Follow the Keychain & Convert .dmg to .iso

Last night on the way home from Aerva, at around 6:20pm, I spent 1 hour driving 6 miles on Massachusetts Ave. It usually takes me 10 - 15 minutes at that time of the day. What was supposed to be a 40 minute commute turned into a 1.5 hour commute. That's why I really have to rent a place in Cambridge when I start working fulltime at Aerva. Spending 2 - 3 hours per day commuting wouldn't be worth it.

I observed an odd phenomenon yesterday while driving in my truck. As I was driving up the on-ramp to the highway I noticed my keychain was swinging in the opposite direction as the truck was turning. It was pointing in the direction of the truck's center of gravity. That's when I noticed my head was tilting in the exact same way as my keychain was. As the on-ramp ended and the truck straightened out, I noticed my head was straightening in exact sync with the keychain. As the trucks center of gravity moved back to the center, so did my head. I think we all do this unconsciously and it probably has something to do with the mechanism in our ear canal that tells us which way is up. What impressed me the most was how in sync the movement of my head was with the movement of the keychain.

I wanted to upgrade my Mac mini's software to the Tiger edition of MacOS X (aka version 10.4), however I did not want to pay for it. So I spent a couple of hours searching for and downloading the 4 CDs required to install Tiger. I found a torrent online which contained a ZIP file of all four CDs, about 1.8GB. After unziping the file, I discovered four files which had .dmg extensions. Argh! I was hoping they were .iso files that I could simply burn to a CD. From my little experience with Mac's, I know that .dmg files are Mac file type. I did some quick Googling and found a way to convert .dmg files into .iso files using a Mac machine:

hdiutil convert /path/to/filename.dmg -format UDTO -o /path/to/savefile.iso

So I used WinSCP to transfer all four .dmg files to my Mac and then converted each one to an ISO format. It was going pretty slow for a network transfer (about 800kbps), so I decided to try using the Windows FTP command to FTP them instead. I figured that maybe the extra encryption overhead required by SCP was causing the slow transfer. Oddly enough, I was unable to convert the .dmg files I transferred using Windows FTP. The hdiutil command was giving weird errors. So I transferred all of them using SCP and they converted perfectly. I then transferred them back to my Windows computer and prepared to burn them to a CD.

I wanted to test out my LightScribe CDR drive, so I installed the LightScribe software first. I wanted to create a cool CD label that looked like the original Mac OS X CD, so I thought I could just scan my old Pather CD and use that. When I opened up my Mac mini box guess what I found. An original Tiger upgrade CD! All this time and work, and there's a Tiger CD sitting in the Mac mini box! Oh well, maybe I'll find a use for the four CD images and all that time and work won't be for nothing. Oh wait, its already not for nothing because I learned how to convert .dmg files into .iso files!

Windows and OSX Folder Replacement: Different!

In Windows, when drag and drop a folder into another folder that contains a folder with the same name, Windows asks you the following:

If you do the same thing on Mac OSX, you are prompted with a similar warning and question:

Notice the title of the Windows dialog box? It says "Confirm Folder Replace". See the OSX dialog box? It says "Copy". Now, you'd think that answering "Yes" in Windows and "Replace" in OSX would do the same thing, right? Well they don't!

In OSX, the folder is "Replaced" by the contents of the folder you are moving. So lets say you have a folder called "My Photos". Inside there you have a folder called "2006 Pictures". You also created a folder on your Desktop called "2006 Pictures" and you just finished moving pictures from your digital camera to the folder on your Desktop. When you're finished deciding which pictures to keep and which to throw away, you drag the "2006 Pictures" folder into your "My Photos" folder. Since there's already a "2006 Pictures" folder in there with all the other pictures from that year, you are asked what to do.

In Windows, if you choose "Yes" or "Yes to All", your pictures are simply added to the existing "2006 Pictures" folder; any pictures that were already in there will remain there (assuming they don't have the same name as the files you're moving). In Mac OSX however, choosing replace would remove the current "2006 Pictures" folder and replace it with the one you're moving! You would lose all your other pictures from that year and the "2006 Pictures" folder would only contain the images you just got off your camera!

