Cafe in Central Jerusalem
I'm writing this sitting in a cafe in Central Jerusalem. The rest of the family has gone to the Dead Sea to swim. Only Liora and Ilana are excited about this, because it is an hour to hour and a half drive from Jerusalem, and the water is smelly and unpleasant. Plus, it is hot. Liora is especially excited about this though, because she's looking forward to floating on the top of the water.
So far I've enjoyed wandering around central Jerusalem and seeing the incredible variety of people who are out and about. There are tourists from all over the world, and lots of Israelis as well. Sometimes it is hard to tell which is which.
I've been amazed as we walked around how many young folks seem to be here prepared to camp; carrying full backpacks and camping gear. Since so far we've been in the old city and downtown Jerusalem, it is surprising to see so many campers around.
We have one more day in Jerusalem before we pack up and head to our next destination.
On our way
As I write this, we're getting ready to leave the hotel in New York to go to the airport to board our flight to Israel. We left RTP last night. The kids and I really enjoyed the limo from LaGuardia to JFK; it was the first time for all three of us in a stretch limo. The girls were a little freaked out at first, but then relaxed and enjoyed it. I had no idea how cramped the inside of a Lincoln-based limo would be; now I understand the Hummer-based ones better.
The best part about this is the fact that the packing & preparing for vacation is done. More from Israel later...
Annoying documentation niglets
Well, I've been working with a partial Roller 4.0 install for the last several weeks while I tried to figure out why the planet aggregator would not work. I didn't get much help from the dl, since my problem was "bizarre". I should have known that this was a synonym for "you missed something so basic we can't recognize the problem".
It turns out that I had the config entry to enable the planet aggregator in the wrong properties file. Despite the effort to make Roller 4.0 simpler to install, there are still issues. In particular, the user documentation specifies only one properties file (roller-custom.properties). There is a bug documented that the planet aggregator actually requires its own properties file with some duplicated entries (e.g. the database connection configuration entries). I assumed that the setting that indicated that the planet aggregator was enabled belonged in this file; it turns out it needs to be in the roller-custom.properties file.
Now that I am past this little niglet, hopefully the rest of the roller 4.0 experience will be good.
Leopard's Time Machine corrupts Entourage 2008 database backups
When I installed Leopard, I decided that since Apple had embedded an incremental backup solution into the OS, that this would make it more likely that I could keep my backups current. I'm not really good at remembering to take the time to back up my notebook normally, and this seemed like it would be a great solution.
In evaluating this, I read several articles that claimed that using Time Machine with the Office 2008 identity database was suboptimal because it would take a lot of backup space, since the large database file would be completely backed up each hour. This didn't bother me much, because my mail database is so critical to how I work that I would trade a lot of backup disk capacity for a guarantee of losing no more than an hour of e-mail updates due to a hard disk failure or other issue.
Then it happened. I had sync problems after upgrading to 10.5.2 (see my other post on this topic), and in the process of trying to resolve them, I accidentally destroyed all of my calendar data. I figured this wouldn't be a problem; I could just restore the identity folder from my Time Machine backup and I'd be OK. After doing the restore, Entourage would not start because the database file was corrupt. I tried to rebuild the database using the Microsoft database utility. After running for ~18 hours, it failed with an unrecoverable error.
That's when I started to look at the database file in each of the last several Time Machine backups. There were four consecutive hourly backups between 10am and 2pm in which the database file was the same size and had the same last modified timestamp. Since I'd sent and filed numerous messages during that time, it seemed to indicate a problem. I tried restoring each of these backups, and all were corrupt. I then went further backward to the first backup that had a different last modified timestamp on the database file. It too was corrupt. Again there were several hourly backups with this same last modified timestamp, although there should have been modified data between each backup.
I then gave up and called Microsoft. While I was on the phone with them, I found this KB article that states "If Time Machine starts an automatic backup while Entourage 2008 is modifying the user database, the backup process may damage the backup copy of the user database.". The Microsoft support rep I talked to on the phone was more blunt; she said that it was unlikely that any of my time machine backups of the database would be whole & usable, and none would be recoverable via the database utility due to the nature of the corruption.
After close to two days using Outlook via Parallels while I tried to figure out a way to get a relatively recent backup restored, I gave up and went back to the last SuperDuper backup I had before I started using Time Machine. I lost months of e-mail because of this problem, and I'm not at all happy. It seems highly unlikely to me that Apple and Microsoft would not have found this during any reasonable testing. If they had, there should at least have been documentation of the problem, and more likely they should have flagged the Office identify file to be skipped by Time Machine, with a clear notice to this effect in both the Leopard installer and the Office 2008 installer.
Leopard 10.5.2 Sync Conflicts between Entourage and iCal
I have Entourage configured to sync my Exchange calendar to iCal, so that I can use iTunes to transfer it to my iPhone. It took a long time to get this set up initially, and during this process I ended up using Syncrospector under Tiger to clear out the Sync Services truth database to finally stop getting duplicate entries and/or unresovable conflicts. After doing so, however, it was very usable.
