Archive for the ‘english’ Category

so - what happened?

Friday, November 28th, 2008

Well, you certainly can’t say I didn’t try to maintain a blog - more than once.

Nonetheless, I just don’t have what it takes - interesting stories. Sure, there are exceptions, but they are few and don’t justify a blog - let alone someone subscribing to it.

Therefore, I hereby - and that’s a first - declare this blog closed until further notice. My life in the cloud goes on - in Twitter.

Thank you all, see you.



Porn for the Blind

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

Now I’ve seen listened to everything:

“…the page is light green. At the top of the page is the ‘Big Tits Round Asses’ logo… inside the house, they engage in a wide variety of sexual acts, flashing in rapid succession…”

Porn for the blind

(Via Nerdcore)



From my cold dead hands

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

Take it now



Opinionated techie Âť Piracy & PC Gaming

Friday, March 28th, 2008

Opinionated techie Âť Piracy & PC Gaming:

“The reason why we don’t put CD copy protection on our games isn’t because we’re nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don’t like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don’t count. We know our customers could pirate our games if they want but choose to support our efforts. So we return the favor - we make the games they want and deliver them how they want it. This is also known as operating like every other industry outside the PC game industry.”

or outside the movie industry, or outside the music industry, or outside the <insert favourite content management industry here>…

(Via Daring Fireball)



DHS screens a MacBook Air

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Michael Nygard baffled the TSA with his MacBook Air/SSD, which apparently looks more like a “device” than a portable computer, which was enough to let him miss his flight.

Fortunately, the DHS/TSA knows that being as secretive as they are is not good for the reputation, so they started a blog to deceive the public make things a little bit more transparent.

How transparent can be seen in a new post, in which Bob, apparently working in the DHS PR department, screens the MacBook Air. His findings are delusive interesting:

“The MacBook does look completely different than your typical laptop or DVD player. I can’t get into specifics of course, but there were a couple of areas on the X-ray that could pique some interest for TSOs.”

So, “he can’t get into specifics of course” - apparently they even declare x-ray images of consumer hardware as a state secret sensitive security information (SSI).

I can’t even begin to explain my disgust with this type of politics.

Information needs to be free!



OS X Spotlight: kMDItemTextContent of text/csv

Friday, March 14th, 2008

Don’t ask me why, but Leopard’s Spotlight doesn’t want to import the content of csv-files:


galahad:~ hessi$ mdimport -d 2 test.csv
2008-03-14 10:48:02.605 mdimport[2804:10b] Imported '/Users/hessi/test.csv' of type 'dyn.ah62d4rv4ge80g650' with no plugIn.

Consequently, it doesn’t generate the kMDItemTextContent entry.

Simply adding the filetype public.csv to Root/CFBundleDocumentTypes/0/LSItemContentTypes/ in System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter doesn’t work, because (TADA!):


galahad:~ hessi$ GetFileInfo -t ~/test.csv
""
galahad:~ hessi$

So, after setting the “correct” filetype:


galahad:~ hessi$ SetFile -t "TEXT" test.csv
galahad:~ hessi$ GetFileInfo -t test.csv
"TEXT"
galahad:~ hessi$

Spotlight finds a plugin to use and even some kMDItemTextContent:


galahad:~ hessi$ mdimport -d 2 test.csv
(Info) Import: Import '/Users/hessi/test.csv' type 'dyn.ah62d4um4ge80g650' using '/System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter'
2008-03-14 11:35:16.576 mdimport[3114:10b] Imported '/Users/hessi/test.csv' of type 'dyn.ah62d4um4ge80g650' with plugIn /System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter.
2008-03-14 11:35:16.579 mdimport[3114:10b] Attributes: {
"_kMDItemFinderLabel" = ;
“com_apple_metadata_modtime” = 227183678;
kMDItemAuthors = ;
kMDItemComment = ;
kMDItemContentCreationDate = 2008-03-14 11:34:38 +0100;
kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2008-03-14 11:34:38 +0100;
kMDItemContentType = “dyn.ah62d4um4ge80g650″;
kMDItemContentTypeTree = (
“com.apple.traditional-mac-plain-text”,
“public.plain-text”,
“public.text”,
“public.data”,
“public.item”,
“public.content”
);
kMDItemCopyright = ;
kMDItemCreator = ;
kMDItemDisplayName = {
“” = “test.csv”;
};
kMDItemEditors = ;
kMDItemKeywords = ;
kMDItemKind = {
“” = PlainTextType;
de = “Reine Text-Datei”;
en = “Plain Text File”;
};
kMDItemOrganizations = ;
kMDItemSubject = ;
kMDItemTextContent = “value1;value2;value3;value4;value5;\nvalue1;value2;value3;value4;value5″;
kMDItemTitle = ;
}
galahad:~ hessi$

