Author: matthew

So, the other day I picked up a gently-used Power Macintosh G4 400MHz for $227.00 off eBay. Yes, this is a gizmo post, so sue me. Anyway, it had a DVD drive (a big plus in my book), Mac OS 9 installed (but no restoration CDs), and according to the seller had a “problem with the hard drive”. He was not sure what the problem was, but after some random time period between a few minutes to a few hours, the operating system would report that it couldn’t read the hard drive and die.

Sure enough, when I received the unit and disconnected my kids computer to hook up my new toy, it had this weird behavior. Disabling extensions didn’t seem to help. So I bought Mac OS 10.3 (Panther, which as of this writing is the “latest and greatest” Apple operating system) from CompUSA for $134.00 (people have informed me I way overpaid for the OS, but, well, I could get it that day that way, and in a retail box with support and everything), took it home, slapped in an old hard drive I had laying around, pillaged memory from my kids’ computer, installed it…

And whaddya’ know? It works great.

So the point of this post is to outline some of what I consider “essential” utilities to enjoy my Mac. For certain applications, I’ve had to hunt down the odd helper app or two to figure out how to use my Mac in “unique” ways. The cool thing is, even without the knicknacks, Mac OS X comes with a ton of useful stuff that covers most of my day-to-day activities; for the things that require specialized software or hardware, like my multitrack studio recording, I still have to use the Redmond operating system.

• OpenOffice.org. OK, I admit it. I’m a cheapskate. If I can avoid paying for something, legally, I will. However, as my subscriptions to Transgaming WineX, Crossover Office, and frequent computer software purchases attest, I’m not averse to supporting software that supports my interests.

  Anyway, OpenOffice.org has everything I need for day-to-day office work. I’m a sysadmin, not an analyst or professional typesetter, so I’ve found it to be an ideal word-processing and spreadsheet platform. Occasionally, I’ve run into weirdness with importing or exporting Microsoft Word .doc documents, but lately that’s becoming more and more rare as OpenOffice.org improves the product.

• Fink. If there ever were to be an essential administration toolkit for UNIX administrators working on a Mac OS box, this would be it. They ported Debian GNU/Linux‘s “apt” utility to Mac OS X, along with a boatload of GNU, free software, and open source software. Combined with X-Windows that ships with Panther, I can have nearly any utility that I’m used to up and running on my Mac in moments — long enough for a download of the application and any dependencies. Installation was painless, and unlike Cygwin (a UNIX-like environment that runs under Microsoft Windows), there’s no weirdness with file permissions or illegal names. Mac OS X is UNIX under the hood, and I’ve already built several utilities not made for it that work just fine under it.
• Patchburn II. iTunes, Apple’s all-in-one music ripper, player, and online music store, is a wonderful application. When I compare it to hideos abortions like MusicMatch, which combine crashiness, bloat, and poor usability in one disgusting blob, I just go ‘wow, how did I ever do without a good MP3 jukebox?’

  Unfortunately, there was one problem: my brand-new HP dvd420e (alternately, “dvd 420e”) 8x DVD+-RW Firewire/USB2.0 drive wasn’t supported natively by iTunes. So I couldn’t burn my purchases from the Apple Music Store to CD and take them with me easily. What a bummer. I downloaded Weird Al Yankovic‘s “A Complicated Song” and “Ebay” as my very first purchases, and was sad that I couldn’t burn them to play on our CD player.

  Anyway, that’s where Patchburn II comes in. Although it’s “beta” (read: potentially unstable) software, it seems to work well enough. You simply run the utility, and, if it recognizes your drive, it will allow you to install a driver for it that is supported in iTunes and iDVD. One reboot later, and I was easily, and trivially, burning my MP3 and M4P (Apple DRM protected files) to CD. Stuck ’em in the CD player in the kitchen, and it was a beautiful thing. I’d literally been hunting, on and off, for days looking for a way to make my DVD burner work with iTunes, and I’m glad I found one.

• Mozilla Thunderbird. This email reader is simply the best-in-class. Although I goofed around with Apple’s “Mail” application, it just didn’t do the trick; it was slower on my large IMAP mailbox than Thunderbird, didn’t have as good of junk mail filtering, and had some very unusual user interface choices in identifying new messages (read: no highlighting!) that I immediately was turned off. Thunderbird on Mac OS X is every bit as good as it is on other platforms, and was surprisingly responsive on this aging Power Mac.
• iPhoto. I can’t improve on this built-in photo app. Some people have complained of slow performance, but even on an individual library with several thousand photos, performance was choppy but acceptable. Maybe I’m just used to working on crappy 700MHz-class PCs and the 400MHz G4 is actually faster, but regardless I really like it. One day soon, I must try out their online photo printing service. Anyway, absolutely killer app that makes Microsoft’s “My Photos” folder look rather under-featured.
• Using the gimp-print drivers without any configuration was just awesome. I have an HP Laserjet 4 SI laser printer with duplexer (a big, 100+ lb beast in my basement), and it was so nice to just put in the IP address, pick a usable driver, and have the OS do the rest. I did buy the Postscript upgrade card for the printer so that I can do real Postscript printing rather than printing pictures of my rasters, but they both are quite usable for my light printing needs.