I want the sync to be one-way for this calendar, so that there is no possibility of sync conflicts damaging my Exchange calendar. 90+% of my appointments are work-related. I keep the rest in a separate iCal calendar, and therefore I can see both on my iPhone normally. There is a setting for this in Entourage sync services that allows you to specify that the sync is one-way, and the Entourage data will always overwrite the iCal data.
Then I upgraded to 10.5.2. Right after the upgrade, I started getting notifications every couple of hours that there were > 200 sync conflicts between iCal and Entourage. If you think about how the setting works, this should be impossible on its face. I've configured the sync to overwrite iCal's version of the calendar; since I did so, how could there be a conflict? In any case, no option I selected in the conflict resolution dialog would clear these exceptions.
I decided to re-do what I'd done originally to get this working smoothly. I turned off syncing from Entourage. I deleted the Entourage calendar within iCal. I deleted the synchronization-related preferences files in /Library for both Entourage and iCal. I stopped the Microsoft database daemon process. I used Syncrospector to empty the Sync Services truth database. I then started Entourage and re-enabled sync services. I then restarted iCal.
The Entourage calendar had been recreated in iCal, but it was empty. I looked at the Truth database in Syncrospector and noticed that it had > 4000 entries from Entourage, so the Entourage sync was working. I looked at the sync state information for iCal in Syncrospector, and noticed that the "fast" sync status for iCal showed errors. I tried it again, and it failed again. I changed the sync type to "Refresh Sync", and that failed too. I then made my fatal mistake, and changed the sync type to "Push the Truth". I understood this to mean that it would push the existing truth data to iCal. Instead, it pushed the "Truth" that the Entourage calendar should be empty to the Sync Services truth database. Worse that that, Sync Services then overrode my Entourage preferences and pushed the Sync Services truth to my Entourage calendar and deleted all of the entries in it. Which then Entourage kindly synced to the Exchange server and deleted all of my calendars there.
There are multiple bugs/bug-like features here. First that you can configure a one-way sync and end up with unresolvable sync conficts. Second that you can use a developer utility like Syncrospector to override a one-way sync definition. Third that the wording in the Syncrospector utility is open to such dangerous misinterpretation.
I thought this problem would simply be annoying; I'd just restore the Entourage database from the most recent Time Machine backup and move on. Little did I know that I wasn't done finding Leopard/Entourage bugs and bug-like features. In fact, the worst was yet to come. See my upcoming post how Time Machine corrupts backups of the Office 2008 identity database.
Why would you run Windows any way other than in a VM?
I just finished restoring my Windows virtual disk from a backup in April. At some point in the last couple of months, it got seriously hosed. At startup, I'd always get an "Error loading Tcp Mib" error, and I could no longer run Windows Update.
I googled around for a while about the error, and didn't find anything that helped solve the problem. Microsoft support is free if you can't run Windows Update, so I opened an incident. 48 hours later I got a e-mail from an MS support rep that said the following (a direct quote):
Dear Eric,
Just wanted to say hi and check if there is anything that I can do for you on this particular Service Request. If so, please do not hesitate to let me know and I will be happy to help.
I'm standing by for your reply.
Best Regards,
(name withheld)
Microsoft Windows Update Support Professional
This is not an especially confidence-inducing e-mail, since I'd described the problem (including the error number) when I filed the incident. It was also interesting that it had been well over the 24 hours promised for the incident. Since I'd had a two-week go-round with Microsoft Entourage support that initially cost me $250 before they refunded the money (because I had to solve the problem myself), I decided that the best bet was to drop back to a backup of the VM from before the problem occurred.
This reminded me again why virtualization is so useful. Restoring a VM (a single OS file) is so much simpler and easier than a full restore, especially if you've been storing your documents outside the VM's hard drive. Since Parallels allows me to use documents in my host OS (Mac OS X), I didn't lose any data when I restored to a backup that was 6 months old.
Photo Nirvana
Now that I've nearly achieved music nirvana, next on the list is photo nirvana. Specifically, I want a well-designed and easy to maintain way to manage my pictures.[Read More]
Trying out Planet Roller's feed aggregation
So I've been investigating more what you can do in blogspace, and what you can do in particular with Apache Roller (the blog system on my site). I just enabled the Planet RSS aggregator, and am experimenting with the results.
[Read More]Really non-intuitive way to add network shares to Leopard Finder sidebar
So I do like the sidebar on the Leopard finder, and I really like the implementation of autofs that makes it super simple to map NFS shares. I have an NFS server at home, and tons of NFS servers at work. The main remaining frustration I had was the inability to browse NFS shares via the finder. I was only able to browse shares by using the Goto function and typing in a directory; it was impossible to navigate from the root filesystem into the share. I'd read that it was possible to add shared folders to the sidebar, and so I tried dragging a folder into the Places section of the finder sidebar, to no avail.
