A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Thanks for all the feedback re: cut tags on (non-LJ) blogs! I've instituted them on Gameshelf and am cautiously optimistic that the site's bounce rate has decreased as a result. It's still pretty crappy even so, but there's other fixes I've got in mind for that.

Bounce rate, in Google Analytics-ese, represents the percentage of people who stay on a site for five seconds or less - in other words, they load the site, say "meh", and move along. Some bounce is inevitable: there are regular readers who don't use RSS and visit the site between updates, and there are folks who breeze in from search engines and decide that we're not what they were looking for. Based on research, I'd like to get our bounce rate down to 50 percent. It's been hovering around 80-85 percent, which suggests that we're losing a lot of potential audience that should be more interested in us, but the site looks so boring that they have no reason to stay...

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In other news, for the last week I've been trying to set up Time Machine in our home so that both my laptop - which speaks to the internet only via WiFi - and my Ethernet-using desktop Mac can both benefit. (The Intellish laptop is my main work machine, and the desktop, a rusty ol G5, performs various labors appropriate to a sessile machine: print server, Torrent torrenter, etc.)

First, I purchased a 1.5TB external hard drive last weekend, connected it to the G5 via USB, and net-mounted it on the laptop. The G5 took to it immediately, and after some groveling, I got a setup where the laptop was also backing up to it - but the Time Machine browser failed to ever show any history for the laptop. It acted as if no backups had ever been made, even though they were all there and accounted for on the backup disk, with new patches getting added every hour.

I couldn't find a solution to this on the web, though I quickly got the impression that was I was trying to do was quite unorthodox, and might work better if I acquired an Apple Airport Extreme router, and plugged the drive into that. So yesterday I visited my friendly local Apple store and had a conversation about this with one of the experts there. Was told that what I had in mind wasn't an officially supported solution, but the fellow had set up something similar in his house, and if I didn't mind getting my hands dirty it should work fine. OK, sold.

So am how having both machines perform their initial backups over the network, to the hard drive that is now plugged in downstairs, under the television, piled in with all the game consoles and DVRs and the new Airport router. They've been going at it for close to 12 hours now, and have miles to go, but that's expected; there's a lot of data. (Yes, I excluded the enormous Final Cut Scratch directories and such from the backup process. There's still a lot of data.) We'll see how well this works.

Side question: if any locals have a FireWire cable they'd be willing to lend me, it may help reduce the laptop's backup time from a few days to a few hours. (Its Ethernet port is busted, alas.)

I chuckle at Apple suggesting that I download a patch labeled "iLife Support".

For some reason - mainly coz I wanted to see Time Machine work with my new hard drive - I upgraded my ancient (~2003) desktop to Leopard. I thought it would be as easy a process as the similar upgrade I put my laptop through last month.

Instead, I am experiencing the failiest OS upgrade I've seen in my 17 years of Mac using. I can't log into my old account, except via ssh; otherwise I'm left staring at a blank screen and a beachball. I can log into other accounts, if I force-quit the Finder once. The new disk was recognized the first time I started up, and now it gets the "You have inserted a crap disk. Initialize?" dialog. (Whose buttons are unresponsive, and which goes away by itself after a minute. Except when it doesn't.)

Installed an OS update through Amy's account, unless I didn't. It was a process full of ambiguous error messages and odd application behavior. I am too tired and cranky to see if it worked, tonight. Tomorrow, maybe.

The next thing I'll try is starting up with everything unplugged, then running Disk Utility, and then after that I guess I'll have to create a new jmac2 user and sidestep into it, or something.

Bah.

My new best friend is screen -D -R. Why did it take me six years of laptop use to discover it?

Curious as to why my hard drive was in a state of continual access, clicking with a heartbeat of regularity every second or so, and in so doing draining my battery a bit faster than I'd like, I ran top and saw this:

  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
  337 top          8.9%  0:02.19   1    19    14   196K   320K   436K  1.37M
  336 Internet E   0.0%  0:43.90   8    99   157  8.15M  12.6M  14.8M  64.4M
  335 LiveJourna   0.0%  0:03.66   3    95    97  2.24M  7.20M  5.67M  52.9M
  334 Mail         0.0%  0:26.00   8   117   118  3.16M  8.08M  7.74M  55.7M
  332 ssh          0.0%  0:00.10   1     9    19   432K   488K   568K  1.88M
  323 zsh          0.0%  0:00.15   1    16    13   184K   700K   708K  1.69M
  322 Terminal     0.0%  0:03.18   5   112   140  2.11M  6.72M  4.52M  55.0M
  321 Microsoft    0.0%  0:04.76   1    56    76  1.73M  9.26M  3.64M  50.2M

"Microsoft"? Uh-oh. I installed the Office:mac demo CD yesterday (I am curious to see if writing a book in a WYSIWYG way is more pleasurable than doing it in straight DocBook XML via emacs) but I wasn't running any of its applications at the moment. So:

[jmac@endif /Users/jmac]% ps awux | grep 321
jmac   321   0.0  1.4    51428   3732  ??  S      0:04.76
/Applications/Microsoft Office X/Office/Microsoft Database Daemon /Applica
[jmac@endif /Users/jmac]% kill 321          

And thus my hard drive fell silent. More props to Apple (and/or Next): nixing the culprit is as easy as pulling up the Login system prefs pane and clicking the Login Items tab. Yes, there's the Microsoft Database Demon icon, exposed and shivering, awaiting its doom at my fingertips. I just wish there was a system-level thingy that notified me when a program sticks things there; if the demon didn't cause so much real-world noise, I probably wouldn't have noticed its presence for a long time.

