Engineering Manager | Trail Runner | Stockholm, Sweden

Wonderwall

Komolyan, nem tudom mi történt a Hankyu Oasis pénztárosaival.

Ma a leányzó vagy fél percig tágra nyílt szemekkel bámult rám mozdulatlanul. Jelét sem adta, hogy a közeljövőben a kosárhoz nyúlna. Aztán mint aki álomból ébred egyszer csak nekilátott a munkájának. Oké, tudom hogy lélegeztelállítóan sármos külsőmnek nehéz ellenállni, na de ennyire? :mrgreen:

Vagy két napja viccesebb volt. Azzal kezdte az ezúttal idősebb kasszásnő, hogy lendületből rávágott arra a kis tálcára amibe az aprót számoltam épp, mire a pénz szerteszét repült. Ezen annyira megijedt, hogy a szájához kapta a kezét, egyúttal rám borította a kosarat benne a másfél literes teával. De végig úgy viselkedett mint egy holdkóros amúgy…

Nem tudom mit szívnak, de én is kérek belőle. :mrgreen:

I've done this before...

I managed to import the songs properly to iTunes finally.

(For non-Hungarian speakers, the last post was about me being unable to change the ID3 info of a couple of songs in iTunes. I could rewrite the tags all right, it just got changed back whenever I restarted iTunes.)

Googling the problem revealed that apparently other people have encountered the same bug, but I couldn’t find any decent solution. So I just copied the songs to Linux, rewrote the ID3s in Audacious and imported them back. It worked.

But in order to do that I had to set up the NFS. And NFS requires that the uids of the users are the same on both machines so I had to change my uid on the MacBook. (Following this guide.)

(I could have sworn I wrote a blog post about this when I first did it. Couldn’t seem to find the post though.)

See how every problem generates a new one?

Anyway, I also managed to get my backup of the Documents folder restored from iDisk. (It’s basically some storage space on Apple’s servers that comes with the .Mac subscription.) I really don’t know what divine enlightenment possessed me at that moment, but I set up a daily backup for the documents on the Mac using the .Mac Backup 3 tool a while ago. Probably I just wanted to try the backup software…

The technology is the following: at the start it creates an archive then whenever a file is changed it creates a so-called increment file. This way only the changes are saved greatly reducing the disk space needed.

However possibly because of .Mac being unbearably slow the process of restoring from a backup takes ages. And Backup 3 isn’t really offering much feedback either, other than the rainbow cursor of death. I guess it has to check through every single increment file and reading those takes time. They could have put a progress bar there or something though, because it really looks like it just hung. For several minutes. And I mean several.

Then when it finally starts copying the files back the progress bar has the nasty habit of disappearing for - once again - extended periods of time.

I can’t complain though because it really did copy everything back.

However, the best part was when I removed the old backups from iDisk. Again, it worked without a glitch - took bloody ages of course - but it displayed something like this:

.Mac acting up
.Mac acting up

I'm not god but if I was I'd be an angry god

Azt magyarázza el nekem valaki, hogy az hogyan létezhet, hogy van egy album, és abból két szám ID3 infoját hiába írom át, ha fejreállok is visszaírja a régire az iTunes a következő indításnál. Nem, nem vagyok ideges…

pulvis sidereus

Ok, Neil innen rögtön a londoni bemutatóra utazott. Nade hogy otthon is előbb legyen Stardust, mint itt (mindig ez van ám)… teljes kulturális sivatag ez a hely, komolyan mondom.

Black Thursday in pictures

R.I.P. MacBook HDD (Thumbnail)

Featuring the dead drive on the left, above that the metal plate that holds the drive in with the nasty screws on it, the new drive on the right, the L-bracket and two screwdrivers. R.I.P. 80G of data. (Clicky for bigger.)

Black Thursday

Not quite the day I have imagined having.

I was peacefully reading Prophet Without Honor during a predictably boring kyogen when Preview froze, displaying the notorious cursor of rainbow death. That could have been a minor glitch, however soon the whole OS X followed. Now that was a first. Up until this morning I’ve always been able to just force quit any mischievous application. Not this time…

So I rebooted, or rather I tried to reboot, unsuccessfully. The MacBook never got past the grey boot screen, and the flashing folder with a question mark didn’t bode well either. Neither did the clearly audible click-click sound coming from the hard disk.

This is the moment when all your life data flashes through your mind.

I ran home, and tried to boot from the OS X installer DVD to no avail. I mean it booted up all right but the HDD wasn’t present. So I disassembled the Mac and with shaky hands I tried the drive in the desktop. Click-click. Detecting IDE drives… For minutes…

So much for the glory of Rome.

