Technitribe

A while back I wanted to backup the songs I’ve saved to my iPod. I was running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). When I searched around I found a tool called iPodDisk. It worked great! Then Snow Leopard (10.6) came out.

The way the launcher for iPodDisk was written meant it only would launch on 10.4 or 10.5. When you launched iPodDisk you would receive the message:

“Sorry iPodDisk requires OS X 10.4 or later”

Fixing this was pretty simple. After searching their google code issue tracker I quickly came across issue #34, “Sorry iPodDisk requires OS X 10.4 or later“. The fix was simple, reply #3 in the thread said to just edit one line in the launcher so that the version check accepted a higher version.

Time goes on and eventually I did a full OS reinstall (for some reason or another) and just recently upgraded to 10.7 (Lion). I’d bought a new network storage unit (Western Digital My Book Live) and wanted to back up my iPod again. Of course, upon downloading and launching iPodDisk again it produced the same error it did previously. It was clear to me that iPodDisk was clearly not being maintained.

While searching for the fix again I decided to read some newer posts on the issue tracker. Reply #51 referenced MacFuse. The project site for that hasn’t made a new release since 2008 though. Reply #60 had the information I was finally looking for.

So the final solution that allowed me to backup my iPod on OS X 10.7, Lion, was to install these two pieces of software:

• iTunesFS
• OSX Fuse

While I’ve been gone from the blogging world I’ve still been working on projects. Mostly I’ve been working on documentation.

• Debian/Fedora Package Management comparison. Since switching my Slice to Fedora from Ubuntu I’ve picked up plenty of commands for managing packages. This is just a quick wiki page giving the roughly equivalent commands from Debian/Ubuntu to Fedora/RedHat.
• regexp basics is a brief tutorial on regular expressions. My roommate abutcher put it together for his WVU CS210 (Advanced File and Data Structures) course. The DocBook 5 sources are available in git.
• The biggest doc project I’ve been working on again (finally) is my Virtual Disk Guide aimed at power users and sysadmins. Currently it’s a rough draft and is constantly undergoing major changes and additions. It’s available as a single HTML document, chunked into multiple pages, and in PDF format. You can get the DocBook 5 formatted source to it through my GitHub account.

My Project Templates project has seen some much needed attention recently. The DocBook starter project has been completely redone. Here’s some reasons you might want to use it.

• Includes a basic starter document with most of the available informational tags present but commented out so all you need to do is uncomment the elements you need for your document.
• Inclues a customizable Makefile that can adapt itself to different operating systems (Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/RedHat, and Mac OS X) by just uncommenting the proper directory paths for the schema and stylesheet files.
• The Makefile has targets for: cleaning up, creating schema locator files for nxml-mode in emacs, publishing PDFs, and publishing chunked or single HTML documents.
• The comments in the Makefile also tell you what packages you need to install to get the schema and stylesheet files.

Using the Makefile for publishing only requires having xsltproc and dblatex installed. Both of which are available through your favorite package manager.

I ran into this issue while installing dblatex (0.2.10) from the most recent MacPorts tree today:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/local/bin/dblatex", line 16, in <module>
    from dbtexmf.dblatex import dblatex
ImportError: No module named dbtexmf.dblatex

I got past it by exporting PYTHONPATH=/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages, but clearly this was not optimal. I was about to file a bug report about the issue but before I did that I read their new ticket guidelines which requested the full build log be included in the ticket.

In the build log was the solution. I would have missed it had my shell scrollback not been set to unlimited. Nestled a good 182 lines back in my buffer was this little message:

--->  Installing python26 @2.6.4_0+darwin
--->  Activating python26 @2.6.4_0+darwin
 
To fully complete your installation and make python 2.6 the default, please run
 
sudo port install python_select
sudo python_select python26

I did as instructed, and sure enough, dblatex started working! I just wanted to post this on the blog in case anyone else ran into this and missed it like I did.

You may find this helpful if you should find yourself using Erlang on OS X and you’ve installed it using Macports. After a default installation you’ll need to manually configure your .emacs file for erlang-mode and set your $MANPATH variable correctly, here’s how.

If you’ve installed Erlang with Macports then you may have noticed that when you edit .erl files you’re not entering into erlang-mode, nor is it available to enter into. Here’s how I got erlang-mode working on my system.

Macports will install Erlang into /opt/local/lib/erlang by default. The paths to put in your .emacs file provided in the erlang-mode documentation only need to be tweaked a slight bit to function properly. Here’s what I put in mine:

(setq load-path (cons  "/opt/local/lib/erlang/lib/tools-2.6.4/emacs/" load-path))
(setq erlang-root-dir "/opt/local/lib/erlang")
(setq exec-path (cons "/opt/local/bin" exec-path))
(require 'erlang-start)

Note that you may require setting “tools-2.6.4″ to something else if Macports has upgraded it’s distribution of Erlang.

Setting up your $MANPATH variable is fairly simple as well. Just put the string “/opt/local/lib/erlang/man” in a file called ‘erlang’ in /etc/manpaths.d/ and make sure it ends with an empty line. Test this by opening a new terminal and running: echo $MANPATH | grep erlang. If it doesn’t come back empty then you’ve done it right.

Today abutcher and I found every way to fail to build VirtualBox OSE from source on OS X. We followed the build instructions on their web site but had some problems. I’ll post a more detailed writeup of what happened and what you need to do to build it later. Until then, here’s a link to download the most recent checkout from svn, built for OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). And here’s the SHA256:

dd55dbaabb23e19c16fb78d5b8f41d68bd19a6ad2ef810818b5d7d480da26393

Often we get Nagios alerts letting us know that your kernel is about to panic and your server is going to crash and die because read/write operations are going to FAIL MISERABLY.

Obviously being a systems administrator it becomes your job to figure out what can go, what needs to stay, et al.

I’ve found that archived logs (logrotate) on a secure server often can be quite large. And on a low-end configuration with a server with only 40G it becomes a nuisance when you have a few Gb of data…
And you all probably know this, but Tim asked when I’d blog. So… I’ll make sure!
Having 40 or 50 files is a pain to manually delete. Sure, you could probably rm -f *.1 *.2 *.3 etc etc etc but that becomes too much of a pain.

On BSD systems there is an awesome counter called ‘jot’; it works exactly the opposite of the GNU command ‘seq’; so for a rudimentary example to remove all files it becomes a simple one liner–

• jot 6 1 |while read i; do rm -f *.${i};done
• seq 1 6|while read i; do rm -f *.${i};done

In Emeril fashion: BAM! You’re now out of the clear.

Shaggy and I drafted this guide to setting up your OpenGL development environment in Apple Xcode for cs470 (Introduction to Computer Graphics) at WVU.  It follows you through installing Xcode and including the relevant frameworks for creating a stock C++ OpenGL project.  Shaggy formatted it in DocBook and I think the result is pretty sexy.  Try it out for yourself!

View the tutorial here: opengl-in-xcode