damians personal blog

I had to remove a complicated file from an external hard drive. When I tried to delete it via Finder / Trash, it said, unable to remove, file in use. Nevertheless it was possible to unmount the volume without errors, which means none of the current processes actually used that file.

No big deal I thought, let's just force delete it. And use the superuser command just in case it's an access rights problem:

$ sudo rm -f /Volumes/sams186/App.dmg

But this time it did not help: unable to remove. So I found that the resource fork could prevent files from being deleted. The resource fork is a file system structure which allows the system to store additional information to a file that does not belong to the file itself, but isn't a file system attribute either.

Open parenthesis:
File system attributes are properties of a file such as file name, block address, file size, etc. The number of file system attributes available and the constraints who apply vary from one file system format to another, which means HFS+ does not store exactly the same information as FAT32 or EXT3.

In the long listing of a directory, the existence of a resource fork is indicated with an @ after the access rights:

$ ls -al /Volumes/sams186/
-rw-r--r--@   1 damian  damian  224395264 16 Nov  2006 App.dmg

To show more information about the resource forks in the folder listing, use the @ parameter:

$ ls -al@ /Volumes/sams186/
-rw-r--r--@   1 damian  damian  224395264 16 Nov  2006 App.dmg
    com.apple.FinderInfo           32

To display the content of a resource fork:

$ xattr -l /Volumes/sams186/App.dmg

And finally, to delete a part of a resource fork:

$ xattr -d "com.apple.FinderInfo" /Volumes/sams186/App.dmg

Having removed that FinderInfo resource fork, the file could be removed without any problems.

        1.Dez.2009, 14:04 :: mac os x :: Permalink :: Comments (1)

After the aforementioned library hack I couldn't see any thumbnails from about 30-45 images, and some had the even the wrong thumbnail instead. (This might be due to an error in importing from the flash card, as some images ended up having the same file name.)

Even the right-click menu entries "Delete Preview" and forced "Generate Preview" wouldn't help. The correct image appeared on double click or entering fullscreen mode, but the preview won't change. I was always looking for an option in the mouse menu, I guess I'm working too much with windows at work -- the option I sought was placed in the "Images" menu and is called - surprise - "Generate Thumbnails".

This did solve the problem with the missing thumbs, but not with the wrong thumbs. Immediately after generating a new thumb from the image it helped. But somehow it seemed to me, generating new thumbs only postponed the problem. And I could observe files having a different original name mix up thumbs repeatedly, it was the same image that got the same wrong thumbs.

So what I tried to do

• Generate Preview on all images
• Generate Thumbnails on all images
• Delete .approject/AP.Thumbnails and other AP.* files

but nothing helped. Until I found that thread in the apple forum, where the user "firstlaunch" suggests to rebuild the database. His advice is to hold [Alt][Cmd] at startup, and then rebuild. In my case, a simple "Consistency Check" did do the trick.

Compare the screenshot below:

        24.Nov.2009, 6:32 :: photo :: Permalink :: Comments (0)

© Apple Computers

The other day I had to collect the pictures of FriScènes, a local theater festival. I freed up some 20 GB on my internal hard drive, and collected about as much data of raw photos in Aperture. After the festival I created a backup of the files on my external hard drive, and copied the aperture library also to the external drive (kind of unnecessary, but you never know).

Some days later I needed to access the photos of the festival. But Aperture (v2.1.4) won't let me set the Library path to the external drive, and I couldn't copy it back on the internal either due to lack of free space.

So after some fiddling in the terminal I found a way to leave the photo files on the external drive and access them anyways with Aperture:

1. copy the .aplibrary folder and all the files in it to your internal harddrive except the .approject files
2. create a symlink on your internal drive pointing to your external drive

In my case, the commands where the following:

 cd /Users/damian/Pictures/
 cp -rv /Volumes/wd590/Aperture\ Library\ FriScenes.aplibrary .

(which I interrupted with CTRL-C when I saw it copied actual image files)

 cd Aperture\ Library\ FriScenes.aplibrary
 rm -r *.approject
 ln -s /Volumes/wd590/Aperture\ Library\ FriScenes.aplibrary/*.approject .

This works fine, though the slower performance of the USB drive causes the thumbnails to appear one after another (instead of appearing instantly when running from the interal drive.)

        15.Nov.2009, 23:05 :: photo :: Permalink :: Comments (0)

There used to be a really cool drinks & booze recipe website - today I found the url being redirected to the threadless t-shirt community, which is not really the kind of advice I was looking for. After a bit of nosing around I found the skinnyCorp being responsible for both of those websites, and it's probably just an error in the domain name resolution.

