FileVault I enabled FileVault home directory encryption on my work Macbook Pro the other day, which is running Mac OS X Tiger (10.4). I was a little bit hesitant about doing this, because of various horror stories about it not working, or performance being terrible. I made sure I had a proper backup, before starting the process. The 160 GB hard disk was about 40% full before I started. It took 1.
Recycling Compact Flourescent Lightbulbs (CFLs) I read in Scientific American that Compact Flourescent Lightbulbs (CFLs) contain mercury, and some US stores/states have recylcing programmes at stores or kiosks. I didn’t realise they contained mercury, and probably would have just thrown them in the bin with my other rubbish. Links: Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs at energystar.gov Compact fluorescent lamp at Wikipedia Toxic Mercury In CFL Bulbs lamprecycle.org (not much use here in the UK)
File::ExtAttr 1.06, mab2ldif I released File::ExtAttr 1.06 to fix building on Mac OS X. File::ExtAttr provides an interface to extended file attributes (meta-data) that’s consistent across Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, Solaris. I also released mab2ldif, which takes a Mork-format address book (e.g.: as used by Thunderbird) and converts it into an LDIF file. You can import the LDIF file into Thunderbird. I wrote this to recover my old Thunderbird address book from an old computer that died.
Perl and DTrace I saw on Adam Leventhal’s blog that Apple ship a DTrace provider for Perl with Leopard: It’s also mentioned on Unix Technology page for Leopard. I had a quick look to see if Apple had released any patches. I didn’t find any – at some point I should dig around their open source section, to see if it’s included in that. I did find OpenSolaris Bug ID 6355891 asking for Perl support to be added to DTrace.
Women in Tech/Biz I read a few interesting articles about women and tech/biz recently: "What I learned about women & business today" at Y Combinator News The entire "Women in Technology" series at O’Reilly, but specifically: "Women Who Risk: Making Women in Technology Visible"; Comments in response to "To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source" (I found the discussions involving the author much more interesting than the article); "Interview with danah boyd" (interesting bit about effects of a 3D environment on men vs.
The War of Art I recently read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It’s a book about overcoming creative blocks and other factors that prevent you from being creative, called Resistance. I found it to be an entertaining, quick read (~2 hours). I didn’t actually find it as useful as I was expecting. I originally bought it to try to get past some blocks, but I overcame them naturally. In fact, at one point I was procrastinating so much that I thought about reading this book, rather than doing anything else – and that spurred me to stop procrastinating and just do something.
postfix config-o-rama I spent a lot of today finally setting up e-mail for my domain, phekda.org. My goals were: Set up an SMTP SUBMIT server (running on port 587), so that I can send mail from @phekda.org addresses from anywhere. Require mail to be submitted over TLS. Authenticate the client by requiring that the client presents a certificate issued by my private certificate authority (CA). Since I’m only going to issue certificates to people/machines I trust, possession of a certificate is implicit authentication.
Perl and DTrace I finally got DTrace working on Perl, as described in Alan Burlison’s blog post on how to DTrace Perl. I have a patch to add DTrace support to Perl, which includes some instructions and example scripts. I’m giving a talk on DTrace and Perl next Wednesday evening at Birmingham Perl Mongers.
Got me some OpenID I finally signed up for an OpenID identity with MyOpenID. I’d been meaning to try out a single sign-on scheme for a while. OpenID hits all the right buttons for me: open, lots of implementations, low barrier to entry (compare that with Microsoft Passport). I found the following blog post and sites helpful: Scott Kveton - Openid 2007-02-13 Ignite Seattle HOWTO: Set yourself up with an OpenID (Wez Furlong) OpenID for non-SuperUsers (Sam Ruby) Use your own URL as an OpenID OpenIDEnabled’s test page The process was pretty straightforward, with one twist.
Some thoughts on the podcast of the “4-hour Workweek” at SXSW A former colleague of mine sent me a link and some comments on the podcast of the “4-hour Workweek” session by Tim Ferriss at SXSW. Here are my thoughts:I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting some trivial fluff. It turned out that the book title over-trivialises his message (in my opinion), and that there’s something for everybody.