What's it all about, Alfie?

I was talking with Liza the other day and she was putting together a few playlists that she wanted to give me to try and expand my listening portfolio, is it were, when she mentioned that it'd be nice to be able to do a little editing on the songs to cut out some not-so-good parts and leave just the chorus and a few other bits in the song. I said I could do that if I got this audio editor, Fission, from these guys at Rogue Amoeba. I was doing a little more DVD ripping this morning, and I decided that now would be a good time to invest a little and get a good set of audio tools for those times that I want something and don't have anything like it on the Mac.

There was a bundle offered by Rogue Amoeba for Fission and Audio Hijack Pro, and I thought that if I ever needed it once, it'd more than pay for the bundle price, so I spent the $50 and got both. I'm glad I did - they work nicely with one another, even going so far as to pull up Fission from within Audio Hijack Pro when you ask to edit a sample. Very nice.

I haven't done a lot of audio editing, and I wouldn't say I'm any kind of audio engineer, but there have been a lot of times when I've recorded a little something - mostly it was the kids on my old NeXT turbo slab, and then wanted to clean it up and use it for my 'build' sounds, or my email notification. I still have Joseph at 2 yrs. saying "Daddy mail!" when every email arrives. That's 11 years and counting. So there are times for the tools, and since they aren't the cost of Photoshop, it seems right to get them and support the developers.

It's also a lot of fun to mess around with sound. I haven't played an instrument in years, but it will always be a part of me and I can remember how it felt. I'm not sure if I'll be doing any mash-ups for Liza this weekend, but it's nice to have these tools available, and it's really nice to support good guys doing good things for this platform.

One of the reasons for wanting to get an iPod touch or even one of the newer 'classic' models is to be able to carry a few movies on the train without opening up my laptop and playing a DVD directly. I was talking to a good friend a while back and he had been using Forty-Two DVD VX to rip a few DVDs to put them on his PSP so he could travel a little nicer with his kids. He really liked the program, so when I wanted to do a little media changing on a few of my favorite movies, it seemed like a good place to start.

I have to say he was right on the money. This is exceptionally easy. You get the program, put the DVD in the drive, stop the DVD Player in OS X and then 'Open' the DVD and tell it what you want to target it for, in my case, the iPod. It knows what to do to get the best image and file size for the iPod, and then it just waits for you to tell it to 'Convert' the media. Very slick. Very nice.

Now, it'd be nice to have it rip the movie faster, but you have to accept that ripping it is a one-time cost, and just like with the CDs for my iTunes library, it's going to be an investment that will really pay off in the future. I haven't gotten a new iPod, and may not get one for a while, but I wanted to get my iTunes library loaded with my favorites before I got the iPod and had to spend hours and hours ripping movies. That would be frustrating.

UPDATE: I got the serial number after ordering it and put it in the app. Then I started loading National Treasure and was not surprised to see that it was going to take pretty close to the running time - plus a little to rip and encode the DVD. I was hoping for something a little less than "runtime plus", but I can't really blame the app, it's taking it from a very high resolution and stepping it down to H.264 for the iPod. Not trivial, and yet it's not really rocket science - just takes time.

Well... it's 9/11 again, and had it not been for a co-worker of mine, I'd have probably missed the significance of the date this year. Maybe not, but it was late in the morning and I hadn't noticed the date yet. And this year it got me thinking about the War on Terror. I really can't stand that phrase.

First, I think it's a bit of a stretch to use the word War in the sense of ...a sustained conflict - like the War on Drugs or the War on Terror. Really... are we fighting drugs or the drug users/makers/dealers/distributors? Are we fighting terror or a limited group of selected terrorists? Call it the War on bin Laden if that's what you want to say - but that's not what the administration wants to say. They want to have a reason for their continued existence... their continued hold on power. Make the people afraid and they'll seek refuge in the security of a man with a gun.

I'll be the first to admit that World War II required our involvement. There were very bad people doing very bad things and the only way they'd stop is by armed conflict. They struck first in Perl Harbor... their choice. But that was a country, or group of countries, and we're being asked to believe that the same is true when you're dealing with a group (no matter how large) of free citizens in multiple countries. It's as if we are to believe that a group, no matter how bad their actions, requires military action to stop what they are doing.

What would you say if the Army rolled tanks in Alabama in the 1960s to stop the Klan? Overkill? I'd agree. They did some very bad things to innocent people, but that didn't automatically trigger an armed military response. We have laws, and lawmen (police) should be (and were) put in the places of lawlessness and finally got order restored. Was it perfect? Nope. Would some have liked the military called in? No doubt.

But it wasn't, and I believe that's a good thing.

Was the military the right governmental unit to bring the people responsible for 9/11 to justice? Maybe. It's hard to say with international boundaries involved. But it's arguable that another group - say the State Department, working with other countries could have been used to bring the people involved to justice. And even if we chose to use the military to bring these people to pay for their crimes, what crimes did we commit in tracking them down?

The ends justifies the means is a very dangerous rationalization. It can get you into a lot of trouble really fast if you're not careful. Pretty soon you might find yourself on the wrong end of the justification and then you're very unhappy about the means being used against you.

And let's say the search for the 9/11 conspirators was conducted by the military. I still don't see how invading Iraq and having Suddam hung is anything more than bloodlust and retribution. If there's some solid evidence that this guy did things that would warrant us going after him, then bring them out in the open and don't call it The War on Terror - it should be a task of bringing a law-breaker to justice. But I don't think anyone involved sees it that way.

There were no weapons of mass destruction. And that was the justification used. Even if there were, Israel has them - are we going to invade them? No. They are our friends. Interestingly, so was Saddam not so long ago. Maybe Israel needs to be concerned? No, of course not. But you can't very well say an old ally becomes a horrible person and so we must invade. It shouldn't work that way. We're better than that. Isn't that what we all try to teach our kids?

If there were solid justifications for the war in Iraq, then let them be known. If it's so secret that telling would compromise national security, then maybe they should have come up with unclassified reasons - or at least unclassify enough to make the case. We require as much from our police and public defenders.

I know these views are not widely held. I'm labeled as not supporting the troops which is totally untrue. I support every single person that puts their life in danger for me and mine. Police, firefighters, the military, coast guard, etc. The question isn't support of them... it's support of what they're being asked to do by our government.

Soon enough this will all just be a historical footprint. Something we talk about like people talked about World War II. But for now, I sure do wish if we as a nation wanted to do something, we stopped using the phrase The War on Terror and started saying what it really was. Whatever that really is.

This morning I wanted to get a few things done with regards to MarsEdit, and my journal (weblog). The first was an issue I'd been having with MarsEdit and importing/including images. When I first captured the Apple logo for decorating Apple-related posts, I got it at a size that was smaller than I wanted. But it was in the beginning and I didn't really know it was a bad size until I used it a bit and created a few more. Then I made another and imported it on top of the original. This sent the image to WordPress and all appeared OK, but it wasn't. Not really.

When I went to add in yesterday's entry about the new iPods, I realized that the size tag in the inclusion was wrong. I had to hand-edit it. Same with the others in WordPress. So then I started playing with it. Turns out, it was inserting the old size with the new image. So I had a bit of a problem. I posted a message to the MarsEdit support forum and didn't directly get my answer, but got close enough.

It turns out that the image is saved into $(HOME)/Library/Application Support/MarsEdit/UpdloadedFiles/ and it's dimensions are also stored in the UploadedFiles.plist in the MarsEdit support directory. So, by placing the correct file from WordPress' uploads directory into the correct place in the /UploadedFiles/ directory, editing the plist, and restarting MarsEdit, I got it working.

Daniel (of MarsEdit) says that he's working on the library functions of MarsEdit to make this more foolproof. Now that I know what I know, I can deal with this, and I'll be much more careful about making icons in the first place, but it's nice that it's all there to be hacked upon.

The second thing I wanted to do was to see about updating WordPress on HostMonster, my hosting provider. Turns out, I was running 2.1.3, and 2.2.2 had some security fixes that it's always good to stay up on. I was very happy to see that when I went into Fantastico on HostMonster, it even pointed out that I had an older version of WordPress, and that I should update it. The update went very smoothly and in a few minutes I was running 2.2.2 and everything was fine. Excellent support from the HostMonster, and WordPress is an excellent tool.

This afternoon I was doing a little work in Coda and wanted to try the SSH Terminal access built into it. I checked my login password and tried. No good - invalid password. Now I should have known what the problem was, but I was not thinking about how SSH authenticates if you have key files on the remote end, I was thinking "login, password" - easy. Well... not really.

I tried a few more times, convinced that I had forgotten my password - something I've never done - but this was telling me that there's a first time for everything. I was sure I had it right, but the login failures were telling me that I was wrong. Also, the fact that I use ssh-agent and key files makes it so that I didn't need to login after getting the key files over. So now I was getting desperate.

I started writing a ticket to the HostMonster support and then thought - Hey... why not get to another machine without ssh-agent running and then try to ssh into the box? Of course, when I did this, it asked me for my pass-phrase, and I typed it in. Then I thought: I wonder if it's using the pass-phrase as the password? Bingo.

I had been thinking that the SSH protocol passed the real password even if the key files existed, but it doesn't. If the key files are there, it doesn't care about the password - it cares only about the pass-phrase in the key files. When I went back and tried that in Coda it worked like a champ.

I was so convinced that I had forgotten my password, but I hadn't - I had forgotten how SSH works in the presence of key files. Wow... glad that's cleared up. I won't forget it.

