Tiger: revitalizing my SC760

Hmm, it seems either Apple or Epson forgot to include the plug-in for my Stylus Color 760 in Tiger. Let’s assume it was a simple oversight and no ploy to tell me to dump the old printer and get a shiny new one, preferably equipped with RFID chips to prevent me from using cheaper ink or re-fills, shall we?
The solution is not perfect, but works for me; your mileage may vary.
I copied the missing file SC760.plugin from a 10.3.x backup (you made a backup before installing, didn’t you?) to /Library/Printers/EPSON/. The Utility icon in the Printer Setup Program is still grayed out, but launching /Library/Printers/EPSON/Utilities/Epson Printer Utility.app from the Finder, allows me to check the amount of ink and the cleaning of the heads again.
If I want to replace my printer and my suspicion regarding the use of RFID chips or any other technology to prevent me from using refills or other inks is true, then my next printer will definitely not be manufactured by EPSON.
Based on recommendations of some people, it might be built by CANON.

Blog: New color-scheme

I started to work on the new color-scheme for the blog, inspired by the recent changes at A List Apart.
The old template was created by Jeffrey Zeldman, by the way. The new one is still based on this work.

Writing: I love Tiger

Seriously, having access to a dictionary/thesaurus just a press on F12 away is great. I used to have Britannica installed on my laptop but this space was freed for other purposes; the other thing I like (as a writer) is the system-wide spellchecker, but that is not a new feature in Tiger.
BTW: If one writes *NIX related texts in Word™, then one should never forget to run the grammar-checker for some good laughs, especially if the text is about *NIX commands.

Blogs: Splogs?

There is an interesting article at The Doc Searls Weblog called How to Save the Web from Splogonoma.
I came to the same conclusions, basically. Being on Blogger and sometimes clicking the Next Blog link, reveals a lot of blogs without any content besides add-word related babble.
I started my first blog in 2000 or 2001 (I don't remember) and the same thing started to appear back then, though. Even if we don't like it, maybe its the price to pay? Only time will tell.

Solaris: Adding Rules to SunScreen

I already wrote about SunScreen, the firewall you receive with Solaris. I stumbled over a little thing to keep in the back of your head while adding rules to it: the order of the rules is significant!
Not that I didn't know about this, but sometimes in the daily rush one tends to forget or simply not think before typing (the very reason was in not enough coffee/phonecalls coming in/basically being busy doing something completely different/don't ask).
I created a new service for Adobe Document Server:
edit> add SERVICE "altercast" SINGLE FORWARD "tcp" PORT 8019
and created a new rule to use the service:
edit> add rule altercast * self ALLOW LOG SUMMARY COMMENT "adobe altercast access"
I verified the settings with:
edit> verify
Saved them:
edit> save
Left the program and activated the new settings.
Eager to see the admin-interface, I fired up my browser and tried to connect; timeout. The software was running (it starts itself, contrary to the manual). I added the rule, the right port, etc. What is going on? Time for a cup of coffee.
I reopened the SunScreen configuration, checked the service settings for altercast, everything seems to be fine. Then the coffee kicked in and I did:
edit> list rules
1 "ssh" "*" "self" ALLOW LOG SUMMARY COMMENT "allow ssh from everywhere"
2 "ping" "*" "*" ALLOW COMMENT "icmp echo"
3 "netbios" "*" "*" DENY COMMENT "no DOS allowed"
4 "*" "localhost" "*" ALLOW COMMENT "allow outgoing"
5 "*" "*" "self" DENY LOG DETAIL COMMENT "look who is knocking"
6 "altercast" "*" "self" ALLOW LOG SUMMARY COMMENT "altercast traffic"
Rule number five pipes everything not covered by the preceding rules to the trusty /dev/null data-sink, the rule for altercast never fired!
To cut a long story short:
edit> insert rule 4 altercast * self ALLOW LOG SUMMARY COMMENT "adobe altercast access"
edit> list rules
1 "ssh" "*" "self" ALLOW LOG SUMMARY COMMENT "allow ssh from everywhere"
2 "ping" "*" "*" ALLOW COMMENT "icmp echo"
3 "netbios" "*" "*" DENY COMMENT "no DOS allowed"
4 "altercast" "*" "self" ALLOW LOG SUMMARY COMMENT "adobe altercast access"
5 "*" "localhost" "*" ALLOW COMMENT "allow outgoing"
6 "*" "*" "self" DENY LOG DETAIL COMMENT "look who is knocking"
Don't forget to delete the misplaced rule from the rule-set first.
;-)

Solaris: Failed to allocate internet-domain X11 display socket.

