As countless other people have likely already noticed, Apple has released a new iPod Updater. Find the gritty details here.

Yesterday, my boss and I were beating our heads against the wall trying to figure out just why cfengine was refusing to run properly on one system. We googled and googled some more, scanned through mailing lists, usenet posts, and all manner of debugging information, because the error message we got was so… Opaque.

# cfagent
cfengine:: Received signal 13 (SIGPIPE) while doing [lock.cfagent_conf.myhost.link._var_cfengine_bin_cfenvd__usr_sbin_cfenvd_136]
cfengine:: Logical start time Mon Mar 27 17:11:55 2006
cfengine:: This sub-task started really at Mon Mar 27 17:11:55 2006

As it turns out, after a couple hours of heading in the wrong direction, I came in to work this morning with a clear head (and a very helpful email from my boss regarding something he found in a mailing list archive), and managed to get it all working. Damn skippy.

The actual problem was that the client was not on the server’s “allowed IP address” list for client connections. So the server was rejecting the connection. A 30-second fix (edit file, commit to repository, update server’s copy) and it’s all working. Now, wouldn’t it have been nicer if the client could have said something like “Hey, I got disconnected from the server unexpectedly, please check it out, kthx!” But no, popping the raw error condition from the OS, or, rather, simply making the extent of your handling of the error be some cleanup and then DYING is apparently the way to go.

Frustrating, to say the least.

Found via a post on The Unofficial Apple Weblog, an article that examines why the iPod scratching issue is rather overblown, and why it really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

iPods do scratch easily, it’s true. My nano is scratched as all hell, though I don’t particularly care. I’m an abusive electronics owner, and my iPod usually shares a pocket with an equally-scratched phone or digital camera, so I knew what I was getting into. By contrast, I have a friend who only ever puts his nano in the breast pocket of his ninety-dollar business shirts, and his looks as shiny as the day he bought it.

Go read it at decaffeinated.

There’s a very good article over on Daring Fireball that goes into some well-reasoned analysis as to why Apple simply can’t screw itself over with the iPod as it did in the late ’80’s with the Mac.

The iPod turned 4 years old last October, and no matter what happens from this point onward — even if iPod sales start to decline — its success to date has been so great that it’s destined to be remembered as one of the great pop cultural phenomena of this decade, and perhaps even the greatest. The Macintosh of the ’80s was a tech-industry phenomenon, not a pop-cultural one. Apple never achieved sales growth or brand awareness with the Mac like they’ve had with the iPod — not even close. Do you know anyone — anyone — who today doesn’t know what an iPod is?

Go take a read.

I think this is especially tempting considering the new (top-end) dual-core Intel goodness that the Mac Mini really is. If I can build a nice, fat MythTV back-end server with lots and lots (and lots) of disk space relatively inexpensively, then all I really need is a gigabit link from that server to a Mac Mini in the living room.

Think about it. All the heat, noise and bother of a multiple-tuner-and-cable-box setup tucked away in some other room, and nothing but this nice, small, silver box on top of your TV. Add in a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, the TV-out adapter (sorry, no HTDV in my house yet), and you’ve got yourself a combination computer / TiVo-killer to die for.

There’s a short writup here about using the Mini as a High-Def video source, and it seems to work fairly well, overall.

Something bothers me, though, about having the television be the highest-powered computing device in the house…

That said, the Mac Mini is the perfect blend of cool looks, incredibly small size, and decent computing power. I wonder if the Apple Remote is useful for controlling MythTV, or if I’ll need to get something else. If I do go with a Mini for the TV, that means all my other work will be going into building the back-end server.

Parts list:

• Athlon X2 64
• Suitable motherboard
• Two Hauppage WinTV PVR-250 cards
• pcHDTV 3000 tuner card
• 3Ware SATA RAID controller
• Five-drive hot-swap SATA drive cage
• Five 400GB or 500GB SATA drives (buku storage!)
• Wheelbarrow of cash for SDG&E

There’s a few things missing from that list, but I already have most of a computer there already (granted, with a fried motherboard). Should be a freaky box. Now, it’s also on the bottom of the list in terms of priorities for budgetary issues, so we’ll see if I ever get to build it.

I began my adventures in learning CSS tonight by setting, as a goal, cleaning up the theme I downloaded and installed to have some cleaner colors and less graphics. I like to think that I achieved my goal. Yes, the site is a lot darker than it was before, but the increased contrast makes it easier to read (in my opinion.)

If people are having problems reading the site in the new color scheme, please let me know in the comments here.

At some point in the future, I’ll take to hacking the actual PHP used to generate the overall layout of the site and clean that up, too.

I don’t know what’s funnier. The story, or the fact that I’m familiar with it myself.

It seems the people over at University of Washington have a silly side.

The Ten Commandments of implementing IMAP clients.

Looking through these old posts, it seems there are a few things I wanted to leave some follow-up on.

Location, Location, Location

First, regarding my angst over Location X, I did finally break down and pay for it, primarily because I got sick of waiting for Automator to start up every time I needed to reconfigure my settings. With a nifty status bar menu, switching location-specific settings is supremely easy.

Location X still needs to start up Apple Mail in order to change its settings, though. So it’s not perfect.

Inert Detritus

As you can probably tell by the fact that this weblog is not named Inert Detritus, I’ve decided against going with that name. It’s not really me, and it looked like it was facing come stiff competition from more professional bloggers than myself.

if ( SGI == heroine ) { go_to_doctor(); }

I’ve divested myself of all my SGI equipment, save the original Indigo2 that I got for free. It’s holding my floor down under one of the tables in my office at work.

RIP, MiniMate

The logic board in the MiniMate started causing all manner of hellish FireWire problems. Since I had (a) voided the warranty by taking it apart for the review, and (b) bought it for a reasonable enough price, I’ve simply taken the hard drive and put it into a MacAlly aluminum FireWire/USB2 case and put the MiniMate in my go-away pile. Sad, but true.

Paper Wait

I never got around to doing anything more than thinking about building a web app for the Kernel Panic Linux Users’ Group.