After making the decision to keep the Scout, I decided to revive the old /scout/ directory on my work server. (For a time in the early part of this decade, that directory was the most popular destination on that domain). After reviewing a page I’d last edited in 2003, I decided to install WordPress in that directory and document my progress with a simple weblog. Installation was a snap, and within minutes I’d changed the template to something cleaner and more useful—a process that would have taken hours in Movable Type.

I’ve been wanting to update/upgrade/redesign this site for about a year now, and the technical and logistical realities of working with Movable Type have been the thing that holds me back. I don’t really want to spend hours fighting with a clunky template interface just to change a color sitewide, or have to wrestle with MySQL to upgrade the database using lousy installation instructions. The WordPress interface is smooth, there are a million plugins to make life easier, the PHP is cleaner, as are the templates, and it just feels better.

So, at the crossroads, I’m considering a switch of allegiance. Doing some preliminary research, I found some pages that talk about migrating data, which doesn’t sound easy but could be harder. I think what I’ll have to do is set up a subdirectory here on idiotking.org, export the data from MT and then import it into WP to get the guts in place. Then it’s going to be a lot of tweaking to get all the old URLs working correctly (this seems to be the biggest hassle) and stuff where it belongs. Where I’ll find the time for this I don’t know, but it will be nice to have a change of scenery around these parts again.

In the last eight years or so, I’ve had a total of about ten all-in-one iMacs come through Idiot Central in assorted models and colors. I’ve kept my eye out for them here and there because they are usually very cheap, mostly bombproof, and will still run OS X at a reasonable enough speed to be useful. However, ten-year-old circuitry gets finicky after awhile, and like anything else, exhibits personality quirks. I’ve had a handful of first-generation colored versions with wonky old hard drives and dead CD-ROM drives, and slot-loading models with twitchy video and fragile power units just waiting for a brief hiccup in current to fry the motherboard. All have been purchased from Craigslist and flea markets and rummage sales, all were put to good use for various projects (or resold), and over the years they’ve finally bit the dust in one way or another, except for one.

I bought Purple—named for its case color—through an ad in the Pennysaver (yeah, that’s right, this was before Craigslist made it to Mobtown) from a chain-smoking dude in Glen Burnie, who may or may not have acquired it by means illegal, and who certainly sketched me out. Before I had a music server set up on it, it first ran home-automation software here at the house. Then, it was a production webserver. For a while it was my mother’s stand-in iMac when her original blueberry model bit the dust, until we got her a laptop. For the next four years, I stuffed it to the gills with my music collection, and it sat under my desk, dutifully hosting my music library. It’s been opened and closed so many times, I can’t remember what the original configuration ever was. A few weeks ago I humped it into idfive and booted it up after a year of retirement, and it cheerfully resumed its duties without complaint.

Like the proverbial Timex, it kept ticking, until this week, when it suddenly refused to wake up from sleep. Several attempts to get it to boot from an emergency disk failed, and finally it offered the weirdest possible sign of trouble I’ve ever seen: a shifted, half-blank display of pixels all running for the edges like animals escaping from a zoo. I pulled the drive the other night and booted it from a spare enclosure; it came up immediately and with no problems, which pointed back to problems within the machine itself. Sadly, I pulled the RAM and clock battery out, then buttoned it back up in preparation for a trip to the dump. I have one last iMac in the basement that’s available for a heart transplant; strangely enough, I’ve been meaning to get rid of that one for the last few months every time I trip over it, but providence made sure I was too busy to ever get around to it.

So, farewell, old friend. It’s been a good five years, and you’ve certainly paid for yourself.

Why does Dreamweaver continue to be such a giant bag of dicks? I mean, it was shite eight years ago; it’s still shite now. God, how fucking annoying it is.

Slashdot ran an article this week about CodeWeavers, a company whose main product has been porting windows apps to the Linux environment. Their primary application is CrossOver, a tool which allows an OS X user like myself to run a Windows app without emulation on an Intel Mac, and they were giving it away, free, for one day.

I was very interested whem I read the description. Instead of having to boot up an entire virtual environment (in this case, an entire install of Windows XP) just to run one program, CrossOver builds a version of the PC app that runs on its own, saving CPU resources and memory. For anyone running a 1st-gen MacBook Pro like me, which caps out at 2GB of RAM, this is important, because my typical workday involves running Photoshop, two web browsers, a mail client, an FTP client, iTunes, several smaller utilities, and XP under emulation with several Windows applications; RAM gets scarce and the machine bogs down.

I downloaded and installed the app, and followed a helpful wizard to install a fresh copy of HomeSite (my authoring environment), which wasn’t actually on their list of supported software. Everything ran smoothly, and within minutes I had it working. After installing a copy of Explorer 6 inside the “bottle” (their term for a virtual partition), I had everything I needed to work with, minus the hassle of booting up XP.

