Anything to avoid typing commands you already know, and apply patches for changes someone else already did.

“No, they’re still where they were,” I answered.

“Good. I want to keep the old table for a really really long time.” His movement settled, and he continued to sleep quietly for another 15 minutes or so before waking up.

Parenting can be so cool sometimes.

Are we missing anything? This is our list to use to make random selections. Not to check off each one like we’re expecting he’ll see everything.

1. The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T
2. The Adventures of Robin Hood
3. Alice in Wonderland
4. Annie
5. Babe
6. Back to the Future
7. Bad News Bears
8. Bambi
9. The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen
10. Batteries Not Included
11. Beauty and the Beast
12. Bedknobs and Broomsticks
13. Bee Movie
14. Beetlejuice
15. Big
16. Bolt
17. A Bug’s Life
18. Bugsy Malone
19. Cars
20. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
21. Chicken Run
22. Children of Heaven
23. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
24. Chronicles of Narnia
25. Cinderella
26. Cloak and Dagger
27. Coraline
28. The Dark Crystal
29. Eric the Viking
30. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
31. Fantastic Four
32. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
33. Finding Nemo
34. Flight of the Navigator
35. Ghostbusters
36. Groundhog Day
37. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
38. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
39. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
40. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
41. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
42. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
43. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
44. Hook
45. Horton Hears a Who
46. Howls Moving Castle
47. Ice Age
48. The Incredibles
49. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
50. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
51. The Iron Giant
52. James and the Giant Peach
53. The Jungle Book
54. Karate Kid
55. Kikis Delivery Service
56. Lady and the Tramp
57. The Last Unicorn
58. A League of Their Own
59. Lilo + Stitch
60. The Lion King
61. Little Fugitive
62. Little Mermaid
63. Madagascar
64. Madagascar 2
65. Mary Poppins
66. Meatballs
67. Monsters, Inc.
68. Monsters vs Aliens
69. Mrs. Doubtfire
70. The Muppet Movie
71. My Life as a Dog
72. My Neighbor Totoro
73. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
74. The Neverending Story
75. Night at the Museum
76. Peter Pan
77. Pinocchio
78. Princess Bride
79. Princess Mononoke
80. Raiders of the Lost Ark
81. Ratatouille
82. The Red Balloon
83. Secret of Roan Inish
84. Shrek
85. Sleeping Beauty
86. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
87. Sound of Music
88. Spiderman
89. Spiderman 2
90. Spiderman 3
91. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
92. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
93. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
94. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
95. Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
96. Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
97. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
98. Superman
99. Superman II
100. Superman III
101. Time Bandits
102. To Kill a Mockingbird
103. Toy Story
104. Toy Story 2
105. Transformers
106. Wall-E
107. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
108. War Games
109. Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
110. Willow
111. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
112. The Wizard of Oz

I’m not going try to link all of those over to the IMDB. Heh.

My laptop’s got a Belkin TuneCastII FM Transmitter plugged into its headphone jack. The laptop (booted into WindowsXP) is running iTunes, playing a song—right now, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band. And the laptop’s connected over our wireless network.

The Linksys WRT54G in the livingroom is running DD-WRT, a replacement firmware giving it a lot more oompf than what comes on the box by default. I specifically put it on to solve the continuous problem of Mac laptops losing their association with it after a few hours or a day.

Anyway, it turns out the only thing preventing the iTunes on my laptop from seeing the shared music off the mini upstairs was that I’d left the “SPI Firewall” enabled. Since I’ve got the wireless already as tight as I can get it (no broadcast, mac filter, wep encrypted and soon wpa), it’s probably not particularly useful since anything connected via an Ethernet cable wouldn’t be protected by it either.

With that firewall disabled, the packets (to whatever port(s)) made it through and can finally play music on my laptop!

Our 9 month-old boy doesn’t seem to like “Let It Roll”, the next song in that album. Let’s see if he likes The Eagles…

The odd thing is, slowly, I’m doing more and more on my slow Debian box with KDE then on the duel processor Mac. MacOS X: iTunes, iCal, GNU Emacs 22, web browser testing. KDE: KMail, web browser use, OO.o, RSS, command line. I still keep the Mac monitor in front of me, hence Emacs. Before I installed KDE, I longed for a GUI sftp access in the Finder, now I use KDE’s file browser to browse my Mac files more then the Mac finder, even though it is right in front of me!

Gotta go, meeting.

