damians personal blog

...still better than broken ones. Hope you get the idea though, it's never as beautiful as reality. And there is no scent on the web, either!

        30.Mär.2009, 23:41 :: herzvoll :: Permalink :: Comments (0)

The problem why Windows on a Mac was a pain in the ass is roughly the following:

• If you use Bootcamp & an NTFS partition, you won't be able to access your Windows data from OS X
• If you use Bootcamp & an Fat32 partition, you could access your data, but the installation will abort with an hardware abstraction layer (hal.dll) error (also see this german blog)
• If you delete the 200mb partition, you can get over the HAL-error, but you're not able to remove the Win partition with the Bootcamp assistent anymore.

That was the dilemma... lose the flexibility to remove the Win partition easily, or don't be able to access your data. Until google published Mac FUSE which stands for File-system in USEr space. If you have some knowledge about the architecture of an operating system: this is a driver (running in kernel mode) allowing to use file system implementations in user mode, as the name suggests. But the really interesting feature is its implementation of a Linux file system API, making Linux file system adaptations ready to use on a mac. Amongst other [rethorical pause] NTFS!

Which solves us the problem described above. First install MacFUSE, and then the NTFS 3G driver and enjoy hasselfree Windows!

        24.Mär.2009, 7:27 :: mac os x :: Permalink :: Comments (2)

This might apply for any website where you enter text and preview it afterwards. I experienced a browser crash when writing the preceding blog entry. And as if a browser crash wasn't annoying enogh, I discovered I didn't save my blog entry when it was finished. Instead I previewed it and headed off doing other stuff, which ended in killing browser.

Sure, as a golden rule, always copy your text before you submit any form, since any website is suspect to lose your content. But I was young and foolish and didn't do that, and even the built-in autosave mechanism of Movable Type didn't save anything helpful.

But my luck was, I did preview it. The fact of previewing it made it possible to find it in the browsers' cache. I opened the terminal and entered the following:

grep <keyword> -r ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/

whereas <keyword> is to be substituted with a word that is for sure in your text but not very common. The same could be applied to Safari, which cache is accessible under ~/Library/Caches/Safari/. The output of the grep command is the filename followed by the line in which the keyword was found. If you found the right file, you can view the contents of the file with the command cat <path/to/file>.

        23.Mär.2009, 0:25 :: mac os x :: Permalink :: Comments (0)

It's been some time since my last blog entry. First for everybody checking once in a while, sorry for the silence. There have been several factors hindering me from blogging.

First and probably most important, Movabletype hindered me from logging into my admin interface. How that? Since about v3.2, MT has an automatic update system. The cool side is, updating has gotten a lot more easier since. After the user authentication, a script runs automatically, and if everthing works fine, you'll see your new MT version seconds later.

IF everthing works fine.

If not, you're just locked out of your blogging software. Which happened to me in fall 08. The update script terminated with the message "Could not create table mt_comments [...] table already exists". In retrospective, it was fairly easy to debug. I used phpMyAdmin to access the database (always backup, whatever you do). There I found the table mt_comments showed as in use. A drop table did the magic, withoutß deleting the current comments. The next login attempt completed the update without problems.

Second I joined the networking platform Facebook and used it as a fast-food-alternative to blogging. The feature of publishing a status is perfect for me, if I want to update my surroundings of what I'm doing or how I feel. I think it is even better than blogging, since most people don't know anything about blogs, not to speak of RSS. However, for technical information it is not very apropriate.

And third last but not least, since about six months ago I made acquaintance of a wunderful girl who happens to become my girlfriend. And since then I love to spend every minute off with my girl, which did not really help to invest time in blogging.

So... now I have repaired the admin interface. I will continue to use this blog for more geek stuff, not only computer stuff but also photography, travelling or topics alike. Enjoy!

        22.Mär.2009, 20:11 :: unsorted :: Permalink :: Comments (0)