore in Culture

Johnny Hart, the creator of the B.C. comic strip died at the age of 76 on Saturday, April 7, 2007.

This really sucks. B.C. was a really great comic strip.

For more check out the story on PressConnect.

Check out the B.C. strip on comics.com.

Posted by: Andy Fore in Gaming, Adobe Contribute

Recently I ran into a situation where I had to change the username and password that Contribute uses for the SFTP operations.

I don’t have my stuff setup to use individual SFTP logins, since I am doing away with direct shell access to the webroot and dislike manually updating permissions for people.

I found out that there is a hidden password policy in the Contribute Publishing System with regards to what it will pass as the SFTP password.

I tend to use mixed-case as well as punctuation and numbers in my passwords. When I put the new password in, the system seemed to take it. Unfortunately, this was only an appearance, since it borked when I closed Contribute and opened it back up.

Apparently it doesn’t like the use of an ampersand in the password. And since the password is stored in an unusual encryption scheme I was unable to recover from this without recreating my entire connection to the particular webserver I was managing.

Stay tuned for a post on the steps to recreate the connection without losing all you data, as well as a utility to help in case of problems.

Posted by: Andy Fore in Poetry

The Gypsy Violin
by Munda

The compelling violin lures With an irresistible yearn Dance, dance, please dance for me

I can no longer adjourn!

Ethereal notes float from its strings Caressing like a lover’s hand Sensual music, Angel’s touch

Leading the way to wonderland

Embracing with utter delight Craving, beckoning me Tempting my lonely heart

Dance, dance on my melody!

Faster, faster the music escapes Without compassion to body or soul Seducer of lonely hearts

Until dancing is my only goal

Faces gyrate while I dance on passion Flashes of fire in the corner of my eyes The violin plays like never before

Until I become one and loneliness dies

With a final cry and a final touch The violin stops, the music ends Leaving behind an emptiness

We’ll meet again, my violin friend

ref. url: The Gypsy Violin

Posted by: Andy Fore in Poetry

When You Are Old
by William Butler Yeats

When you are old and gray and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead,

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

ref. url: When You Are Old

Posted by: Andy Fore in Copyright

So, according to a story on Reuters, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is evaluating whether or not to ban Novell from didtributing future versions of their Linux OS.

“The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft,” Eben Moglen, the Foundation’s general counsel, said on Friday.

Apparently they might use their lock on the intellectual property rights to key pieces of the opern-source OS to achieve this.

My questions:

1. Exactly how are they going to achieve this, if the software is open-source?
2. Which version of the GPL are they going to claim that permits this?
3. How does this action promote the goals of the FSF which according to their About Us page include: “our worldwide mission to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of all free software users.”?

Has Richard Stallman lost his ever-loving mind? He wants people to use Linux. And not just as the OS they run on their servers, but as an everyday OS. He wants people to stop using DRM on their electronically available downloads, as evidenced by the campaign to stomp out DRM.

If Novell wants to enter into a business agreement that results in commercial support and interoperability with the non-free software juggernaut Microsoft, then how is this bad for Linux?

Just because RS doesn’t like Billy Gates and his commercial giant, doesn’t mean that he needs to start by using the same tactics he stands against when someone gets in bed with MS and Linux at the same time.

Shame on you RS, put your money where you values are. If you want people to use open-source then don’t use bullying tactics to keep it from happening.

UPDATE: according to a story at Linux-Watch, the Reuters story is misleading. Apparently the patent agreement is completely legal under GPL v2, but they are working on a language for the next GPL v3 draft that will make it a violation of the license. I say again: why is this MS/Novell deal bad for Linux? And as the Linux-Watch story points out, the current Linux kernel developers don’t like GPL v3 and apparently have no plans to move from GPL v2.

Posted by: Andy Fore in Poetry

Who is She?
by Gabriel Rosenstock

Who is this goddess of yours? Who is she?

‘Pure fantasy, I wager.’

‘Is she not clear to you?’
‘No, she is not.’