My desktop system has sporadically been freezing up on me, even as I try to swap out various parts to figure out what’s causing my grief. I’m finally giving in and accepting that it’s a 9 year-old system with a mixture of 1-year and 7-year parts. It’s wasted too much of my time. So I’ll start figuring out what to do for a replacement (yay tax deductions for work).

To be practical, I need to move some things to not depend on it until I get the replacement. First on the list is all of my mail folders which are usually available via the IMAP server (running courier-imap) on my desktop system. The little Mac Mini on the corner of my desk is probably the answer; having just upped its memory I figure it’s ready for the task.

Luckily David Bondes in Sweden has spelled out most of the steps to get the Courier IMAP server to build and run under OS X. Elsewhere, I found ttya.net with a more complete and up-to-date set of instructions about how to make authentication work.

The best discovery is MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts), which uses a FreeBSD-style ports system to make it really easy to build and install random software to run on the system. As you’re about to see, though, the efforts of the MacPorts version of courier IMAP needs some further polishing.

The steps I did:

• Install MacPorts.
• Downloaded and installed everything with the fun command
  sudo /opt/local/bin/port install courier-imap
  which did all of: db44, courier-authlib, zlib, openssl, and courier-imap.
• Edited /opt/local/etc/courier-imap/imapd and set IMAPDSTART to YES (may actually be irrelevant)
• The command the script said to run to make it start up when we boot:
  sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.courier-imap.plist
• sudo cp /opt/local/etc/authlib/authdaemonrc.dist /opt/local/etc/authlib/authdaemonrc

and edit authdaemonrc to have authmodulelist be just authuserdb.

• Following the instructions from ttya.net, put entries in a new file /opt/local/etc/authlib/userdb
  that look like
  username uid=511|gid=511|home=/Users/username|shell=/bin/bash|systempw=*|gecos=Real Name
  with userdbpw to generate the hash that replaces the * for systempw. Then run makeuserdb to convert the userdb into a DB4 database. Make sure you have a TAB character, not a space, between username and uid.
• sudo mkdir -p /opt/local/var/spool/authdaemon
sudo /opt/local/sbin/authdaemond start

• I also had to do this to make it generate the SSL key:
  sudo sh /opt/local/share/courier-imap/mkimapdcert
• And the command to make it start now without having to reboot:
  sudo /opt/local/etc/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.courier-imap/courier-imap.wrapper start
• I didn’t have to run maildirmake Maildir because I’m syncing mine over en masse.

And it works! The manual bits after port did its deeds were pretty tedious, and the majority should be able to be done as part of the Portfile included with courier-authlib. It should also be possible to use the DirectoryServices API to make an ‘authosx’ sort of module to not require the userdb hack. (That file needs to be regenerated any time someone changes their password, for instance.)

That’s ok—at least I’ve let go of a major depencency on my dying desktop system.

We’re using an Apple Mac Mini as our server du jour. In addition to keeping all of our CDs ripped on it in iTunes, it is our DHCP server, our nameserver, our printer server, and keeps our free dynamic DNS entry up-to-date so we can avoid paying for a static IP address with our DSL connection. It sits on top of a cool external hard drive for holding the music and backups (as a samba server).

The only problem was the way iTunes would make the rest of the Mini come to a bit of a crawl—even when other computers are just asking the Mini to resolve some hostnames. Today, after the small box sat on my desk for three full months, I finally took half an hour to do the deed. Following an awesome memory upgrade tutorial, I replaced the normal 512Mb of memory in the Mini with a whopping 1GB of luscious fruitful memory ready to serve your every need. Beautiful memory is waiting to talk to you now…cough. Since this is an older (PowerPC-based) Mac Mini, it took very little effort at all; newer ones involve more surgery.

Increasing the memory has really made a difference. I can be in iTunes loading up the white 10Gb second-generation iPod with music to play on the DART when I have to go up into Dublin. But at the same time I could have a Terminal window open, or bring up Safari to look up the generations of the iPods in Wikipedia. And it all just works. What a difference! This helps avoid random excuses used to buy new stuff. Which is a good thing—honest, I’m reminding myself of that all the time. It’s better this way. It still works just fine.

Even better now.

Really. It’ll eventually sink in.

P.S. I’m toying with tossing random cartoons at the beginning of some posts just as an experiment. A friend of ours does some awesome writing in her blog (added to our links on the right of our page as well), but she also includes a great assortment of pictures and cartoons with her posts. I found it’s a neat extra piece to the whole blog entry, and makes it more satisfying than just reading all plain text. Maybe I’ll get tired of hunting for something I like each time, or maybe the few people reading this are on dialup and loathe the waiting time. But let’s see how it plays out.