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The Maze Meltdown (SF Chronicle): San Francisco has received a major problem when a gasoline truck ruined an important highway segment during the night. 8,600 gallons of gas burnt hot enough to simply “melt” parts of an overpass and drop a large chunk of highway on the road below.

Those people in the Bay Area are already stressed enough with their daily commute. Having a major segment of highway missing for possibly a few months will drive a lot more people nuts. Guess lots of them will now reconsider Caltrain. Loving my 10-sec commute even more now …

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bath in the sprinklers

We had a really good night in the tent. Pia was sleeping through the whole night and started to wake up around 5am. It was lovely to see her listen to the birds around and she suddenly said: “The birds are teaching me how to whistle …”. That alone made all the trouble worth it.

Just before 6 o’clock we decided to get out of the tent and go back in the house. Pia stepped out first and waited on the path for me. I closed the tent and was about to join her when suddenly I heard hissing noises all around us. It was exactly 6 o’clock and the automated sprinklers in the yard went off! Pia started to scream, because she was scared and I started to scream, because I wanted her to move quickly. After a few seconds I think she realized that she should follow me and we ran back into the house - both of us half-soaked from the sprinklers along the path.
Then I remembered that I saw the gardeners truck on Saturday afternoon. I assumed that they had come to continue to fix the coyote fence, but now I know that they came to start the drip-system and the sprinklers instead …

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Tent in the garden

For the longest time I promised Pia I would put up the tent in the garden. Today it looks like it’s going to be nice enough to spend the time out there. We placed the tent into a protected corner of the yard and *will* spend the night in it. Pia’s very, vey excited. And she got her priorities right: after putting up the tent she went immediately inside and grabbed some drinks, food and a few dolls to sleep with her.

Tent in the garden

Perhaps I’m making a mistake and she won’t go back into her “normal” bed afterwards. We’ll see …

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It’s itching right now. I have the scuba-diving-itch. For some unknown reason, I went to Google Earth and looked at my favorite diving destinations. It’s been a year since I went scuba-diving the last time and I feel the urge to put some pressure on my brain. I think it’s the warm weather that made me think of water again.

During my Google Earth session I also went to the Sudan. The photo above is a screen-grab from Google Earth showing a wreck just off “Port Sudan”. I still have the fondest memories about one of my more exciting diving trips there. We went on a two-week live-aboard on the “MS Aurora”, leaving from Port Sudan and diving the southern parts of the Red Sea. The ship’s captain and crew were all italian and I loved every minute on the vessel.

Places like Sha’ab Rumi, Sanganeb (the lonesome lighthouse), the wreck of the Umbria, the Toyota-wreck and Cousteau’s under-water habitat come to mind (a sub-merged metal structure where Cousteau and others would live for prolonged periods). Bluish endlessness. How I love it!

I’m glad that Pia shows some interest in diving: every time she sees the scuba-photo in the bedroom she asks when she can go under-water. When we have a bath together she practices scuba-diving by holding her breath as long as possible in the tub: we are up to 15 secs now …

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While playing last night, I ended up on the carpet in front of the fireplace and pretended I was sleeping. Pia came running through the whole house and took a big leap onto my chest. I didn’t spot her, because my eyes were closed. Of course, her knee had to hit my rib cage with full force. It hurt like crazy and I was running around with watery eyes for a few minutes.

Over the next few hours things got worse and when we had a shower before bed, I saw some dark discoloration on my chest where she had hit me. Needless to say that I did not sleep a lot last night: every time I turned I would wake up from pain. And as soon as I was asleep again, the slightest movement would send more pain through my body. I’m afraid of coughing and sneezing, because it always feels like my chest is going to break open.

Called the doctor this morning and went in for an examination after dropping Pia off at school. The xray (it’s not the one above) shows a small crack in a rib on the right side of my chest. There’s nothing you can do to make it heal faster and the doctor gave me some stronger pain-killers and told me to take it easy. Great, just great.

