Incidentally, this week I have reached another milestone. I have two computers at home: one is a (headless) mail server, and the other is my iMac desktop. The server was a Linux box until a few days ago when either its power supply or mobo died.

I meditated on this, and came to the conclusion that it was worth several hundred dollars to me to not have to fuck around with the PC hardware dance again, so I replaced it with a Mac Mini. This means there are now no Linux machines in my house*, and even at work, I no longer have any Linux machines that have video cards in them**, which is as it should be.

So, if this release doesn't work on Linux... uh, that's why.

*  except Tivo, which doesn't count.
** except the kiosks, which almost don't count. (Ha.)

So let's say, just for the sake of argument, that I was thinking about switching to a Mac Mini or something for the DNA audio streams. What software would I use?

Right now I'm running Icecast 2.2.0, and I get audio into it by using the Perl "Shout" library. The MP3 bits come from one of two places:

• When the club isn't open, the audio just comes out of mp3 files on disk. This part's easy.
• When we're open, the audio comes from the sound card via "arecord -q -f cd | lame ..."

So I could continue just using Icecast 2.2.0 (it's somewhat of a pain in the ass, but I'm familiar with its failings by now), but what's the OSX replacement for that "arecord" command? I've googled up a few recipes that involve installing esound, but there's just no fuckin' way that's the sane answer.

Nicecast ($40) looks nice and simple, but I don't think it does what I need: it doesn't seem to be non-interactive enough. In particular, I need to switch back and forth between "live" and "archive" from cron.

Though, you know, I'm not sure anyone actually cares about that... Right now the live streams (and by extension, the Real stream) re-broadcast audio from the saved archives during the day when we're not open. I guess I could just give up on that and have them be silent during the day, and assume that people who want to listen to the archives will do so explicitly.

Suggestions?

Also: does a MacOS version of RealProducer even exist any more? I can't tell what all this "Helix" nonsense is about, but it looks like it all stopped in 2004. (Please note, I'm talking about RealProducer, not RealServer: Producer is the software that reads from the video card, encodes video, and sends a single stream up to RealServer for re-broadcast.)

(And before you ask, switching from Real to Quicktime is not an option, because GrooveFactory, the folks who are generously donating video bandwidth and re-broadcasting to us, only do Real, not QT.)

Poll #720645 dna media
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Audio:

Video:

XScreenSaver 5.00b4 out now.

• Should be somewhat faster than 5.00b3.
• All the savers should work properly on both PPC and Intel Macs.

Please let me know if you find either of those to not be the case.

See todo.

I think this is getting really close to being called a non-beta release, since at this point I'm not sure I'm not sure I'm going to be able to make any further headway on performance. I'm pretty much out of ideas on that front, short of "throw away most of the work I've done so far, and re-implement Xlib in terms of OpenGL instead of in terms of Quartz". Which, as you may imagine, I'm not particularly eager to do.

The reason it works on Intel Macs is that Apple finally replaced my busted iMac, and the replacement is an Intel Core Duo. And it is OMG fast! Seriously, it seems like compilations are around 2.5× faster than before, and all the screen savers run way faster too (so there goes any hope of having decent xscreensaver performance on slow machines, since I won't even be able to tell there's a problem any more...)

The one exception to this speed-up is, of course, Photoshop. Photoshop is a fucking dog, since Adobe still hasn't released an Intel build of CS2, meaning it runs in the PPC emulator. It feels like it's running at 75% to 50% of the speed it ran on my PPC iMac, and it uses a truly gargantuan amount of memory. Like, after editing a dozen pictures, closing them all, and hiding Photoshop, minutes later it was still consuming 6% CPU and almost 1.5 GB RAM.

So if you use Photoshop more than XCode or other Apple-provided software, I'd say stay the hell away from the Intel machines until Adobe gets their shit together.

This "spontaneously and randomly power off the computer" feature is really getting old...