Anyway, I’m certain that eventually the honeymoon will be over with my “new” (to me) machine, but for the time being, I’m definitely liking it. I have a fully-featured, fast command shell (which is important for me as a UNIX admin), access to all the usual free software utilities to which I’m accustomed, and an extremely well-designed user interface (oh, man, comparing Apple’s “Dock” to the taskbar in Windows… wow, what a bunch of better-made choices) that even my kids can pick up on in short order… well, it’s a lot of fun.

Things I’m still looking for:

• The “Classic” environment install, from a retail box Mac OS X to a clean hard disk, is a pain. It would be very nice if there was some all-in-one Classic zip download from Apple so I don’t have to install an old hard drive, zip up the OS 9 System folder (a whopping 300+ megabytes), and then unzip it to Mac OS X in order to run kids’ games and old Mac-compatible applications.
• A good primer on Python programming using “cocoa”, the Mac OS X GUI toolkit. Haven’t dug very hard yet.
• An inconspicuous, wireless way of pumping tunes from my Mac to another room. The Airport Express with AirTunes seems like a reasonable possibility there, but it’s incompatible with my existing 802.11b wireless network — ugh. $$$$$ to upgrade…
• A cheap 802.11g/b non-USB adapter (maybe PCI or FireWire?) for my Mac. I don’t want USB, because this old Mac only has USB 1.0 — or a maximum throughput of about 10 megabits/sec. Rather slow if I were to upgrade to 802.11g @ 50 megabits/sec. Firewire’s 400mbits/sec throughput would be really reasonable, though. And forward-compatible should I ever upgrade my Mac.
• An in-line spellchecker in my browser. KDE‘s “Konqueror” has had this for a while if you have ispell (or is it aspell?) installed: it highlights possibly misspelled words in your text window, which would have been a great thing for this blog posting.
• Network hotsync for my Palm Tungsten C. That is one of very few annoyances I have moving from Microsoft PC-land: the Palm Desktop for Mac OS X doesn’t support network hotsync. I’m used to just walking into my house and pressing the hotsync button; my Tungsten then hooks up to my wireless network, finds my PC, and syncs up. It’s much faster than syncing via a USB cradle, and far more convenient. Though I use the cradle for recharging anyway, and it’s now hooked up to my Mac, I miss the speed of wireless hotsync.
• Better keyboard and mouse. The hockey-puck mouse is annoyingly small for my hand. I don’t care to have fifty buttons on my mouse, and Goodness knows my children have a hard time remembering right-click, left-click, middle-click, but a scroll wheel is handy 🙂 And though the keyboard is a pretty translucent deal, it’s rather small and uncomfortable to use for extended periods (except in my lap; maybe a wireless keyboard, eh?).
• A way to access the F9, F10, F11, and other special buttons using a mouse/keyboard combination. Maybe I just haven’t found it yet, but I use the F9 (show all windows as small versions of themselves to find the right window) and F11 (move all windows offscreen temporarily) keys a LOT. It would be nice for them to be where I don’t have to look at my keyboard to use them.

That’s it for now. Overall, for the UNIX or GNU/Linux administrator, Mac OS X is an excellent choice of operating system to take care of business. For those, like me, at home on the command line, the pretty GUI is a nice, usable bonus. For people like my wife and kids, I think this system approaches nirvana of usability at the moment. It was trivial to hook up my digital camera and have the computer “do the right thing”, and equally trivial to do most other things — except try to hook up an unsupported Firewire external DVD drive.

I apologize for not posting many blog entries myself lately. Between trips to Washington, D.C., St. George, Utah, and taking care of various things, my time has been intensely short and precious. I promise to be more verbose in coming weeks 🙂 Quick news about me:

* Bought myself a new (to me) Power Macintosh, and stripped another one of my computers to provide parts to get it running again. For the money, it’s quite, quite cool.

* Trying to complete a project where I work, and it has been incredibly mentally taxing.

* Had to take down barnson.org’s photo gallery due to security exploits. Will have a new one up, once I have about four hours to put together.