Tomorrow we say good bye to my GrandMa Beaty. My Dad's Mother. She has lived to be 97 years old. 1910... think about it. She's lived through both World Wars - Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf Wars... she was alive when Orville and Wilbur took to the air and she's seen the creation of the International Space Station... She's seen the creation of television and the boom of cable and satellite distribution of same. Amazing life.

Lots of feeling about GrandMa Beaty... as a kid, it was the Banana Pudding that I remember most about her. She was nice and funny, and things were basically just as fine as could be. Later in life I realized that she could be stubborn, cranky, a real "tough broad". Not bad, but certainly a dimension that a little kid would not understand.

A few years ago, she broke her leg - I'd say it was running with the bulls in Pamplona, but it was probably something very ordinary. Anyway, the bone wasn't jealing right, and so she told the doctors to "...just cut it off." Can you imagine? Wild.

Anyway, she with GrandPa Beaty - gone nearly 40 years now. Sad... happy... amazed. I wonder what people will be saying about me. Given recent issues at work, there are probably plenty that will dance on my grave. But I know it's not all bad... they're just the vocal ones at work now.

I finally got around to putting up a very simple web face to frosty, my iMac G4 that used to be my Mom's until the hard drive died and I got her a new 15" MacBook Pro as a replacement. It's nothing fancy, in fact, it's pretty much the same web site I put up for all my machines. It's clean, simple, and just enough to look decent.

Ah... that feels better.

Why is it so hard to find a person in Facebook? I got an invite chat from an old co-worker this morning and I've been trying to 'find' him on Facebook quite a few times today. Why don't they have a "Last, First" name locator? I can tell if it's Dan, so what's the big deal? It's like you have to look through one of the email/chat networks or one of the other social links. You can't just try to find him by name. Seems like a very bad idea to me.

I'll keep trying, but this is insanity not to have a better way to look people up.

UPDATE: Seems there's a simple name search, but you have to get past the recommended account initialization steps which seems to be looking in your existing networks for friends. Seems that would be one of the options in that initial set-up. Oh well... it's done now.

Today I've been doing more coding on the SOD position file editor. I talked about it a lot in the post yesterday, but it's nice to be moving forward - even if it's slowly. The Java GUI tools are powerful, I'll grant you that, but they aren't something that you can use once every year and expect to be really proficient at much of anything. You have to dedicate a lot of time to getting into each class and how it fits into the collective whole to be able to code a good looking GUI without having to hit Google for every other feature.

Also, today is my anniversary - 22 years. Amazing. Going to try and have a little fun this weekend.

With the fixing of the Mac Mini at home, it seems like a really good time to get the backups going there for the kids laptops and for Liza's as well. The latter is going to be a pain as it's a Windows laptop, but I'll try to see if there isn't something that I can find to do that without driving me insane in the configuration process. Anyway, the first thing I wanted to do was to check up on the backups that were happening on frosty, an iMac G3 server in my office.

I looked at the drive used for backups and noticed that it was 53% full! That didn't seem right, so I checked on things and sure enough, my script wasn't deleting the old backups, it was leaving them around. I spent a few minutes clearing out the old backups in the directory - keeping the last week as that's the rotation plan. Then I spent just a few minutes noticing why the script had failed (I copied it from my CVS backup script and it didn't have different users to deal with) and fixed it up so that it deletes the week-old backups right before it makes today's backups. Looking a lot better.

Next thing is to get the kids machines to mirror their accounts to frosty so that when the backups are done, they backup the mirror and we have duplicate redundancy in the system - the user accounts on frosty and the backups of the accounts on frosty. I like this plan a lot. At least until Leopard comes out, and then with Time Machine I'll have to re-think all this and get those backups going in whatever way Time Machine allows.

I've always been partial to the unix tools, and I've used rsync and rdist in the past so it seemed like a nice way to get the kids machines mirrored to frosty. I found a nice article that talks about setting up rsync on Mac OS X and walks through the configuration of the SSH key files, etc. This is nice because I haven't generated key files in years, and it's always something I have to go back to the man pages on to get right. This makes it much more convenient.

In the article, there's a reference to using launchd to automate backups when attaching an external drive. I'm not so sure I need that, but it's an excellent use of launchd and I just might find a use for it someday. No, I think it'll be easy enough to just cron the backup script on the kids' laptops so that they kick off in the early evening and mirror themselves to frosty. With rsync only the changes are going to get sent, and that'll save a lot of work as most of the files on the kids machines are not going to change that much, and so the bandwidth on the wireless network will be minimal. I still like the full backups of the accounts on frosty, but that's a drive hanging off the machine - no big deal.

So, this weekend I'll spend some time getting the rsync scripts on the kids laptops going and make sure they work. I'll also put the same kind of backup script for all user accounts on squirt, the Mac Mini that everyone seems to use from time to time. That'll make sure that we don't loose anything from that guy, either. It's a good plan. I'm excited about it, and it'll be really nice to get it all going.