Udo's Techblog

I can't believe I missed this for so long, but I just learned that Brian Oscar Grimm, who together with Tanja Andrews created freshtopia.net, passed away this month due to brain cancer. I only met Oscar and Tanja once, at Scobleizer's mom's home in Montana, but was deeply impressed with their warmth, creativity and good humor. They were so very very nice, people that make you feel comfortable instantly even if you just met. I am so sorry. When someone so young and creative leaves this early, the sense of loss is overwhelming. You and your work won't be forgotten, Oscar. Goodbye.

This is very basic, but when I wrote this entry about being unable to reformat a new USB drive, it reminded me of an episode that happened as I was waiting at the Saturn Electro service desk because my printer had crapped out on me. As the unfriendly support guy was busy in the back with my printer (making up excuses why I couldn't return it), a woman came to the counter with her MacBook and a USB drive she just bought. We were bored, so we started chatting about her problem. Turns out, she couldn't copy folders from her laptop's drive to the USB disk - can you guess why?

Some USB drives are factory-formatted with NTFS, the Windows NT filesystem. By default, a Mac can read the disk just fine, but it can't write any data to it. A little pen icon with a strike through it indicates this read-only state on the Finder window's footer bar.

What you need to do is re-formatting the USB disk with a Mac-compatible filesystem. Don't be scared, open Disk Utility, click on the USB disk > select the Erase tab > select "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" > click "Apply" to format (at which point any data currently on the disk will of course be erased).

All done!

Oh, and if it doesn't work, look at this here.

When you get a new USB drive, it's usually formatted with FAT (the Windows compatibility filesystem). As long as it's not NTFS (the Windows journaled filesystem), you can usually read from and write to the drive without problems when you hook it up to a Mac. However, if you don't need Windows compatibility, it's a good idea to format the drive using the native OS X filesystem. It offers more features, better Mac compatibility and journaling to make your data safer.

Normally, you can easily re-format any drive on the Mac by opening Disk Utility, selecting the disk in question and choose erase with the "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" option. Sometimes, this returns a "Volume Erase Failed: The underlying task reported failure on exit" message. This is a horrible unixism, because Disk Utility obviously called a command-line tool that exited with some cryptic error message so it doesn't know what to do.

First of all, there is most likely nothing wrong with your new USB disk, don't listen to the support forums. This is the thing: when your USB drive was factory-formatted, they partitioned it to be as compatible with Windows PCs as possible, so they gave it a partition setup called "Master Boot Record". And for some disk sizes, you can't put a Mac OS partition on top of that. So all you gotta do is change the partition scheme of the drive.

Go open Disk Utility, select the USB drive. Make sure not to click on the underlying partition, but on the actual disk drive entry above it. You can find it easily, because it's not only labeled with the whole disk size, but also identifies the manufacturer of the device and its model name. After clicking on the device, select the "Partition" tab > click on the "Volume Scheme" dropdown menu > select "1 Partition" > click on the "Options" button.

Then, a dialog window appears where you can select the partition scheme. It's probably marked "Master Boot Record". Go ahead and select the "GUID Partition Table" (or "Apple Partition Map" if you want to boot off the disk with a legacy PowerPC-based Mac). Click "OK" to close the dialog and then click the "Apply" button to re-format the drive. Should work like a charm!

It just thought I'd leave this here for you, it's delicious. From TFA:

BARTLET: GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that's what they are. Sarah Palin didn't say "thanks but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said "Thanks." You were raised by a single mother on food stamps - where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I'd ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you're at it, I want the word "patriot" back.

McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn't know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can't do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie - the truth isn't their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they've earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It's not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It's not bad enough she's forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It's not enough that a woman shouldn't have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist's baby too? I don't know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she's got the qualifications of one. And you're worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

Hey, it seems the time is almost right for a few of those silly ideas I was having back in the day (entries 9, 10, 18, 21, 27, and so on) - only they're calling it persistence instead:

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/08/interview_red_5s_paperrpg_duo.php :-)

When you decide to use FileVault to protect your personal stuff on a Mac (and you should), you are effectively using an encrypted disk image as storage for your home folder. Now, when you delete something in there, the space for it on the hard drive isn't restored immediately. Instead, when you sign off later, OS X compacts and reclaims the space.

Many people use disk images not only implicitly with FileVault, but create them to protect content on other drives, such as USB disks or Flash memory sticks. The problem here is, disk space never seems to come back after you delete something on there, no matter what you do. This is because OS X designers really screwed up usability when it comes to actually working with disk images: cleanup doesn't happen when you unmount the image, nor is there a menu option to reclaim lost space.

