Organizing Photos – How do you do it?

I have too less space on my harddrive. No matter how big a disk I choose, it takes me less than a month to fill up any drive. I think this is partly because I do so many things with my Powerbook and partly because I can’t really decide what to delete.One of the things that take up most of the space is my iTunes Library and second is my digital photos. Since ever I got myself a Canon EOS 400D (see my other post) I create dozens of photos a day.

Mac OS X Terminal tip: Increase the scroll buffer

Hi all,

 

in Mac OS X nearly everything can be done in the graphical environment – which is cool. But there are other possibilities to this. As under the hood, Mac OS X is still a BSD System (that is actually the reason it works as opposed to Windows), you can also use the console. 

 

Albeit being happy to have it, there is a glitch to the Mac OS X Console (or Terminal.app as it is called). You can only scrollback 10000 line, or so. This might sound like plenty of room, but if you are a console junkie like me, sometimes this is just too less.

 

Now there is a simple solution to the problem: increase the scrollback value or make it unlimited – this is how you do it:

 

 

1. Open the Terminal (you can find it in the Utilities folder)
2. Hit Command-I
3. Choose the Buffer-entry from the drop down menu
4. Set the desired buffer limit

 

That’s it. 

Accessing GMail as a Filesystem on Mac OS X

THIS IS STILL INCOMPLETE

Hey all,

it’s quite a while since my last posting. Had a lot to do recently and was busy.

Initially this blog was about how to access your GMail account via a filesystem mount on your Mac OS X desktop. By doing so, you can access all your Mails in your GMail Inbox as files on a Volume on your Desktop. However, as I had some difficulties actually getting this to work, I extended it with information on SpotlightFS.

Why would you want to do that?

Because it’s fun and possible!

Ok, how do you do it then?

I use MacFUSE for this – you can find out about MacFUSE on this site. Excellent information on the standard gmailfs that we’ll use, can be found here.

Now, off to the installation process.

Download the following files:

• MacFUSE-Core-0.2.5
• SSHFS-0.2.0
• SpotlightFS-0.1.0
• fuse-2.6.3
• gmailfs-0.7.3.tar.gz
• libgmail-0.1.5.1

By the way, I think you should propably try to follow the versions given and copy/unpack all sourcecode (that is libgmail, gmailfs, and fuse, the other three are Mac OS X Apps) to the /usr/local directory.

MacFUSE

Install the MacFUSE package. This is one of the few occassions where you need to restart your Mac – broke my 198 Day counter, but gave me the chance to also apply the latest security fixes and Apple updates. Anyway, the restart is of course necessary, as MacFUSE needs to interact with the MacOS X Kernel.

SpotlightFS

After the restart you should give Spotlight-FS a try. Place the Spotlight-FS App in your Utilities folder and double click on it. A new mountpoint, called SpotlightFS will be shown in you folder view and your desktop. If you open it, you will see a folder named Smarter Folder. Create a new folder with the contents of your Sptlight query. I choose Adobe Interactive Forms, because I want to get all docs and infos about Adobes Interactive Forms from my harddrive.

This is an exciting possibility to get easy barrier free access to the hundreds of informations all scattered around my home folder. You can find out more on this here.

Now let’s take a closer look on the other we downloaded, what twhere they about? ah, getting gmailfs to work on your Mac.

SSHFS

Next give the sshfs a run. This one is about accessing an ssh server as a filesystem server, maybe presented as a folder on your desktop.

You will of course need an ssh server, if you do not have one at hand, don’t worry, Mac OS X comes prepacked with one. Open the System Preferences Pane and click on Sharing. In the Sharing Dialog activate the Remote Login Service. This will enable the sshd and allow you to login via ssh to the IP address given.

Next start up the sshfs application and log on to your own system.

Fuse

To get GMailFS working you need a pythin binding for Fuse, which, in turn, requires a patch from MacFUSE to compile on MacOS X. If you try to compile fuse straight away, you will get an error like during the make run.

These are the steps you need to do:

1. Download the MacFUSE source from CVS repository
2. Patch the Fuse source with
3. Compile Fuse from the dowloaded directory

You should propably become root for this and you need the mac os x patch for your fuse package (2.6.3 if you followed this):


   su -
   cd /usr/local
   tar -xvf fuse-2.6.3
   svn checkout http://macfuse.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ macfuse


In the fuse-2.6.3 source directory, patch and compile fuse:


   cd fuse-2.6.3
   patch -p1    sudo make install


This is the moment I got stuck the first time, the bl… fuse would not compile even though I patched the source with the Mac OS X patch.

