A Happy New Year

to all readers. Sorry for not writing so long, but the incident with my 12" (described here, actually one post below) took a lot of time to resolve. The usual holiday-turmoil didn't help to speed things up either.
Again, I wish you a healthy, successful 2006. May the backup be with you, just in case.
;-)

Mac: It could happen to YOU, as well!

How's your backup? It's current, right? Well, let me tell you a story:
It happened during the silent days before Christmas. Life was good. The last backup a couple of days old. Nothing new here. My 12" PowerBook rested next a really noisy SUN-box (with noisy I mean Gee, are we that close to the airport? You get what I mean.). The resting place of my 12" (you notice that I omit the word trusty, do you?) was, as already mentioned, next to that SUN-box. It has been sitting there, peacefully, for about two weeks. To be precise, I sometimes lifted it to my lap (hence the name Laptop) to do some typing, next to the SUN-box, mind you.
While doing a print-run, three days before Christmas, it started to act up. The RAM was maxed out, according to Apple's specs, but some of the programs cannot get enough of it, so I thought that I had taxed it a tad too much. Acting up means that I had to see the Spinning Beachball of Death more often than usual. I closed a couple of programs, we are talking *NIX here, after all, to see if everything else starts to run more smoothly. Things simply got slower. Now I got suspicious. Caches to full? /tmp directory overflowing? I fired up a terminal-session to have a look. I watched the program jumping in the Dock merrily, but no window appeared. I tried to launch Safari, out of curiosity, same thing here. Let's reboot.
It took ages until the PowerBook came up again. A quick check in the /var/log/system.log showed no errors. But it felt different. Something emitted a strange noise. I unplugged the PowerBook to take it someplace else to investigate.

Imagine your favorite suspense music, now!

When I left the room with the SUN-box, the PowerBook emitted a noise similar to a coffee-grinder. It came from the front-left corner of the case (the home of the hard-disk, for non-Mac-users). I placed it on my lap, thus in a slight angle (Laptop remember?), the noise intensified. I tried to hold it straight, the noise changed, but did not disappear. Neither Terminal nor Console displayed any errors, none, zilch, nada. Enough joking around, reboot to Verbose Mode, this mode, in a nutshell, makes OS X behave like any other *NIX system, means you get a lot of diagnostic messages. Nothing to see here. Still grinding. All right, Single User Mode. No errors reported, according to the logs. What is going on?
I rebooted the system using the DVD, DiskUtil told me, that I am not in possession of a hard-disk, great. I mean, it made its presence heard, believe you me! I zapped the PRAM, booted from DVD again and, tadaaaa, a hard-disk. You guessed it, noise but WITHOUT ERRORS.
According to Apple - Support - Discussions - PowerBook G4 12-inch I'm not alone, not that I felt better, though.
I bought a Mac mini to have a backup system and I will try to repair my 12", giving it a chance to earn trusty again.
To be fair, it helped me in the writing of three books and a lot of consulting stuff, but it was always treated with respect.
I'll keep you posted.

*NIX: SUN bashed in Survey

The Register comments on a survey about *NIX vendors called Sun ravaged, IBM lauded in Unix server study, which makes SUN look kind of bad, compared to IBM and HP.
There is one fact that needs some extra consideration IMHO, though. Solaris 10™ is a fantastic OS, but it has two drawbacks:

1. It does some things differently


2. It does require more recent hardware

Number one is some kind of drawback because there are usually more flavors of *NIX in a datacenter, means the admins (FYI: those are the overworked, time-starved folks trying to keep everything up and running) need time to integrate it and will only do so if it really pays off in the not so distant future. There is a solid share of machines still running Solaris 8, believe me. The usual practice to install every new incarnation of an OS, so prevalent in the other OS-camp, does not exist in the *NIX world. It even changes, albeit slowly, among the MS-Windows™ user-base, as well. So, *NIX admins have to switch modes, we are talking of the never touch a running system ([my take:] if it does what it should) world, mind you.
Number two is even harder to tackle, most sys-admins do have some kind of staging system for the various *NIX flavors in production, but more than often not the kind I described in my book (in a nutshell: the little brother/sister of the production system). Means they are not able to test-drive and evaluate the OS. Then there are the–smoothly running–production-machines not capable of running Solaris 10; an upgrade would essentially mean getting new hardware, doing burn-ins, testing, installing the software (maybe doing an upgrade), testing again, and, in worst case, rewriting all kinds of scripts and programs to deal with the changed software; think about time-starved and on a low budget.
To cut a long story short: switching to Solaris 10 would mean a lot of effort and re-learning. These are things sys-admins like; it's the reason they took the job. Provided they have the means, budget and time. Go figure!
The fact that most respondents think that SUN will be the dominant supplier of *NIX systems in five years time shows, that the sys-admins would be willing, if supplied with the two things which are usually cut first: man-power and money.
Just my two cents.

A Writers Wish-List

There is one omission in the wish-lists of Fun Joel, the book is called What just happened?. Maybe it is taboo in Hollywood, but I found it at a local bookstore and read it in an afternoon. My verdict: very entertaining.
Check out the other lists here, here and here.

Links: Ken Levine

I added a new link to my list on this blog, By Ken Levine. He worked on some of my all time favorites like Becker, Frasier, Cheers and M*A*S*H.

(Screen)Writing: Writer/Re-Writer

I found some very interesting thoughts in the article The Myth Of The First Martyr...I Mean...Writer at The Artful Writer.
The article deals with the writer/rewriter myth. IMHO: yes, it is much harder to do a re-write than creating an original manuscript; been there, done that (I might expand on this at a later date, but don't hold your breath).

Musings: Programs are the Means to an End

I wrote the section Which Editor to choose? in the Unix/Linux Survival Guide based on discussions, flamewars and the rest of the whole shebang. But I recently discovered, that this type of discussion seems to spread out of the realm of computers. Sure, everybody thinks that the e.g. car that one owns is the best, or the computer, the T.V., you get the picture. But this is not what I'm talking about at the moment. I'm talking about an unsuspecting customer confronted with We are using [insert your favorite operating system/software-package here] and therefore the end product is far superior to what you can expect from [insert the operating system/software-package you really hate for whatever reason here].
Reality-Check: A customer does not, I repeat, does not care about how something is created, most of the time, that is. The German version of the aforementioned book was written in XML using Emacs (no, I won't tell you which flavor [if you really don't know why I won't tell, look here and here]) and the American version in MS Word. The publishers couldn't care less about the program used to create the manuscript, all they were interested in was to get it in the right format, period. The editor used was a tool, the result was a manuscript.
On a side-note: Try writing a text about *NIX commands like date, apropos, etc. and run Word's grammar-checker on it ;-)
Back on topic, as long as your customer wants an end-product, means no further processing on the customer's side, do not bother, or worse, annoy, him/her how you will create said product. It really does not matter if we are talking graphics, layouts, photos, manuscripts, movie-scripts, buildings, cars, airplanes, or cookies (the baked variety). (Try to avoid the if all you got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail trap, though.) The worst thing that could happen is an—for whatever reason—annoyed customer.
Quick example: I don't feel that good going to the ATM since I learned that most ATMs are running some kind of MS Windows ™ these days.
:-)

Writing: Setting the right Mood and stick to it!

This is something I found out while working as a programmer, but it applies to writing as well. If you are listening to music while doing one of the aforementioned tasks, there will be a noticeable influence on your writing/coding style. DUH!, I hear you say? Right, but sometimes this fact can be used to your advantage.
Let's say you are supposed to work on something really wild and adventurous and you are actually feel a little more mellow than the work at hand allows – or the other way round for that matter. My cure are specially crafted playlists in Apple's iTunes (also to be found on my iPod, of course). That way I have a weapon against my current mood and, especially effective, against the background music in the different coffee-houses I'm writing in.
Too simple? You bet. Give it a try.
BTW: Regarding coding style, check your variables. Mine were called damn1, damn2, etc. for debugging when I was in a very bad mood, looks ridiculous when doing a code-review later, believe me.