* Needing to upgrade my Drupal weblogging software. Got a good working prototype, but a few niggling problems, like my theme not working, have prevented me from upgrading.

* Had to deal with a spammer creating hundreds of anonymous postings on my site. So glad that I don’t allow anonymous publication — you need to have a working email address to post without moderation. Still, the cleanup from that stunk, even though nobody could see the spam but me.

* Doing my regular volunteer work for The Free Software Foundation has been taking up some spare time, as well as some charity work for other organizations. I must learn to say “no”…

So what’s new for you? Other than Sammy’s house, of course 🙂

So I’m off work this week, visiting friends on the East Coast. I’m sitting at Justin‘s PC typing this up while checking email.

Unfortunately, somehow the Apache web server startup script on my box got foosed, and it looks like my virtual hosting provider had some kind of outage yesterday. Since I’m on vacation, I don’t feel like taking the time to debug the problem, but I’m sure it’s something fairly trivial. Using “apachectl”, the built-in apache control script, started the web server just fine, but “/usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache.sh start” didn’t do the trick — which would prevent the http daemon from starting up automatically.

It’s been an interesting few days. I flew in Tuesday, and Justin picked me up from the airport. We’ve hung out, hashed on a few tunes on the guitar, and generally had a relaxing, enjoyable time. Today I’ll be hitting the National Air and Space Museum with Jon Brusco. Not sure what else we’re going to do, but considering my flight leaves tomorrow, it doesn’t really matter — it’s just nice to hang out with friends I haven’t seen in nearly (or, erm, more than nearly) a decade.

Disinfopedia, a non-partisan watchdog wiki for political spin doctoring, led me to a story today that the Bush-Cheney campaign has been asking religious volunteers “to turn over church directories to the campaign”.

My gut reaction here? That’s just repugnant.

My wife and children, all church-goers, have their information on the records of their church so that other church members can contact them about church-related business. Not that I think that here in Utah, the Republican political equivalent of Nirvana, there’s any doubt who our electors will be voting to be President this fall.

But encouraging church members to be activists for a campaign by having them submit rosters of church members to the GOP without the consent of those on that list? Ugh, that’s vile. Particularly when (at least on our local church rosters) there’s a big, important-looking notice informing readers that any non-church-related use is prohibited. And volunteers doing this could endanger their church’s tax-exempt status.

Maybe I’m way off base here. I’d love to learn that I am, since I voted for Bush in 2000, and I supported him through 9/11 and the early days of the Iraq war. I’d love to learn this was some kind of big mistake by an overzealous Bush campaign writer. But this latest bit of information sure seems to be another black mark against Bush for the “John Kerry Is A Douchebag But I’m Voting For Him Anyway” page.

Just in case you can’t leave home for Independence day:

http://www.scottferguson.com/pages/LadyLibertyFireworks/LadyLiberty.html.

So Rampant Games ran an all-day press playable demo this past Saturday. It was for press folks to drop in, download the game, play some multiplayer, interview the developers, and that kind of thing. I’m the composer for the soundtrack for “Void War”, a Rampant Games title due out this summer.

Well, Void War got a review on War Cry, a popular online gaming site. Since I am writing the music from the game, all I’m going to excerpt is this:

<the game> has a very fitting score.

Woot, yeah, that’s me, I wrote the score!

I’ll see if I can get a full demo song up here so you can get a feel for the music. Justin listened to one tune, and said it reminded him very much of the screaming guitar/classical style from near the end of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”. I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not, but the music was definitely written to suit the feel of the game.

My firewall has been running OpenBSD 3.2 for a very, very long time. It’s been extremely stable, attached to an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), and keeping my computers safe and free from the latest worms people worry about on a seemingly weekly basis. Really, it’s been almost maintenance-free. I’ve really enjoyed it.

It’s running on an old Pentium Pro 200MHz with 64 Megabytes of RAM. Donated to me by American Investment Bank, this old box was, literally, headed out the door for the junk pile when I interposed and asked if I could rescue it from that ignoble fate.

The things I like about it?

• It’s extremely quiet, since the processor only uses a heat sink, and not a fan. There’s a fan on the power supply, but I seriously think this little box could do without any fans and still keep a reasonable temperature.
• It’s kind of large-ish, but very empty, and sits next to my entertainment center on top of the UPS that keeps the power supply to it stable.
• It doesn’t have a reset switch, and I can cover the power switch with duct tape to prevent 2-year-old fingers from exploring.
• Running BSD on it is a joy. For most of what I need it for, it’s more than fast enough, and OpenBSD (unlike the Linux kernel) avoids paging things to swap if possible. This means that, I can come back to it after a few days of not using it, and log in quickly. On some of my Linux hosts, if I haven’t shelled in for a while, they take a while paging back in the stuff the computer hasn’t used in a while before giving me a chance to log in.

