IM web client

AIM seems to be everywhere. while there are many people that I only talk to on skype, icq, or gchat. Now, there is a central web chat client to do all the popular chat clients (except skype, darn those people at skype!) It even offers logging. Now, this is one time when I don't feel comfortable letting other people hold my data. In fact, I do half of my chatting over encrypted protocol. Not that my archives are encrypted, just the data going over the net. I guess I don't trust the world, but for some reason, I trust my self. This is often a mistake, because I know what a flawed person I am.

I look at my chat logs the way many people look at there email logs. I keep everything, I have conversations from June of 2001. Did I say how much I like spotlight? It is one of the few things I feel the need to keep a good backup of.

If you use meebo, let me know! I would love to hear what people think of that client.

office on the web

Most people only need a real simple office suite. The basics of word processing, and spread sheet. Maybe a little presentation work. These days you can move all that to the cloud. Web based applications have some real advantages over regular ones. First off, web framework provides many high level tools for layout. This makes for a rather small footprint (especially if you already have a browser opened). The program is downloaded every time you run it, so it is always up to date. If you are using someone else's computer, they don't need to have any special software to read your data. Also, if your data is also saved in the cloud, you don't need to worry about backups or brining the data with you.

Obviously there are security concerns depending what you are working on. However on the other end of the spectrum, if you need to share your data, This is the best use for you. The one provided by Google is pretty basic. I would suggest numsum. It gives the added function of graphs. As far as I know, none of the online ones offer macros, but they all seem to give you standard functions. That, and database-like collaboration. With google spreadsheet, I know people have had a group editing the same table at the same time. Every time you update a cell, it saves that change to the server. Then anyone else viewing it sees that change happen on there screen.

fink vs. port

Fink and port are two different ways to get all the open source tools from linux on to your mac. They both work just fine, but it seems to me that more people use fink.

I use port on my desktop instead of fink. Why? well, if you read my earlier posts, you will likely guess because I like anything different. If you did guess that, your mostly right! For me, trying new things is what life is all about. They both get the job done, however I had my fink database corrupted one too many times.

Port is a slower tool since it compiles everything you download locally. This is annoying, but for me, worth the time. Besides, how often do you need to download a new linux tool? Most people live with just a few they set up months ago, and only update them every so often.

stargate, the new star trek

Stargate Universe is to be the third story in the stargate universe. It sounds like they do not want this to be just a spinoff, but a new show concept taking place around the stargate. Tell me you don't think of star trek when you read this.

There was stargate sg:1, this set out the charters, and the missions. Like in the first star trek series which introduced the mission of the enterprise. In stargate, you had the Goa'uld then the Ori. Just like startrek started with the Klingon, then added the Borg. Both shows use other species quite liberally. Once, on a stargate special, it was said that stargate is more flexable than star trek because everything in star trek has to take place on the same ship. Stargate nearly always takes place on an alien world.

There is the occasional episode that takes place on the home base (earth or Atlantis). As a fan, I do see my self following a new stargate about a new cast, on a new set than I was a following deep space nine or Voyager. Oh wow, I'm a bigger geek than I realised! I should get help

NIS files

Files used for the data: source

Master File	Map(s)	Description
/etc/hosts	hosts.byname, hosts.byaddr	Maps IP addresses to host names
/etc/networks	networks.byname, networks.byaddr	Maps IP network addresses to network names
/etc/passwd	passwd.byname, passwd.byuid	Maps encrypted passwords to user login names
/etc/group	group.byname, group.bygid	Maps Group IDs to group names
/etc/services	services.byname, services.bynumber	Maps service descriptions to service names
/etc/rpc	rpc.byname, rpc.bynumber	Maps Sun RPC service numbers to RPC service names
/etc/protocols	protocols.byname, protocols.bynumber	Maps protocol numbers to protocol names
/usr/lib/aliases	mail.aliases	Maps mail aliases to mail alias names

If you change any of these values You will need to run the make file again.

playing with my template

I started to play with the Stylish plugin for firefox. This allows me to make changes to my css code by hitting an update button. I can then explore all of my site with the changes showing up. You won't see them, which is nice! This is a great tool. No where near as powerful as greasemonkey, but more simple, and easier to make changes. At some point soon I will need to make a list of my must have plugins. I only wish I didn't need to restart firefox so much. Oh well.

