I spent almost two days trying to do that. It is still quite a grimm process.

Then I found this howto on compiling netatalk 2.0.3 for OpenSolaris.

Just to remind myself, 'cause I always forget [code lang="shell-unix-generic"] sudo ipconfig set en1 DHCP [/code]

Only good karma for Apple today. First a definitive shiping date for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: October 26th. Juheee!

Second they announced an iPhone SDK for February '08 cool

Third the iPhone will ship without SIM-lock in France, which means a way to get not-SIM-locked iPhones. wow

For details you can look at the Apple Hot News or take a look at the great fscklog (German).

Expect cries of victory to begin shortly!

Apparently it's a known problem if you use IMAP and Mail.app with GPGMail. From the GPGMail Mailing list:

I use the latest version of GPGMail with Apple Mail 2.1.1 on 10.4.8 Intel. I have noticed that if I use GPGMail with the options "Authenticate messages automatically" and "Decrypt messages automatically" Mail behaves strange at marking messages on an IMAP- account read/unread. About every second mail that I have read but left in it's folder appears as unread after a short time and after opening another IMAP-folder.

Then don't do that. :-)

Seriously, it's a know bug. The work around is to make sure that the "Only if unread" checkboxes are left NOT checked.

This has annoyed the hell out of me ever since I reinstalled Tiger onto my MacBook Pro after my disk died and got replaced in September. Nice to know there is a workaround.

This link has been making the rounds, but I will put it here anyhow. It is a story describing the painless process to get Windows working on a Mac and the painful process of doing so on a Sony Vaio PC. It is especially interesting to read the comments, looks like almost everyone has the same experience.

Is so hard to get clean installation and to not sell your soul to the crapware-makers? You would think, that Sony, who is is a Premium-PC maker whose machines cost no less than Apples', could. But it is a mindset.

In have recent years I have seen a growing movement of professional IT people walking away from Windows and towards Linux or Mac OS X. The total market share may not grow quickly, but the market share in the high end market seems to rise quite rapidly. Change is on it's way. And Microsoft and the PC manufacturers are helping it by doing everything in their power to anger the demanding consumers.

If I buy a computer I want to use it for what I indent to do. Windows sands in your way in every possible way. I could make a long list of things that are annoying the crap out me, when I have to use Windows, but I will just give two examples:

If you drag an item to the trash recycle bin in Windows it gives you a dialog asking you if you are sure if you want to put this file in the trash. And when you click yes (the yes or no button creep in Windows is a completely different matter of bad UI design) and the empty the recycle bin it asks you for confirmation, again. But why? Either you ask the first time or the second time (which is more reasonable) but why twice. It is quite unlikely that I draged the icon in the trash by accident, and even if I did, it would be in the trash and therefor not lost - that is what the trash was invented for.

The other thing that annoys me a lot is the way Wireless networks are handled in Windows XP (I cannot really recall the UI in Vista, I only remember the very annoying UAC, which occurred all the time...). If the WLAN-Card recognizes a new Wireless network a bubble pops up (with a sound!), interrupting you in your work flow, and telling you that it found a new WLAN, although you were writing something in Word and the last thing you want is to use any WLAN. It just feels like Windows wants to say: "Hey look, I can do WLAN, too! I'm so proud!", and I get that feeling a lot. And it annoys me.

This may seem like minor things, but it aggergates. Additionally you get viruses and worms, product activation ("You just bought Windows but don't trust you", just like the RIAA), spyware, crapware, drivers, DLL hell, copy protection drivers for games (wich is an ever increasing nightmare, because it is an arms race that the game manufactures cannot win), weired networking issues and ugly looking software and of course Windows has a half-life, too.

So if you value your time, do yourself a favour and get a different OS. I promise you, you will not miss Windows.

Can you see a pattern?

Bonus question: Identify all programs!

While setting up my new Mac mini as a home server I digged around deep in the OS X man pages, where I found this gem.

Form hdid(8) I give you instructions on how to do a ram disk in MacOS X:

hdid -nomount ram://

will attach a ram disk that can be mounted and used after
being formatted with a newfs utility or Disk Utility.app.  
A sector is 512 bytes.

A small shell script to create and mount a ram disk:

[code lang="shell-unix-generic"]

!/bin/sh

NUMSECTORS=128000 # 64MB Totoal mydev=hdid -nomount ram://$NUMSECTORS newfs_hfs $mydev mkdir /tmp/mymount mount -t hfs $mydev /tmp/mymount [/code]

Although a bit slow this might be useful for printing

[code lang="shell-unix-generic"] man -t bash | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app [/code]

Don't you just hate it?

Although you have turned off the "Lower display birghtness…" setting for the power adapter in the Energy Savings panel it just gets ignored. Some searching on the Apple Knowledge Base turns up this Article wich basically states: "We know it is a problem, but we did not care to fix it."

Here is a simple script you can run to stop you display from misbehaving:

[code lang="shell-unix-generic"] sudo pmset -c halfdim 1 sudo pmset -c halfdim 0 [/code]

It turns out, that turning the setting off and on again fixes the issue (at least till the next time you disconnect the power supply or put your mac to sleep.

Locking a workstation when you go away should be quick and easy. And most times it is.

On Unix workstations running X11 you lock your screen by typing xlock into a shell.

On Windows you can press Windowskey-L to do the same (one of the very few uses the windows key at all).

On MacOS X you can add a menubar item wich lets you lock the screen. The preference for this is hidden away in Keychain.app. But you have to use the mouse to do this. This is not very convenient if you work a lot inside the shell. So here is what I did to speed it up:

Write a shell script that looks like this

[code lang="shell-unix-generic"]

!/bin/sh

open '/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app' [/code]

name it something like lock make it executable and put it somewhere in you $PATH.

Now you can just enter lock into your shell when you leave your workstation.