General

In OSX, it actually is possible to remap your keyboard to swap the Control key with the Caps Lock key, putting them in the correct place.

I’ve recently discovered the Joy of Applescript.

Applescript can be used to very easily mount SMB shares. Open /Applications/Applescript/Script Editor, and paste in the following script (change the variables to match your setup):

tell application "Finder"

open location "smb://user:password@computername/sharename"

end tell

Save the script as an application, and be sure to check “Do not show startup screen.” This will yield a clickable item that will behave like any other app, and can be used to quickly connect to an SMB share.

Yesterday I needed an application that would connect to a router via its serial port. In Windows, I would normally use Hyperterminal. After some research, I discovered Dave Alverson’s Zterm. Zterm has been around for a while –since 1995, as far as I can tell. However, the author has updated the code to be compatible with OSX. Now I can use my iBook to gain dialup out-of-band access to routers. Bwahaha!

Over the weekend, I learned how to update the firmware on my G4 server. The poor thing was running Firmware version 4.1.old, and didn’t know about booting straight into OS X via holding the ‘x’ key at boot, network boot, or Firewire Target Mode.

Since the only Mac I’ve ever owned came with OSX, I’ve had no real use for Classic in any real sense, so I chose not to install it on this system. Once I downloaded the firmware updater, I found it would only run from OS 9.x (Classic). I’d never done a Classic installation before, but it wasn’t very difficult, with the exception of a few snags.

The Blue People of Troublesome Creek, Kentucky, are a group of people living in a small, relatively isolated area who all have varying shades of blueness to their skin. Dr. Madison Cawein researched the anomaly and isolated it to a recessive gene that caused the an absence of the enzyme diaphorase. Diaphorase converts converts methemoglobin, the blue, oxygen-depleted form of hemoglobin, back to the hemoglobin that gives oxygenated blood a red color.

Woot! Since Rod is extremely leet, he was able to get the server completely rebuilt and running very quickly. There are a few weird things I have to fix, and most likely some dead links, but otherwise FreeBSD rocks.

Thanks, Rod!

“Servatus,” the server that hosts unxmaal.com, thecreep.com, omnilegent.org, and mfiles.us, has been up for over 231 days. This box is typically stable, but over the past few months things have gotten rather wonky. I’ve been meaning to rebuild this thing on FreeBSD 4.5, which I’ve been using at work for some time now. Package management under FreeBSD is much more mature than anything I’ve tried under linux, so I think I’ll generally have fewer headaches about internet services when I have one less linux box to worry about.

Today, in honor of Laura‘s new haircut, we went to see Am???lie. My recommendation: ignore its French-ness. Ignore its subtitles. Go see this movie. It’s worth your while. Am???lie is the rarest form of film: funny without being stupid, smart without being pretentious, visually deep without requiring a Beowulf cluster.

True, there’s no girl out there who’s quite as ingenuous as Am???lie, but the movie does a good job at playing on my need to believe that there’s someone like her in the world. Sometimes, like at 3:45 on a Sunday morning, it’s important to have such beliefs.

For a few months Robert and I have debated deleting these two obscure and indefineable albums.

“What the hell is this bleepy crap?” I exclaim, and move on to something else.

A few weeks pass, and Robert might attempt to listen, before giving up in disgust.

“It sounds like medical equipment malfunctioning.”

“More like ‘Revenge of the EMS Tone’.”

Yesterday, Robert finally decided to do some investigation to find out exactly what Ryoji Ikeda’s ::Matrix: Music for Rooms was really about.

This weekend I bought an Apple Macintosh Server G4/500 from Rod. It is much love.

The machine came with a 500 MHz PowerPC 7400 (G4) processor with the AltiVec “Velocity Engine” vector processing unit and 1 MB of backside cache, 340 MB of RAM, three 18.0 Ultra2 LVD SCSI hard drives, an ATI Rage 128 Pro, and a SCSI DVD-Rom drive. I added another 256 MB of Ram, and will eventually fill the system to capacity with 1.5GB of RAM. As soon as I figure out how to remove the front bezel, I’m going to replace the DVD drive with my 16x Yamaha burner.