All set… ish

So, here starteth my last week’s work as a single bloke. The next time I sit at my desk on a Monday (the first one in October), it’ll be with a resized-but-still-doesn’t-really-quite-fit ring on my wedding finger, if I haven’t managed to lose it on a South African beach by then.

The arrangements have been far from smooth, and I’m secretly regretting not having a stag night1, but otherwise (largely thanks to Julie) things are about as organised as they’re going to be before Saturday week. Speaking as someone who generally hates weddings2, churches and being the centre of attention, I’d be lying if I said I was completely psyched up for the occasion just yet, but I’m sure the end will justify the means!

Now, back to all that work stuff I need to finish before I disappear for a month…

1A choice I made partly because most of the people I’d want to invite are scattered too thinly and widely around the planet to have any chance of attracting a critical mass, partly because stag nights in Dublin aren’t quite so appealing when you live here and have to wade through scores of them any night you go into town, and partly because the majority of frat house stag night antics have never held much allure for me anyway. As many pints as I could squeeze in at GUADEC was the closest I managed instead, but I’d have been having those anyway, and there wasn’t exactly much chance of a final fling there now, was there? :o)

2Don’t ask me why, I’ve just always had a strange aversion to them– I won’t even watch them in films or on the telly, if I can avoid it!

NDAS on Linux

Anyone know how to use Ximeta’s ndasadmin tool to access existing, non-FAT32 partitions on an NDAS disk from a Linux box? I have my NDAS drive partitioned into three (one ext3, one HFS+ and one FAT32). I can access all three partitions over the net from OSX, and from Ubuntu via a direct USB connection.

The instructions on Ximeta’s website, and this post on the Gentoo forums, suggest it’s perfectly possible to see non-FAT32 partitions if you partition and format the drive from the Linux box. I’d rather not reformat my drive, but right now all I can see over the net is the FAT32 partition. Any clues?

The indisputable leader

Cool, there’s a Top Cat cartoon on TV just now without the canned laughter. God Bless the BBC1! I wonder if they’ll get the same backlash when they revert that they did when they accidentally showed a chortle-augmented episode of M*A*S*H?

1 When I was a lad, they wouldn’t even call it “Top Cat” in the listings, because there was a cat food on the market at the time with the same name…

Back to back

Dobey, I’m sure you’d rather avoid iTunes, but it does let you do what you want, in a roundabout sort of way– you can tell it to rip any two or more consecutive CD tracks as a single file, so they’re always played back to back. Of course you then lose all the ID3 info for one of the tracks, and you can’t apply it retrospectively to already-ripped tracks, so we could certainly do better.

DTrace your Macintosh

From the OSX Leopard sneak peek:

When you need a bit more help in debugging, Xcode 3.0 offers an extraordinary new program, Xray. Taking its interface cues from timeline editors such as GarageBand, now you can visualize application performance like nothing you’ve seen before. Add different instruments so you can instantly see the results of code analyzers. Truly track read/write actions, UI events, and CPU load at the same time, so you can more easily determine relationships between them. Many such Xray instruments leverage the open source DTrace, now built into Mac OS X Leopard.

Cool or what? Now, if they’ll just open source their GUI so we can reciprocate by including it in OpenSolaris… :)

Model Behaviour

I do wish mobile phone companies (well, Nokia in particular) would print model numbers somewhere on all their handsets. I’ve had three different ones now, and every time I go to buy an accessory, I can never remember which one I’ve got. (I think I currently have a 3100, and Julie has a 3220… but it could quite conceivably be the other way around. Or neither.)