Monthly Archives: June 2010

Marmaduke Killers

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Kelson

Movie marquee spotted a couple of weeks ago:

Quick, someone call the ASPCA!

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Southern Lights…from SPAAACE!

Posted on June 20, 2010 by Kelson

Check this out:

It’s the aurora australis, or southern lights, seen from above! It was taken May 29, 2010 from the International Space Station. Bad Astronomy talks about what causes aurorae in the blog post where I found the picture.

Seriously: The aurora. From space. How cool is that?

Posted in Space | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Mac OS X Finder Deleting Files on a Linux Share (Solved)

Posted on June 20, 2010 by Kelson

Last week I connected to my Linux desktop from my Mac laptop, and Finder wouldn’t let me copy files over to the Linux box. Even stranger, it would delete the original file on the share after stating that it didn’t have permission to access it!

The error message it kept popping up was:

The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items.

So it didn’t have permission to access or save the items, but it had permission to delete them? Clearly the error message wasn’t telling the whole story!

Even stranger: if I opened a file with an application like TextWrangler or NeoOffice, they had no problem saving it! It was only Finder that had the problem!

Now, I’ve successfully transferred files back and forth between these computers many times before, but I had changed two things recently:

  • Upgraded the Linux box to Fedora 13.
  • Installed the Mac OS X 10.6.4 update to Snow Leopard.

I didn’t have much luck searching online, maybe because I was looking for the wrong terms. The closest I came up with were discussions like this one, but they all involved a server using netatalk or other AFP file sharing implementations. I’ve been using samba (Windows-Style SMB shares) on the Linux box ever since I had some problems with Netatalk and decided that since the Mac would connect via Samba, I wouldn’t worry about it.

I idly posted the problem on Twitter. My brother replied that he’d run into the same problem (on Ubuntu, IIRC), and suggested turning off Unix extensions in Samba. That meant opening up /etc/samba/smb.conf on the Linux box and adding the following line to the “Filesystem Options” section:

unix extensions = no

I restarted Samba on the Linux box, and that was it. The Mac was able to copy files over without any errors!

I hope this post helps someone else solve the same problem.

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Landscape Under Renovation

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Kelson


Landscape Renovation, originally uploaded by Kelson.

Irvine is dreadfully afraid you might think the dead grass is the result of poor maintenance.

Apparently, they’re also concerned that the old Grass Under Renovation signs might not be inclusive enough.

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New Spring Graphic Novel in January (Wheel of Time)

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Kelson

Spotted on the Dynamite forums: Amazon has New Spring: The Graphic Novel available for preorder, with a release date of January 18, 2011.

They’re using the cover from the prose novel in the listing, which I assume means Tor hasn’t submitted a cover yet. I’d say the cover from issue #1 of the comic book (shown here) would work just fine.

It’s taken a long time (and three publishers) to complete this adaptation of the Wheel of Time prequel, even though it only covered eight standard-sized comic books. (Check out the New Spring-tagged posts here for the whole story.) I’m sure Tor Publishing was frustrated, since they couldn’t actually release the collection until the individual chapters were complete, and Robert Jordan was extremely frustrated with the situation.

The same studio has also started adapting the main series. The third issue of Eye of the World arrived in stores earlier this week. According to this post, the original plan was for Eye of the World to cover roughly 36 issues, to be collected in six volumes. Just for book one.

Dynamite has been good at keeping the comics on schedule since they relaunched a few months ago, but at that pace, even if they never miss a month, it’ll take 42 years to adapt the whole series!

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Election/Patch Day

Posted on June 13, 2010 by Kelson

My calendar lists last Tuesday as “Election Patch Day.” (We had a state primary election, which fell on Microsoft’s second-Tuesday-of-the month schedule for releasing software updates.)

I guess you could consider elections to be patches keeping the government up to date.

Edit: On the other hand, there are usually two or more competing “patches” that disagree on how to fix the problems, and even what needs to be fixed.

