//extrabright

Before upgrading to Snow Leopard, I was using the NFS automount capability of Mac OS X. It was a handy way for my laptop to connect to my home NAS server (a linux box running Ubuntu).

Unfortunately I had to redo the NFS config after upgrading and I noticed that Directory Utility was not present anymore in Snow Leopard.

Here is what I found out after some research:

Remote NFS URL: nfs://[server]/[path]
Mount location: [path to local mount folder]
Advanced Mount Parameters: -i,-s,-w=32768,-r=32768

sudo automount -vc

That’s it. The NFS share should now be accessible.

References:

I have been spending the last couple of days of my spare time performing a simple operation with my mac, yet slightly more complicated than expected: merge the two partitions of my hard drive into one. This was necessary since I did a mapping, quite usual on Linux, where my system was sitting on the first partition (50 GB) while my user data was on the second one (the rest of 300 GB). But this mapping was not making me happy, since the system partition was always almost full (Mac OS X is not well suited for a multi partition disk drive, I find).

Although you can resize a live partition with Disk Utility (great feature, even if you booted with it), you cannot move the base position of a partition. You can merely resize it, if more space is available. So I had to back my second partition up for later restoring it. I went for Time Machine, since I was already using it for backing up my laptop.

Time Machine Caveats

Unfortunetely I noticed a couple of caveats during the restore operation:

Solution for merging two partitions

I finally found a solution to restore the second partition or to merge them: I had to fiddle directly with the Time Machine backup, copying manually the files I wanted from the second partition to the first, and did a restore of the first partition using Time Machine restore utility.

Here are the details of the steps I took:

This worked for me. You should now have a merged partition on your drive, the restore utility having removed the ACLs during the operation. Phew! This was not a straight forward action! I still cannot believe that Apple did not take into account that people can have more than 1 partition on their drive (I might still have missed the way to do it, did not find it so far though).

Links/Info

Folks, I think that I have found (one of) the geekiest hello world out there. Implemented in Groovy using the dynamic interception of method calls. Here it goes:

class Hello {
  Object invokeMethod(String name, Object arguments) {
    System.out.println "hello $name!"
  }
}

def hello = new Hello()
hello.john()
hello.you()

Which produce the following output:

hello john!
hello you!

I suppose the same mechanism can be used with Ruby (and some other dynamic languages).

I had this in mind since yesterday: how to write a self-reproducing program in Groovy, or a Quine, a program which prints out its source code. It’s actually a fun exercise.

Here is my version:

a = 'c = (char)39; println "a = $c$a$c"; println "$a"'
c = (char)39; println "a = $c$a$c"; println "$a"

It looks scary, but it is actually not that terrible. The first line is the definition of a variable a of the form:

a = '[some string]'

The second line is first the definition of the single quote character assigned to c. We then print out the first line (including the variable definition), where we replace the single quote by our character c, and where $a is the content of a. This part looks like:

println "a = $c$a$c";

Finally we print out a.

The only thing that we need now to do, is to replace [some string] in the first line. It happens that if we take the complete second line and assign it to ‘a’ in the first line, we will get the desired output. We see here that if we had not used $c in the first println of the second line instead of the single quote, the string assigned to a in the first line would not be legal, since it would contain inside the string a string delimiter (and if we escape it, we don’t get the same output as the program code).

That’s it. It was fun.

Links:

Already a long time that this issue is bugging me. The great ’screen’ unix command has a problem, at least on ubuntu: the backspace key produces the same effect than delete (first char on the right of the cursor gets deleted). Very annoying. Hopefully the solution is easy. Edit your file ‘~/.bashrc’ and add the following line:

alias screen='TERM=screen screen'

Check out my new mix in the sound section! I did something a bit different than the previous time, as I wanted to explore the electro-rock style, which is really a great and energetic combination.

• Extrabright Mix 02: From electro-rock to minimal, with an electronica introduction and a new age epilogue. Calvin Harris remixed by Mr. Oizo, Ellen Alien, Justice, Miss Kittin, Love Motel and a couple of other great tracks.
  

Just installed a Wordpress plug-in that aims at providing a good rendering on the iPhone. It’s called WPtouch. Neat.

I had some database issues 2 weeks ago, therefore I lost a couple of comments. Sorry guys. I hope it will stay stable now.

Cheers!

Just figured out how to get Twitter update the pidgin status (e.g. GTalk, Jabber, ICQ, MSN, etc.). For that, you need to install a pidgin plug-in written in Perl. Here is a small howto about it (as the Perl stuff was a bit tricky):

Install Perl. On Windows (yeah, I know. It’s at work. ), install Active Perl version 5.8.8.X. Don’t take the last one, the 5.10.0, as Pidgin does not support it yet.

Testing the wordpress application on the iPhone. It seems quite easy to post something. Apparently it works also on a self-hosted wordpress instance.

Just trying the Flock browser for posting a blog news. It’s great. It’s about like writing an e-mail, with a good blog integration, where you can define tags, categories and that kind of news-related things. Really cool. Much quicker than the web interface.

I published some time ago a news regarding reducing the power consumption of my home server to 53 W. There was some open issues like how to reduce the consumption further.

Regarding this, I finally simply decided to switch off the server automatically every night using a Cron job. This is an elegant solution, as I am not hosting anything on this home server, other than stuffs I am using at home. Everything else is on my dedicated server.

This solution has the following two advantages:

What I can still improve:

Will check this out.

Update: I actually activated wake-on-lan. This is really handy. I did a small script on my mac, which uses the utility ‘wakeonlan’ (installed through fink). That way I can confortably switch on the server remotely from my laptop when I need to. (The wake-on-lan option must be activated in the BIOS.)

The small script that I use (this will only work if the server is in the LAN):

#!/sw/bin/bash
/sw/bin/wakeonlan [server mac address]

Something I wanted to do since ages. My wireless router WRT54GL running the Tomato firmware has a button on the front, which can be used to toggle WIFI on and off. The router has also a rather visible LED indicator, behind the button, that is unfortunately not used to show the WIFI status. (Originally, the wifi status is just shown by a tiny LED, that is just visible when watching closely the device).

It’s easy to fix that. Using the web interface, go to the ‘Administration’ > ‘Buttons / LED’ page. Replace the custom script by the following code:


# status: 1: wifi on, 0: wifi off
status=$(wl -a eth1 dump | grep associated | cut -d " " -f 2);
# toggle wifi & amber led
wl -a eth1 $([ $status -eq 0 ] && echo up || echo down)
led amber $([ $status -eq 0 ] && echo on || echo off)


Then change the setting for ‘0 – 2 Seconds’ to ‘Run Custom Script’. That’s it. Now when we press the button, the wireless is toggled and the LED switches itself accordingly.

Tested with Tomato 1.19.

According to the free newspaper “news” of today (Zurich, Switzerland) page 15, the computer-science Professor Kieron O’Hara, which is concerned about the loss of privacy in the internet age, is advising the editor in the interview to “google regularly one’s name, phone number and credit card number”, to see if this information is to be found somewhere on the net. OMG. I am wondering where this crap comes from. Either is this professor as intelligent as my banana tree, or the editor writing this did the interview in Esperanto, which neither of the two are understanding.

Why is it a bad idea to google one’s credit card number? Just in case you don’t know.

I have watched this talk a couple of days ago. It is really interesting so I am posting it hereafter.