Mar 16 18:15:35 localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = -122
Mar 25 20:18:17 localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = -122
Mar 25 21:03:56 localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = -122
Mar 26 06:17:22 localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = -122
Apr  8 08:45:09 localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = -122
Apr  8 08:50:34 localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = -122
Apr  8 14:57:30 localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = -122
Apr  9 00:15:04 localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = -122
Apr  9 08:04:43 localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = -122
Apr  9 11:54:59 localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = -122
Apr  9 15:06:44 localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = -122

Again I'm faced with the decision: haul it down to the store for the fourth time now, or just back up often and wait until it fries my logic board and drive again?

I got my computer back today -- less than 24 hour turnaround, which was very nice! (What wasn't nice was that I had to spend more than an hour getting hostile at managers on phone and in person in order to make it happen fast, but at least it's done.)

So guess what the problem was? Go on, guess.

The last time they fixed it, the tech forgot to plug in one of the fans, so the other one was going nuts trying to take up the slack. Nice.

On the one hand, I feel a little silly that I didn't open it up and check for something so simple, but on the other hand, fuck that, when you get something back from the shop and it's still broken, you're supposed to turn right back around, not try to fix the non-fix yourself.

But, I'm surprised that in my googling I didn't turn up anything like "lmsensors" for the iMac, since that would have made it pretty obvious what was going on.

Ah, blissful fan-free quiet.

Stupid computers.

I took my iMac back to the store today, for the third time in the nine months I've owned it. The current problem is that the fans are on constantly, and the thing is twice as loud as my refrigerator. It's completely silent just after it boots, but after exactly 5 minutes the fans start ramping up, and by 10 minutes, they're on in "windtunnel mode". This is true even if the machine is just sitting at the first page of the installation DVD. I've reset the SMU, PRAM, and NVRAM, so they're giving me a new logic board, again.

And when I was dropping it off today, the guy in front of me was complaining about the exact same problem! If I heard him right, he had also just had his logic board replaced. And the tech was looking like he'd never heard of this fan thing before.

How about that.

Since I got my Mac back, my fonts are weird again.

Back when I first got the iMac, I noticed something odd, which is that light text on a dark background is rendered more bold than the other way around. Consequently, the theme used by my LJ and the DNA site look kind of assy.

Then a month or so later, the problem went away, and my fonts looked like they should. Maybe there was a Software Update, maybe it was some other app I installed, I don't know, but something seemed to have shaken the cobwebs out of the font renderer.

Well, I need to do that again, and I have no idea how.

Check out this weirdness, which I suspect is related in some way: my tcsh $prompt is "%U%B<`whoami`@%m:%~/>%u%b ", meaning the prompt is bold. This is what Terminal looks like:

with antialiasing off:

and with it on:

When "Window Settings/Display/Anti-aliasing" is checked, the non-bold fonts become bold, and the bold fonts become non-bold! WTF?

Update: Set System Preferences / General / Font Smoothing Style to "Standard", and quit/restart Safari/Terminal etc., and this problem goes away.

So, my iMac (20" G5) died for the second time last week.

(  --More--( 6%)  )

So, then when I got it back, all was well and good, except that it was as loud as a fucking jet engine! The fans seemed to be on high all the time. At first I thought, well maybe the reason it died the other two times was that the fans weren't on high enough before, and it melted. But then I reset the SMU again and now it's back to being gloriously quiet. Hmmmmmmm...

Update: I spoke too soon. Ten minutes later, and the fans are loud again, even though I'm not doing anything but iTunes and typing. Shit.

So what's this SMU business all about, anyway?

In summary:

• Apple's software: So awesome. The honeymoon is not yet over.
• Apple's hardware: Pissing me off. (But not nearly as much as PC hardware pisses me off.)
• Apple's support: Good for not trying to charge me for any of this. Pissing me off by being so slow, and for apparently not having fixed it right the first time.

I'd like to use rsync to back up my Mac, mostly because it's what I'm used to. But, resource forks. What's the done thing?