Lo and behold in the comments for someone's Leopard comments, someone mentioned that you can add mounted shares to the Places section by dragging the folder over there while holding down the apple & option key together. This makes a significant usability leap forward for me, and I just can't believe that the technique for doing this is so obscure. I'm starting to look forward to going back to work now so that I can add the shared folders I use there to the finder settings on my other account.
I honestly don't know why the UI is build so that you cannot drag a folder onto the word PLACES and have it get added to the places dialog. This seems like a significant usability hole that could be filled relatively easily. If there is an OS-X UI convention that prevents this, I'd love to hear about it.
Music Nirvana (nearly) Achieved
A few years ago, I started to see the potential of the combination of the Internet, digital music, and mobile technology. I could feel that it should be possible to collect all of my music onto a computer, have it fully indexed & searchable, and available pervasively throughout my house. I was imagining the ultimate expression of this, which would be a computer in audio form factor that would catalog your CD collection automatically, make audio controls available via the web, and therefore place total control of your collection at your fingertips.
I'm starting to benefit from the realization of this vision through the excellence of implementation of Apple's iTunes, iPhone, and some of its supporting infrastructure. As I write this, I'm listening to my most recent playlist both from my notebook and my living room speakers (song is being streamed to an AirPort Express). I have Signal installed, so I can carry my iPhone with me and walk away from my notebook, and still have the control to skip songs, change volume, change playlists, search for other songs to play, or anything I'd like.
Most of my collection is on my iPhone itself, so if I wanted to just use earphone/earbuds, I could have nearly the same experience (but somewhat less comfortably).
I've had pieces of this working for a few years. I bought the AirPort Express to stream music to over a year ago, and stopped using it because it dropped out too often. Now that I have the AirPort Extreme with Gigibit Ethernet, I haven't had a single drop.
I spent a few hours yesterday searching for album art online, so that I could have a nearly complete collection for display via CoverFlow in either iTunes or on the iPhone. There are a variety of classical CDs that I still don't have covers for, but I can scan them if it really bugs me (I did save all of the covers...)
The only remaining fly in the ointment at this point is the lack of a reasonable audio-style form factor box from Apple that I could use to replace the Linux box in my house, so I could run the music completely off my server and still access iTunes DRM-protected tracks. The pieces to stream non-DRM tracks are clearly available for Linux, but I don't want to spend time on a solution that isn't complete.
More signs of useful Leopard infrastructure
It is now much easier to use Mail with SSH connections to your own mailserver.
[Read More]Leopard loses directory info manager
And so how to you get/set the UID for your user to make NFS security work? The answer is the dscl tool.
[Read More]Home networking
I started having problems with my Netgear WGT624, and thought that switching to an Airport Extreme would be a good idea. I had some initial problems with it due to not setting it up correctly, and I was irritated about the lack of flexibility in available non-routable IP addresses. Both of these have turned out to be offset by the rock-solid behavior since I set it up correctly, and the speedy performance (and I don't even have N clients).
You won't read in the reviews (or the docs) that this router limits your choices for routable IP addresses. The non-routable IP addresses available for the internal part of your network are limited by the software; I'd been using 10.3.1.* with my NetGear, and had to redo my internal network to one of the available choices. This was not part of my plan for replacing the wireless router, and therefore I was quite annoyed for a while.
I also found more limited flexibility in connectivity than I was hoping for. There is a specific Ethernet port that on the router that you're supposed to use for your cable modem. I had arranged my network so that the cable modem was inside the central wiring closet for my house, and it was connected via an Ethernet switch to all of the ports on the LAN. When I plugged multiple Ethernet devices into the AirPort, ignoring the port for the Internet connection, I got random hangs every minute or so. When I plugged the cable modem directly into the AirPort, the random hangs went away. Now I've got a extra ugly box in a central room in my house that could have been elsewhere if the AirPort Extreme had a more flexible design.
Having said all this, I was hoping for higher reliability and greater ease of use when I decided to go with the AirPort Extreme. I got both of those, at the cost of flexibility that did matter to me. Now that I've adjusted my network configuration to work within the limits imposed by the AirPort Extreme, I'm greatly enjoying the product. If you're considering a wireless-N router and you don't need a great deal of flexibility in your network setup, I encourage you to consider this product.
OK, I thought Leopard sucks with HP printers, but it was me
Was amazed after upgrading to see that I had no printers defined. Tried to set up my 6180 all-in-one again, and the first time it failed. Tried again just now (after I noticed the HP printer utility worked), and it prints just fine. My bad.[Read More]
Finally paved Grandale
After living with one of the worst roads in Durham for more than 5 years, it is finally paved.[Read More]