Thursday, February 14, 2002

OsX tales Steve Zellers relates an interesting story about a damaged CarbonLib, which was causing Radio to crash (most likely caused by one of the development builds he had installed and never quite got rid of). Doc Searls has been dealing with serious OsX problems (with help) for several days now. One thing I'd like to learn from Doc, was it all on the same partition? One thing I learned long ago was to keep everything essential away from the startup partition. With my now regularly scheduled kernel explosions (a couple times per week, just so you know we care) I have corrupted apps which just have to live in the /Applications directory. Everything else I try to keep elsewhere. 11:59:26 PM

Headlines and Taglines I love great headlines. A really great one can a draw reader into a story where a bland one might make you pass. So a great headline can make a so-so story well known while a bad headline can kill a great story. My headline style seems to be aimed at sensationalism, as I realized tonight standing in a 7-eleven (I walked away laughing and I am sure the clerk thought I was a bit off my rocker). While I seem to strive for headlines that are the story, there are a lot of people out there with good stories under great taglines. I'm going to start collecting them. If you see a great tagline for a weblog, please forward it to me. Thanks! 11:22:10 PM

Bubba almost didn't make it We nearly had a serious educational dilemma at home this evening. Jonathan, my youngest son, brought home the kindergarten class hamsters from school this afternoon. Scooby and Bubba plan to stay the weekend, maybe. While holding and petting one of the hamsters in the kitchen this evening, my wife decided to let our nearly three year old Beagle sniff things a bit more closely. So she held out the hamster toward Grady and bad idea... He grabbed the hapless varmint in his jaws, but thankfully didn't run off. It might even have been his idea of saying hello. Sarah bopped him on the nose and the soggy hamster was dropped on the floor. Grady got chewed out for doing something I would normally think is OK (we have some rats in the hills around here) but was very bad form in this case. Luckily, Jon doesn't need to go into class next week and describe to a bunch of pampered five year olds how our dog mauled Bubba (or Scooby -- I can't tell them apart, but I liked the headline). 11:05:03 PM

What a Kicker! I was talking to the Mac client guys at work today about how to deal with servers on a PowerBook, which has a dynamic IP model versus what I've been doing until now, where my IP address stays the same. I need something which can tell that an IP change has ocurred, and perform the appropriate actions (for JBoss I think I need to stop and start it basically because of the persistent database connections). Kris Amico mentioned that I should take a look at the configd_plugins code in darwin, and see if there might be a notification available to me there. Herb Hrowal later was talking about his super tunnel script which calls things like: /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Kicker.bundle/Resources/restart-NetInfo /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Kicker.bundle/Resources/restart-lookupd Wow! I had no idea these were out there. As it turns out, Kicker is part of the configd_plugins group. I can now replace my lookupd and (mostly guesswork) netinfo restart scripts and have them call the system scripts. Lots to learn in this new OS, lots to learn. 10:42:55 PM

© Copyright 2002 Dave Ely.