(  --More--(13%)  )

A few weeks ago I lamented that iPhoto doesn't match the way I like to organize my photos, and was thinking that the way to go was to buy a copy of PhotoMechanic and use that instead.

Well, I finally got a copy of Photoshop CS2, and it turns out that it includes a tool that does pretty much exactly what I want! The file browser dingus in "Adobe Bridge" gives you a bunch of different views for looking at, rating, and pruning thumbnails, and it approaches it as "visualizing the contents of a directory" (which I like) instead of "I've sucked all your photos into some scary proprietary database, and now I will show you search results" (what iPhoto does).

So I think that now the way I'll be doing it is:

• Copy photos off camera to a YYYY-MM-DD-title/RAW/ directory;
• Copy that to YYYY-MM-DD-title/EDIT/ directory;
• Edit those through Bridge and Photoshop;
• "Tools / Photoshop / Image Processor";
  Output to a web directory;
  Resize to fit 900 x 750.

The "Web Photo Gallery" command looks promising, but none of the templates generate pages that are very close to the layout that I use today, so I guess I'll just keep using my script to generate those. (Maybe someday I'll poke around and see if I can customize Photoshop to do it my way instead.)

It's been a long time since I've used Photoshop, and it really is an amazing program. It's no wonder that it has no competitors. The last time I used it seriously was, I think, Photoshop 3.5, which was the last version they released for Irix. Since then I've been using GIMP, which is a decent program (in that it's approximately equivalent to Photoshop 3.5) but man, the real thing is just leaps and bounds ahead. And so fast!

I am especially thrilled by "Image / Adjustments / Photo Filter" and "Image / Adjustments / Shadow/Highlight". Those two commands let me do in a couple of seconds what I'd spent ten minutes doing with "Levels" in GIMP!

I'm still not sure what the Right Thing to do is with respect to gamma. The default Mac gamma is brighter than the default Windows gamma, meaning that on a Mac, you see more detail in the dark areas. I guess my Linux box was calibrated in a Windows-like way, because when I look at my old galleries, a lot of the pictures look kind of washed out, and (even worse) I can see blocky JPEG artifacts in some spots that previously looked solid black.

So I guess the thing to do is leave my monitor set at "Mac" gamma, and when I'm editing pictures, err toward "too bright" instead of "too dark". That means that the failure mode might be that a picture looks too dark to some users, which I think is better than icky JPEG artifacts being visible to some other users.

I think I've finally gotten all my mail imported into Mail.app. It was a tedious, glacial pain in the ass.

What's a good typing-break timer? I grabbed Time Out, and it seems ok... it's kinda ugly, though. And it's more insistent than what I'm used to (XWrits).

Update: AntiRSI is a lot better looking.

I want a dock button that means "create a new Safari window". If you click on Safari in the dock, it opens a new window if there are none; but otherwise it opens some existing window. I want a fast way to always get a new window. (I imagine this is a Small Matter of Applescript...)

Update: There's a "New Window" menu on the right-click context menu on the Safari icon in the dock, which is close enough.

I love that in Safari, Cmd-Shift-click does "Open Link Behind..." (opens a link in a new window, but stacks that window behind the one youre curent looking at.)

However, is there some way to change that binding so that Cmd-click does that (without a shift)? One of my mouse buttons sends Cmd-click, so I'd like to be able to do "Open Link Behind" without using the keyboard. (I could change that button to send Cmd-Shift-click, but that would be less convenient in other applications.)

Update: Please stop telling me how much you love tabs. I'm happy for you, but I think they suck. You needn't elaborate on how wonderful you think they are. I get it.

I'm getting along with Mail.app OK, but it's weird that:

• You can't click in the "unread" and "flagged" columns to change the status of a message (you need to use a toolbar button instead).

• There seems to be no way to put a "next message" or "next unread message" button in the toolbar. I really miss that. I find myself scroling and visually searching a lot.

I really wish I could get it to save a copy of my outgoing messages into the folder of the message to which I'm replying. Right now I'm doing BCC and then manually refiling my outgoing messages, but that's annoying.

