kahunaburger

Since updating my Mac mini to 10.5.1 some time ago, I’m unable to connect to my LaCie 1TB disk via AFP (AppleShare). I can see that the volume appears in finder, but upon selecting it the authentication process never completes. The cursor keeps spinning and I never see the content of the disk. I also tried the command line version (mount_afp) and I’m seeing the same results, no matter what arguments I use. Mounting the disk via SMB still works, but iTunes won’t write to the share, if it’s mounted via SMB.

Anybody else seeing the same or similar problems? I created a support-ticket with LaCie and as soon as I get an answer, I’ll write a follow-up.

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12/23 I took a lot of pictures. The camera always seemed to be ready when I needed it. First off we have my failed attempt to make some German “Laugenbrezen” (pretzels). After meeting Christina the other day, I decided to give a recipe from chefkoch.de a try. The important part about the recipe was to dip the pretzels into a liter of warm water with some dissolved baking soda. That’s supposed to give the pretzels the unique brown look when baked afterwards. Turned out to be a bad idea to use whole-wheat flour instead of the all-purpose flour: I could not get the dough sticky enough to form pretzels and ended up doing “rolls” instead. Don’t get me wrong: things tasted still great, but just did not look great.

Pia tried some in the morning for breakfast, but preferred the cookies instead:

After breakfast little one decided that her hair was bothering her and that she needed to put some clips in. We first trimmed her bangs to have less of the tickling hairs hitting her eyes and then put some clips in to keep the hair out of her face:

She looks so grown-up in that picture above - luckily she reverted to her silly own in the next one:

After hanging out at the house for a while, we decided to walk the dogs. Going outside means to bundle up quite a lot. Temperatures were in the 20s and it required some extra layers to keep Pia warm:

About half way through the walk (30 mins), she always gets bored, wants to sit on my shoulders or whines about getting back to the house. At that point I always have to find something that keeps her going and makes her forget that she’s cold/tired. This time it was the snake-walk: daddy walks in front of little daughter and prepares a track that Pia has to follow precisely. To keep it challenging I have to walk backwards and/or make long bunny-jumps:

On the last stretch back to the house, she discovers that the snow has become stickier and that it’s easy to form snowballs:

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.. to all regular (and not so regular) readers out there. Have a nice Christmas and take it easy on the turkey!

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Things were so simple in the old days, when we had a single server acting as web-/application-server at the same time. In order to see what was going on, one would just “tail” the servers log-file (for example Apache’s access_log and/or error_log) to get live information about the servers activity.

Things are not as easy these days. For one of my work projects only god knows how many individual servers are involved: web-server, application server, rendering server, conversion server, etc. To see activity on all systems involved, developers usually have multiple Terminal windows open, are logged in to multiple servers and “tail -f” logfiles in those windows. While this allows people to get a live view into the system, it makes it very difficult to correlate log-events on one system to log-events on another system. The logs are tailed independently and the information is not “interleaved”.

There are existing utilities out there that allow you to look at multiple files at the same time (most notably http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/), but as far as I know, there is no platform-independent one.

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How often have you clicked on a link that leads nowhere? To a 404-page? To a non-existent place? Most of those 404-pages are boring, but this one is at least entertaining - in a sorry kind of way …

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Puzzle #1: The bus in front of me has a sticker on the back that announces that he would stop on all railroad-crossings. And sure enough he does stop when we come to one of the few railroad crossings in Santa Fe (I think there’s a total of five in the whole town). However when we approach the next intersection the bus driver speeds up and crosses the light when it’s solidly red. I’m not talking about dark-yellow or orange, I’m talking about RED. Why does he stop at a railroad-crossing 30 secs before running a red light?

Puzzle #2: On my way to picking up Pia I notice a Sheriff on the side of the road ticketing another driver. Why the heck do we have police AND sheriffs running around here? Is one used for tasks the other one can’t perform?

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I HATE unsolicited phone calls. I hate them especially when they come from sources I can’t verify. There’s a reason why I subscribed to Caller-ID: I want to know who’s calling me. If you or your company does not want to reveal information about yourself, I have to assume that you want to hide something until you have a real person on the phone. Whenever I see a caller-id display of “Toll Free”, “Unidentified” or something along those lines, I will ignore your call and you’ll head straight to the answering machine. If you have important information for me, you’ll leave a message on the system. If you don’t leave a message, I have to assume that your call is not important enough to be returned. That technique has worked just fine over the last few years and I’m going to stick to it.

Recently I’ve been using 800notes.com to identify callers. I even have a firefox-plugin that allows me to enter the calling number and get to the records right away: NM Veterans of foreign Wars, some Chase sales office, etc. - you are not going to get a real person, because you don’t identify yourself. If you had nothing to hide, you would not hide your identity.

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On Saturday I made the mistake of telling Pia we may go sledding the next day. Mistake, because she did not have the right clothes here at the house and she did not have a sled either …

Sunday morning after walking the dogs in freezing temperatures we ventured out in order to get all the necessary supplies for an afternoon sledding-adventure. We had the hardest time finding a snow-suit for her and ended up buying a jacket-/padded-pants combo at a sports store in Villa-Linda mall. Yep, it’s a boys jacket, but Pia did not mind at all, in fact she liked it to wear boys clothes. At the same store we also found an inflatable tube-sled with some handles on both sides. Just perfect for her.

After her nap we bundled up and drove up to Hyde Park about half-way up to the ski basin. Hyde Park has a dedicated sledding area with two runs: one is the bunny hill and the other one is a steeper and longer ride. As it was the first time for Pia to go sledding, we started out half-way up on the bunny hill. She was a little scared on the first run (that was quite the surprise, because she’s usually not scared of anything). You should have seen the big smile on her face after her first ride had ended. “Higher, higher” she demanded for the second ride and the 2nd one started 3/4 up on the bunny hill.

Sledding at Hyde Park

From then on we had to go all the way up on the hill and all further rides started at the very top, where “the big kids” also started. She really had a blast and we had to do this for about 1.5 hrs. Whenever she finished a ride, I had to go down all the way to the bottom of the hill to meet her and help her back up with the sled (was a bit too slippery for her to make it all by herself). Back on the top she jumped on the sled and immediately went down again. So daddy also got a workout from climbing up and down the hill 25 times.

Around 5pm when it got dark and the temperatures started to drop below the 20s we decided to go back home and have some hot chocolate. I guess I know what I’m doing next weekend.

Sledding at Hyde Park

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If you are still looking for a Christmas present for your toddler, I may have an idea for you: One Laptop Per Child has extended it’s give-one-get-one campaign until the end of the month. You buy a laptop for your child (or whoever else gets the present) and at the same time you donate a laptop to a child who can’t afford one.

I just ordered one for Pia after reading some favorable reviews from 5-,6- and 7-year olds about the XO laptop. She been hogging the Mac in the kitchen and even my main computer way too often lately and it’s time that she gets her own.

Once it’s here I let you know how it goes with the new gadget …

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Can you tell how sick I am? I actually love this short video below. The female voice reminds me of the one used in Portal (and if you are at all into puzzle games, run and get a copy of this one):

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