Silly Apple, CHMODs are for Kids!

My iMac is configured to dual-boot OS X and Jaunty Jackelope (though I suspect that will soon become Leonidas). As such, I like having the ability to listen to music no matter which OS I'm booted into. On Mac, because everything's in iTunes, it's not that big of a deal (obviously). Linux, on the other hand, has a bit of a difficulty negotiating with HFS+ volumes.

It's not that it can't read them, no, it's that it respects UIDs, and UNIX permissions. For whatever the reason, Mac selects a UID of 501 instead of 500 for normal users, and disallows group and other access to items placed within the user's home directory (as it should).

It used to be the case that simply firing up any number of media players (originally XMMS, now Audacious, and more recently Rhythmbox) as root would work fine in reading the HFS+ partition mount. Of course, more and more players have decided running as root is a no-no (which for the most part it is), so what is a person to do?

Well, the easiest solution is a simple chmod -R a+rx. It's quick, easy, and effective. Writing isn't fully (super-duper fully) liked by Linux on HFS+ (something about the catalog files, I think), but just for Mac's security sake as well we're not throwing in write permissions. Now, this is only on the 'Music' parent directory (and all its children), so I fell relatively safe modifying it. And wouldn't you know, it works fine. So why, then, this blog post?

Time machine. It recognizes a different file structure for the data stored in the affected directories, and thus determines it needs to be added to the backup directory. The thing is, the only piece of data which has changed is the metadata relative to the file data! My iTunes library is around 55 GB, and I really don't feel like backing up all that data, again!

Oh well, perhaps in the future Apple will correct the delta methodology to divorce file data from metadata.

Got any other interesting tidbits related to Time Machine?

New Layout

Hooray!

I have a brand-new, custom-designed layout finally.

It was weird getting things to align properly, as Blogger always inserts:

<div>style="clear: both;"</div>

...after every post. However, using double floats solved the problem (float main left, and sidebar right).

Rosetta, Still?

So, in the process of redoing my iMac (I'm very bored, and it needed cleaning), I decided to actually install Microsoft Office 2007 (some teachers at Drexel create the most hideously-proprietary documents which NOTHING but Office can open). What's interesting is that the updating process (to update the AutoUpdater) is still PowerPC.

Seriously, can we please move forward now?

On a related note: As many people have pleaded - Adobe, FFS, please optimize your updater! It takes nearly an hour to update CS3! I can have an entire enterprise-class operating system installed, updated, and configured in the time it takes to update 7 applications and their shared components!

Got any apps lingering around that force Mac OS X to begrudgingly load the Rosetta framework?

Dear God Save Me From HTML Hell!

I'm not quite sure what it is, but the Google Site HTML editor is absolutely retarded! It chooses the most obscure, odd ways of doing what seems to be the most easy of tasks.

Take for example, the task of inserting a simple Javascript RSS feed reader. It's a fairly straight-forward installation. But with Google Sites, it has to be a Google Gadget, with its own specified height and width. And, after you insert it, the HTML editor decides it will randomly insert around 25 lines of whitespace for no apparent reason. Seriously, for a company employing the top minds in computer science, you'd think this kind of crap wouldn't happen.

That being said, I still love their platform architecture, just not their front-end implementation.

And what's wrong with b, or more correctly strong tags? We don't need span tags littering up the HTML all over the place.

Also, let's try putting a majority of the text in p tags, as div just isn't appropriate for text, imho.

Google, want to hire me to fix it?

Update

Google has updated it's Google Sites HTML engine, and no longer does things quite as poorly as before. I must say, for all the little gripes I have with random software companies, few of them show a dedication to getting things right like Google. Things may be a bit broken for a while, but sooner rather than later, a patch will come out making everything ok.

But this still doesn't excuse them for their silly gadget-insertion stuff. It needs a bit of rework.

Update 2

I was prematurely happy. It still throws in a very large amount of whitespace crap. Oh well.

How's that for off-the-cuff SEO?

So, I was just wondering how Google was doing in ranking my page. To my amazement, halfway through typing my name into Safari 4's Google search box (on the 'e' in Weigand), it had a suggestion for "Sebastian Weigand"!

Needless to say, I was stunned! Then, I wondered, how relevant was it? Well, I'm pleased to say that a search for Sebastian Weigand on Google nearly fills up the page with appropriate results!

Nifty, eh?