And this is what we see on Channel 7 in HD.

Then you have all the other info on screen, all in the 4:3 space. And this is the HD channel. There is this thing called widescreen - perhaps Channel 7 have heard of it?

I don’t just blame Channel 7. I blame the IOC. They should have mandated that the bid winner for broadcast rights had to put any on screen displays in 16:9 space, not 4:3, for any HD broadcast. And any station identifier should be made transparent, and placed in the outer part of the 16:9 space.

Here’s what we should have got:

Yeah, we wish.

Sure, Channel 7 invested a lot of money in getting the Olympics. It is cheaper for them to use the same graphics on screen for SD and HD broadcasts. In fact, it’s probably just an upscaled SD image on their HD channel. But Channel 7 could have used these Olympics to show the world what is possible with the technology. Start with proper use of widescreen. Move on to imaginative ways to tie into the internet. But nope - we got the basics.

And apparently the first week of the Olympics consists of just swimming.

Here’s my first screen of icons:

Note Mail, Contacts, Phone, Notes, etc. And here is my second.

Mainly games and trivial things that I’ll probably delete by the end of the week.

So, see the mullet? It’s all “business up front, party in the back“.

You probably wish you hadn’t come back to my site after reading that, but thank you anyway.

They aren’t  letting many people actually look at the body, but at a press conference they did show some photos.  One of these photos was of Bigfoot’s mouth.

Bigfoot's Mouth

Just check out those teeth - they look better than most humans. In fact, they look better than the discoverer’s teeth seen in the same photo.  How does Bigfoot, who we suppose is a wild creature without a toothbrush, keep his teeth in such great condition?

Most people feel the evidence for this Bigfoot find looks a little dodgy. Bigfoot looks like a costume stuck in a freezer. And the teeth are too perfect it seems for a wild animal.

But then, ask yourself this: if you were going to devise a Bigfoot hoax, wouldn’t you have made sure the teeth looked a little worn and dirty or decayed?  Just to add some realism?  Why didn’t these guys do that?  Maybe it is real after all!

But then, maybe they thought about that.  Maybe they figured that by making it look fake, people would think “that’s so fake, no one could be this incompetent at creating a hoax, so it must be real”. So their hoax looks more real by looking more fake.

Mind blowing I know. But it is similar to my now famous “Perfect Disguise for an Armed Robbery”¹. For those who haven’t heard this before (you need to pay more attention to me), it goes like this. You’re a criminal, about to perform a non-violent armed robbery. You are a generally clean shaven person, with dark hair. So, you go to great trouble to give yourself a very realistic looking red goatee and moustache. You then put on a very fake looking black beard and moustache, one that is so dodgy that the people you are robbing can see that you have a fake beard. In fact, they can clearly see you have a red moustache and goatee under the fake beard.

So, the victims of this crime report the robbery to the police and insist that the person who robbed them had a red goatee and moustache that they tried to cover up with a fake black beard. When the police come around to your door, you are clean shaven.  And obviously do not have and never had a red moustache and goatee.  Your neighbours also know you to never have had a red moustache and goatee. The case is thrown out of court.

The perfect crime.

So is this the perfect hoax?

¹ I do not condone armed robbery, or robbery in general. It’s a joke. Don’t send me hate mail.

Channel Ten in Australia have started showing the X-Files TV series from the beginning. On their HD channel (Ten HD).

Great news if you like the series. But when you watch it, you may find something doesn’t quite feel right. Everyone seems to be a little too close, like they are encroaching in to your personal space. There seem to be a lot of extreme close-ups in the show and at times the stars have parts of their heads cut off.

So, what’s going on?

Well, Channel Ten, in their ultimate wisdom, have decided that people won’t watch the show in HD unless it is widescreen. So, they’ve taken the 4:3 show (the first few seasons were filmed in 4:3), and chopped off the tops and bottoms, stretching it out to give the appearance of a widescreen programme.

Here’s a clip from the episode last week:

And here’s that same scene from the original broadcast:

No wonder everything seems so close.