GMailFS

Let’s next get the gmail-fs thing working. That’s what this is all about, ins’t it?

The needed libgmail is a python library so you need to install it via the command line – start the Terminal application from your utilities folder. In the command line window cd to the folder where you downloaded and unpacked the libgmail tarball:


   cd Desktop/libgmail-0.1.5.1
   python setup.py build
   sudo python setup.py install


Make sure the library was installed with the standard python framework – MacOS X can have different python versions and if you install it, say with the 2.3 python framework and later try to call it from the 2.4 framework, this fails. Strictly speaking you should use the python 2.3 or 2.4 framework and you should make sure that it is called with a simple python, like shown in the above picture.

Next, download the Python FUSE bindings from it’s CVS repository:


   cd Desktop
   cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@fuse.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fuse co -P python
   cd python
   


Now, after the libgmail is installed, copy the gmailfs-0.7.3 directory to your /usr/local directory.


   cd Desktop
   sudo cp -pr gmailfs-0.7.3 /usr/local
   cd /usr/local/gmailfs-0.7.3


Unfortunately this led to an error in my case, so lets dive into this abit deeper.


   python gmailfs.py
   Traceback (most recent call last):
     File "gmailfs.py", line 20, in ?
       from fuse import Fuse
   ImportError: No module named fuse


BIRTHDAY

Hi all. It’s my birthday today. I can’t believe I’m 34 now. whats next year is like a quater of a millenia plus 10!

Wait, that does not really make a lot of sense.

Whatever. It’s my birthday and I will have the greatest day Dinner with some friends – THAI!!!

Chatter, Twitter – Special Greatings to all birthday kids (pretty sure there is a different name for that in english).

So what does really 34 mean? Is now the time for the big change? Maybe the time to think things over. Getting a grip on your live – already got married, so that is obviously not what has to happen now. Maybe I should get settled down? Buy a house have a kid? Slowing down?

NA, DON’T THINK SO!

It’s 34, that is 1/4 of a millenia plus 10 – thats nothing. Settling down, resting can wait.

I think 34 is the time go abroad – leave Germany and try some other country for a couple of years. IT Consultants can work everywhere I can rest in say 1/4 of a millena plus 30.

Apple Store New York

I just stumbled over this little excerpt of a story about how Apple designed their first Apple Store and had to think, how I visited the Apple Store New York 5th Avenue in New Yorks 5th Avenue in December 2006.

“One of the best pieces of advice Mickey ever gave us was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work,” says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product. Apple Store Version 0.0 took shape in a warehouse near the Apple campus. “Ron and I had a store all designed,” says Jobs, when they were stopped by an insight: The computer was evolving from a simple productivity tool to a “hub” for video, photography, music, information, and so forth. The sale, then, was less about the machine than what you could do with it. But looking at their store, they winced. The hardware was laid out by product category – in other words, by how the company was organized internally, not by how a customer might actually want to buy things. “We were like, ‘Oh, God, we’re screwed!’” says Jobs.

But they weren’t screwed; they were in a mockup. “So we redesigned it,” he says. “And it cost us, I don’t know, six, nine months. But it was the right decision by a million miles.” When the first store finally opened, in Tysons Corner, Va., only a quarter of it was about product. The rest was arranged around interests: along the right wall, photos, videos, kids; on the left, problems. A third area – the Genius Bar in the back – was Johnson’s brainstorm.

I tell, you believe this a 100% if you ever visited that Apple Store in New York. First thing you see is this big glass cube with the Apple Logo in the middle. This cube is actually the entrance. It has a wide spiral stairs and an elevator. Downstairs it opens in a wide and bright hall that is overcrowded by People and Macs

There are dozens if not moer eMac, iMac, PowerMac, PowerBook, iBook, MacBook Pro and so forth. Every system is fired up and loaded with fun software to play around. They have free internet and nobody minds if you sit for an hour with a Starbucks coffee fiddling around.

I had the greatest time…

Gimme some more

Normally I am very happy with my Macintosh (I have a 15,4″ MacBook Pro with 2.16Ghz Intel Core Duo – no Core 2 yet). Yesterday, however, I was about to get mad.

I was writing on my HA concept in Apple Pages, had a couple of Powerpoints and Excels open, iTunes with my favourite Music Videos, Skype to talk to Olli, Bjoern and Patricia (although she never really answers, so it’s more like a monologue), Firefox with some SAP Pages, Safari with a dozen or so info sites and iPhoto to check-in some digital photos via USB from my EOS 400D. This is a pretty normal workload for me, but as you can imagine, switching applications or opening new ones can get a bit slow.