Blogger seems to give a powerful bases to make a template. I am more used to Joomla, and I am thinking about learning django. However that will take a lot of time. Also not all hosting ficalites offer python, or if they do, it's not on there cheap plan. I need to ask myself how much I think I will be using this. Python never did seem all that cool to me. I remember learning PHP, it was magical seeing pages come to life. Python was easy, less annoying than tikle. Maybe I should give ruby a try instead. I learned a little ruby for my invoice reports in datavision. It hard. However I was running an ruby interpreter written into the java runtime grabbing data from java to format it for the report. In other words I was not just using standard ruby, so everything was convoluted, even a simple hello world!

So much to learn, so little time to perfect! Now I hear work has started on a new version of html. What do I need to do to keep up? I keep finding new things with CSS all the time; I only started to learn javascript, and am quite the newb at PHP. Web devlopment can be so daunting some days.

A grand slam

I have been following Folding@home since the early days. At some point they reinvented themselves. New client and server... I thought they would lose a lot of users, however the new server gave better stats, brining more users into the fold. Then talk begun about a BOINC client for FAH, This made it into beta testing. Fairly popular, but the folks at Stanford put the project on the back burner for the Folding@home Petaflop Initiative(FPI). Projects under this, such as the GPU client in 2006, the just released ps3 client, and the SMP mac client (still in beta).

The Trade off

These clients can only do some kinds of calculations. This is where the brilliance of the people on this project shine through. Throughout the history of this group, decisions were made to do things in a way that would offer the best speed for the hardware people have around the house. Prior to the move to alternative machines, there was a move to alternative cores. Like the more recent moves, this was a way of gaining raw computational power for flexibility. Older tools don't go away! While the number of hours PS3 is the hot new way to get stats for FAH are limited, The benefit of that 5-year-old desktop is still important!

If you find this interesting

I encourage you to listen to Vijay Pande speak. This group has a cherasmatic leader, and a great community at the forums site. Bravo guys, you did it again!

first steps with NIS

netatalk stopped working for me. It has always been a problem child. Yesterday I got NIS runing, and all is good. It took a long time to get it up and running, Much strife, but I did, at last figure it out. Here is how I got it going on my ubuntu box.

1. First things first. You need the nis package. Setup a domain name, any will do, this is not DNS domain names.
2. configure /etc/ypserv.conf
3. secure /etc/ypserv.securenets
4. run the make file at /var/yp/
5. run ypserv or ypserv -d for debug mode
6. test it on a computer configured with the client. Type in ypcat passwd.byname. It should give you a dump of user names, user ID's groups, full names, etc.
   

If it's not this easy for you let me know. I don't have it fully working, I think it's a problem with ypserv.conf. However, I got my nfs shares showing all the data I want. This will be a multi-part story. More will be released as I learn it myself.

Wikipedia amazes me again!

I thought I was looking at the best and brightest of home accounting software. When I went out to look for an open source accounting tool in late 04' I only found gnucash. For my last post I went looking again and found this article covering a few more tools, many of which were not gpl, but commercial products with free versions. Then.... Then I found a wikipedia page!

I know what your thinking, freshmeat has lots of such programs. Your right, close to 200 projects in the catigory of accounting. Most of which are CRM, and unsuitable for home use. This wiki site will give you a good idea of what your getting yourself into.

I am nearing two weeks after the end of my blogless life. Despite how simple some of my posts are, I am still amazed how much I care about it. I may keep this thing up after all! If nothing else I need to find some way to compete with Tim while he is climbing the great outdoors. Best of wishes to him!

accounting software

as a open source nut, I'm not big on quicken or QuickBooks. When I started keeping track of my expences, GnuCash was my only option. These days, there is something else starting to get ground. Eqonomize is a new, and easy tool for personal accounting.

GnuCash is hard to use, since it uses Double-Entry Accounting as does Eqonomize. However it is possible to access your data with postgres. As far as look and feel go, looks like I will soon be switching.

This is not to say there is a major difference between them. In fact, they seem pretty equal. I am only considering look and feel. Keep an eye on these two! I know some of you are thinking, there is more than that. You are right, there are other programs out there. I haven't looked at them, and they are not open source. That is a major point for me. Also note; none of these seem to use any sort of encryption. All your data is sored plain text. This is only a problem if you don't know about it. For anyone who knows there way around a shell, it's a matter of making a script to encrypt the data when it's not opened, and decrypt it when it is.