You’ll notice though that it isn’t fully widescreen - it looks like even Channel Ten staff noticed the clipping if they made it fully widescreen, so they cut it back just a little.

So why am I complaining? I’m offended when people mess with original content. And the point is that Channel Ten don’t get technology.

Widescreen TVs come with a button you can push to tell it to zoom a 4:3 programme to fit a widescreen TV, if that is what you want. So why force everyone to view a bastardised version of the programme when you can offer people choice?

But then it’s the same issue all the TV stations have with technology. I can work out what channel I’m on by pushing the “info” button on my remote - yet they continue to ruin the viewing experience by putting the station identifier on the screen and saying it helps people to know what station they are watching. That Ten HD watermark is huge!

It seems there isn’t a single network with any respect for TV programmes anymore. Revoke all their Free To Air licences!

Getting Trac running on OS X Leopard Server is quite simple, though it does require some use of the Terminal application. The following is a tutorial on installing Trac, with an emphasis on doing so in the most OS X way possible, and integrating with Open Directory for authentication (the standard user authentication method used by Leopard Server).

This tutorial is made easier if you follow the instructions here on setting up SVN on Leopard Server. I will in particular make use of the sections on “Using Server Admin” and the section immediately following on “Back to the Terminal”.

Installing Trac

From Safari on your Leopard Server, download the latest version of Trac (at the time of writing, this was version 0.11.1).

If downloaded from Safari, this would normally download the zip file to the Downloads directory, and unzip it automatically. If not, unzip it manually. Then follow these commands:

cd ~/Downloads/Trac-0.11.1
sudo python ./setup.py install

Enter your admin password, and allow Trac to install.

Setting up the Environment

Making folder choices that are OS X-style, create an area for your Trac Environments. The location I choose is /Library/Trac/Environments. From the Terminal type:

sudo mkdir -p /Library/Trac/Environments

The next step is to create an environment for your development project. Because the folder name used here will be part of a URL, and URL components tend to be lowercase, I choose to use a lowercase name for the environment. Suppose we have a project “My Project”. For this project, I create an environment as follows:

sudo trac-admin \
/Library/Trac/Environments/myproject initenv

You will be asked a number of questions. For most you can take the default, but you may want to change the name, and you should enter the correct location for your subversion repository. In the example above, the interaction looks something like the following:

Trac will first ask a few questions about your environment
in order to initialize and prepare the project database.

Please enter the name of your project.
This name will be used in page titles and descriptions.

Project Name [My Project]>

Please specify the connection string for the database to use.
By default, a local SQLite database is created in the environment
directory. It is also possible to use an already existing
PostgreSQL database (check the Trac documentation for the exact
connection string syntax).

Database connection string [sqlite:db/trac.db]>

Please specify the type of version control system,
By default, it will be svn.

If you don’t want to use Trac with version control integration,
choose the default here and don’t specify a repository directory.
in the next question.

Repository type [svn]>

Please specify the absolute path to the version control
repository, or leave it blank to use Trac without a repository.
You can also set the repository location later.

Path to repository [/path/to/repos]>

Creating and Initializing Project

….

Congratulations!

Now, change the owner of the Trac area:

sudo chown -R www:admin /Library/Trac

And set up Trac administration:

sudo trac-admin /Library/Trac/Environments/myproject

This will bring you to a prompt along the lines of:

Welcome to trac-admin 0.11.1
Interactive Trac administration console.
Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Edgewall Software

Type: ‘?’ or ‘help’ for help on commands.

Trac [/Library/Trac/Environments/myproject]>

At this prompt type:

permission add authenticated TRAC_ADMIN

Then type:

quit

Make sure these two commands are applied from with trac-admin, not directly at the Terminal command-line.

Using Server Admin

Start up Server Admin on Leopard Server, and go to the Web section. Click on Sites at the top of the Server Admin screen. In following my SVN setup instructions, you should have a site set up on port 443. We will use this site, so select this site from the list.

Choose the Realms Tab, and create a new Realm for Trac by choosing the + button under the list of Realms (Subversion should already be listed). Enter information as shown.