If you should find the message in the title in your /var/adm/messages file on your SUN box running Solaris 9, welcome to the club.
It seems that Patch '118305-04' is the reason. From what I gathered so far, SUN is looking into the problem.
There are reports that forcing sshd to operate IPv4 only, sometimes solves the problem. It made no difference on my machine.
Given that, I don't have a solution, yet. I just wanted you to know that you are not alone in this.
:-(

Blogs: Interesting

While reviewing my link list on this blog, I noticed that a lot of the writing links are links to blogs written by screen writers. I don't know why, actually. These are the blogs I read on a regular basis. The latest entry to this list is not for the easily intimidated and is aptly called I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Take a look, you'll like it.
[update] I didn't capitalize all letters of the title because that is the electronic equivalent of shouting.
;-)

Tiger: to busy to install other applications

The whole system feels different, not marketing lingo, it really feels different; faster; more responsive; can't put my finger on it now...
The mail.app lacks the little status line that shows what's going on, but that is just a minor inconvenience.

Tiger: Wow!

Tiger is up and running; it is actually up and running for a while now (got carried away playing with the new features).
The spring cleaning effect was badly diminished by the imported user accounts, a.k.a. my desktop is still a mess. I was hoping to copy the things I need piece by piece and loose some in the process.
My two favorites are (as of now): Dashboard and Spotlight, the latter is incredibly fast in finding things, not that I would need that functionality that bad.
:-)
I'll keep you posted (need to play around with some more things before installing other applications).
BTW: The whole system feels much faster.

Tiger: Installation done, migrating accounts

The installation worked, I added the two jumbo patches to get the system to 10.4.2, no problems so far.
The Migration Assistant is churning away at the moment. Would have been nice if you had a choice of applications and folders to migrate (maybe I just could not find the option, though).
Let's wait and see...

Tiger: After the Backup

Permissions repaired, data backed up, ready to go.
I decided to put the promises in the installation manual to the test (not really a bold decision regarding the existing backup), a.k.a. erase and install (also known as spring cleaning) and restoring some of the settings with the assistant application. We'll see...

Is that a Tiger in your pocket?

Never touch a running system. This saying still holds true in today's computing world. Apple's new operating system Tiger is in the wild for some time now. My approach to new releases is simple, if something does what I want, why change it right away? OS X is just another *NIX-based OS and I do not switch the Solaris release on my SUN to a new .0 release just because it is available, why should I do so on the Macintosh I use for my daily writing?
Don't get me wrong here, if I should have a spare box to test new software, I do so. There was just no spare Mac to be used for testing, that's all. Since most of my projects are in the finishing stages right now, I decided to jump the gun and install the new OS for my trusty 12".
I'll blog the progress as it develops. Since I will treat the new OS like any other *NIX OS, including the usual precautions, the whole shebang might be interesting for you.
I started with the usual steps, means I prepared the system for a backup using the steps outlined in Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Computer Hygiene to get a backup with all log-files in a clean state, a.k.a. with the oldest files purged.
I'll be back after the backup-run.

From the Imagination of the Writer to the Screen...

After reading the post You Can't Walk Into An "Office Building" at the The Artful Writer, I kind of wondered aren't authors supposed to lay a solid foundation for the story and the characters? Don't get me wrong here, my way of working could differ from the ways of others, but (big but to be precise) I thought that creating a personality for a book requires to create some more background than what will be visible to the reader/viewer of the story.
Creating such a background will simplify things for the author, it allows to answer questions about the behavior of said character and stay focused on the story. Call me old-fashioned, but the looks of the office building mentioned in the article will be on my list of things about a certain person appearing in a book, to answer simple questions like if the persons looks out of the office window (if he/she is not located in a cubicle), what will be visible? Just thinking about the potential description of the office and the building sparks ideas for plots and scenes.
Granted, descriptions like this should not end up in a script; not in the level of detail I create them, but doing so first, would give me all I need to talk to the A.D. in case of doubt.
Just my two cents (YMMV) ;-)

Most alien planets look like Vancouver?

