Whistling in the Dark

A couple of days ago Christian Martick released a new version of his wonderful Mac Jaiku client Juhu. There was a small problem though; he compiled it as an Intel only app. It was a mistake and he plans on recompiling and rereleasing it but until then me, and anyone else with a PPC Mac was out of luck.

Thankfully Christian has licensed Juhu under the MIT license and released the source code so I was able to recompile it as a universal binary. If you’re running an Intel Mac then just use the official version. If you’re on a PPC mac you can either wait for Christian to get a chance to fix the official version or download my build here. I changed absolutely nothing other than the build options. Please don’t ask me to fix anything as I’m not a programmer, just a bored geek who can fumble his way around xcode. Also, if there are bugs in this build please don’t bug Christian about them because this isn’t his offical build.

Update: Christian has released 0.9.9 which fixes the PPC bug as well as a Growl bug.

When I got my MacBook a couple of years ago I got the white one because it was cheaper (the famous Apple black-tax). Big mistake. Not only does the white plastic scratch easily but unless you use it wearing a bunny suit in a clean room it gets dirty real quick. So I either have to clean it at least weekly or I look like a complete slob.

I wish Apple didn’t make you pay for the black finish but I’m definitely paying the premium next time.

Every April my .Mac account comes do and every year I try like mad to find a way not to have to resubscribe. .Mac is Apple’s service that offers email, web space, remote storage, remote desktop, and calendar, todo, address book, mail syncing between Macs. Syncing is the only part I really use and it’s indispensable. The question I struggle with every year is if it’s $79 indispensable (through Amazon, $99 from Apple). On one hand that’s a real chunk of change to just sync. On the other hand I have yet to find something that works as painlessly. Rsyc gets confused by binary files and manually trying to merge the files is a quick path to a drinking problem. I’m still looking for a solution but I get the feeling that I’ll once again be gritting my teeth and rolling pennies to re-up again this year.

Ars Technica has posted a great, easy to understand article on filesystems today.

Some day I’ll create a page with details for all the systems. Until then this will do

Now that I’ve moved muad-dib.us over to Go Daddy I’ve been thinking of what to do with my home server (which used to host my domain). I’ve decided to turn it into a NAS as well as a development/play box for things that I’d eventually like to add to this site. I had been planning to upgrade the hardware sometime soonish anyway so I just need to change the required specs.

• CPU/Motherboard: Before I wanted a fast CPU to handle a ton of SQL queries without breaking a sweat but is not super important any more. Now the important thing will be a lot of SATA connectors and possibly 1000baseT networking (could be added via PCIe card)
• RAM: 2GB. It’s so cheap that it just makes sense. I could add more but I’m not sure it would be needed.
• Hard Drives: I’m going to want at very least 1TB of space (if not much more) in a RAID5 set up. Hardware RAID would be preferable but good RAID cards that work with Linux (or *BSD, I’m not married into using Linux) are very expensive so I’ll probably go with softraid (lvm2 or whatever *BSD uses).
• Case: Prettiness is not important but cooling and space are.
• Backup: Here’s the hard part. How the hell do you back up that much data without going broke? An extra set of drives that are rsynced over nightly? I know I’ll have RAID5 but that is not a back up. It’s times like this that I miss when you could back up a whole system onto CD.
• Switches: Right now my network is 100baseT. Because the wiring itself is CAT5e it should handle gigabit speeds. I just need to swap the switches out.