Once created, the Realms tab should look as follows. Add users to the Realm as required - note that they only need to be listed as having Browse Only permissions.

Go to the Settings at the top of the Web administration page, and choose Modules. Find the “fast_cgi” module and turn this on as shown.

Save all changes.

Back to the Terminal

In Terminal, go to the directory /etc/apache2/sites. If you followed the subversion setup instructions, you will be able to go to the sub-directory “0001_any_443_yamato.internal” (or whatever your directory was called) and add a Trac configuration file.

cd /etc/apache2/sites/0001_any_443_yamato.internal
sudo vi httpd_trac.conf

In this file place the text:

ScriptAlias /trac
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/
Current/share/trac/cgi-bin/trac.fcgi

All on one line. Note that the last two lines should be joined without a space, but there should be a space after “/trac“.

Now set up Fast CGI:

cd /etc/apache2/sites
vi global.conf

In that file place the text:

FastCgiConfig -initial-env
TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR=/Library/Trac/Environments

All on one line.

Back to Server Admin

Restart the web server, by clicking Stop Web and then Start Web.

You should now have a working Trac installation, linked to your project’s subversion repository, and using Open Directory for authentication of users. You should also be able to add and remove people from the Trac Realm at will, without having to mess with the configuration files.

In my example, Trac is available from the web link https://yamato.internal/trac.

Further Configuration

If you want to further configure your Trac environment, you can edit the file /Library/Trac/Environments/cdms/conf/trac.ini and make any changes.

I love my Japanese game shows. Probably the highlight of every trip I make to Japan. And for years I’ve been saying on these trips: “We should take some of these shows to Australia - people will love them!”. So when I heard we were getting this show I was excited.

And then I realised we weren’t getting an entire show. Instead we were getting a segment of a show (Brain Wall), stretched out to make an entire show. Mistake number one.

So, the idea of the show is that contestants (celebrities) stand on the “Play Area”, and walls come toward them with shapes cut out - and they have to fit through the shapes, or get pushed in to a pool. You can’t really get that wrong…can you?

Well, here is an example of a “Hole” in a wall.

And now let’s take a look at the male celebrities Channel 9 chose for the first episode.

Notice anything (apart from the fact that the male body in spandex is rarely a good look)? Yes, at least two of these guys (Jacko and Tim) are obese. And look at the hole in the wall. No matter how hard you try, those guys will NOT fit through that hole.

And there is the second problem. It is only funny the first time you present the contestants with holes they can’t fit through. If you continue to do that, it just isn’t funny. And half an hour later the guys had scored a big fat zero.

So Channel 9, you need to actually do a bit of work if you want something to work in Australia. You can’t just buy all the props from Japan, slap it all together and hope it will work. You may not have noticed, but generally Japanese blokes are much skinnier than your average Aussie blokes. So you have to build new props (with cut out stomachs for Jacko and Tim to fit through apparently), or only choose skinny women as contestants (don’t get me started on the sexist comments the host made about the women in the show).

As usual, Channel 9 are idiots. They don’t deserve rights to the show. They don’t deserve a free to air TV licence. And that watermark is still annoying.

I should point out though that the show rated very well. Perhaps like me people were expecting more. I can’t see it lasting as is.

So anyway, I’m out visiting a business partner, and in the foyer of their building they had one of those touch screen directory displays. The type where you put in the first letter of the company you are looking for, and then select the entry you want and it gives you all their business information.

I took some photos of it with my phone, so the quality is poor. But anyway, it looked like this:

And at the bottom are these funky up down buttons for moving back and forth between pages.

So anyway, I thought I’d test the software a little - hey, it’s a hobby. What happens if I go backwards on page 1?

Oh no they didn’t? Oh yes they did! So I went back a few more pages.

I considered going all the way back to see if I could crash the software when it reached some type size limit, but there was a guy behind me wanting to use the device.

Anyway, the company wasn’t even listed. But they were in the building. So not only is the software untested (and full of the most basic of edge case bugs), it doesn’t get updated very often either.

