Mac

A long time ago I used ksh with vi key bindings, and life was good. Then I moved on to bash, but for some reason, I never investigated using vi key bindings. I simply lived with the defaults (which, for the record, are emacs-like key bindings). So, just the other day I said to myself, “Self, I want to use vi key bindings in bash. I want to again experience the joy of traversing and editing my command line in COMMAND MODE.

A while back I wrote about advertising Linux services via Avahi/Bonjour. Since then I’ve made a few changes to my setup.

First, I nixed netatalk for direct AFP support. My primary reason for using it was to gain a more Mac-like network filesystem which would make Time Machine happier. Well, Time Machine uses a sparse bundle disk image on it’s target; after learning about that, using AFP seemed a bit unnecessary. Also, Samba CIFS/SMB seemed to perform better. I don’t have solid benchmarks for this, but simple file copies seemed to be consistenly faster with Samba. One of the biggest annoyances about netatalk was all the extra hidden files and folders it created. I run a hybrid network, I have more Mac machines, but also Windows, plus I browse file systems on the command line quite often; and those excess files pushed me over the edge.

Second, I nixed Time Machine. Just when I thought everything was working perfectly, it completely blew up and could no longer access its data store. Not good for a backup solution. I plan to write about my new home backup solution sometime, but it’s basically rsync with a few key points.

I’ve been spending some time getting my son’s blog setup. In doing so, I discovered that as of WordPress 2.5, there is built-in [ gallery ] functionality. Though it isn’t full featured, it’s pretty nice, and perfectly integrated with WordPress, since, well, it IS WordPress. Currently the process to put photos into a gallery is: Choose photos in iPhoto Export chosen files to disk Create new WordPress post Add media via WordPress uploader This isn’t too bad, especially for a geek who’s used to lots of arcane workarounds to accomplish simple goals.

I have to use VPNs at work. Specifically, to access my production webservers (etc), I have to use a Cisco VPN client. Sadly, the VPN concentrator overrides my choice of allowing local LAN access. So, when I am on the VPN, I have my DNS options changed so I can’t use any local servers. This is a serious, serious pain. So painful in fact, that many times instead of fight with it, I simply would run a Windows session in VMware (on my Mac) and connect the VPN there.

I had this error popup today on my Mac OS X Lepopard 10.5.4 machine. This is not cool as, well, I NEED MY VPN TO WORK! Thankfully google came to my rescue. The solution is to execute the following in Terminal: sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart Thanks for the answer, VirtuallyShocking.com.