Osx on

Laptops, Time Machines, File Vaults, oh my.

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I travel with a laptop everyday: to and from work, to coffee shops or to friends’ houses. While I use new, randomly generated passwords (courtesy apg) my home directory had not the same level of security.

That’s changed. Both my sister-in-law and a colleague had their laptops stolen recently and so encountered all the usual headaches and fears about personal and corporate information in the hands of nefarious individuals.

Wanting to quell any such concerns of my own I completely re-worked my security and backup strategies.

Amit Singh, questions, answers, Xcoders.

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I had the good fortune to attend a talk given by Amit Singh at the Seattle Xcoders meeting held in the Google offices in Fremont.

Amit is the author of Mac OS X Internals, a book eclipsing the 1600 page mark (according to Amazon) making it one of the longest technical books I’ve ever seen. He spent some talking about his experience writing:

no editors checked on him because most technical authors give up
eight to nine chapters were cut from the already monstrous book
he claims to not be an author and has no interest in writing another book
he spent months at a time writing most of which he found all-consuming

I didn’t find much value in the technical content of the talk (not because of Amit but because I’m rarely in a position to need details at this level of the OS and I do have some Mach background from NeXT days) but the feedback on authorship was worth attending to confirm what I already suspected. I’ve been approached about book writing before but have balked because of the time commitment and lack of financial reward – I find writing technical articles and blog posts time consuming enough.

pysmug on Python2.6a3.

Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I decided tonight was the night to try Python2.6a3 on my macbook pro with a goal of getting pysmug to run on it.

After downloading and doing the typical configure && make dance I saw this:

Failed to find the necessary bits to build these modules:
bsddb185          gdbm              linuxaudiodev
ossaudiodev       readline          spwd
sunaudiodev

Apparently setup.py won’t build the readline module with the stock readline library on my mac. I already installed libreadline from MacPorts so I applied the following patch: