Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I don’t talk about politics or personal things on this blog very much, but today I came across an article from the New York Times I thought was especially good.

2,000 Dead, in Context

Americans, as a whole, are woefully ignorant of their history and the price that has been paid so that they may enjoy the comfort of that same ignorance. The result is a lack of perspective which hinders our ability to make effective decisions and skews our expectations, ultimately to our collective detriment.

As an aside, I’m especially pleased that the author of the linked article calls our current military action the “war against terrorism”. I have long detested the usual phrase “war on terror”. It sounds grammatically questionable, but that’s a minor pick: “War on terror” is a war “on” (perhaps placed on top of it?) a concept, whereas “war against terrorism” is a war against (which means to actively oppose) a particular action and/or ideology and, necessarily, those who practice it. Perhaps our news media, the creators and perpetuators of “war on terror”, prefer the nebulousness of the phrase in order to call into question the importance of our effort.

Remotely and Securely Controlling Other Computers from Your Mac for Administrative or Support Purposes

Date: January 13, 2006
Time: 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM
Code: M264
Speaker: Aaron Adams
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I had some video I captured with iMovie sitting on an external Firewire drive for a little while. That drive was getting full and I needed to clear off some space by moving some of those iMovie projects to DVD. The problem was, one of those projects was 5.38GB, larger than what a DVD can hold. I needed some way to either compress it down or break it up so that it could fit on a single DVD or span multiple discs.

First, I compressed the project using gzip and bzip2 from the command line. Neither utility compressed the video very much, and neither compressed it to a size that would burn onto a single DVD. Enter hdiutil! (The command line analog to Disk Utility.)
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Now we enter a whole new era of tiresome complaining about the video iPod. What features will be missing that some loud, whiny geeks expected? What minor flaw that affects some small number of careless users will be whined about and picked up by the press as if Apple is coming apart at the seams? What half-baked hack that a handful of people will use will be touted as a glorious hacker sticking it to big bad Apple who wants to control the very soul of their customers, robbing them of their God-given rights? What completely overblown trivial miscellanea is going to grow into the next crying point that I’ll be completely damn sick of hearing about this time next week?

I dread it.

I have two Tiger servers that have a problem, and I’ve seen that others have a similar problem on the Apple Mac OS X Server discussions forum. Over the course of some number of days, the servermgrd process seems to spin out of control, gradually eating more and more CPU time until it starts to affect the responsiveness of the server. Not all Tiger servers seem to have this problem, but for those that do, there’s a simple fix.
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