Well, at least the system still does what I want and does not simply crush like others would – thanks to mach-kernel and FreeBSD backend.

Well anyway, I came to the point that I thought “Man, this is really taking some time now!” and then it happened! Bham(!) MS Word crashed. It’s always those MS apps that crash, never really happens with my other apps, just this bloddy MS Office. I checked top in the terminal to see paging behaviour and wow, the system was thrashing – desperately paging in and out trying to free space for my demands. I eventually had to close some websites and did not dare to open more than 5 Exvels a time this day.

Later when walking to my Hotel in Amsterdam Central, I came along an Apple shop – have never seen it there – and thought, well lets have a look. Hop in, up to the counter, put my MBP on it, smiling to the girl saying: “this one is in need of another gig of RAM”. “Well, hi there,” she replies “a pleasure, that’ll be 98EUR. Would u like us to put it in directly?“, Sure like hell I want you to do whatever you want!

5 minutes later my Book was at 2GB of RAM and we immediately gave it a test. MS Word 3 Documents, Excel 5 Sheets, Safari and Firefox a couple of pages each, iTunes, Pages, iPhoto, Skype and then that pretty girl sais, “Oh you got World of Warcraft?” – I usual have it in my Dock – “I love that game. What’s your character?, mine is a Dranei Hunter“.

Gee, she is a beauty. So here it goes, without even thinking I hook up to their Airport and fire up WoW. So now it’s like real stress test, all that apps still up and running and now WoW in window mode. But you probably already know, It worked flawlessly and fast!!! The only downside was that my Undead Mage was not at all able to impress that girl Maybe I should get some nicer looking character for occasions like this(?)

Hm, we’ll see

Hotel Life

I’m sitting in my hotel room in Amsterdam in Mercure Arthur Frommer and watch a bit CSI, no it’s actually Navy CIS or so – I like CSI more. I think it’s kinda cool TV series. Although I have to admit that the new series seems a bit boring. I don’t think it’s because of the FX, they are certainly still very cool. Maybe it’s just overdone now, with all CSI Miamy and CSI New York. But than again, that could be just a too simple answer.

Well anyway I still want to get the connection between Twitter and Growl on my Mac going. This’ funny, its a bit like in the old Linux days when you tried to get that damn Soundblaster going just to listen to some beeps and greeks from X. It was never really because you needed to have sound on your computer. Thats not what computers where used for at that time – at least not intel Boxes, where Linux originated from.

It took me well over a week to first get the Soundblaster thing going. Mostly because there was no Internet and no Google! I had to phone people and personally talk to them – got the phone number from some guy from the Bielefeld PBX,

Today all you do is merely ask google!

But still, some things have to be tried out the hard way, and twitter-growl, at least on my Mac, themes to be this.

Twitter Growl Interaction

This on is about how to make twitter updates show up in growl on my Mac.

It would seem that two so increasingly popular things like twitter and growl that both use free apis and have an open infrastructure be easily interconnected – wrong! I had to search quite a while on the net until I came along some ruby program that can be used to interface with growl. The script by Alex Payne is called twitter_monitor.rb and is apparently based on a script by Matt Bidulph called twitter-monitor.rb – notice the difference?

So, first download twitter_monitor.rb and put it in /usr/local/bin or somewhere in your path.

Second, Ruby itself is not a problem as, like with most cool programs and stuff, it comes with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (Hey Redmond, redoing stuff is not enough to make a good OS, it needs vision) but to get twitter-growl-interaction working one needs to have rubygems as well. So head over to rubyforge and download, unpack and compile/install gem 0.9.2 in the terminal:


chris$ curl -O http://rubyforge.rubyuser.de/rubygems/rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
  [...]
chris$ tar -zxf rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
chris$ cd rubygems-0.9.2
chris$ sudo ruby setup.rb
  [...]


After this you can find the gem binary in your /usr/bin folder. If you do not want it to end there but maybe prefer it to be in the /usr/local/bin folder you have to path options to the build process like this:


chris$ sudo ruby setup.rb -prefix=/usr/local


You can pass a lot of options like this to rubygems, but I’d say for a normal use case the defaults are quite OK. Note that you can also decide to only setup rubygems by passing setup, to the setup.rb script.