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Pop Stars as Fish

Posted on June 11, 2010 by Kelson

Last night I noticed @BadAstronomer posting ideas for a Twitter meme, #fishpopstars. It’s pretty much what you’d expect: take a singer or band name and make a pun with the name of a fish.

Katie and I came up with these:

  • Death Crab for Cutie
  • Chum-bawamba
  • Flounders of Wayne
  • Vienna Tang
  • Betta than Ezra
  • Dace of Base (or Ace of Bass)

Some favorites from the event:

  • beano76: Sushi and the Banshees
  • shinkaide: Squid Vicious
  • MisterElGuapo: No Trout
  • ebrown2112: Fleetwood Mackerel
  • Caissie: Sharkira
  • dominichamon: Kylie Minnow
  • ethanwc: Crash Test Guppies
  • ThisModernDeath: Ling Cod Park
  • earlkabong: Herman’s Hermit Crabs
  • znmeb: Pike and Tuna Turner
  • AndyJukes: Smelton John
  • KenPlume: Mackerel Jackson
  • notgiamatti: Jefferson Starfish

It looks like it’s still going on if you’re in the mood for fish puns.

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National Park Service vs. Robots From Space

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Kelson

If you went out to the movies in the US during 2009, there’s a good chance you saw this turn-off-your-phone PSA in which a movie about “robots from space” tries to negotiate blowing up Mount Rushmore.

In a case of life imitating art, the National Park Service is currently battling Transformers 3 — a movie about robots from space — over just what they can and can’t do with a national monument!

Okay, you can’t blow up a national monument, but…

Bill Line, Park Service spokesman, said the producers “have asked to do some things that simply are not done on the National Mall,” among them staging a “car race” along the Mall’s gravel paths and flooding it with artificial light in order to shoot at night.

Apparently it’s not unique to Transformers 3, but a fairly frequent battle between the park service and film producers, which means Sprint’s video isn’t just a funny story, but a bit of an in-joke to those familiar with the industry.

Hmm, any chance the new movie will have a chorus singing “Robots from space!” in the background?

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Dreamwidth and Debian

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Kelson

Whenever I visit a Dreamwidth journal and leave it open in a tab, I always find myself wondering why I was looking at the Debian GNU/Linux website. For possibly obvious reasons:

I can’t imagine how I keep mixing up a dark red 1½-turn counterclockwise spiral with a dark red 1½-turn clockwise spiral! :-D

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Why Link Length Matters

Posted on June 8, 2010 by Kelson

Twitter writes that link length shouldn’t matter, but the zillions of URL shortening services out there show that, for now, it does.

But why?

There are two main reasons to shorten* a link:

  • There’s a technical limit, such as SMS message length or email line width.
  • You expect people to manually enter the URL.

Right now, with Twitter messages limited to 140 characters and links forced to share that space with the rest of the post, URL shorteners are critical. But they’re working on a plan to accept longer URLs, and specifically shorten them for SMS messages. The full link will be available on the Twitter website, desktop clients, and other platforms that don’t have that hard and fast limit.

That will cut down on the demand for shorteners, but they’ll still be useful.

For one thing, there are other microblogging platforms out there like StatusNet.

For another, there’s email.

IIRC, the first URL shorteners launched because email programs often break up really long lines, including really long URLs. In plain-text messages, that leaves links not just unclickable, but inconvenient even to copy and paste, because you have to copy each line separately and paste them together. This will continue to be an issue as long as people continue to put visible URLs in email.

And then there’s the human factor. It might not be easy to remember http://is.gd/cGE8V, but it certainly takes a lot less time to write it on a scrap of paper than http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/07/hard-to-port-eject-goose-eject/.

Which of those URLs would you rather type on your keyboard? Or worse, on your mobile phone?

*In this case, I mean making it really short and cryptic. There are plenty of reasons to keep links readable and sort of short.

Posted in Computers/Internet | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment