Here are the 21 spellings in order of usage this year: Hanukkah, Chanukah, Hannukah, Hanukah, Chanukkah, Hanuka, Chanuka, Channukah, Hanukka, Chanukka, Hannuka, Hannukkah, Channuka, Channukkah, Hannukka, Xanuka, Channukka, Janukah, Janukkah, Janukkah and Chanuqa.

Previous years: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008.

Update: As of Git 1.7.0, converting existing branches to tracking branches got a whole lot easier. git push now has a -u flag which will set up tracking based on a successful push.

$ git push -u hub master
Branch master set up to track remote branch master from hub.

For reference, here’s the original post:

There are two ways to convert an existing branch to a remote tracking branch, using git config or directly editing the .git/config file.

In both of these examples, the local and remote branches are named “master”. The remote repository is “hub”.

git config commands

$ git config branch.master.remote hub
$ git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master

editing .git/config

All the git config commands do is add the following to .git/config, editing the file manually has the same result.

[branch "master"]
    remote = hub
    merge = refs/heads/master

What would be nice is an additional config command, branch.<name>.track, which would split a full refspec, sending the relevant parts to the remote and merge commands.

At some point, I need to stop writing drafts and actually publish something here.

The night of September 10th I went for a run, instead of my usual route, I ran downtown to Ground Zero. Amid the street closings, barricades and police, an overnight fire crew was walking slowly up Church Street with a large wreath. My eyes filled with tears and I could do nothing except kept going.

The fire station across 14th Street from our apartment, Engine 5, gathers on the sidewalk in front of the station for four moments of silence each year. I would imagine most stations do the same.

8:46am is always the hardest. That’s when everything floods back. Each of the following moments gets a little easier, but this is when the memories of images and smells and feelings are nearly overwhelming.

9:03am was the moment we knew Flight 11 was no accident, but that distinction and those 17 minutes of residual innocence have been lost to time.

At 9:59 the South Tower fell and one of the city’s mountains vanished, we knew things would never, ever be like they were.

By 10:28, many of the emotions have washed out, grief and awe give way to genuine feelings of thanks and respect.

Previous 9/11s: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008.

Pretty much every one of these I’ve owned has failed.

Almost all of my failed power supplies were connected to one of our otherwise awesome Other World Computing Mercury Elite-AL enclosures. Generally, the power adapters last about a year, then go hissy and fail. All of them have been plugged into power conditioning UPSes.

The model number is ACU057A-512. They’re manufactured by SunFone who also supply power adapters for LaCie. These fail so dependably, I’ve taken to keeping spares on hand to make sure I can keep our server’s backup drives online.

Lacie has a photo identifying their power adapters (original). I have a few very old versions of these which explicitly list SunFone as the manufacturer — amazingly they’re still working.

If you’re lucky, the power supply will just fail and the drive will no longer mount. If you’re unlucky, the power supply will gradually fail and some data on the drive will be corrupted. Often the drives will be heard faintly clicking, and if they mount at all, they’ll report all sorts of errors. After at least 8-10 failures, I can only remember one instance where data was compromised. Thankfully that drive was part of a redundant backup strategy, so nothing was lost.

When these fail, they emit a hissing sound. Sometimes it can be heard from across a noisy room, other times I had to hold the brick up to my ear. Sounds like this:

Bob Friesenhahn’s report on MacFixit also mirrors my experience.

I have four D-series LaCie drives here. All of them have experienced power failure. In fact, in the past couple of years I have replaced six failed power supplies. The power supply model number is ACU057A-0512.

The failed supplies were all plugged into a high grade UPS and see an average temperature of 75 degrees. Average time to fail seems to be six months. No supply has lasted more than one year.

Now I purchase these supplies in bulk and keep three of them on hand at all times.

As of September 2009, it looks like OWC has finally switched to a completely different power adapter. Also, a their replacement part number for the doomed SunFone adapters now shows Jentec model JTA0707-Y. OWC has been really good to me over the years, so I’m hoping this change will be the end of this story.

Update January 2011: All of the replacement Jentec power supplies have been working smoothly for over a year.

Those little search bubbles that popup on the New York Times website whenever you select text really annoy me. Clicking this bookmarklet on any NYTimes page will prevent them from appearing:

NYTfix

This is a 2-minute solution, there’s no domain checking or anything, all it does is remove existing bubbles then cancel the document’s mouseup observer, which the NYTimes site uses to trigger the search balloons. The bookmarklet was very quickly checked in Safari, Firefox and IE8, NYTimes text selection doesn’t work at all for me in IE6 or IE7.

There’s been a lot of stuff going on in my life this year, and I haven’t had much time to prepare for WWDC or even really to think about it before getting here. But I’ve posted my predictions for the past handful of years so I jotted some thoughts down on the plane. I haven’t been keeping up with the rumors, so these are quite literaly pulled out of thin air. This is last minute again, I’m posting this from the keynote line. I’ll update with right/wrong and clean up typos after the show.

Snow Leopard

Apple will claim they lied last year they said Snow Leopard would have “no new features.” They’ll probably position it as “this was just too cool not to put in.” What we’ll see will be a radical rethinking of elements of the OS X Interface. The team who built the iPhone UI will have been brought back to the OS group to work their magic on Mac OS. The features may not be ready yet and might not be included in the developer build, but it will be demoed and highly publicized. (just don’t call it leopard skin) Possible strategies include something like “the iPhone was built with the best of Mac OS X, now we’re bringing the best of iPhone back to the Mac.” [wrong, but probably just too early]

The total re-thinking of the window menu bar in the Safari beta and elements of the iLife interface (hopefully the less infuriating subset) will prove to have been a hint of what’s coming. Aside from revamping the appearance and function of interface windows, I expect some sort of real-time text suggestion/correction system similar to the iPhone’s inline typing corrections.

We still won’t get true resolution independence. I really want to run at AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.8, but it doing so breaks all sorts of little things around the system. [seems right, but we’ll see]

Hardware

New iPhones will be announced and demoed, but they won’t be available for a month or two. A lot of iPhone 3.0 is known already, but one thing we might see is some sort of demonstration where the iPhone becoming an auxiliary input and display device for nearby macs. Sort of like Remote but more functional. [right on iPhones] [wrong on timing]

I’m doubtful about any new hardware, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see a small upgrade to portables coupled with a simplified portable product line. The distinction between MacBook and MacBook Pro has gotten really fuzzy. [right on new iPhones]

Portables will also be acquiring location-awareness through a basic GPS chip. If they don’t, I’ll just repeat this one for the next Apple product announcement and for every subsequent announcement until it comes true. It is insane that any portable computing device doesn’t know where it is. [still wrong, so I’ll be trotting this out again next time]

No tablets or Netbooks. Though everyone will be talking in hushed whispers about their hackintoshes. [right, too easy]

I’d be terrified to bring a hacked-Mac netbook to WWDC, but someone, possibly quite a few, will. I have to leave the conference early this year to attend a wedding, I will be starting a rumor that Apple saw my hacBook and threw me out of Moscone for running Mac OS X on non-apple hardware. [right. I saw many netbooks, though only one guy dumb ballsy enough to run Mac OS X on his]

Jobs is the elephant in the room. Everyone seems to expect some sort of appearance. I don’t think he’ll be here, but if he does appear it will be either via video iChat or there will be a video letter/statement. Either one of those will be an unintentionally hilarious recreation of the 1984 Apple ad. [too much waffling on my part to call this either way]