Another Word for Nerd

I called the Galleria Apple Store today and spoke to the head of the tech department (who will be doing the actual work on my machine) and described the bad experience I had yesterday.

He apologized for the behavior of the Apple Genius (who had diagnosed all of the machine’s problems as being due to cigarette smoke before he even unpacked it out of the box) and said “Hey, you’re under warranty, plus you have AppleCare, don’t worry we’ll take care of you.”

It seems that I just had the bad luck yesterday of encountering a rabid anti-smoker.

Anyway, I’m expecting a call later today from the actual tech to tell me the status of my machine. After speaking with him, I feel better about any future dealings with that particular Apple Store; it was nice to be able to talk to someone who didn’t act like a condescending know-it-all.

My “real” christmas present for myself this year is my MacBook, which I paid off today.

A good friend of mine returned a favor that I did him early in the year and sold me his barely-used white 2Ghz MacBook (60G, 1.5G RAM, SuperDrive, AppleCare, etc) four months ago for a lot less than he could have sold it to someone else for, and under the same terms in place when I sold him my iMac G5 back in January (“pay what you can, when you can”).

I sent him the final payment today, got a bill of sale, and now I can feel like the awesome little system is actually mine.

I don’t normally talk about politics here, but this made me laugh.
(by Brian Topping, via Boing Boing):

I turned 32 on Sunday the 5th.

Made out decently when it comes to birthday gifts.

Amy got me a pocket watch, and my mother got me a new iPod Shuffle and a sleeve for my MacBook.

No socks and underwear though.

I’m testing out Qumana, a new weblog client for OSX and Windows.  It’s a Universal Binary, so I can use it natively on the Intel-based Mac at home.

So far, my main comment is "takes way too long to start up", compared to MarsEdit (on the 1.25Ghz G4) or even Ecto under Rosetta emulation on the Core Duo iMac at home.

It has a good user interface so far, so we’ll see how things go.

I got Rhapsody DR2 and OpenStep 4.2 running in the Parallels VM on my Intel-based Macintosh.

(OpenStep was the precursor to Rhapsody, which was the precursor to Mac OS X…)

is this!

After the past 24 hours, I’ve come to the conclusion that there needs to be a universal file system format that has the same support on all operating systems.

My main “server” system here at the house is a Dell PowerEdge SC420 with a 2.5Ghz Celeron-D CPU, 1G RAM, 160G SATA HD, and GigE. Since I got the machine (for $250 during one of Dell’s CRAAAZY DEALS last year), I’ve been running Fedora Core 4 on it with no problems. On top of FC4, I use rsnapshot to do nightly backups of my colocated server and some client machines.

I decided a few days ago that it was time to ditch FC4 and put Solaris 10 on the machine now that all the hardware is fully supported. First, however, I needed to get my rsnapshot repository off the machine. That was accomplished with a 250G SATA hard drive and a SATA to USB2 adapter with power supply. Now I had my critical data on an ext2-formatted hard drive.

I proceeded to reinstall the Dell with the latest Solaris Express release. I then installed the ext2fs drivers for Solaris 10, and attempted to rsync the data back off the hard drive. Five minutes in, the system wedges hard and requires a reboot.

Okay, so that’s not going to work. I carry the HD and adapter back into the other room, plug it into the Mac, and install ext2fsx. When I try to mount the drive, it complains about a bad superblock. So, a couple hours of forced-fsck_ext2 later, I can mount the drive.

When I try to rsync from the Mac over the network to the Dell, the Mac gripes about filenames on the ext2 partition. Crap. That’s not going to work either, and I don’t have another Linux box to mount the HD on.

It was then that I realized I didn’t *need* another permanent Linux installation. I downloaded Knoppix, booted it on my AMD64 Windows gaming box, then plugged the USB/SATA HD in. It was detected and mounted right up, and has been happily rsync-ing everything back to the Dell/Solaris system for the past couple of hours.

I know that in my situation, having a couple of big disks sitting on an NFS server would have been the easiest way to do things. Others might have suggested FAT32, however my rsnapshot backup repository makes heavy use of UNIX hard links, and would not be “portable” to FAT32.

This all demonstrates the need for a truly portable filesystem that can be easily transported between operating systems without having to use ugly hacks. I’m hoping that ZFS might eventually be the solution, if Sun ports it to Linux as rumored and even maybe OSX.

I’m wondering if it would be usable on single disks, since everything I’ve seen seems to emphasize its mirroring/redundancy and handling of multi-disk pools over its non-dependency on byte endianness and portability between CPU architectures.

SBCL build on an Apple Intel Core Duo iMac (Dual-core 2Ghz, 1G RAM):

//build started: Mon Mar 6 08:48:56 CST 2006
//build finished: Mon Mar 6 08:58:54 CST 2006
real 9m58.717s
user 8m50.595s
sys 0m31.261s

Thanks to Cyrus Harmon’s patch for 20060503 SBCL from CVS. I used CLISP (v2.37) to bootstrap SBCL from source, then recompiled it with itself just to make sure things were going to work.

gojira:~ mrbill$ uname -a
Darwin gojira.local 8.5.1 Darwin Kernel Version 8.5.1: Mon Jan 30 21:07:08 PST 2006; root:xnu-792.8.36.obj~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 i386
gojira:~ mrbill$ sbcl
This is SBCL 0.9.10.15, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
More information about SBCL is available at .

SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
BSD-style licenses. See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
distribution for more information.
*

Cyrus Harmon finally has SBCL working under OS X on an Intel-based Mac. I can get back in the swing of things now. Thanks, Cyrus!