Anyway, I finally decided it was time to upgrade the old girl again. She was running an old version of OpenSSH, that, while not vulnerable (since OpenBSD wasn’t vulnerable to a recent OpenSSH exploit), was a target for automated attacks to just keep trying. I got sick of it. And I wanted to start over fresh, have a chance to remember what it was like to configure an OpenBSD system from scratch again.

So I swapped in a relatively new hard drive left over from my recent upgrade of my home studio workstation, and began the CD-ROM install. I chose to go ahead and install everything. In OpenBSD, this means (oh, the horror!) that the install is close to 400 megabytes. For EVERYTHING. Compare that to RedHat, where an “everything” install clocks in at about 6 gigabytes.

I chose a relatively sensible (from a security perspective) partitioning scheme: a 4 GB / (root) partition, 4 GB /var (people can DOS your box by filling up log files), and really big /home. I thought about doing a /usr/local partition (for those ports and packages you know), but the only real advantage I see there is that you can mount that partition read-only to prevent people running custom binaries. Given that I’m the only user of the system, and that if an attacker chose to, he could just umount /usr/local and remount it read-write if he were able to get in anyway, I thought it was of dubious benefit.

I did flag /var and /home noexec, and / will be mounted read-only (which includes /usr/local) once I’m done installing packages, so it’s all good.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I ran into an incredibly annoying behavior: My OpenBSD firewall would keep just disappearing on me. I mean, one minute, I’m surfing the ‘net with impunity, the next, I can’t resolve hostnames, can’t ping it or anything past it… gah, annoying. Went a whole day today without being able to check on it, because it was down.

And my kids were ticked 🙂 “Dad, I couldn’t Google all day!” “Dad, I couldn’t visit Barbie.com!” “Dad, why wasn’t my email working?” “Dad, what happened to barnson.org today?”

You get the idea.

Well, after much Googling, thinking, and checking for flags, I finally figured out the solution from this cryptic man page entry for apmd:

If the -a flag is specified, any BIOS-initiated suspend or standby re-quests are ignored if the system is connected to line current and not running from batteries (user requests are still honored).

That was my problem: though I wasn’t loading the APM (Advanced Power Management) daemon, the BIOS of the box was sending standby requests which the operating system was honoring: turning off the monitor, slowing down the CPU, turning off the hard disk, but most importantly:

Shutting down the network interface cards

I can deal with a machine being slightly non-responsive when I first connect (after all, it’s little better than a dumb router with a really secure operating system), but when the NICs shut down, it’s useless. So I edited /etc/rc.conf.local, adding this line:

# MattB: “-a” causes apm to ignore standby events.
apmd_flags=”-a” # for normal use: “”

I fired up apmd with “-a” manually from the command line, and it seems to be behaving now. But I keep getting this message in the log file now, hundreds of times:

Jun 24 18:15:40 monica /bsd: apm0: APM set power state: parameter out of range (10)

Guess that will be the next thing to figure out. The long-term solution is probably to go into the BIOS of this decrepit old system and change the power management setting.

The problem?

This is one of those ancient Compaq systems where the BIOS menus are stored on the hard drive, rather than being a chip on the board.

I nuked the first hard drive when I installed OpenBSD.

The joys of computing!

So several years ago I used to work for Excite@Home. Except when I was hired there, they were called “iMall”; our e-commerce operation was one of many acquisitions in the years prior to @Home’s demise.

Anyway, I used to make the daily drive to go work for Steve Fulling and Phil Windley. It wasn’t too bad: an hour and fifteen minutes from my house, sixty-six miles each way, driven lovingly on back roads from my home in Tooele, UT to Orem.

I have an interview with a company in Provo, just slightly south of Orem, on Thursday, so I decided to follow my usual routine and make sure to stake out the building in advance. Really, it’s so that I can be sure I find the place; the only thing worse than my sense of appropriate comedic timing is my sense of direction. Anyway, I made the drive from Salt Lake City, to Provo to check out this enormous campus. I mean, enormous. I know, people from back East will think our little large companies are laughable, but this would be, by far, the largest company I’d worked for if I am hired.

Anyway, so I discovered that, in the intervening years, the little back country road I took every day to work has now become a gridlocked, bumper-to-bumper, torn-up main street. There are thousands of homes now where there used to be fields of potatoes and other vegetables. In the verdant valley I used to pass through without noticing much development, the community of Eagle Mountain has encroached half the mountain side.