However it started me thinking about the websites I use regularly (IMDB, MacEssentials) or I have entered data which has not been saved anywhere else (Facebook, criticker.com). What if they stopped working today? The decline of web2.0-bubble, the end of the world as we know the people being born after 1990 know...

Let's hope it will continue like it was for the past few years!

        8.Nov.2009, 20:58 :: web world :: Permalink :: Comments (1)

Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 install a new set of fonts - Constantia, Corbel, Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas. Office 2007 users often use them without knowing they might not be installed on other computers, resulting in strange behaviour and changed document layout.

How can you see you don't have them?

If these two lines look the same to you, then you don't have them:

• The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
• The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.

How can you get them?

Here is the official way how to download them for free anyway:

Go to the Microsoft Download Center and search for open xml converter. Look for the latest version of the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac (44 MB).

The inofficial way, for all of you who don't want to pollute your system with Micro$oft software, get only the fonts (6 MB).

For all the PC users, go to the Download Center and search for compatibility 2007 and then download the latest Compatibility Pack. If you don't need it and just want to use the fonts, you can uninstall the software, and the fonts will stay on your system.

Oh, and by the way, the real official way to get those fonts is to buy The Complete Font Collection - all 25 fonts for only $299, let alone if you buy them one by one only $35 each!

        4.Jul.2009, 9:12 :: unsorted :: Permalink :: Comments (0)

...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 (1)

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)

Der Tag beginnt nicht gut.

7:35 Uhr, mac-essentials.de zitiert Focus:
10 Tage nach dem Launch des neuen iPhones ist es in sämtlichen US-Apple Stores ausverkauft: nur in Kalifornien, New York, Honolulu und New Hampshire soll es laut AppleInsider einzelne Exemplare geben. Auch europaweit gibt es keine iPhones mehr [...]

Auf Couleur3 berichten sie dasselbe - nirgendwo keine iPhones mehr.

Doch um 10:35 Uhr bekomme ich eine Nachricht auf die Combox, weil ich im Büro einen sehr schlechten Empfang habe:

Ich glaube, ich habe für den Weg weniger als 10 Minuten gebraucht, und etwa sämtliche Verkehrsregeln gebrochen, die man auf der Strecke nur brechen konnte! Auf dem Weg habe ich mir immer gedacht "das kann nicht sein, die verarschen dich!" Aber als ich im Shop wartete und zusah, wie einer Kundin vor mir das iPhone verkauft wurde, fasste ich wieder Mut. Zu recht - die iPhones hatten sie am Samstag in einer Express-Lieferung erhalten, hatten am Samstag aber keine Zeit gehabt, die Anrufe zu tätigen.

Fazit: 1x iPhone 16GB weiss, als bestehender Swisscom-Kunde (basic liberty) mit Aboverlängerung für 24 Monate kostet 419.-, wenn man eine gute Verkäuferin hat, die erst den falschen Preis sagt, nur noch 369.-.

Meine ersten Eindrücke:

• Die Bedienung ist genau so sexy, wie ich sie erwartet habe. Ich habe mich danach sogar dabei ertappt, wie ich mit OS X à la iPhone umgehen wollte...
• Noch vorhandene SMS werden wie üblich ohne Hinweis beim Wechsel der SIM-Karte gelöscht.
• Notizzettel alias Stickies werden nicht synchronisiert - halloo?! Ich glaub die Entwickler haben gepennt!
• Die fehlende Zwischenablage macht sich im Normalfall nicht bemerkbar, weil fast alles notwendige eingebaut ist. Es sei denn, man will bei einem Kontakt Vorname und Nachname vertauschen.
• Einige Kontakte werden mysteriöserweise nicht synchronisiert - keine Fehlermeldung, keine Benachrichtigung.
• Kein synchronisieren über WLAN, sondern nur USB2 (Kabel).
• Das surfen ist toll, da hat Apple nicht zuviel versprochen. Coverflow ist auch super, und Karte mit GPS funzt genial.
• Mail lädt auch von Spam immer die Volldarstellung. Als default müsste immer nur eine Textansicht gezeigt werden, und die Bilder erst auf Knopfdruck. Aber mit MobileMe müsste das Problem nicht mehr so schlimm sein, da man Spam via den Computer aussortieren kann, und die Änderungen sich dann auf's Natel replizieren.

        21.Jul.2008, 22:05 :: apple :: Permalink :: Comments (0)