Update: Please stop mailing me to tell me "just Cmd-click the Sent folder to see your incoming and outgoing messages together." That conflates the entire Sent folder with the current folder, not just the subset of Sent that are replies to the messages in the current folder. It is, therefore, totally worthless.

Also, my BCCs make the "you have new mail" flag go up: it's not smart enough to not notify me about mail from me. To get better notifications for incoming mail, I'm using the "Mail Notification" AppleScript that came with Growl, and having my mail filters run that when putting messages into certain folders. I guess I could just hack that script to be silent when the mail is from me...

I think that iPhoto doesn't conform to my old picture-taking workflow. I think it's a good workflow, though, so I'd like to know whether I'm wrong, and there is some way to do what I want with iPhoto.

Previously, I did this:

• Move pictures from camera;
• Create "date-name" directories for each session: e.g., if I shot a show that had three bands on June 1, the directories would be 2005-06-01-foo, 2005-06-01-bar, and 2005-06-01-baz.
• Put all the photos of each subject in a RAW/ subdirectory (e.g., 2005-06-01-foo/RAW/). Never touch those.
• Copy */RAW to */EDIT. In the EDIT subdirectory, delete the junk, and color correct and crop the rest.
• When publishing to the web, copy some subset of EDIT, and resize and post the copy.

I don't think I can easily do this with iPhoto. iPhoto seems to want to obscure the actual location of the files on disk from me: it wants me to access my photos only through the iPhoto UI, using its notion of galleries. It always stores files on disk in its world in directories like YYYY/MM/DD/, which is close to my layout, but I want my "keywords" in the directory names as well, not solely in some undocumented metadata file off to the side somewhere.

I think that PhotoMechanic makes it easy to do things the way I want, since it doesn't make assumptions about where your files live. Basically you can just point it at a directory and it will let you browse, flag, and manipulate things in that directory without first importing copies into some central place. rzr_grl swears by PhotoMechanic, and it's used by a lot of newspapers.

But, PhotoMechanic is $150, and contains a lot of other features that I don't particularly need. So before I buy it, I'd like to know if any of you iPhoto users out there know how to bend iPhoto to my will.

Update: Turns out that Adobe Bridge does everything PhotoMechanic does, and it came with my copy of Photoshop CS2. Goodbye iPhoto!

Ok, guess what? The Mail.app importer discards the "Date:" header and uses whatever was in the envelope ("From_") instead. So, not only is this bogus (the send-time is more interesting than the receive-time) but it means that it's going to mis-date just about all of my really old mail, since those have correct Date: headers but seem to have in their envelope the date at which they were converted to "mbox". I blame Kyle Jones.

This means I get to write a script to parse all those Date: headers and regenerate the envelopes. How many times have I done this? Then re-import the mail again. How many times have I done this?

*sob*

otterley: I gave up on IMAP because the server is just far too much of a pain in the ass to figure out how to get running.

So I'm mostly using Mail.app for email now. I like the UI, and the filtering and junk mail stuff seems nice.

I don't understand what the done thing is with respect to multiple identities; how do I partition things into "jwz@jwz.org" and "jwz@dnalounge.com" worlds, given that I have only one mail server for both? It doesn't want to let me add an "account" with a duplicate (or missing) mail server.

Update: Aha! An "account" is per mail server, but you can have more than one address per account: type commas between them, and a "From" menu shows up on mail composition windows.

Also, is there any way to get it to save a copy of my outgoing messages in the same folder as the message to which I am replying, instead of putting them all in Sent?

But OMG is importing my old mail slooow!

Now I understand that A) I have more mail than just about anybody, and B) mail importer modules never get any real love, since nobody ever uses them more than once, if at all, but geez, it takes roughly 1 second per message! And that's just to import them: the first time I select an imported folder, and when I leave the folder after I've marked all "read", it does some other incredibly slow thing...

