I’d looked into SproutCore and sort of liked the idea. I see Apple is doing more with it — the gallery of MobileMe looks pretty cool.
Here’s an interesting video (jump to the 20min point and listen for about 20min) that argues why we should move more business logic to the browser and use a higher level framework like SproutCore.
Category: Technology
OpenSuse 11.1, kdm_greet, slow ssh login
I was suffering from slow ssh logins — it’d take 20 seconds to get a login prompt. I noticed this process, kdm_greet, running. Google found a posting message that said the problem is kdm_greet is having to examine a bunch of fonts:
kdm_greet takes a long time to run due to out-of-date font-cache
It didn’t seem reasonable but I went ahead and ran:
fc-cache -f
Login was so fast I thought at first nothing happened.
Well, it started to get slow again. I monitored what was happening and it looks like sshd was taking a long time (30 seconds). That made me think of reverse DNS lookups. I checked
/etc/resolve.conf
and it had an out-of-date nameserver entry. Removed it and things are fast again.
Gmail, Apple Mail, and IMAP
I’d noticed my Apple Mail wasn’t always getting new messages in a timely manner. My iPhone would frequently get it before Mail!
- Setup gmail, apple mail account as per google’s suggestions
- These imap settings from google combine how gmail works with Apple’s mail. Read the extra details and the settings make sense.
- It took 25 minutes to download all the email
While I was at it, I went ahead and setup syncing with google calendar. Recently, Google and Apple improved it so it could be two way:
Finally, it turns out that contact info between Apple’s Address book and gmail (and Yahoo!, for that matter) are doable:
WordPress, libxml2 bug
I just upgraded to OpenSuse 11.1 and it’s giving WordPres grief. MarsEdit looses the left angle bracket characters when the article is transmitted via xmlrpc. I don’t have a solution but here’s what’s going on:
- MarsEdit knows about it: Losing left angle bracket on publish
- WordPress knows about it: XMLRPC api stripping leading angle brackets
- Php knows about it: libxml2 2.7.1 causes breakage with character data in xml_parse()
- libxml2 knows about it Release of libxml2-2.7.1
- Here’s someone with a similar Temporary LIBXML2 solution
I downloaded libxml2-2.7.2 and installed. It didn’t help.
WordPress migration
I switched from blogger, which is the google hosted blogs to my own self hosted blog running WordPress. To be precise, I’m running WPMU or WordPress multi-user.
I did it mostly because my home-brewed website wasn’t being fully utilized. WordPress gave me the basics of what I wanted: provide some static contact, make it easy to link to anything I have under development, and provide the dynamic content (aka blog entries).
Wordpress offers a decent number of themes and lots of ways to customize. I also wanted to be able to upload photos and videos more directly instead of going through Picasa or Fickr.
The migration is easy — you can import directly into WordPress from Blogger. While in WordPress:
I’m not sure what went wrong for me but I lost all the formatting the articles had.
There were some problems with funky characters that caused MarsEdit issues but some editting took care of that.
More tests
Well?
- Lists
- More
- Numbers
- And more
- with some sub
Mac OS X (Leopard) and ssh-agent
I had SshKeychain installed before and am trying to get back 10.5’s ssh agent to work. I found this article which pointed me to the solution and this fascinating file
~/.MacOSX/environment.plist
From How to get Leopard ssh agent to work:
The solution is to use terminal, go to your home directory, cd to .MacOSX and look and see if there’s an environment.plist file. In there will be some XML to set this persistent string for SSH_AUTH_SOCK. You need to take that out. If there’s other stuff in the file, like a CVSHOME entry, hand-edit the XML to take out the SSH_AUTH_SOCK entry. (How to do that is beyond the scope of this post.) If the only thing is that entry, just delete the environment.plist file.”
And this is an even better article that describes the the past situation, how it works now, and the integration with launchd
More install changes
- Commented out setenv and home in /etc/sudoers/
- Hmm, I had to run xhost +; must have ssh misconfigured
- Ran yast2 ntp-clinet and configured time syncing with random pool.ntp.org
- Enabled apache2 in run time services
Installing OpenSuse 11.0
A little late to the party (11.1 is going to be available in 5 days on Dec 18, 2008) but I finally upgraded my server, including going to OpenSuse 11.0. Btw, installing from a DVD is way better than poping CDs in and out. Some notes along the way:
- I had to enable DHCP explicitly
- After enabling DHCP, I had to do /etc/init.d/network restart
- Ran updates
- Installed printer. Via timecapsule, Network print direct
- Installed apache2, mod_python, etc
- Installed mercurial
- Installed gcc/g++ (4.3)
- qt4-devel, qt4-devel-doc, PyQt qt
- emacs, emacs-lisp, xemacs, xemacs-packages
- texlive, texlive-latex
- boost
- doxygen
- make
- scons
Mac OS X (10.5), NFS, and Linux
I got around to getting my MacBook to mount an NFS filesystem from my Linux server. There’s a nice set of instructions on using the Directory Utility to do so. The problem stumping me was:
kernel: nfsd: request from insecure port (10.0.1.197:57367)!
And the bit of magic that eluded me before was adding the “-P” option:
Unfortunately, my uid on my MacBook is 500 and on my Linux server it is 1000.
There’s an option for more recent implementations of NFS that allow the
/etc/exports file to include a ‘map_static=”/etc/nfs_map”‘ option to specify a
uid mapping but it’s not available in OpenSuse.
Pete Ware 