So, next question - why is the File Type of these files not “TEXT”? This csv was copied from a Windows machine, but even files created by SubEthaEdit have an interesting file type:


galahad:~ hessi$ GetFileInfo -t test_see.csv
"****"
galahad:~ hessi$



Ghost Bikes | ghost bikes

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

Ghost Bikes: “Ghost Bikes are small and somber memorials for bicyclists who are killed or hit on the street. A bicycle is painted all white and locked to a street sign near the crash site, accompanied by a small plaque. They serve as reminders of the tragedy that took place on an otherwise anonymous street corner, and as quiet statements in support of cyclists’ right to safe travel.”

(Via The new Cafe (racer) society)



Schneier on Security: Security vs. Privacy

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

Schneier on Security: Security vs. Privacy: “Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and — possibly — sky marshals. Everything else — all the security measures that affect privacy — is just security theater and a waste of effort.”

(Via Daring Fireball.)



ZFS on Mac OS X 10.5

Friday, January 4th, 2008

Have you ever seen a Drobo? Cool stuff, eh? Yes, if it weren’t be USB only (let’s be honest, it sucks), therefore had a limit of 2 TeraByte per Volume and used some kind of proprietary “SAFE” algorithm (”it’s like RAID.5, but better”). No thanks…

Hey, I’m a geek, I can do this on my own, can’t I? - So let’s start again…

Have you ever seen ZFS? Cool stuff, eh?Yes, if it didn’t run primarily on Solaris and FreeBSD (sorry, too much stuff to learn at the same time). Linux, well, yeah, userspace… you wouldn’t want that, would you?

Fortunately, Apple (well, yeah, most likely Steve “the dictator” himself) decided to like ZFS and to port it to OS X. It wasn’t ready in an Apple-kind of way for 10.5, but it’s available for developers, which I am not, but Apple doesn’t know that.

Installation:

It sucks. There is a pkg installation file in the developer connection, but it only runs on 10.5.0. So, after some screwing around with pax (seriously, who wrote that man page, and what is a member of an archive file?!), I was able to extract zfs.kext (if google is your friend, you might be able to find Shawn Ferry’s documentation on how to do that). Victory is mine!

Playing around:

I wouldn’t want to bore you with the umptiest description on how to create a pool - the PDF “ZFS on Mac OS X” from Apple says it all and is a very good start (thanks Chris). Let’s just say I had two hours of fun creating pools, making snapshots and clones and swapping disks.Some additional reading:

Critics:

Well, my first plan was to rebuild a Drobo. Unfortunately, ZFS does not yet allow you to add an arbitrary amount of disks to a RAID.Z. The possibility to substitute every disk in a RAID.Z with a bigger one and afterwards just using the additional space is nice, but definitely not the same. A friend of mine suggested to use a stripeset of disks as one or more parts of the RAID.Z, which would give me at least the possibility to use all the 120, 160, 200 and 250GB disks lying around, but:

“Virtual devices cannot be nested, so a mirror or raidz virtual device can only contain files or disks. Mirrors of mirrors (or other combinations) are not allowed.”

Oh come on, where’s the fun in ZFS if you can’t do something stupid?

The OS X implementation is… well, yes, Beta. A source at Apple told me the data is stored “rock solid”, but I might have some kernel panics to get it there and from there. It’s not that bad, at least it’s predictable what you shouldn’t do to avoid kernel panics (primarily: do not unplug (even unmounted) ZFS devices), but you can see that it is not yet integrated in the rest of the system:

  • The mounted volume has drwxr-xr-x root:sys
  • The Finder can’t use the Trashcan on ZFS volumes. Everything gets deleted at once.
  • zfs umount doesn’t work most of the time. Surprisingly, dragging the volume in the Trashcan does?!
  • The afp share names for pool and filesystems are just the poolname plus an increment:


     afp://192.168.0.103/data

     afp://192.168.0.103/data1

     afp://192.168.0.103/data2

    Funnily enough, unmounting and remounting filesystems results in higher increments:


     afp://192.168.0.103/data3

     afp://192.168.0.103/data4

     afp://192.168.0.103/data5

  • SMB, on the other hand, doesn’t show the filesystems at all. But, if the filesystems are mounted inside the pool, it is shown as a directory
  • Does compression work? It seems so, but a 30MB file consisting of zeroes takes either:

     30MB (ls -la),

     1MB (zfs list) or

     1KB (31.817.728 bytes) (Get Info on SMB-mount).

    Unfortunately, zfs get all still says: compressratio 1.00x
  • to be continued