Drove a Car in Australia

Today I drove a car in Australia. I drive on the left hand side of the road. I survived. Whew!
No great problems – I was thankful to have a Hewrtz Neverlost to help with the navigating – but by the end of the four hour drive I could navigate without it.
I drove on divided highways and on little roads. It went pretty well. At one point I went into a residential area and drove arond like a drivers test, using signals, doing different types of turns.
I looks like I can survive it. Probably the only dodgey bits are (1) proper lane alignment – I drive too close to the curve and (2) the odd use of the wipers instead of the blinkers.
Tomorrow I try again. I think I will go visit Steve Irwin’s Zoo. Sorry – that is SO touristy by I am a tourist.

Moving a Directory from one Apple Mac to another with Target Mode

As we all get MacBook pro systems, we need to move out home directories back and forth. Here are my Chuck crib notes for the process.

This is my process when I switch mac’s. Boot the old mac in target mode.

Boot the new mac normally. Lets assume the account is ‘csev’.

Make a new account other than csev. Make this account an administrator.

Make a new csev account. Make the account an administrator.

Logout and login as csev. Once csev has logged in once log out and then log in on the other administrator account.

Start a terminal program .

$ sudo sh
Type your password for the non-csev account

# cd /Users
# mv csev csev.old

Plug in the target computer – It should appear as a disk.

# ls -l /Volumes

Make sure that you know the right volume that corresponds to your old disk – note that your new disk may be here too. If they are both Macintosh HD – there will be something that makes the mount point unique.

# cd /Volumes/whatever/Users
# ls -l
**** You should see csev

Now comes the nifty bit.

# tar cf – csev | ( cd /Users ; tar xfv – )

What this does is tar (no compression) up the directory from the target drive – send the output through a UNIX pipe, and then untar the files in the /Users directory in the new system.

Output will stream by. If you want to see the errors, remove the ‘v’ from the second tar. Don’t compress – (z option) it is a massive waste of time and CPU.

Once the tar completes, do the folllowing

# cd /Users
# chown -R csev.csev csev
This recursively sets the ownership of the files to the new account. Chown will complain about the -R option – ignore that.

Update 2009: They changed the syntax of the chown command in Mac OS/X 10.5 and later:

# chown -R csev:staff csev

When complete – close the terminal window, log out and then log in to the csev account.

Viola!

Reproducing SAK-1307

I really really wanted to find and nail http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-1307. We had such a fun weekend with the DAV-crew that I wanted to get this wierd one for the folks at Yale and at UM. So I instrumented a bunch of the notification code and went on the warpath.
The good news and bad news is that I couldnot reproduce it :( So I put in my debug logs for storage.

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Invention: Multi-Currency Gambling in Shipol Airport

Ther is a casino in the Schipol Airport called the Holland Casino. They need to build a slot machine that takes all of the world’s common coins.
Thousands of people file through Schipol daily leaving countries with pockets full of change that they will likely throw away when they get home.
Now there are a few places where you can give your change to charity – but I never find them. (By the way – US airports need the Chainge for Chairty right before every security line).
But what you do with the slot machines is walk up, put in your Euros/Quarters/Quid, etc and pull the lever. Most of the time it just eats your money. But sometimes you get some fun $$ back like say $100.
The odds in this slot machine will be bad because the cost of exchanging the “hard” currency is bad. And why not give 10% to charity. Charity would get more taking 10% off the top at these slot machines than from the little places that they currently have.
It is a win win situation and people woould love Schipol even more than they already do!
(Sorry – I wrote this one down during climb out form Stuttgart Airport – so I have to put it in the blog so I can throught the little scrap of paper away).

Invention: Home PDA Server

With the advent of WIFI Based PDA’s and video games – a new need arises. Effectively a lieelt home router with PDA suppport built in. It would be great to have a simple mail client, a calnedar tool, and an AIM client. Probably the easiest way to do this is to have this be a browser based tool that does all the hard work in the server and serves up extremely light markup.
Someone will build this into their home gateway like Link Sys and then build a set of phone/PDA units for about $100 apiece – effectively cheap blackberry’s that only work in the house.
This will actually solve the problem that WebTV has failed at so miserably for 10 years now. Instead of reading mail on the TV – you will read mail and do IM on the remote control!

Invention: Retractible iPod Earphones

Sometimes I just get ideas that jump into my head – often in the shower or in that part of a plane flight where you cannot have electronic devices turned on – so I am reduced to thinking, pencil and paper.
I invent many things, never write them down and then get ticked because folks make a zillion dollars and I am still driving a 1996 Oldsmobile.
So I am going to start putting my ideas into my blog. Not to get rich – just to get credit when someone else does:)

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