Lazy developers. Crap software. Probably Windows developers.

There are a number of resources on the net showing how to setup Subversion on Leopard Server, but just about every tutorial I’ve seen ends up with something that works - but if you make any unrelated changes to your web server with the Server Admin tool at a later date you end up changing your SVN settings and having to redo them.

What I propose below is a general way to avoid this problem that can be applied to Subversion and other tools. I also try and do this in the most OS X way I can, using OS X style folder locations and naming, and the Server Admin tool wherever possible. Further, I show how to integrate with Open Directory for authentication (the standard user authentication method used by Leopard Server).

Creating the repository

The first thing we need is a repository on Leopard Server to store all your files that are under SVN control. In OS X style, I have chosen to store this repository in /Library/Subversion. I will set it up to have multiple repositories - my first is called “projects“. You should change as you see fit. As “projects” will later be accessible via a url, where most url components are lowercase, I chose to name all our repositories in lowercase.

You will need to open Terminal, and type the following. You will need to enter your admin password.

sudo svnadmin create \
/Library/Subversion/Repository/projects
sudo chown -R www:admin /Library/Subversion
sudo chmod -R 770 /Library/Subversion

Using Server Admin

Start up Server Admin on Leopard Server, and go to the Web section. Click on Sites at the top of the Server Admin screen. In my setup, I’ve chosen to have two sites - our intranet on port 80, and our SVN services on port 443 (i.e. we will access SVN using https). Do this by selecting the + button under the list of domains.

Under the General tab, fill in the details for your server. In particular, make sure your domain name is set correctly, and will not change later. In the example below, our machine is called “yamato” and the domain is “yamato.internal” - an internal domain that isn’t used outside of the VPN.

Under the Options tab, select “WebDAV”.

Under the Realms tab, we create a new Realm. This will be used in the future to add new users giving them access to SVN (or not). You create a new Realm by clicking on the + button under the Realms list. Fill in the dialog box that slides out as shown below.

I call my Subversion Realm “Subversion”. Once created, to the right I add the users I want to allow access to SVN, giving them appropriate access (in this case all my users have “Browse and Read/Write WebDAV”).

Under the Security tab, select “Enable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)”. I created a new certificate, but you can use the default that Leopard Server creates for you on installation.

Now save your changes.

Click on Settings at the top, and choose the Modules tab. In this tab, find “dav_svn_module” and enable it by ticking the appropriate check box.

Save your changes.

Back to the Terminal

In Terminal, go to the directory /etc/apache2/sites. Here you will find configuration files for your domains. Of particular interest is the domain I have setup for SVN:

0001_any_443_yamato.internal.conf

We want to avoid changing this file as much as possible, only changing it enough to load the changes we need, and changing areas that won’t change if we make further changes to this file via Server Admin. To do this we create a sub-directory called 0001_any_443_yamato.internal.

cd /etc/apache2/sites
sudo mkdir 0001_any_443_yamato.internal

Now, edit 0001_any_443_yamato.internal.conf using your favourite command-line editor.

sudo vi 0001_any_443_yamato.internal.conf

In the file, find the line:

LogLevel warn

Above this line put:

Include “/etc/apache2/sites/0001_any_443_yamato.internal/*.conf”

Replacing the name of the server with the name of your server.

Now, go to the directory you created, and create a new file called httpd_svn.conf.

cd /etc/apache2/sites/0001_any_443_yamato.internal
sudo vi httpd_svn.conf

In this file, type the following

<Location “/svn”>
DAV svn
SVNParentPath /Library/Subversion/Repositories
</Location>

and save your changes.

Back to Server Admin

Restart the web server, by clicking Stop Web and then Start Web.

Almost done

Now you just need to add a new project. You’ll need to create the usual SVN directory structure for a project, and import the project with svn import. The URL for the projects repository, in my example, is https://yamato.internal/svn/projects. Authentication will use usernames and passwords of users in your Open Directory.

And that should be it. Now you should be able to add and remove people from the Subversion Realm at will, without having to mess with the configuration files. The general idea of putting extra configuration files in to a subdirectory makes extending Apache much easier while maintaining the use of Server Admin for day to day GUI tasks - I’ll show you how easy that is soon in another blog article on getting Trac up and running on Leopard Server.

Troubleshooting

At a later date we discovered that svn status -u didn’t work - giving an error. We found that we could only get this working by turning off the Forward Proxy we had configured under Web Settings in Server Admin. It is quite possible this could be fixed by adding an appropriate ProxyPass directive in httpd_svn.conf, but haven’t figured that out yet. If you do, please let me know.

Fairly unusual for such high profile rock legend to have a background in science - particularly physics. However, it does explain a lot about a song Brian penned in 1975.

The song ‘39 appeared on Queen’s 4th studio album “A Night At The Opera”. Many people don’t realise that the song, although sounding like a story about explorers finding new countries, is actually about space explorers and the “twin paradox” of special relativity. Here is an excerpt from the lyrics to ‘39:

In the year of ‘39 came a ship in from the blue
The volunteers came home that day
And they bring good news of a world so newly born
Though their hearts so heavily weigh
For the earth is old and grey, little darling we’ll away
But my love this cannot be
Oh so many years have gone though I’m older but a year
Your mother’s eyes from your eyes cry to me

Good for Brian in finishing his PhD, but I’m glad he left it until now. Queen wouldn’t have been the same without him. And after all, he’s only a physicist.

That watermark is so good, we need to take a close up look at it. And by close up, I mean let’s look at this thing as it would appear on your reasonable sized TV screen.

You’ve gotta love that!

What an absolute typographical nightmare. The H is cut off, but the D isn’t, so the whole circle-thing is lopsided. In fact, the first vertical stroke of the H appears to be longer than the second, though it might just be an illusion brought on by having the H cut off in that way. Spacing is inconsistent between elements, and the font itself is so vastly different from the font used on the 9 that it sticks out like dog’s balls. The watermark now takes up even more space, and of course is still in the 4:3 space.

Why would Channel 9 do this? Well, clearly they haven’t the creativity to come up with something unique, so they’ve copied the 7 HD watermark. But in Microsoft style, they’ve changed it slightly to try not to look like they’ve copied it (”Let’s use a circle instead of a square!”) and ended up with something cheap and nasty.

Channel 9 - laughing-stock of the industry.

It was all very strange. In past years the Logies have been full of hype, international guests, and an ever increasing number of hosts - reaching an incredible (and ridiculous) 5 in 2006. This year, there were no hosts at all. They maintained last years back stage team (Hamish and Andy), but that was it. Just a voice over guy, and people presenting awards.

Cost Cutting?

Perhaps. Ironically, the cost cutting actually fixed one of my biggest complaints about the Logies each year - the parade of international guests that sycophantic local TV celebrities fawn over. This year we had no international celebrities up on stage! Absolutely fantastic. If only this was done for the right reasons - it seems more likely it was done to save money, or there were no big US movies about to be released here so no Hollywood stars out here peddling their wares.

So, celebrations are in order. It really is just a shame that the whole affair was so incredibly boring. The show needed Bert as host - I almost fell asleep at times.

Highlights

Really, there were only two highlights.

The legendary Garry McDonald presented one award. His introductory speech was a ripper, but was met with uneasy laughter and the distant sound of crickets:

You know, recently audiences have been spoilt for comedy in this country, with such a diverse variety of programming culminating in nominations going to each free-to-air network.

Well except Channel 9.

Which is shame considering their programming schedule this year actually delivered the most laughs.

Ironical isn’t it, in the year that David Leckie discovered that he might never be able to give the finger again Channel 9 just keep giving him reasons to.

Sounds like Garry hates Channel 9 as much as the rest of us do.

However, best quote of the night goes to my favourite Australian comedian Shaun Micallef who started his award presentation with the following gem:

50 years ago, television was like a nymphomaniac clairvoyant…
a medium you turned on with a knob.