Blog: It's nice to be mentioned

Fun Joel added this very blog on a list of blogs he reads, thanks a million El Duderino.
The downside, there are so many blogs in this list I did not know, that the next couple of days will be hard on my usual schedule.
;-)
Thanks again.

Solaris: Simple Display of logged Entries in SunScreen

This is another entry for the I could remember this, but why should I? I have it on the blog. category.
I already wrote about the firewall in Solaris 9 called "SunScreen" here and here. Now a quick reminder for me and others who tend to forget the syntax of commands.
To display a list of all denied connections, the following chain of commands can be used:
ssadm log get | ssadm logdump -i - -t a logwhy 256
This command results in a list of denied connection-attempts to the machine, provided the entry for denying contains LOG SUMMARY or any other valid specifier for the LOG command. log get instructs ssadm to (no surprise here) get the log. It is then piped to another incarnation of ssadm which is instructed to read from standard in (-i -), to convert the seconds stored with every entry to a meaningful time and date combo (-t a) and to filter the entries for a why-code of 256.
BTW: One thing that seems to be really hard to remember for me is the way the numerous options of ssadm are named in the man-pages, e.g. man ssadm-logdump. Who would have thought of that, a hyphen, outlawed in *NIX to prevent confusing the different shells. Hm.

It starts to get annoying!

I'm about to cancel my subscription to the Music Perspectives PodCast. Don't get me wrong, I've been listening to it for quite some time now and I think it is excellent, BUT I can't take the lame Don't steal music stuff any longer. It's probably not even Ed Justen's fault that I am annoyed, but everybody has to draw a line somewhere and the last Music Perspectives PodCast contained this stupid line and this time it was one to many.
I DO NOT STEAL MUSIC! And I really don't like to be a suspected thief, either. If the record companies consider me a paying enemy, then I'm not interested in doing business with them.
My stand regarding DRM is simple – really simple in fact – if a CD contains DRM I ignore the artist. Completely, zilch, I'm not interested. The artist does not exist for me, period. I won't download anything from the artist, I won't buy the CD, I actually will switch the channel on the radio or TV when said artist appears, end of story.
This may sound extreme, but as I said, everybody has to draw the line somewhere. If I really care about an artist, then I will send an e-mail, explaining my view of the world to the artist. I do not expect an answer, though.
I am a published writer, but I would never think of putting a Don't copy my books, please anywhere, neither spoken, nor in writing. It is a matter of trust, you know.
;-)

Mac: Are we really that different?

The article Dear switchers remembered me of one occasion I found out (again), that we Mac users seem to be really thinking different.
I started working with Macs in '86 and continued to do so on and off until now. After an absence of about four years from the Mac-Scene, I got my first PowerBook in 2000. I really liked it and used it to work on a game-design document on a flight from L.A. to London. The flight was over night and the crew shut down the lights in the cabin after a while. I noticed that some people wandering in the plane gave me a Thumbs-Up when passing my seat. I tried to place them, but never met one of them to the best of my knowledge. Number ten or eleven solved the riddle for me: How do you like the Pismo?
I didn't knew about the glowing apple logo then.

InDesign CS2: Inherit Color solved!

I received an e-mail a couple of days ago from Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion of DesignGeek Central fame (if you are into design, check the site, seriously).
The solution to the problem described in this article, can be solved easily, if you know how. I was wearing my programmer hat as I tried to tackle the problem, I guess. If you CMD-click on the offending swatch in the GUI used to define the character-format, the setting reverses to the inherit state. It's that simple!
There goes the plan to create an AppleScript app to fiddle with this (and other) settings, though.
;-)
Thanks again to Anne-Marie.