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My LiveJournal is definitely getting geekier, especially since I took up this latest project. I apologize if I am putting anyone to sleep, but I fear that it's only going to get worse. I should consider dusting off my O'Reilllynet blog and shunting these sorts of posts there, before I start losing Friends.

Finsihed reading the missing manual book last night, hiding out in the Shrine while Carla and the Carlas were GURPSing downstairs. She has found approximately one hundred new players for her Discworld compaign since I snuck out of it, successfully trolling from the Mostly Looney crowd and the people who played in her Vericon pick-up game. So that's pretty good.

I consider the book a good read, though I found its stance a bit on the fanboy side, passing up opportunities for criticism I would have taken. The most glaring example I recall comes when Pogue addresses a security flaw in present Mac OS X machines: a malevolent user with access to the physical machine can effectively get root (or its classic-Mac equivalent) simply by restarting the machine into OS 9 (providing an OS 9 CD if the machine doesn't have that system on-disk). He advises considering the system CDs as the box's master keys, and storing them somewhere safe. Erm, that metaphor doesn't work very well, when you consider that every modern Mac owner has the very same "keys".

Regardless, I learned a lot. Today I will finish reading Apple's PDF all about Netinfo, and then I'll turn my attention towards working on an outline again. I turned in a lame one on Friday, but I am shmarter now, and the sooner I can turn in an outline I like, the sooner I can sign a contract, and start collecting sweet, sweet advances. Mm, baby.

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My iBook screen definitely has a pinched nerve, or something. Opening it past a certain angle, about 95 degrees or so, blackens the screen. This is workable, but annoying. Unlike the broken media bay latch, this problem has continuous effect on my iBook use (I'd like the screen to be facing my eyes, not my chest), and so I'll start seeking information on a fix now. Hum dee.

I finally got around to sending Arcus a bill. For some reason, I waited until the owner sent mail to a list saying that he just spent too much money on toys. Take that! Anyway, bless Mac OS X for having Save to PDF an option in all of its standard print dialogs (by way of the Preview app), cuz god knows that I'd never get around to actually printing this out and mailing it to them.

I made up some bogus letterhead, too.

Yes, that is an iconic coffee mug lodged in an iconic stomach. I stole it from this page. Yes, I told Arcus that it's not a real DBA.

Accomplished a lot today, even though no outward progress was made. I'm sleepy, but if I don't write all this down now I'll regret it later. Warning: xtreme nerd kontent follows, until the <hr>.

So, after months of longing, my iBook is finally the programming powerhouse I've always wanted it to be: it has Apache running mod_perl, and the Gnome project's libxml2 and libxslt libraries, along with their respective Perl APIs. I realize as I write this that I still need MySQL on this thing before it's truly a full-on self-contained portable LAMP development machine, but it's now quite capable of letting me perform all the hacking I'll need to finish The Book locally, wherever I am, and that's a good thing.

mod_perl I was just too timid to try installing before this week, but after Andy forwarded me a mailing-list message from Randal Schwartz proclaiming that he got it to install after a day of tweaking, I knew it was possible. Unfortunately, I dunno what path Randal was running down; I couldn't get his methods to work, but a Google search let me to an Apple page about Mac OS X and Perl which assured me that, once I had installed mod_perl in the usual Perlish installation way, I had to simply tell my httpd.conf file to dynamically load the library on startup, and it would just work. And it was right!

Well, except for the fact that the current Apple-shipped Apache server is broken as configured and gives you scary startup errors, but the fix for that was also easy to locate. See, Google is cool.

I installed Mason on it, too, just 'cuz, and it appears to run flawlessly. Happy, happy.

On the libxml end, my membership on the perl-xml mailing list netted me this post from Paul McCann, which does an excellent (if somewhat roundabout) job describing the necessary acrobatics needed to get these sweet libraries on OS X. I let myself get held up by a typo within the instructions that I should have caught, though: "-without-iconv" should have been "--without-iconv", and so everything took a few extra compiles-through before it all came out right. The important thing is that this iBook now has the XML::LibXSLT Perl module on it, which is just awesome. Yep yep yep.

Anyway, I look forward to many near-future hours sitting in the cafe and hackhackhacking.

However, thanks to Charles' mightiness, this house has not just a working firewall again, but wireless! I've been lounging on the papasan chair downstairs all day, in fact, iBook in lap. Niiiiice.

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What is the protocol for dealing with a friend that you're used to inviting to random movies and such, but who has started to date somebody? Are you supposed to Cc: all future invites to the foofriend as well? You scoff, but I don't think this has ever happened before with a local friend. Yes, I am so removed from the dating scene (whatever that means) that I find myself comically at a loss. Eh! I'll just ask. (In effect, I just did, but I'll do it anyway.)

(What do you think of the word "foofriend"? "Significant Other" is a nice phrase for its gender-neutrality (as with "mate", but that one always seems more awkward to me) but it carries a bunch of implications that "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" don't. But, when speaking in the abstract, I hate saying "boyfriend or girlfriend" as much as I do "he or she". So I take a page from the gang at rec.games.nethack with their strategies of dealing with "foocubi", those naughty demons.)

(Now of course I'm thinking ahead to this word catching on, so that people unfamiliar with the hackish etymology of "foo" will use the word and perhaps infer that it means "a friend with whom one engages in foo", and thus grant that venerable syllable yet another geek-culture definition. Hey, it could happen.)