Comedy Gold.

The rest of the night was a snorefest.

The following is a possibly solution to get Spotlight working if you are having this issue¹.

1. Login in to your server as an administrator.
2. Open the Terminal application (in your /Applications/Utilities folder)
3. Type the following exactly as written in to the Terminal:
   
   

   sudo rm /.metadata_never_index

   It will ask you for your password. You may get a “file not found” error, as the file has only been reported as being there for some users. Regardless, move to step 4.

4. Type the following in to the Terminal:
   
   

   sudo mdutil -i on /

Spotlight in the right corner of the menu of your server login should indicate it is indexing, and before long will start working.

1. This post is based on a discussion in Apple Discussions, and fixed the problem we had been having with out server.

When it comes to editing these shared contacts, things are a little less straightforward. Leopard comes with an application called “Directory”, that allows you add/delete and edit shared contacts. The trouble is, in doing this, it uses non-standard LDAP attributes (not that there is a “standard” as such, but the ones they use aren’t even used by their own Address Book application). So it is best you just ignore this feature of Directory until Apple fix it - (I’ve logged it with Apple - radar bug report number 5801945).

If you are on a Mac, your best bet is to create your shared contact in Address Book, and then drag the entry to Directory. This works great, except that “notes” are lost. - I’ve logged this as a bug with Apple (radar bug report number 5818049)

If you aren’t on a Mac, or you don’t like the Address Book hack to get around Directory issues, you need another tool to edit the shared contacts. I have found very few tools that could authenticate with a default Open Directory set up - mainly because the client needs to be able to authenticate with SASL, and handle CRAM-MD5 challenge responses.

The one LDAP editor I found that works is Apache Directory Studio.

Once installed, the settings are basically (assuming your Leopard server has domain “yamato.internal“):

Network Parameter
Hostname: yamato.internal
Port: 389
Encryption: [No encryption or SSL]

Authentication
Authentication Method: CRAM-MD5 (SASL)
Bind DN or User: [Your OD username]
Bind Password: [Your OD password]

Browser Options
Base DN: cn=people,dc=yamato,dc=internal

Leave all other entries as defaults.

Once setup, you can connect and browse to entries. You can edit the entries and save them as required.

This means you can, for example, easily edit an existing shared contact. You could even use it as a crude way to enter shared contacts, by creating a template entry, and using that for new entries. Not pretty, but at least will give you correct attributes for LDAP Address Book searches.

There are better LDAP based address books with editing capabilities on the net, but I couldn’t find any that could authenticate with Open Directory beyond the one mentioned here. If you find any, leave me a note in the comments.

Suppose, for example, you are using Thunderbird. For the example, assume your Leopard server has domain name “yamato.internal“. Then you enter the following in the Thunderbird Address Book when creating a new LDAP server entry:

Hostname: yamato.internal
Base DN: cn=people,dc=yamato,dc=internal
Port Number: 389
BindDN: [Leave blank]

This will allow you to search for “people” - i.e. shared contacts entered through Apple’s Directory application in Leopard or some other application. Keep in mind there are huge bugs in the Directory application that ruin this bit - you’ll need to drag people from your local Address Book to Directory to ensure the shared contact works with LDAP search rather than edit them in the Directory application itself, or you may want to enter “people” using some other third party tool (see next blog article I’m writing).

If you want to search on users, change the cn=people to cn=users.

Basically, DirectoryService is crashing on users of Leopard Server. This in itself isn’t a big problem - Leopard Server restarts DirectoryService if it fails. The problem is with AppleFileServer. AppleFileServer seems to lose the ability to authenticate users with the new instance of DirectoryService. This means Time Machine backups stop working, and users can’t mount the server using AFP.

Currently, as of 10.5.2, this has still not been fixed. Apple have apparently given users suggestions such as sending a HUP signal to AppleFileServer at regular intervals to get things back on track, but in my limited testing, this doesn’t work - leaving the user with the ability to only mount certain shares.