‘Clearer than day is she
‘ clearer than night …’

‘Not clear to me …’

‘Day in night is she
‘ night in day …’

‘I see her not …’

‘Look inside yourself!’

‘Difficult …’

‘Then look at her frost

covering the grass.’

ref. url: Who is She? In English and Gaelic

Posted by: Andy Fore in Software, Adobe Contribute

While changing some things on my computer setup today I decided to change the name of my harddrive and computer to match my local DNS entry.

Having done this many times before I knew that there would be certain applications that would be looking for an absolute path that would have issues, such as Dreamweaver sites and the root folder locations for them.

Adobe Contribute (formerly Macromedia Contribute) has the same problem with the stored sites that you have setup prior to the name change.

Here is how to fix Contribute after changing the harddrive name:

1. Open up the Contribute preferences file located in /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences/ (in my case the filename was Contribute 4.1 Preferences, this will be different for other versions) in your favorite text editor.
2. Start searching at the top of the file for each instance of the old harddrive name.
3. Replace each instance with the new harddrive name.
4. Save and close the file.

Now the next time you start Contribute, you won’t get the any error messages related to having missing site files.

Oh, and don’t forget to backup the file first. You do back up your data right?

Posted by: Andy Fore in Copyright, Cyberspeech, Music

Everyone wanted DRM-free music and EMI partnered with Apple to make it happen.

Now apparently it’s not being done right. Of course, we all knew that the account holder name and associated e-mail address was being stored in the DRM encrypted tracks. But somehow everyone seems to think that Apple was going to just cease to embed that because the song was DRM-free.

Ars Technica has a story up on this.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some data was being analyzed in aggregate, although Apple’s current privacy policy does not appear to allow for this. As with the dust-up over the mini-store, Apple should clarify what this embedded data is used for.

Give me a break. Sure, if the privacy policy states that Apple isn’t going to use the data for purchase analyization, then fine. But I would be willing to bet that the author of the story has at least one of those grocery store cards, or a gas station card, or even a driver’s license, that contains some sort of barcode or mag stripe on it. What exactly do you think the stores do with all that data on your purchasing habits? They analyze it for trends of course.

Chicken Little, the sky is not falling.

Posted by: Andy Fore in Sayings

Another day, another off the wall saying.

So my father used to use the phrase “You Can’t Roller Skate In A Buffalo Herd” all the time when I was growing up. Until recently I never really cared what the origin was, I used the phrase and went on.

Recently, however, the subject of my unusual phrases came up at a luncheon for one of my student assistants that had just gotten a new job as a full time staff member in another department.

So, here’s the origin. The phrase comes from a song by Roger Miller entitled, strangely enough, You Can’t Roller Skate In A Buffalo Herd. For the complete lyris visit .

Posted by: Andy Fore in Gaming

Many of us have played online games. Even more of us play them with the intent of socializing during the game with our fellow players.

However, there is another group of online gamers, the mute ones.

Ars Technica’s Opposable Thumbs journal has an interesting post concerning the online gamer segment that just wants to play against a human. They don’t have any interest in interacting outside of the regular game play itself.

I wonder how many gamers there are out the like this. Is there a market for a service that caters to those who only use the online games and online components to garner non-AI opponents?

Posted by: Andy Fore in Free Speech

From the Ars Technica story:

A Michigan man is being prosecuted for using a cafe’s free WiFi… from his car.

The Michigan law apparently bars you from accessing someone else’s network without their explicit authorization.

Seems to me that this is really getting out of hand. Where’s the law that says that the owner of the network has to secure it to prevent unauthorized access? Given the ease with which you can secure a network and still allow your customers access when they wish, I would think that this is a no-brainer.

Also, is there a law that says I can’t stand on the street corner, on the public sidewalk mind you (because I would hate to get arrested for loitering), and use the street lamp that the store is paying for to read a newspaper or book? Isn’t that unauthorized use of their electricity?

Posted by: Andy Fore in arfore.com

So apparently I am just way behind the times.

According to a news story at WashingtonPost.com, one girl ran her family Verizon Wireless bill to the tune of $1,100.