If you ever see this innocent looking girl on the streets, run as fast as you can away from her or at least wear some heavy body armor when you approach her …

Innocence

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Uschi Gone Wild: Cow Causes Udder Horror in Hannover … ha ha, “Udder Horror”, that’s funny …

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The other day I posted about some problems with iTunes downloads, where iTunes insisted on throwing an “err = -34″ whenever I tried to download stuff from the iTunes store. iTunes said that there was not enough disk space for the download to complete. The disk in question had more than 800GB available.

After some back-and-forth with the support staff at Apple (who, by the way, were pretty fast with their responses), I ended up at some higher level support person who told me that Apple does not support iTunes catalogs on network disks. Say what? One of the main reasons why I bought the LaCie 1TB Ethernet disk was to have a common storage area for all my media files and that includes the iTunes catalog. The last response from Apple said that I should move all my files over to a disk that is attached to my Mac and then reimport the library.

My bullshit-light started flashing red after I heard this. In the past 25 years (since I started using computers) I’ve been in way too many situations where the operating system or an application uses the wrong data-structures to hold information about a disk’s free space. I think the first time I saw it on an Amiga 1000 after attaching a 20GB external third-party disk. The OS did not think it would ever see more than xx GB and as a result it showed a negative number where one would have expected the real free disk space. The solution at that point was to partition the disk into several smaller chunks with each chunk being less than xx GB.

Fast forward to April 2007 and it looks like I’m seeing the same problem again. This time it is either a bug in iTunes or the AFP-client (which is used to connect to the LaCie Ethernet disk). Did not want to repartition the disk and decided to use a different strategy. So if iTunes thinks there’s not enough space, then let’s reduce the space even further to a level where the free-space-calculation works correctly again.

I went to a Terminal window and typed:

$ cd /Volumes/share
$ mkfile 100G foo

The “cd” brought me to the mount-point of my big disk and the “mkfile” command creates an empty file. The “100G” specifies the size of the empty file and in this case it means 100 GB. After waiting a while for the command to complete, I restarted iTunes, went to the iTunes store and restarted the downloads. And this time it completed without any complaints or more “err = -34″ messages.

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Seriously - how difficult is it to figure out how much disk space is available on a volume? I do remember the “old days” when disks went across the 32GB boundary and the data type used to store the disk-free-information was stored in a signed value and applications got confused with the “minus some number of GBs available”. But nowadays that should not be a problem anymore. At least, that’s what I thought.
Earlier on I tried to purchase some “Spiderman” cartoon episodes from the iTunes store. Most of them downloaded just fine, but the last 6 ones just give me an “err = -34″. The description tells me that I’m running out of disk space and that I should erase files or empty the trash.
Weird thing is that I have more than 50% available on my builtin 80GB disk and that the volume that hosts the iTunes library has 800GB available. How much more disk space does it need? Below is a screenshot with the disk information and the iTunes error message …

This should be filed under “Unnecessary annoyances …”

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Before Pia went down for her nap yesterday afternoon, she sat in front of the fireplace in the kitchen and used her markers (thanks to the German grandparents) to draw on some paper. “Big deal” you say? Well, normally I would not mention it, but since a few days ago her paintings have suddenly changed. Where we previously had stuff that only Pia could identify, she suddenly started drawing human-like figures (look at the papers in the first photo). Thought it was worth recording here on kb …

I see people

I see people

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Shahram at work pointed me at a video tutorial for a Firefox extension that talks directly to Amazon’s S3 storage in the cloud web service.

Pictured above is a simple file-browser implemented as a Firefox extension. The left pane lists local directories and the right pane shows content that is stored under my name at Amazon’s web service. Besides being able to copy fiiles from/to S3, one can also “synchronize” a local directory with a remote directory. Very neat and easy to use.

The video tutorial (screencast) can be found here: http://www.askmrvideo.com/cam/s3/.
And the firefox extension can be downloaded via: http://www.rjonna.com/ext/s3fox.php.

The tutorial also explains how you can reference S3 content directly from your web pages. Guess I know where I will be hosting large files in the future. Now if it only wasn’t for the brain-dead “bucket names have to be globally unique” problem …

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