After installing rubygems, you should update the repository:


chris$ sudo gem update


As you can see, I use sudo to get termporary root privileges which is a cool thing that I always loved about BSD, Unix and Linux. There should be no need to promote a normal user to administrator just so he can use an USB stick, like with some other crippled things that can merely be used to format a floppy. UPS, I’m doing the bashing thing again – back to track.

After you updated your repository like this you want to install twitter. I will post my terminal output so you can see:


chris$ sudo gem install twitter
  Install required dependency hpricot? [Yn] y
  Select which gem to install for your platform \
   (universal-darwin8.0)
   1. hpricot 0.5 (ruby)
   2. hpricot 0.5 (mswin32)
   3. hpricot 0.4 (mswin32)
   4. hpricot 0.4 (ruby)
   5. Skip this gem
   6. Cancel installation
  > 1
  Building native extensions. This could take a while...


well did not take that long…


  Successfully installed twitter-0.0.4
  Successfully installed hpricot-0.5
  Installing ri documentation for twitter-0.0.4...
  Installing ri documentation for hpricot-0.5...

  lib/hpricot/elements.rb:366:39: \
   'attr' ignored - looks like a variable

  lib/hpricot/elements.rb:366:66: 'attr' ignored \
   - looks like a variable
  Installing RDoc documentation for twitter-0.0.4...
  Installing RDoc documentation for hpricot-0.5...

  lib/hpricot/elements.rb:366:39: \
   'attr' ignored - looks like a variable

  lib/hpricot/elements.rb:366:66:
   'attr' ignored - looks like a variable


Hm, some messages did not look too promising, like this “attr ignored – looks like a variable” thinggy. First thing I do, in situations like this, is try it a second time:


chris$ sudo gem install twitterPassword:
  Successfully installed twitter-0.0.4
  Installing ri documentation for twitter-0.0.4...
  Installing RDoc documentation for twitter-0.0.4...


Looks better – but who knows. Now edit the file ~/.twitter to include your twitter account information. It should be pretty self explanary, there is a line asking for your email and for your password – by the way you want to make sure the file has 400 rights.

Next, after twitter is setup, install the twitter daemons


chris$ sudo gem install twitter daemons
  Successfully installed twitter-0.0.4
  Installing ri documentation for twitter-0.0.4...
  Installing RDoc documentation for twitter-0.0.4...
  Successfully installed daemons-1.0.5
  Installing ri documentation for daemons-1.0.5...
  While generating documentation for daemons-1.0.5
  ... MESSAGE: Unhandled special: Special: type=17, text="All"
  ... RDOC args: --ri --op \
   /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/doc/daemons-1.0.5/ri \
   --quiet lib README Releases TODO
  (continuing with the rest of the installation)
  Installing RDoc documentation for daemons-1.0.5...


These messages are not really promising as well, but nevertheless let’s try twitter out:


chris$ twitter friends

  Something went wrong!!!

  Most likely: The twitter gem requires hpricot version
  >= 0.4.59.
  Check to make sure that you have at least that version
  installed.
  To install the newest version of hpricot:

  sudo gem install hpricot \
   --source http://code.whytheluckystiff.net


Ok, Ok, I do:


chris$ sudo gem install hpricot --source http://code.whytheluckystiff.net
  Bulk updating Gem source index for: \
   http://code.whytheluckystiff.net
  Select which gem to install for your platform \
   (universal-darwin8.0)
   1. hpricot 0.5.110 (mswin32)
   2. hpricot 0.5.110 (ruby)
   3. hpricot 0.5.110 (jruby)
   4. hpricot 0.5 (ruby)
   5. hpricot 0.5 (mswin32)
   6. hpricot 0.5 (mswin32)
   7. hpricot 0.5 (ruby)
   8. Skip this gem
   9. Cancel installation
  > 2


We already know this part and it ends with the same errors or warnings. Question is, what to do now? Hm, I will have to investigate on this one a tiny bit.

Blu-Ray and HD DVD Keys allegedly broken

A crack was published on the Doom9 forum by Arnezmai that makes it possible to extract the “processing key” (used to gain access to single Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs) from HD-DVD players.

Arnezamis crack builds on the one by Muslix64 – published a couple of weeks(?) earlier – that broke into HD-DVDs by hacking into the “volume keys”

Atze Schroeder

I enjoyed a cool show by Atze Schroeder yesterday. He is a German comedian and his playing this overcool “I am the womenizer from the Ruhrpot and if you Girl want a ride, Hm well, I can manage that”. Surely his role is that of a dirk, but he is so funny – the crowd laughed it’s guts out.