This is how I spent my afternoon looking for two items: 1) a replace drive 2) a Torx T8 screwdriver. Luckily Apple has a really generous policy about hard drives and memories: the user can replace either of them without losing warranty. Not that my warranty was still valid, but it also means both parts are easily accessible and user serviceable. They are behind the same L-shaped bracket I removed when I installed the extra memory from Crucial. Why the Torx then? Because the HDD is held by a flexible metallic plate that keeps the HDD in place and also protects its circuit-side. And this plate is held by four not-so-ordinary screws. Torx is basically a star with six arms, but try to explain that to a Japanese shop assistant. Well, after about twenty minutes of haggling they managed to find the right one, so it went rather better than I expected. It’s a nasty trick by Apple though, least I don’t think these screwdrivers are in abundance in a common household. Or maybe I’m wrong and they are popular over the New Continent. (If anyone’s curious, the Japanese term’s ヘクスローブドライバー T-8)

I went for the same manufacturer that Apple used, Seagate. The original drive was an ST98823AS (80G), and I got an ST9160821AS (160G). An upgrade I could have lived without to be honest. This guide shows the detailed instructions how to replace a drive in a MacBook. It all went shiny, it’s not quantum physics after all. OS X flew on in less than an hour, took about another thirty minutes to upgrade itself to the latest version, and violá, freshly installed Mac.

Also, apparently other people had similar issues.

If only I hadn’t lost nearly fifty gigabytes of music.

My entire music collection.

But hey, if you’re an idiot you surely deserve to die. And I was a prize one for I never even thought about backing up such important data. Why would the hard drive fail in the notebook I bring to classes every day, with which I travel and move around while switched on… The universe is vast but human (my) ignorance is the true infinity.

Only thing I’m left with is the 7.5G of the iPod. Which is a funny thing, because you can’t transfer music from the iPod to the computer, only the other way around. You can only sync with one iTunes application at a time. So I had to use YamiPod to first copy all the music from the iPod to a temporary folder, then import it all back to the new iTunes and then sync back the songs to the iPod. Well, least I have those, although it’s heartbreaking to look at all the broken albums from which one or two tracks were saved by some playlist…

Luckily I had all my music I actually paid for on the iPod as well, or else I’d be looking for sharp things already…

(What does data loss teach you? Buy your music.)

Funny I can get so worked up on a simple hard drive failure you could say. And yes maybe I’m overreacting… but music was what really got me through the days here. And, like TV shows, it’s an integral part of my life. So I’m now all emo, thanks for asking.

I hate being the person who gets so sad for losing an iTunes library.

Macskafogó 2!

Lopás, persze, de ez annyirajó! “Hol vannak a birodalmi rohamosztagosok?”

New English

You know, like, pointless classes, or whatever. And basically tomorrow’s like the same, and the day after. Actually, all we’re like looking forward to is, like, new episodes of, like, TV shows. Totally Like Whatever.

isolde's reality

isolde, akit jó olvasni, most egy novellát publikált a blogján: Valahol máshol. Érdemes elolvasni, és nem hosszú. Külön pozitívum, hogy PDF, valamint én nagyon szeretem a Dsuang Dszi álmát.

Ez a hétfő ünnepnap Japánban (sportnap), ezért érek rá ennyire. :mrgreen:

United Colors of Kossuth tér

A következő bejegyzéshez kerestem a Dsuang Dszi álmát a MEK-en, és egy valami egészen másra bukkantam helyette. Anno körülbelül egy hónapja akartam írni a főállású magyarokról, - amolyan “ide kell majd nekem hazamenni” hangulatban - de aztán visszatartottam magam. A véleményemet azonban sokkal jobban elmondja Szabó Lőrinc verse.

Erről:

Meg erről: Szegény ember legkisebb gyermeke.

Szabó Lőrinc
HAZÁM

Nem faluba, nem Budapestre
és nemcsak magyarnak születtem,
fél Földre süt a nap felettem,
fél Földdel együtt fed az este.

Tanítóm minden, ami él,
apám a múlt egész világa
s addig terjed hazám határa,
ameddig az agyam elér.

Nagyon szegény, ki büszkeségét
más érdeméből lopja ki
s ripacsként a mellét veri
azért, ami helyette érték:

én azt szeretném, ha hazám,
e föld, hol mindent, ami ember,
vágytam példázni életemmel,
lehetne egykor büszke rám.

(forrás: MEK)