P.S. Check out Tim's blog. He is the reason I got on blogger in the first place. I will be adding pictures from his trip along the way. Should be a very cool trip.

more mozy

Remember, I am using the beta client. But this is some really serious news!

After this I will lay off for a while. My test recovery gave me an uncompressed disk image sent over http. Let me tell you; this is bad! The sending client outputs the data https(TLS); everything is secure, but inbound... backups are received in plain http. The file I downloaded is also not encrypted! This means, if anyone was intercepting my net traffic, they will also have a copy of my backup.

I tried wring to the mac support group, but it seems to be either slow or 1-way communication. If anyone can help me out let me know. I would like to use mozy, but right now, they just lost a lot of trust.

another word on mozy

I want to close this subject. But there is plenty more to explore with how it works. Today I sat down with my brother (windows user) and explored just how it works, backup to recovery. Backup end, it's sweet! Everything I could want is recorded. If there is something I don't want backed up, I can easily exclude it. I can view my current backup, see old system states, and I have started to trust there encryption (the black box it is)

Recovery end works much the same way. For a full backup, I select the system state I want to restore, and hit a button. Then I get a message saying "wait for an email." This took a while when I tried it around 7PM CDT. I don't know how happy I would be if I actually had to wait all day to even start downloading my backup. On the bright side, For very large backups I can opt for fedex next day.

Processing Cost:	$29.95
Shipping:	$35.00	(FedEx Next Day *)
DVD Cost:	$x.xx	($0.50/GB)
Total:	$xx.xx

Not cheap, but if I had gigs and gigs of data, I'd consider it. Tomorrow, I will let you know how it went with my limited restore. Until mozy is ready for prime time, I will be using JungleDisk. Far more limited, but far fewer unknowns.

Lastly, I figured it out! I now know how to build spotlight searches.... My original thought was correct. Type in a complete query: kMDItemContentType = "com.apple.protected-mpeg-4-audio" This line will find all of your purchaced iTunes music, without finding any regular music using the same codec.

Best use of a tesla coil

I am such a geek; and easy to entertain it would seem! I know a friend who built a vandegraaff, but they just aren't as cool. I only have one of the small ones under glass like you can buy at any store. I don't think I would ever spend more than $100 on one of these.

looking at mozy

Well, Mozy sent me an invite to beta-test there mac client. I already saw them as the client to recommend to people. The 30 days retention, and private passwords are good enough reasons, but there are more! Mozy does block upload, and they allow you some file sharing ability. These are all things you can't do with carbonite. Oddly enough most of these are features I cannot do during this beta testing time.

I do have one advantage windows users don't seem to have (maybe in vista) i can use spotlight searches to find files I want to backup. I haven't gotten that to work yet; but I will be posting again if I get that working. However searching for a string seems like a silly way around it. I would rather use item kind, or content type tree. That would be really useful. Though if I do like it, I will be buying the unlimited storage, then I would just backup everything, excluding cashe and index files, so such features won't matter.

Like all online tools, it takes a long time for inital backup. They warn you that it may take days. They don't peg your upload; they send 1 or 2 files, then stop for a while. I've seen carbonite do this same thing. Once this thing goes public, I will have a good cross platform backup solution. At it's price point, 4.95 a month with a 1-year contract, it will make a break-even point with amazon somewhere around 30GB. The main reason I say mozy is better than some form of backup on s3 is retention. It is always important to have a couple days of backup just because you don't always know you need it.

spotlight front end

Last time I went over finder, I talked about how to use the command line. This time I will breeze through the GUI. Using spotlight through the menu bar, or on the side of finder will not allow you to take advantage of only searching in one kind of meta data. These tools only allow you to search for a string anywhere in the document. File name, file type; anything!

For power users, spotlight is not for finding lost documents, it's for creating abstract groupings of files. First, try the search in finder. This is not the same as the search in the menu bar, because in finder, you can specify a path. Either the folder you are looking at in that window, home directory, hole hard drive, or all local drives. To the right is another option to search some other path if you need it.

