Finder Hangs after installing Leopard on my Mac Mini

I installed Leopard on my G4 Mac Mini from a Family Pac install. Upon reboot, the Dock appears but I have no icons on my desktop and no menubar on top. The “beach ball of death” spins while the mouse is over the desktop. This page suggested:
sudo mv “/Library/Application Support/DivXNetworks” “/Library/Application Support/DivXNetworks.prev”
and that did the trick. Sweet!

I found the above page as a link on this page, which also suggested deleting “com.apple.finder.plist”. I didn’t actually try this solution because the above worked.

I hate ID3 tags

I still have a good number of songs in my music collection that have poor or missing ID3 tages. I thought that, with 2008 nearing and all, perhaps somebody had finally made some progress on a tool for automatically fixing this stuff up. I tried iEatBrainz and MusicBrainz Picard and didn’t get very far with either one. I also found id3tool which is a very handy command line utility, for those who are familiar with sed, awk, and the like.

I learned about id3tool from this page. It includes some nice example shell scripts and points out that you need to select the songs you modified and choose “Get Info” to force iTunes to re-scan the ID3 tags of the selected songs.

Cold Weather Cycling Clothes

Riding on the road (or even in the woods) in the winter can be cold! This Christmas I got a pair of Pearl Izumi Slice ThermaFleece Cycling Bib Tights (size L), and they strike a powerful blow against the sinister forces of cold. I posted this here to remind myself in case I want to order another pair.

svn+ssh://hostname/absolute/path/to/repo

So I’ve been using two different SVN repositories at school that were setup years ago, when I wasn’t really familiar with SVN. Today I decided to create a repository on one of my own servers for some personal files, and I don’t want the headache of making sure the installation of Apache is secure and up-to-date. I learned about the existence of svn+ssh:// as an access mechanism. It does exactly what you might expect, tunneling svn traffic over an SSH connection. The backend that makes this work is a program called svnserve that is installed by default with the subversion package, at least on Debian. This page of the SVN Book contained this information.

Now, I run SSH on a non-standard port. This too can be handled, by editing your ~/.subversion/config file and adding an entry to the [tunnels] section. For example:

[tunnels]
jonssh = $SVN_SSH ssh -p 12345

Now, I can checkout my repository with:

svn co svn+jonssh://myserver.com./full/path/to/repo

Lovely. Don’t forget to edit that config file, or the non-standard port will break things.

nmap

By default nmap does not scan all ports, it only scans up to port 1024. For a more satisfying scan:

nmap -p T:1- hostname

This tells nmap to start with TCP port 1 and go up.

Spokes come in a lot of sizes

I have trouble keeping track and measurements are often subject to error.

The Shimano hub on my singlespeed uses 260mm spokes on the rear wheel drive side.

The rear hub on the green specialized also uses 260mm spokes on the rear wheel drive side.

Leopard’s Dock is ugly

I don’t like the “glass” feature of the Dock in Leopard (OS X 10.5). The internet is full of people suggesting the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

Worked for me.