A part of me mourned the serene country ride I’d never have again.

And a bigger part of me wanted to move to one of the new houses if I do get this job. They are big, and inexpensive, and closer to my work than I am now.

Ever find yourself on that same kind of mental path? Remembering the way things were, wishing they were still that way, and yet being glad for change because it keeps life fresh and interesting?

Aside from the gridlock, though. That’s boring.

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

I just received this valuable terrorist alert in my inbox. In the interest of furthering the war effort, I present it for you now:

At New York’s Kennedy International Airport today, an individual, later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator.

Attorney general John Ashcroft believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. He is being charged with carrying weapons of math instruction.

“Al-gebra is a very fearsome cult indeed”, Ashcroft said. “They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on a tangent in search of an absolute value. They consist of quite shadowy figures, with names like ‘X’ and ‘Y’ , and although they arefrequently referred to as ‘unknowns’, we know that they really belong to a common denominator and are part of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the great Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, ‘There are 3 sides to every triangle.’ ”

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, “If God had wanted us to have weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes.”

“I am gratified that our government has given us a sine that it is intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are willing to disintegrate us with calculus disregard. Murky statisticians love to inflict plane on every sphere of influence,” he said, adding: “Under the circumferences, we must differentiate their root, make our point, and draw the line.”

He warned, “These weapons of math instruction have the potential to decimal everything in their math on a scalene never before seen unless we become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to factor-in random facts of vertex.”

He said, “As our Great Leader would say, read my ellipse. Here is one principle he is uncertain of: though they continue to multiply, their days are numbered as the hypotenuse tightens around their necks….”

I apologize for my lack of posts lately; I’m cooking up a couple of technical articles with tips I’ve picked up on FreeBSD and spam filtering.

But more important than that, I’ve been working my keister off preparing music for Void War by Rampant Games. We have about half the songs ready that we need, and there’s about six weeks until release.

Suffice to say, I’m stressed 🙂 But the game is looking really good already, plays very well single-player, and Jay and John, the programmers, are working out some multiplayer bugs (though it’s quite playable multiplayer, just not on a link that’s subject to really bad packet loss). It’s not much money unless the game scores incredibly big, but still, the worst case is that I’ve spent several months preparing music for a game that doesn’t take off.

And I really think this game will do well in the independent market 🙂 Otherwise, why do it?

But if nothing else, doing so much music has got me back “in the groove” of it again. Not a day goes past that I don’t end up having a new riff or theme playing in my brain on my trip home from work. I’m eager to sit down to my synthesizers and Cakewalk Sonar 3.1 to compose music when I get home.

Some technical things bug me, like some really weird routing changes in the signal path between Sonar 2.X and 3.X. Why did they route everything to a sound card channel by default rather than to BUS A and then the channel? Why’s the CPU usage so much higher on the same tune as 2.X? Progress, I guess.

Which means I’m saving money for a new computer, too. Got a check in the mail from a good friend who owed me money, and it looks like I should be able to afford that dual Athlon motherboard, memory, and CPU combo I’ve been hunting for.

Dual-processor computing rocks. People pooh-pooh it because it doesn’t “benchmark” as well as a single-CPU system, but if you’ve used the two types, you know the difference. A duallie remains very responsive under heavy load, while a single doesn’t. Simple as that. Sure, you lose some top-end performance, but when I’m adjusting sliders, tracking my automation in setting and killing effects, and trying to use various software synths, I need all the responsiveness I can get. I know what it takes to max my CPU, and if I could just do that, and be able to manually adjust a slider without causing a dropout or jerkiness in the slider motion as recorded due to a badly lagging machine, I’d be satisfied.

Well, OK, not really. It doesn’t matter how much hardware I have, I’ll probably drive it to the max anyway.

So last night I started a new tune for Void War called “Bereft”. Umm, here, I’ll give you a little chunk of it:

“Bereft” Sample. Internet Explorer screws this up if you just click. Try right-clicking and “save as” instead, otherwise it chops it in half. Lame web browser.

(Note: You’ll need a player capable of ogg vorbis to play this. I recommend WinAmp. I’ve changed audio formats; I’m sick of the politics surrounding MP3, and the fact that OGG is half the size for the same quality doesn’t hurt. I’m pretty limited on space here in my virtual server.)

Anyway, that’s just what I worked on last night prior to our playtest. Definitely nowhere near finished, and is a lot of cut-and-paste while I flesh out the structure.

But anyway, to get back to the point of my post: this is why I haven’t had much time to post. Busy, busy, busy. And finding a new job! So if you know anybody looking for a good UNIX admin, point them to my resume, would you?

Off to work now!