This is nice, but not always enough. For me, being in graphic design, I search for images of a certain file type and suffix on the name, done within one pay period, placed in my working folder. While all the images themselves are in sub-folders I can search the main folder for something special using command-f, or the plus icon all the way to the right, past others. This allows you to search using all the power of meta data. Under attribute, select other. It may take a second or two for the window to pop up. At the bottom of the window is a check box to add that attribute to favorites. Now, let's say you chose Duration greater than 3 minutes. Now you want to add the attribute songs from the iTunes store. Click the plus icon, choose the attribute kind. The kind you want is not in the sub menu, so click on "Others..." This list of other file types takes for ever to load, once it does, protected iTunes songs are called MPEG-4 Audio File (protected).

Finding the right kind type is hard. If you know a file that is of the kind you are looking for run it through the command line tool mdls to find the line marked kMDItemKind. If that is a little to specific for you follow kMDItemContentTypeTree till you find the right item for you. Then, since the GUI does not have an entry for content type tree, use Raw query, then type in kMDItemContentTypeTree = "whatever.you.want.here". Once your search is complete, you may want to save it. Because, in my opinion, the GUI is so slow, you may want to make an further changes to the search with a text editor. The saved search is a standard xml document, the search is a standard search string like using mdfind.

I hope that helped, and happy searching!

lost on the web

Somewhere I have seen a site that displays first names, and how common they are throughout history. It was very dynamic, I think it was flash. But at last, it's lost somewhere on the web. It could have gone away, or maybe it's still just hiding from me.

I use s3

I use Amazon s3 for my backup. It is pretty nice, cheap, but not all that easy when compared to what is out for windows. As a mac user, I am more limited on what I can use for backup. Mozy and carbonite do not yet have mac versions. Because of the nature of s3, no product built on it can do rotating backups (where you have a backup of every file for the past n days). However, for people looking to store 30GB or less, amazon is probably cheaper. If you need more than that, mozy and carbonite offer unlimited storage for less than $5 a month! (so long as all drives are directly attached to the computer)

What S3-aware software I do use is jets3t and jungle disk. These two programs cover about any possible need I would have for there services.

• files to send to the general public
• self-expiring url's when you don't want to leave something publicly avabial
  
• share files with other s3 users only (by there email address)
• encrypting/compressing files for upload

There are plenty of programs that use s3 these days, but those two are the only ones I use.

There are drawbacks to s3 over other online backup programs. One is s3 has no native directory structure. The other is s3 has no means to rename or copy data. Even meta data on any given key (see wiki page for definition of terms) can not be changed. Lastly, there is a bug with files larger than 2GB. This is a high priority for them, but for me, it is not that important.

backup backup backup!

I can't tell you how many times I find someone with an 8-year old computer and no backups. I was recently handed a laptop where BIOS didn't recognize a hard drive attached. She was working hard to pass a class, What do you think this will do to her grade? Hard drives can die at any time for a variety of reasons.

Unless you don't have a hard drive in your computer, you need to backup! Please please please backup. Not doing so is very costly. What would you do if your address book database was corrupted tomorrow? What if windows doesn't boot up next time you restart? These things happen, and can't always be fixed.

You can backup online, on an external hard drive; maybe CD's if your masochistic like that. I strongly suggest a fully automatic system so you never forget. For less than $5 a month you can backup your complete system online! I like this kind of solution because someone else takes care of all the hardware, and you get free software updates. As backup software gets more sexy, like what apple is doing for it's next OS release, I'm sure people will get more into backup solutions.

But don't wait, do something now! have a backup of everything important to you, Think hard on this... What is important to you? all your records: email, accounting, instant messaging, purchased items from iTunes or other online download services. You will never truly know the value of something until it is gone!

spotlight

It's not much of a secret, I am a mac fan. I switched to mac
with the release of the g4, and started using OS X as soon as it was
out. Spotlight is a tool that some people still don't use to the extent
of it's powers. because of my unix background, I wanted to share how to
use the spotlight database from the command line.