Priorities: To Noodle or not to Noodle…

A client bailed out of an appointment this morning. Confronted with two days to spare, a tough decision has to be made: How will I spend the time at hand?
Cleaning the apartment? Yeah, right. Actually, I could work on my book (something I had planned for next week). Factually, I think I will do a bit of noodling (I learned about this word at Franklin McMahon's excellent PodCast Media Artist Secrets). It refers to play around with something in a creative way to find out about new and interesting uses for it. For example: I couldn't find the time to nose around in the new features of Reason, there are a couple of approaches to investigate them:

1. Read the manual (could be interesting)


2. Read in a book about it (could give another view on the subject)


3. Noodling

A real puzzler, what would be the most fun thing to do?
;-)

Mono: Yep! Works!

Title says it all. The -r switch did it.
BTW: This is an update to the post below this one ;-)

Mono: Compiling a WSDL

This post belongs to the I had a hard time finding this information so I put it somewhere I can easily find it again category.
I tried to compile a WSDL with mcs like this:

wsdl Service.wsdl
mcs /target:library Service.cs

and always got this error message:

Service.cs(22) error CS0234: The type or namespace name `Services' could not be found in namespace `System.Web'

I found this command after a long search on the Internet:

mcs /target:library Service.cs -r:System.Web.Services

Now everything seems to compile O.K. Let's see if the resulting .dll works.
I'll keep you posted.

InDesign CS2: Inherit a Color

I'm currently working on a book about using XML/XSLT with Adobe InDesign CS2. I have worked with the program and its competition like Quark XPress and FrameMaker (no link here since the Mac version ceased to exist) for quite some time now and I think that the XML support has matured quite a bit. It's not FrameMaker yet, but I keep my hopes up high that the program will eventually get there.
There is one aspect of the Character Formats which puzzled me, though. I could not find a way to change the color of such a format to nothing, the setting the format uses when it is created. If you change the color-assignment for the format in the GUI once, there is no way to get back to nothing, means the color from the enclosing paragraph format is inherited. Sure, one could simply create a new format and exchange it for the now non-working one. But in my case, the format is used (and mis-used) in a number of ways and I really don't want to check in all the places. So I came up with a simple AppleScript to do the switch:

tell application "Adobe InDesign CS2"
set myDoc to document 1
tell myDoc
set myCharFormat to character style "insert_cstyle_name"
set the fill color of myCharFormat to nothing
end tell
end tell

Yes, I know that this could have been done in a single line, but this line would not fit in this layout. (It might not fit on certain browsers anyway.) But still, here you go, switching back to nothing.

Writing: Organizing Ideas

After reading The end of One Big Text File at MacDevCenter.com, I found that I'm not alone in my approach. But (a big one, as always) I still advocate using lists, more than one, that is. As I wrote in my book Unix/Linux Survival Guide, I tend to keep lists leaning to a certain subject. They hold all the bits of information I deemed interesting at a time, but are too small or insignificant to create a whole file for one of them alone. On *NIX, these directories can be greped, on OS X they can be spotlight(ed) or greped.
Bigger ideas (think information spread over more than one paragraph) go into their own files with a speaking name. This mode of operation allows me to browse the little ideas or information on a certain subject for inspiration. No, they do not migrate into their own file if I expand on them. I want to preserve the bits a subject started from, when you start polishing something, a.k.a. rewrite it to fit a special purpose, some of the original information could get lost. Said information might give me an insight from a different angle and I don't want to loose that.

Movie: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

I went to see Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang a couple of days ago. Go and watch it, seriously.
A quick test if this movie is for you:

• If the first word that came to mind after watching Pulp Fiction was WOW!


• If you tried, like me, to buy another ticket for the same movie after watching The Usual Suspects.

Go see it, the script is great and I actually could not find anything that I did not like about the movie. Okay, there is one thing, no release date for the DVD, yet.
This movie is so not Hollywood (Will the audience get that joke or do we have to re-write?; OMG, the girl is naked, what shall we do about it?; What would be the target audience for this movie, and isn't it to intelligent for them?). In short: this is how movies should be made!

Confusing Adverts by IBM

Is it just me or should the guys in the new ads for the IBM Blades take a look at the link pointing to Tivoli?
The ad with the runner states: "If we are using Blade-Center, then we don't have to run to the machines." Didn't IBM buy Tivoli for that reason?
Just a thought.