The only reliable solution I’ve found is to restart AFP. Obviously we don’t want to do that all the time - it should only be done when DirectoryService crashes. To do this, I’ve built the following launchd daemon. Basically, it works as follows:

The daemon watches the /Library/Logs/Crashes directory, and wait until a crash occurs. When it does, it runs a script that checks to see if the crash was a DirectoryService crash, moves these crash files away in to a sub-directory, and restarts AFP.

Not a great solution, as if someone is connected at the time, they get booted and have to remount. I’m experimenting with other fixes people have listed that don’t require AFP to be restarted, but so far I’ve found they don’t seem to work consistently.

You can download the daemon here.

Once downloaded, uncompress the file (double click in Finder). Safari may unzip it automatically for you.

From a Terminal, cd to the unzipped folder (if downloaded from Safari, by default it will be in ~/Downloads).

cd ~/Downloads/restartafp

Now, type the following. Note that you need to be logged in as an administrator, and you will be asked for the administrator password in order to do the first operation.

sudo mkdir \
/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/DirectoryService
sudo cp com.curmi.restartafp.plist \
/Library/LaunchDaemons/
sudo cp restartafpondscrash.sh \
/usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod a+x \
/usr/local/bin/restartafpondscrash.sh
sudo launchctl load \
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.curmi.restartafp.plist


To test this is working, you can do the following, and check /var/logs/system.log to see if it mentions the restart.

sudo touch \
/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/DirectoryService_trigger.crash


If for some reason you want to uninstall, run the following commands from the Terminal.

sudo launchctl unload \
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.curmi.restartafp.plist
sudo rm \
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.curmi.restartafp.plist
sudo rm /usr/local/bin/restartafpondscrash.sh
sudo mv \
/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/DirectoryService/* \
/Library/Logs/CrashReporter
sudo rmdir \
/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/DirectoryService


I hope this is useful to others out there. I’ve filed this bug with apple (radar bug report number 5836741), and I hope Apple fixes it soon.

The fix I’m currently trialling was listed here, and suggests that rather than doing:

serveradmin stop afp
serveradmin start afp


in the script, we do:

serveradmin settings afp:authenticationMode = "standard"
serveradmin settings afp:authenticationMode = "standard_and_kerberos"

I’ve tested this and it didn’t seem to work, but I’ll try it again just in case. I’m sure DirectoryService will crash on us sometime tomorrow to confirm if the fix works or not.

Much as I feel sorry for the US having such ugly money (especially given how beautiful and practical Australian plastic notes are), I would have thought http://getreligionoffourmoney.com (not a real link) would have been a little more important than worrying about a purple 5. In fact, it looks like I’m not alone in that thought after all.

Once you have true separation of church and state, you can have a go at making your money look good. God knows it needs it.

“Frickin’ Australian interfering in US affairs!”. Yeah, well now you know how the rest of the world feels. Suck it up. :-)

Anyway, I of course flew here - a boat trip would be a little slow, and I get sea sick. That meant travelling on a plane. And I hate plane travel more than I hate going to the cinema.

First, you are stuck for hours (in this case 10 hours) with little room to move. You breathe the same recycled air as everyone else - and all around you you can hear people sneezing and coughing. Little snot nosed kids run up and down, the guy in front of you keeps pushing his seat so far back that the tiny 4:3 screen they show crap movies on is so close to your face that you can’t actually focus on the movie without getting a headache, the headphones are made to be uncomfortable and have non-standard connectors so you can’t easily plug in your own, food comes out infrequently, is so awful that you end up picking at it and leaving the rest, and then you are left with the tray and rubbish sitting on your lap for a good hour before they bother to collect it, the seats are too uncomfortable to sleep in, and anyway, the noise of all the people and engines would pretty much put a stop to that.

And then you have the toilets. Tiny little boxes that you line up to use, and inside you find your feet swimming in piss. You can almost see the germs flying around you as you stand or sit trapped in that little box.

Which brings me to the title of this article. The Mile High Club.

Who the hell is going to have sex in a plane’s toilet? First, there is hardly enough room for one. And then there is the sticky floor, the smell of urine and faeces, and those germs. Those germs!