Comparing the footprint of the two approaches, Parallels/XP (at rest) uses 209 MB of RAM, plus 12.86 for HomeSite. CrossOver uses a mere 69MB, plus an equal amount for HomeSite, which should make things zippier in theory.

So: on the surface, it looks great; I’ll try it out for a week and see if it supplants Parallels as my Windows alternative and report back here.

So they’ve announced that the Seinfeld/Gates ads for Microsoft are officially ending. While I understand the underlying concept of the two ads I’ve seen (are there more?) I’m still puzzled by the execution.

They are using Bill Gates to personalize Microsoft, making it less of a monolith and more into a friendly, cheerful entity. Seinfeld is there to be the comic foil and provide the yuks, showing how Gates can be an everyman like the rest of us. Seems simple, right? It would be, if the jokes and execution weren’t so oblique. It’s like the writers tried so hard to be hip and self-aware that they forgot the concept completely, so the situations and dialogue become a 30-second riff on shopping and “Real America”, subjugating the message behind “We’re stinking rich and look how funny it is to live with the little people” jokes. Yeah, so we all have a bitchy grandmother who lives with us, and we eat leftovers, and we have lousy taste. I’m sure you have an ugly lamp somewhere on your estate too, Mr. Gates.

So what does this say about the brand? To me it emphasizes the divide between the huge, wealthy corporation (Gates) and the customers it services (the family), and the tone of the jokes highlight how it looks down on the rest of us. Seinfeld is there for some unknown reason; his presence is pretty much superfluous in the context of the setup. The same effect could have been achieved without paying him millions to show up, and could have humanized the Gates character even more.

Let’s examine the Gates character for a minute, too. I’m calling him a character because he is there to portray the human side of the company, and the in-joke is that he’s “just like the rest of us”, even though he could buy and sell any country on earth. He does get humanized, and they even show his sense of humor, something the Microsoft PR machine was never really able to achieve. But no amount of kidding around will change the fact that he is one of the five wealthiest men on the planet, and that he will never be “one of us.” When his Vista install crashes, he has five of the smartest men at Microsoft immediately parachute into his billion-dollar estate to fix it, while we all have to sit on hold with the Geek Squad for three hours. They also never made a visceral connection between Microsoft and Gates. It’s implied, but it doesn’t go any further than that, and his reason for being in the commercials is never really explored or explained. Finally, and this is the most obvious and perplexing point of fact: He doesn’t work there anymore. He works for a foundation he started which tries to find creative ways to give away billions of his dollars in aid. Yes, he will always be the figurehead for the company, but that just underlines their most serious problem: They have no real brand identity.

So what does this million-dollar marketing effort achieve? Absolutely nothing. It leaves us all scratching our heads attempting to divine the message. Is it about Seinfeld? Is it about shoes? What is it supposed to mean? The end result is an ambiguous celebrity endorsement that showcases the failure of Microsoft to be able to connect, on an individual level, with the billions of people it touches every day. My guess is that a lot of people are in big trouble as a result of this campaign, and that there is a scramble to reshoot new ads which will be as bland and cold as the previous attempts to promote the company.

Onsite again, attempting to migrate a MySQL database to a new version of OS X Server. I’ve got the machine live on the internets, but now I have to move the database, get a Perl script to talk with it, upgrade passwords, and get a table of users to be able to log in.

Update: MySQL is installed differently on OS X Server, from what I can tell, and so does not work the same way as with plain old OS X.

I’m on bedside watch this evening with my pops, who is dealing with fluid drain and a tracheotomy tube, so I decided to find something light to occupy my downtime: Installing MySQL and PHP on my laptop and setting up a development environment. Because what could be more easy and fun than wading through pages and pages of forums to try to install and talk to an open-source database?

Disclaimer: I’m not a grey-haired wizard, so these instructions are what worked for me, but not the One True Way. I’m including them here to maybe help someone else save some time. I’m running 10.4.11 on an Intel MacBook Pro, and I’ve never installed or started MySQL, Apache, or PHP on it. So here goes.

First, I checked to see if MySQL was installed on my machine with this terminal command (which should return a tidy list of applications):

ps -axc

If it’s installed and running, there should be something in the list called “mysqld”. It wasn’t there for me. I also searched for any files called MySQL, and didn’t find anything that looked like it was a running module. So I downloaded an Intel installer package from the MySQL site, ran the installer, and installed the Preference Pane.

After wondering stupidly for a few minutes why I couldn’t get anything to come up at http://localhost/ in Safari, I remembered to turn on Personal Web Sharing in the Preferences, which starts Apache. This is why they call me the Idiot.

Next, I looked to see if PHP was running on this machine by writing the following file and saving it as php_test.php inside /Library/WebServer/Documents:

<html>

<p>This is an html line</p>

<?php

echo “this is a php line”;

phpinfo();

?>

</html></span>

Opening up Safari, I pointed to it here: http://localhost/php_test.php

Safari dutifully printed the code without parsing the PHP, so I knew it wasn’t working. I do know that PHP is preinstalled on OS X but not configured to run out of the box, so I did some looking.

