Just a Theory

Didn’t it used to be the case that when you used the Mac OS X Finder to burn a CD-ROM that you could then mount that CD-ROM on a Windows box? In the last few months, I’m suddenly finding that this is no longer the case. So now I have to use hdiutil to convert a .dmg file to the Joliet and ISO9660 file systems:

hdiutil makehybrid -o image.iso -joliet -iso image.dmg

And then I could burn a CD readable on Windows. What the fuck? I burned three CDs that were then useless to me before I finally dug up this hint. And I had this problem with CDs burned by Tiger, too, last summer, so it’s not just Leopard. It seems to me that Mac OS X should always default to building a hybrid CD that’s then readable by Windows, Linux, and everything else. Why doesn’t it?

I was fiddling with iCalendar invitations yesterday, trying to get Sandy’s .ics files to import into Outlook. I got that figured out (yes!), but in the meantime iCal started crashing on me. I was reasonable sure that it was due to a bogus invitation file, but could not for the life of me figure out where iCal was keeping such files. It just kept crashing on me as second or so after starting up, every time.

I finally figured it out by quitting all my apps, moving all of the folders in ~/Library to a temporary folder, and firing up iCal to see what folds it would create. And there it was: ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.iCal. I quit iCal, deleted the new folders in ~/Library, moved the originals back, and looked inside the iCal caches folder to find a bunch of invitation files in the incoming folder. I deleted them all and iCal fired up again without a hitch. W00t!

So if you’re having problems with iCal crashing and have a few invitations in it and you’re wondering how to get iCal to ignore them, just quit iCal, delete all of the files in /Users/yourusername/Library/Caches/com.apple.iCal/incoming, and start iCal back up again.

And now I’ll be able to find this information again when next I need it. :-)

Just a few quick notes on how I set up launchd to run rsnapshot to backup my new iMac. The configurations I made are based on Kenn Christ’s blog entry.

1. Installed the rsnapshot port:

   sudo port install rsnapshot

2. Changed /opt/local/etc/rsnapshot.conf as follows:

   snapshot_root	/Volumes/Demiterra/Backup/
   #interval	hourly	6
   rsync_long_args	—delete —numeric-ids —relative —delete-excluded -extended-attributes
   exclude	*.cpan*
   link_dest	1
   #backup	/home/		localhost/
   #backup	/etc/		localhost/
   #backup	/usr/local/	localhost/
   backup	/Users/		
   

   Note that I’ve commented out hourly backups and the default backup directories. I’m using the Backups subdirectory on a My Book half terrabyte drive that I picked up at Costco for $220. Your configuration may of course differ.

3. Tested it by manually running:

   sudo /opt/local/bin/rsnapshot daily

4. Created hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly launchd plist files for rsnapshot. The hourly one runs every six hours and I threw it in just for completeness. You can download them all from here. Just put them into /Library/LaunchDaemons and run:

   sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.rsnapshot.periodic-*.plist

And that’s it. Enjoy!

This just blows. It will be a while before Bricolage runs on Windows, then. The PostgreSQL team is understandably reluctant to simply include the whole ICU library in PostgreSQL. Maybe it could be compiled into the binaries, though?

I just realized that I never posted my recipe for configuring and installing libreadline on Mac OS X. I need it for use with PostgreSQL, and don’t fully understand why Apple has not yet included it with Mac OS X. Maybe it’ll be in Tiger?

In the meantime, it turns out to be pretty easy to configure it and build it yourself, assuming you have the developer tools (Xcode) installed. The only thing that’s different from any other Unix is that the support/shobj-conf must be modified to be able to find other libraries installed on Mac OS X. Here’s a shell script I whipped up that can do the whole thing for you, soup-to-nuts.

#!/usr/bin/sh
export VERSION=4.3
curl -O ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/readline/readline-$VERSION.tar.gz
tar zxvf readline-$VERSION.tar.gz
cd readline-$VERSION
perl -i.bak -p -e \
  "s/SHLIB_LIBS=.*/SHLIB_LIBS='-lSystem -lncurses -lcc_dynamic'/g" \
  support/shobj-conf
./configure
make
sudo make install

Hope that this helps others!