This means, you have to use the command line to compact disk images manually. Open a terminal window and type something like this, where "SomeUSBDrive" is the name of the disk or directory where your space-wasting image is located and "NameOfTheImage.sparsebundle" is, well, the image itself:

cd /Volumes/SomeUSBDrive
hdiutil compact NameOfTheImage.sparsebundle

If the image is encrypted, you'll be prompted to enter the password for it. Compacting images is really fast if you're using sparse bundles, but if you're not: this might take a while.

This has been all over Slashdot, but here I go anyway:

It would appear that the US President has been briefed by Phoenix scientists about the discovery of something more "provocative" than the discovery of water existing on the Martian surface.

Whatever it this "big find" is, you can be reasonably sure that it's NOT gonna surprise anybody in the scientific community. Remember how the water discovery got so hyped up by the media, it was somehow implied that we didn't already have pretty compelling evidence for its existence for a long time now?

I guess the really sad thing here is that not only is NASA keeping measurement data under wraps from the public (who by the way paid for the mission), it is also going to censor and modify findings to aim for compliance with the views of the religious committee the White House has appointed to stifle science and education:

They have also made the decision to discuss the results with the Bush Administration's Presidential Science Advisor's office before a press conference between mid-August and early September.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that we're never going to be able to trust anything that comes out of what is supposed to be a mission of discovery for the benefit of the whole world. Which is a damn shame. Not only did we as a civilization mess up our space exploration capability beyond recognition, but the few measurements that we actually get from outside of this world are sanitized and "corrected" for political and religious conformity.

From the quote-out-of-context department comes this nugget, uttered by the head of the IOC press commission Kevan Gosper:

"We have always had an understanding, and we haven't necessarily talked about it, that any sovereign government will block pornographic sites and what they might consider subversive, or sites which are contrary to the national interest."

On the other side, I can now understand why the IOC had no problems whatsoever when it came to selecting China as a host for the Olympics despite everything that's going on there. People like Naomi Wolf would say that we're in the process of closing down our democracies anyway so I guess in time there probably won't be much difference between a "free" country and an authoritarian one whatsoever. I think she has a point there.

So I went to the T-Com store this morning...

Me: "Uh... I'm thinking about buying an iPhone!"
T-Com guy: "Well... they're out of stock."
Me: "So, any idea when they could become available again?"
T-Com guy, shaking head emphatically "God, no. It could be a looooong time." Then, leaning closer: "We might never get them at all!"
Me: "Hm, riiight... I'll come back in a few weeks, then?"
T-Com guy: "Please don't. Why do you want one, anyway?"
Me: "Well, it's got good web connectivity, at a flat rate fee, and GPS!"
T-Com guy: "It sucks! The GPS doesn't even work!"
Me: "It... doesn't?"
T-Com guy: "No it sucks! Everybody thinks iPhones are so cool..."
Me: "Well, but I'd like one!"
T-Com guy: "What exactly do you need GPS for, anyway? I'll give you a 2G for the same price! It's way better!"
Me: "Dude, that's, like, my iPod Touch with crappy voice capability."
T-Com guy, hypnotically: "You don't need the 3G, the 2G is. even. better. The new one sucks."
Me: "Well thanks, I think I'll stay with my old carrier and buy a nice Nokia, then."
T-Com guy, beaming joyfully: "That idea sounds great, too."

[this is somewhat explicit]

The good news: Joss Whedon's long-awaited Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is now online. And I must say, when I saw this reviled Hulu icon in there I was convinced it wouldn't even play (since they don't offer content for un-american people). Well, there's a suprise: turns out, they'll let Dr. Horrible sing in other countries.

But just for the weekend. After that: no more. But, you can buy it on iTunes! There is a big sticker on the site, taking you right to the iTunes Music Store.

This is, of course, where the bad news starts: you see, iTunes has a strong regional commitment policy. This ensures, for example, that us Germans can only consume German content (by the way: we translate every single second of content that comes out of other countries first - a painful and quality-destroying process that often takes years). So I can't give you my money, Joss, because obviously you don't want it. You'd rather I wait for the crappy German version which will never come out since this is a niche product. But at least you, Apple and the fucking MPAA can rest assured that American content gets only to Americans and the rest of the world stays in their own little corners. Well done.



Oh, and by the way, look at that iTunes window telling me politely to fuck off and die: it's in German! My OS X is set to English. Why is my iTunes speaking to me in German then? Or why is every single game I order on Steam in German, even though I specifically set it to deliver everything in English? Why does Google insist on giving me their German site even though my browser and OS are both set to English? Stop prescribing content that you think is "better suited" for me and fucking start giving me what I requested!

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Update: It's once again available (internationally) on Hulu: You can watch Dr Horrible?s Sing Along Blog online once again for free via Hulu. This IS still available to those who are outside the USA. Thanks, Joss, it's appreciated! :-)