using mdfind
-onlyin <directory>
special charters
many special charters are used for spotlight queries. rounded brackets are used for operations that should be done first. They are also used for the $time variables.
queries work alot like sql: kMDItemFSName = filename.jpg or kMDItemResolutionHeightDPI = 400
Remember, if you want to find <= or < to use single quotes so you don't redirect!
equals can be == or = not equal is <> or !=
working with strings
Strings can only use the = or != operators, nor do they have regular expressions. The do have a few tricks you can use. kMDItemContentTree = "audio" will return no results, because by default, strings need to be whole words. There are three flags you can throw for special cases
like this. To search for partal words, like kMDItemContentTree = "protected"cw This will search for any file type that has the word protected in it's attribute list. for example: com.apple.protected-mpeg-4-audio however, I have bought one video on iTunes and the only tags it has is public.data and public.item meaning in searchlight
to ignore case, c
to ignore case, c to ignore whitespace, w
to ignore accents (like é or ü) d
and, while you don't have full regular expressions, you do have wild cards "*protected*"
negate
When you do a search, sometimes you can use -word to search for things that don't have a word, or you can use !=

Limitations
Operator is ignored for kMDItemTextContent Example:
kMDItemTextContent = 'legacy' is the same as
kMDItemTextContent != 'legacy' is the same as
kMDItemTextContent <= 'legacy'
however documentation just says you can't use greater or less than, so it may just be a bug

if you wan to search for something that doesn't have a given word, you must also specify a word you do want to search for. If you do a negate search without a regular search, it ignores your request to negate. If you negate two words, it will return 0 results. Example:
kMDItemTextContent = '-work' is the same as
kMDItemTextContent = 'work'
kMDItemTextContent = '-work -done' returns 0 results
kMDItemTextContent = '-work done' returns documents that have the word 'done' but not 'work'

Just searching for GID or UID will not limit your results. If you search with -onlyin or with another search flag, you will get what you want.

If you search for a attribute that doesn't exists, it will be false for that item. Example: kMDItemContentTypeTree = 'public.image' && kMDItemFSCreator != '*Photoshop*' will return all the pictures that were created with something other than photoshop, unless the creating program doesn't have a value for FSCreator.

kMDItemUsedDates is a little funky. The first time the file is used, it will record full date and time, after that, all will be listed as year, month, day, and timezone. The time is always midnight GMT, if your timezone observes daylight savings, you will see the displayed time change one hour.
Also, some programs will wipeout this information when saving the file (photoshop is one.)


Important notes

kMDItemFSCreator is the wrong attribute for audio files, to read the audio files application tag use kMDItemAudioEncodingApplication
kMDItemContentType gives you file type Example: for PDF files "com.adobe.pdf"
kMDItemKind gives you who opens it: if the application for a PDF file is Preview, then it's "PDF Document", if it's set to Acrobat, then it's "Adobe PDF document"
kMDItemContentTypeTree is even more versatile, However you may need to include a few != because it may give more results than expected Example: kMDItemContentTypeTree = "public.audiovisual-content" will find all media files.


useful attributes

There are plenty of addributes I don't see any particle use for, but There are a few gems.
kMDItemDurationSeconds Length of media in seconds (movie or song... maybe more types, Don't know yet)
kMDItemFSCreator Application used to create the file. (not including the Audio encoding app)
kMDItemAudioEncodingApplication Application used to create the audio file
kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden self explanatory
kMDItemFSLabel none = 0, gray = 1, purple = 2, etc.
kMDItemUsedDates list of timestamps the file was opened.
for a full list of attributes, apple has them here



date attributes

working with time is different than other attributes. You can't say kMDItemFSContentChangeDate = 'YYYY-MM-DD'. There is a special tool for this.
$time.now(minus x minutes)
$time.today(minus x days)
$time.yesterday(minutes x days)
$time.iso(ISO 8601 date)

the reason behind my url

I chose that name because I'm a fan of the beastie boys. Somehow I can come up with the most suggestive titles to my screen names, and never think of it as odd. Also, there are a lot of used names out there! there were many choices before this, and I don't plan on writing here on a regular basis, so I don't see it as a big deal.

Despite my interest in becoming part of this new medium, writing isn't my thing. I admire people who do this regularly because I know I will never be one of them.

note: my old url was beastiefan.blogspot.com... I have since learned I can change that

post 1 of 0

not that I ever wanted to blog, but I needed to setup an account anyways. I guess this makes for another worthless blog taking up valuable space on the net.

well, now that I got it, I think I'll use it to talk about something near and dear to me. Sillydragan... In just 7 months, we should be married! Right now it seems so improbable. I feel like it's still up to fate to decide what will happen on that day. Any well wishes and the like would be appreciated.