When I last upgraded my phone, about a month or so ago, the Cingular rep asked me if I wanted to add text messages to it. He seemed real surprised when I told him that I sent and received a total of 10 or 12 messages per month.

I guess I am just not hip enough.

Posted by: Andy Fore in Linux, Windows, Apache

Well, over the weekend some of the other sysadmins of the world provided the solution to the Office 2007 file download problems.

It’s all about the mime types. For those of you not in the know, a MIME type is an Internet Standard that is used to help webservers and e-mail servers know what kind of files are being served up and sent out. Check out the Wikipedia article for more.

So on an Apache webserver you need to add the following to your mime types file:

application/vnd.openxmlformats docx pptx xlsx

Thanks goes out to Vlad Mazek and his post on this one.

Now if only it was so easy for a Windows webserver running IIS. For the process on updating IIS, surf on over to the entry on David Oberton’s blog at a href=”http://uksbsguy.com/”>UK SBS Guy.

Posted by: Andy Fore in Windows

So with the impending roll out of Microsoft Office 2007 here at work, we have discovered something interesting. Apparently IE 6 and IE 7 don’t understand how to deal with the new file types that were introduced with Office 2007.

For those of you who aren’t aware, with the introduction of Office 2007, Microsoft has moved to new new file format for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint called Open XML. The new extensions for the files have an x added to the end of the familiar Office file extensions. For more on the file types check out the Wikipedia entry Microsoft Office 2007 file extensions.

The behavior when attempting to download the files using IE is that the browser treats them as zip files and displays the familiar “Run, Save, Cancel” box after starting the download. The fun part is that Firefox 2.0.0.3 and Netscape 8.1.3 both check the file extension against the file types list of the OS and if the new file types are listed appropriately, they tell you the correct type of Office document that you are attempting to download. (Note: you only get the new file type definitions if you have installed Office 2007 or the Office 2007 File Compatibility Pack for Office 2003).

Good game, Microsoft. I really hope that you produce a fix soon.

For those searching for more information on this, here’s a couple of links I found on the problem:

http://www.tutorials-xe.com/ERRORS/docx-becomes/
http://www2.nau.edu/~d-elearn/faculty_support/tutorials/office2007/office2007.php

Posted by: Andy Fore in Linux

In the process of rebuilding my MythTV box with Gentoo, I found a bug in the 2.6.19 kernel when it comes to using wireless and ndiswrapper for my Linksys WMP54G v.4 PCI card.

When you configure the kernel you normally have to only select CONFIG_NET_RADIO=y and CONFIG_NET_WIRELESS=y.

But with the 2.6.19 kernel I discovered via post on a board that you also need to select one of the wireless chipsets as a module, even if you don’t plan on using it. If you don’t do this then CONFIG_NET_RADIO will still be marked as “n” when the kernel is built even though that isn’t what you selected at config time.

To check the required values you can use the following command:

zgrep CONFIG_NET_RADIO /proc/config.gz
zgrep CONFIG_NET_WIRELESS /proc/config.gz

Posted by: Andy Fore in Mac OS X

So, I hate developers. Wait, let me clarify: I hate developers who can’t think through the user experience.

When an uninstaller is written it really should remove all file associated with the application.

Case in point, recently I moved to a Windows Mobile-based smartphone, so I needed to cross-grade to Missing Sync for Windows Mobile from the PalmOS version.

When I run the uninstaller it removed a lot of stuff, but the following data was left behind:

• Missing Sync under the home library Application Support
• Palm Hotsync under the home library Application Support
• com.markspace.missingsync.ConduitManager.plist under the home library Preferences
• com.markspace.missingsync.palmos.plist under the home library Preferences
• com.markspace.MemoPad.plist under the home library Preferences
• Palm under the home Documents directory
• Palm Hotsync under the system library Application Support

Admittedly, some of these files/directories might be valuable if you want to re-install your software for some reason, but at the very least the installer should ask you if you want to remove it.

Also, in the Hotsync folder(s) there are sometimes conduits that are not part of the Missing Sync software, so it was actually nice that those were left behind.