The fact that there are people who would actually consider this is exactly why I hate shaking hands with people. And exactly why I love the Japanese - they bow when you meet them, they don’t shake your hand. I’ve got to move here permanently.

Here is the watermark as I discussed some time back:

And here it is now:

So, the ABC “listened” to the complaints. They made it a little bit smaller, and a little bit more translucent.

And apparently everyone is now happy. “The ABC care about us”. “The ABC listened”.

No. The ABC served everyone a shit sandwich. And when there were complaints, they put some sugar on it. And people ate it and thanked them.

People today are conditioned to accept crap. Whether it’s the software they use, the cinemas they sit in, or the TV stations they watch. Near enough is good enough.

Where are the people questioning why we need this watermark at all? Or why it has to be so large? Or why it has to be in the 4:3 region of wide screen broadcasts?

And more importantly, how could anyone in charge of such an organisation have allowed the first version of the watermark to be released - regardless of whether they later “fixed it”?

The people of Australia own the ABC. We pay for it in taxes. We should be demanding the removal of this watermark from our screens - not celebrating that they reduced it in size! That’s not a victory!

I hope you are enjoying that sandwich.

Anyway, great movie. Worth watching just to see the last 10 minutes actually. But this isn’t a review.

The movie is very very long. About an hour in to it, the people 2 seats away from me start to get bored - low attention span I suspect. So they begin to chat. Quietly, but just enough whispering and giggling to get on my nerves and make me remember exactly why I hate going to the movies.

This goes on for a good half hour, and I’m starting to get really pissed. I keep hoping they’ll stop and get back in to the movie, but it doesn’t look like it. I’m really angry. So I turn and I say “Mate! If you don’t shut up - there will be blood!”.

Ok - I didn’t. I wanted to say that. But instead I said “Guys, can you please stop talking?”. And to their credit they did for the rest of the movie.

Anyway, the whole movie experience just sucks. Every time I go it sucks. Mobile phones go off. People chat. There is always some dude with bad B.O. that keeps wafting in my direction. People come in late and ruin the start. People open their chips and rustle the wrappers. Phone lights flash as someone sends an SMS. People sneeze and cough around you. How is this enjoyable?

“But you have to see it on the big screen”. Yeah, that’s just great. So you sit amongst the human filth and look up at a big screen. A screen that more often than not has some flaw in it that your eye keeps being drawn to. The one I was in Saturday is a brand new Hoyts cinema (Melbourne Central), and either the screen had a vertical seam half way across, or there was a fault in the entire copy of the movie they were showing.

Like everything today, people are all too willing to accept “near enough” and will put up with stuff like this. Get the movie on Blu-ray or DVD and watch it at home. You’ll thank me later.

Well, Channel Nine are at it again (yes, I’m a bit late on this - they changed it a week or so ago, but I got a bit busy, and then the ABC thing came up).

Here’s Channel Nine’s new HD wartermark in action.

That’s quite the improvement over the previous attempt, no? Let’s see them side by side.

So, what’s the problem? It’s smaller. Are you never satisfied Jamie?

Well, check out the location of the new Nine HD logo. See the wide gap to the right of the logo? The watermark is actually positioned for a 4:3 picture.

I can tell you right now Channel Nine, no one is watching Nine HD in 4:3. No one.

You stupid, stupid people. Stop messing with the picture! We don’t need to continually see what station we are watching - that is what the ‘info’ button on a digital set top box remote reveals when required. Do you not understand technology? Your logo doesn’t stop people copying your shows and putting them on BitTorrent. All it does is annoy everyone who watches your shows. You really don’t get the internet either. No wonder your ratings continue to plummet.

Here’s a collection of all the watermarks, except SBS - that’s another rant yet to come. I guess the only reason I haven’t ripped in to 7 HD is that they’ve at least stuck with their first attempt (annoying as it is). Keep in mind that 3 of these watermarks are in a 4:3 frame, 1 is too far out from the corner, and all are annoying as hell!