Following directions here, I opened the http.conf file in Pico (I’m a dork, yes)

sudo pico /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

and uncommented (remove the #) the following lines:

# LoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.so

# AddModule mod_php4.c

I went back to the Preferences, turned off Personal Web Sharing, and turned it back on (thereby restarting Apache without having to resort to 5 minutes of Google searching and arcane Terminal commands). If all was done correctly, Apache should now be loaded with the PHP modules on.

Reloading the php_test.php file in Safari, I got a happy PHP config page (you’ll know it when you see it).

OK, so next I have to see if I can talk to MySQL with PHP. I’m coming clean here and admitting I’m using a copy of PHP & MySQL for Dummies, which doesn’t really get into the issue of passwords and root users until Chapter 5, and then it sort of glosses over things. A simple fact it took a while to find is that MySQL starts up with a superuser of “root” and a blank password. (I think I already knew this, but then forgot it). Anyway, I used a script found here, and changed the following lines from

$host=”hostname”;

$user=”mysqlaccount”;

$password=”mysqlpassword”;

to

$host=”localhost”;

$user=”root”;

$password=””;

All this page will do is talk to MySQL and return a list of variables, thereby confirming that it’s running and available to connect.

When I loaded the page in Safari, I got the dreaded “Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/mysql/mysql.sock'” error. As much as the Idiot here can figure out, this is some issue with the OS X install of MySQL and the pathways it uses.

Looking around the web, I found this page in Apple’s forums which seems to fix the issue. In a nutshell, I followed the instructions at the bottom of the page to create a symbolic link to the lock file, like so:

cd /var

ls

If there’s no directory in there named “mysql”, then do this:

sudo mkdir mysql

cd mysql

sudo ln -s /private/tmp/mysql.sock mysql.sock

Then, I reloaded the mysql_up.php file I’d made earlier, and I got the result I was looking for: A table with a bunch of numbers that made no sense (variables). but the important thing was that there were no errors, which meant that PHP was talking to MySQL.

Now, I just need to learn how to program so I can use this shit.

I’m pretty good with backups. I have six CD sleeves filled with digital media that spans my professional career back to 1997, and there’s one Holy Grail cataloging app which indexes the entire collection. I’ve been looking, though, for ways to make the process easier and more automated. After all, these are computers, right?

I suppose I could learn UNIX shell scripting and use rsync to do the heavy lifting, but I don’t have that much time. Instead, I’ve decided to bang my head against Apple’s Automator. I’ve been down this path before, as you may remember. This time, I found some help in various places and used a little more common sense to solve my problem.

My needs were this:

On a specified recurring date, make a copy of my Mail folders.

Compress it into a Zip archive.

Move it to my Backups folder.

Open my mail application, and email me a notification.

Simple, right? Some trial and error and six scripts later, I had a working application that did what I wanted it to do reliably, and I’ll share it with you here. (These instructions are for Automator 1.0.5; I haven’t updated to OS X 10.5 yet on this machine).

First, from the Finder actions on the left, drag Get Specified Finder Items over into the right window. Pick whatever files need to be backed up. (This was the step that stymied me last time, for reasons I can’t remember.)

Then, drag Create Archive from the same list. Rename it something that makes sense (instead of “archive”).

Drag Rename Finder Items over from the list. I added underscores for separators from the pulldown lists.

Drag Move Finder Items over from the list, and navigate to the place you want the final zipped file to live.

Note: I’m using Mail.app for my email, so there are prewritten Automator actions that ship with this program. If you’re using some other email client, this may not work for you.

Now, drag Launch Application over from the list. Select Mail.app from the pulldown list. In the gray action title bar, click the Files/Folders arrow and select Ignore Results From previous Action (otherwise you will email the documents to yourself).

From the Mail.app actions on the left, drag New Mail Message over, and fill out the appropriate information. (I wrote a short email that notified me of a successful backup.)

Finally, drag Send Outgoing Messages over to the right.

When all this is done, go to File -> Save As and name the action. Be sure to save it as an application. Test it out and see if it works. Make sure it doesn’t move your files from one place to another as opposed to copying them. I had issues when I used the Copy Finder Items action, where it simply moved the files instead of duplicating them, which meant I lost my email for about five minutes.

Now, to set it up as a recurring event, go to iCal and click on a date sometime in the future. Name it whatever you like. In the Alarm section, choose Open File. Directly under that pulldown, choose Other… and navigate to the Automator application you just saved. Once that is selected, you should be done.

And there you have it. An automated application that will back up a folder(s)/file(s) and send confirmation email on a specified date. I could add multiple things to this archive, set it up to compare two folders, write a log file, or a number of other scripted functions, but this works for the present day.

Coming up: An Automator 2.0/10.5 workflow to automatically mount an FTP server, compare two directories, and back up the local version. Handy for people who have multiple websites, like me.