Or more like the surroundings of Vancouver,B.C. if you are into watching Stargate, that is. Why, do you ask?
The Artful Writer explains why in an article called Runaway Production...And Why It Happens.
BTW: guess why most of the planets in Farscape looked like Australia?
:-)

Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Computer Hygiene

I you should use a Macintosh running OS X, then said OS needs to do some maintenance on a regular basis. If the computer runs through the night, it will take care to run the necessary steps itself. BUT if you are a good citizen of this planet, then you told your system to go to sleep when not in use for some time, to conserve energy.
Here is the catch, like you are brushing your teeth every morning and evening (or more often), the computer tries to keep itself clean. You cannot brush your teeth while asleep, do you? Same goes for your Macintosh, if it sleeps, it cannot clean the system.
Apple set up three cleansing rituals for the system, but these rituals tax the system considerably. For that very reason, these rituals (vulgo: cron-jobs) are scheduled to run sometimes during the night. On a side-note: if your systems seems to get unresponsive during the day, check the setting of your timezone; the machine might think that the time is somewhere between midnight and early morning and starts the cleaning (another reason to set the correct timezone).
Back to the problem every environmental conscious being faces, the computer cannot take care of the cleaning, but there is hope (you already guessed it, didn't you?). One can easily start the necessary programs by hand:
sudo sh periodic daily
sudo sh periodic weekly
sudo sh periodic monthly
Can be run in the terminal at the appropriate times. One word of caution, though: the weekly and monthly scripts can take a considerable amount of time to finish, plan accordingly.

The man's got a point here

I really like podcasts, they allow me to listen to stuff that interests me at my own schedule while being busy doing things that cannot be avoided (or at least shouldn't) like filling up the dishwasher, watering the plants, you get the idea.
John August found a reason in a similar line, read the article Podcasting is for babies at his blog.
Two more things to add, I completely agree with his take on ringtones and I promise to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as soon as I find the time.
(I know writing shouldn't occupy all of ones day but still...)

Blogs: Have you tried BlogPulse?

I spent some time today playing around with the Trend Search tool at BlogPulse. Quite addictive I have to say.
In a nutshell, the tool allows you to enter up to three phrases to search for and plot a graph over the last month or the last two months showing the frequency the phrases turned up in the blogsphere. Sounds simple? It is and as I already mentioned, highly addictive.
I'll be heading back there....
:-)

OS X: Clear those Caches (sometimes)

My cuddly 12" reared its ugly *NIX head today. Mail and Safari showed a spinning beach-ball and did nothing else. What is a writer to do?
PANIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Silly thoughts like pen and paper again? or if you want to get on my nerves, think what will happen if I throw you out of the window!; the latter is, based on the price of a Mac, an empty threat, of course.
Time to switch from panic-mode to let's fix this-mode.
I headed to the excellent macosxhints.com and started searching. Why didn't you use MacFixIt?, you may ask. Because the last thing I need is a This content is for subscribers only message while in panic-mode, period.
During the transition from panic-mode to let's fix this-mode, I made use of the 19+ years of *NIX experience. Single-User mode, fsck -fy, did not help. (Hint: to get a Mac into Single-User mode, press the Apple-key and the S-key simultaneously after you hear the startup-sound.)
I used another account to repeat the steps with Safari, everything works as expected. So it has to be something in my account. One of the searches revealed another direction to go: caches.
I cded to the following directories and used my trusty friend of old: rm -r *:
~/Library/Caches
/Library/Caches
/System/Library/Caches
and while in the vicinity, I deleted /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache as well.
To cut a long story short, everything seems to work again. I posted the steps in case someone needs to solve a similar problem.
BTW: Before doing anything like the steps described, back up first!

I really like the "Half-Blood Prince"

I finished the latest installment of the Harry Potter series a couple of days ago and decided to let it sink in before writing about the experience.
I really like the book, I have to say. I like it even more than the other books, with the exception of The Order of the Phoenix maybe. The book got better with every page and I found myself reading faster after turning another page. Work kept me from reading it straight after my girlfriend gave it to me. I wanted to read just a couple of pages a few days ago and grabbed the book around 10:30 PM. I finished the book around 4:30 AM.
In short, read it!

Solaris: Where is the SunScreen?

Sun's gift for every Solaris 9™ user is a firewall called SunScreen. The problem is that most users don't know where to look for it. Let me reveal this secret:
You are supposed to install a package hidden in a directory on CD 2 of the distribution, it is in
Solaris_9/ExtraValue/CoBundled/SunScreen_3.2/
Easy to remember, isn't it?
Just change into the directory and issue the following command:
./install -nodisplay
You will thank me for the nodisplay option, if you should forget it on a machine like mine (SS20), the install will take ages, believe me.

BTW: On a machine with a, more or less, standard install, you will need to install the following packages as well.
SUNWapchu
SUNWapchr
SUNWsprot
The SunScreen installer will nag you for them, if they should not be present (they are on the second CD as well, by the way).
I'll leave the configuration for another entry, the product is well documented, though.