It took me about an hour to figure this out. I was installing Eclipse on my MacMini and then adding the PHPEclipse plugin. To add the plugin, you simply have to copy two folders into your Eclipse installation folder. On my Windows PC's, I just dragged and dropped, so when I did the same on the Mac, I expected the same result. Every time I tried launching Eclipse after installing the plugin, I would receive all kinds of errors. I finally figured out it was because all the default plugins that are required for Eclipse to run, were being replaced by a plugins folder that contained nothing but the PHPEclipse plugin!

The MacBookPro is growing on me

I've recently fallen in love with feel and stability of Apples MacOSX operating system. I would really love an Apple MacBookPro in place of my IBM Thinkpad T41. I've been doing a bunch of computer work for Heidi at Life Alive, a vegan restaurant here in Lowell. She has a MacBook and I've had to use it quite a bit recently to configure remote access to her office (which isn't working by the way, hah).

I checked eBay to see how much Thinkpad T41's were selling for and I was shocked with what I found. $700! Holy crap, laptop prices have come down. Not more than 8 months ago the T41's were sellin' for $1600 on eBay! I bought it for $1800 brand new on eBay, when the retail price in stores was $2600. Oh well, maybe I'll hold onto it for another year or two and get a MacBookPro later.

I tried installing a Gnome MacOSX-like theme on my laptop (Ubuntu Linux) and that actually turned out pretty nice. Theres a lot of tweaking required to make it look and feel the way I want and I don't have time to do that right now, but it's nice to know it can be done. I also upgraded the Gnome Display Manager (gdm) and amazingly, everything worked much faster. Applications loaded faster, web browsing was faster, even scrolling was faster. I had no idea how slow things were running until I felt the faster speed. I'm not sure why upgrading gdm would make things run faster, but it did.

.Mac and WebDAV

Last night I decided to register for a .Mac account to use with my Mac Mini. The main reason I decided to sign up was to test the iCal publishing features. I discovered that I can sync my Blackberry with my iCal Calendar on the Mac using PocketMac, then publish the calendar to .Mac and view/subscribe/edit the calendar from my Windows and Linux computers. This would be enormously useful as I'm constantly managing my calendar on a day-to-day basis.

The .Mac registration process was painless and smooth, much simpler than Microsoft's Passport crap, which is even difficult to grasp the concept of. The only thing I didn't like about the .Mac sign-up process is that they don't send you any kind of confirmation email to your "other email address" and instead only send an email to your new .Mac address. Having a confirmation email sent to your other email address containing the mail server information for your new .Mac email account would be very useful.

After signing up, I entered my username and password in the .Mac section of the Preferences. After that, the email application was automatically configured for my .Mac account; nice. I then opened PocketMac and after setting a few options, I synced my Blackberry. All my contacts and all my Calendar entries magically appeared in the beautiful iCal Calendar. Very nice.

OK, so this is all well and nice but for this to be really useful, I need access to the calendar from multiple computers. This is supposed work by simply publishing the calendar to my .Mac account and then subscribing to the calendar from another application that supports WebDAV. I tried Mozilla Sunbird, which is still in it's alpha stages of development (comon guys! finish this!) and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I was able to subscribe to a previously published calendar, however I wasn't able to publish one. And then when I tried subscribing to the calendar which was exported from the Blackberry, I received weird errors, even when trying to view the calendar on Apple's website.

Well, during my research on "other" applications that support WebDAV, I discovered that WebDAV is open source and that it's possible to simply setup your own WebDAV server to which you can publish calendars using iCal and even imitate the iDisk feature of the Mac OS (a remote disk feature that allows you to store and access files from a central location). Wow, this is awesome! I can setup my own WebDAV server, sync my Blackberry with my Mac, publish and have access to my Calendar from anywhere. I'm glad I didn't take the plunge and pay for a subscription to .Mac, which by the way is $100 per year. I like having an @mac.com address, but I'm not sure it's worth the $8.60 per month.

So last night, I tried setting up a WebDAV server. Yes, thats right, I "tried". I spent hours trying to configure it properly, but kept running into weird problems. Not only problems with WebDAV, but with Debian's packaging system as well. So, I've put that aside for now. I have 59 days remaining on my .Mac trial account, so as long as I get a working WebDAV server running before then, I should be all set.