And it's making iTunes skip. I'm actually somewhat surprised by this; I thought I read that OSX had some realtime scheduling features, and I assumed that iTunes would be taking advantage of them. Guess not.

Do per-user crontabs still work on 10.4? Or should I be using launchd instead?

I have some cron jobs that need to ssh to other hosts to do stuff (rsync and cvs via ssh, etc.) On Linux, the only way to make this work was to use non-password-protected ssh certs. On OSX, is there some keychain magic I can do to tell it that these scripts are pre-authorized, without having to leave the private key files unprotected? (I'm guessing not, but I figured it was worth asking.)

Update / Summary: Crontabs still work (they are run by launchd). Some speculation that maybe they will stop working in 10.5. No easy answers to the keychain question, but ydna has some interesting tricks.

I don't have any wireless devices of my own, but a certain lady of my acquaintance has a Powerbook that she would sometimes like to use from the couch without dragging an ethernet cable over. Can my iMac behave as a wireless base station? I created a network on the iMac, and was able to see it from the laptop, but the laptop wasn't able to get to the interweb. Is there some extra trick I need to do to get the iMac to route between wireless and ethernet?

Update / Summary: "That should work", followed by "it would be a lot easier to just buy an Airport."

Attention: Please only fill out this poll if you are actually a Mac user. I don't give a flying fuck what you use on Windows! I honestly didn't think I had to spell this out, but apparently I do.

Poll #511923 Fight!
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Browser:

Mail:

AIM:

IRC:

Please explain your answers. Especially if you said "Other!"

(  --More--(25%)  )

Life with the new toy is going well. So well that it has already moved up to the "front and center" position on my desk, and is currently the only computer with a monitor attached.

After some foolish dilly-dallying with Fink and Darwin Ports, I came to my senses and realize that they represent much of what I was trying to escape in the first place. I expect to be using neither of them very much if at all. Most useful things that actually work on OSX (e.g., Privoxy) have normal .pkg installers.

Playing movies: out of the box, QuickTime works fine for QuickTimes, and I held my breath and installed Windows Media Player (shut up. I don't care.) which works ok for WMVs. Then I installed some plugin from divx.com which made QuickTime able to play AVI. But there are still some MPEGs that I can't play; I don't know what's special about them, but is there some other obvious thing I should install? (If the trick involves the word "mplayer", with which I already have some experience, then I will take that to mean simply, "get used to the fact that you can't play those." I'll live.

SSH KeyChain is awesome! This is what "ssh-agent/ssh-add" always wanted to be when they grew up.

Second screen: iMacs have a miniVGA port on them, but are advertised to only do mirroring, not multiple desktops. But, there's a hack for that that makes it work, so now I've got two monitors hooked up, yay!

Five monitors! Something Must Be Done.

Keyboard: My keyboard has both PS/2 and USB connectors on it, so you'd assume that would mean it just does both, right? Uh, no. Turns out this keyboard contains three separate devices: a PS/2 keyboard, a PS/2 left trackpad, and a USB right trackpad. WTF? So I had to get an adapter, and it takes up two USB ports if you want to enable both trackpads. Craziness. Works fine, though.

Mouse: By default, the Evoluent mouse only has the wheel, pointer-finger, and middle-finger buttons enabled. USB Overdrive lets me enable thumb, wheel-click, etc. But it's nagware. Is there a free driver, or is USB Overdrive the only game in town?

Perl hacking: I haven't had any luck installing Perl libraries with CPAN. E.g., "cpan install Image::Magick" has compilation errors even after I've Finked as many relevant libraries as I can. What's the trick here?

Update: Apparently the problem is that Fink was installing ImageMagick 5.x and Perl wanted to install PerlMagick 6.x. I got it working by: uninstalling the Fink version of ImageMagick 5.x; installing the DarwinPorts version of ImageMagick 6.x; hand-hacking the Makefile.PL that CPAN downloaded to include -L/opt/local/lib and -I/opt/local/include; and running "make all install" from inside the .cpan build directory. That sucked, but it worked.

XEmacs: The Carbonated XEmacs was easy to build and install, but it's crash-happy. With my .emacs file loaded, it crashes as soon as I visit the first file. And I am sad. I'm typing this in XEmacs running under X11, and that's not so bad, but X11 programs have some goofy keyboard-focus issues (Growl notifications steal focus from X but not from "real" Mac apps, for example.)

Maybe I'll try to kick it all 1980s style and learn to live with xemacs -nw in a Terminal. How do I make the Meta key work there?

Fonts: OSX does something wacky with fonts. I think that it notices when it is rendering light text on a dark background, and uses a different font in that case! And that font looks to have been software-boldified or something. Try it! Take the DNA page, save a copy, and swap the foreground and background colors (or make it white-on-black.) Look at them side by side: they're different! The dark one is bolder. And it's still bolder if you grab a screen shot and invert the colors, so it's not just an optical illusion. Both Firefox and Safari do this, so it must be an OS-level thing.

Dock: The Dock still really sucks. Aren't the Apple UI designers supposed to know about Fitt's Law, and that it's a bad idea for click targets to move around the screen at random? Because the dock centers (no matter where you put it) the Trashcan is never in the same place twice! (But the Gnome Panel Window List applet was even worse, so hey.)

Dashboard: Monumentally, stunningly useless. Some of the apps might be useful if they were apps and not segregated into some weird all-or-nothing layer of their own. And you can't seem to turn it off. Did they have to hype this dumb thing up because saying "10.4 is the bug-fix release of 10.3" wasn't sexy enough?

Several people seemed vehement about the fact that Darwin Ports is better than Fink. Why? Are there dissenting opinions?

What is the Darwin Ports analogue to the FinkCommander GUI? If the answer is "there isn't one" then that says to me that Fink is already a thousand times better than DP, even given the fact that FinkCommander is an awkward, hidious Tk thing or whatever it is.

I just want an easy way to install various bits of open source software on OSX, preferably without ever compiling any of it. Fink will give me binaries. Will DP? I can't tell. All the documentation on the web site seems to be aimed at "people contributing software to DP", not to people like me who just want to use it. This apparent focus does not fill me with confidence that it's what I want.

Update / Summary: Concensus seems to be that Fink has more stuff, but DP is more stable. Maybe there's a GUI, maybe there are binaries; I haven't investigated, because I finally came to my senses and realized that both Fink and DP represent a good deal of what I came to OSX to escape. So I plan to use them absolutely as little as possible. Software I actually want will probably have a .dmg installer.

Remember last week, when I tried to buy exactly the same audio card that 99.99% of the world owns and convince Linux to be able to play two sounds at once? Yeah, turns out, that was the last straw. I bought an iMac, and now I play my music with iTunes.

This took... let me see... just about zero effort. Well, I still have to go buy some longer audio cables, but that's it.

I plugged a mouse with three buttons and a wheel into the Mac, and it just worked without me having to read the man page on xorg.conf or anything. Oh frabjous day.

Go ahead and say "I told you so" if it makes you feel better.

Anyway, this means several things:

• You shouldn't be holding your breath waiting for a new release of Gronk.

• I also got to stop using the crapware known as Mozilla Sunbird; now I can use iCal, which Just Works (for example, the alarms actually go off, and it doesn't periodically shit a WAV file into my .ics file.)

• The future direction of xscreensaver has become... highly ambiguous.

I'm still using my other Linux machine to read mail and run XEmacs, but I'm hoping to wean myself of that eventually, one way or another. If all goes well, then in six months or so, the only Linux machines I'll ever have to touch will have no video or sound cards in them at all.

The only thing I couldn't figure out how to do: compile xscreensaver. It stopped working some time between OSX 10.3 and 10.4 due to some GTK/Fink stupidity where pkgconfig/gobject-2.0.pc never gets installed. I'm trying not to care. That's going quite well.

Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys.