The weather forecast for today shows a forty degree drop over the course of the day. That’s nuts, but Saturday’s forecast low is even crazier. 65° to 17° in 24 hours? (In Celsius, that’s 18° to -8°) The snow from Sunday’s big snowstorm has pretty much melted away just in time for more winter.

Temperature extremes like this make me think of the expansion of railroad rails in heat, and, for whatever reason, an algebra problem from my first math class in college. Oh, and the temperature of the Moon ranges about 500° F during a Lunar day, I never realized how hot it got there, though it would only affect your feet since there’s no atmosphere.

The good news: The CPUs were just upgraded to 1.83 and 2.0 GHz (from 1.67 and 1.83 GHz).

The bad news: This will likely delay existing ship dates by up to two weeks.

The interesting option: For an additional $300, the processor can be further upgraded to 2.16 GHz.

I just got off the phone with the Apple Store and was told that there would be a 2-3 week delay in shipping the 2.16GHz MacBooks. I was also told that my ship date was pushed back to Feb 28 on the existing order. So I sprung for the upgrade. Hopefully my math is right and the extra shipping on the faster CPU doesn’t stack with my existing delay. Final Cut Pro won’t work until sometime in March anyway, so it’s not a huge crisis for me to wait. Now I can take a few weeks off from checking Apple’s order status page three times a day.

The new computer I don’t even have yet is almost 20% faster than when I bought it. Not too shabby.

I finally moved my small CVS repository to Subversion this weekend. Using CVS has largely been an act of faith, Subversion promises to be slightly easier to use and understand.

I installed Subversion using the official Subversion installer package. The repository was created with the FSFS format. Easy so far.

These Migrating from CVS to Subversion instructions are largely a walkthrough of installing Fink, then using Fink to install Subversion and cvs2svn. Having used Fink in the past, I wanted to install everything without it. I’m not especially comfortable with how much Fink does for me, and have found it adds some difficulty when transitioning systems.

Much better CVS to Subversion instructions are provided by Marc Liyanage, had I seen his walkthrough sooner I would have been done hours earlier.

Most of those hours were swallowed up naively trying to get the cvs2svn script working. Thinking it would be easy to work around the default Mac OS X Python installation DBM Module problem, I followed these instructions to install the most recent Python. Each step was written out clearly and worked as described.

That just about all worked, except the cvs2svn script was still showing the DBM error. Apparently, Mac OS X doesn’t include a BerkeleyDB installation. So, following Marc Liyanage’s lead, I installed Berkeley DB and the bsddb3 package, though not nearly that efficiently. As mentioned in the sial.org tutorial link above, I also modified the first line of the cvs2svn to point to my new Python installation: #!/usr/local/bin/python

Finally, when all of that was done, my CVS repository was seamlessly imported into Subversion in under a minute. Give or take three hours.

This whole convoluted installation brings up one of the messy things about Unix that I still don’t know enough to be comfortable with. I now have two versions of Python installed. Why? BerkeleyDB is also installed, and will probably never be used again. How much disk space did I just lose? Can I just delete this stuff? Or would that cause something else to break in the future? Maybe it’s just negative conditioning from screwing with Windows myriad co-dependencies, but managing under the hood stuff in Mac/Unix scares me.

My parents ISP, Cox cable blocks port 25 so I haven’t been able to send any mail whenever I visit. For years, I’ve known about SSH tunneling, but never played around with it. Now, about 8 hours before I head back to New York, I finally sat down, read the man pages and set up my first tunnel. It worked perfectly and I can send mail again. Here was the command:

sudo ssh [user]@joemaller.com -L 25:email.joemaller.com:25

I hadn’t yet read down to the -R flag, so that left an open connection in a terminal window. Not a big deal especially since I don’t yet know how to close a connection I can’t see without killing the process (and I’m not even sure that works).

In Mail.app, I added an outgoing mail server to the main account with the address “localhost” and all the same login settings as the normal server (password authentication, port 25, etc).

While I’m comfortable with the command line, I immediately started wondering about applications that could do this simply for non-geek users. There are a lot of times I get calls from friends and co-workers asking why they can’t send mail from some remote location. Unfortunately, the two applications I found, AlmostVPN and Tynsoe projects looked like they’d terrify casual users — too many options with scary names.

I might throw this onto the bottom of my to do pile, it seems like a simple AppleScript Studio project that I might be able to bang together in a few days. The basic interface should only show the address of the remote host and login-name, extras could go in a drawer. Another nice option might be automatically switching and restoring the outgoing mail server in the current mail account.

I’ve been in California (the OC) for the past two weeks helping my parents through an unexpected medical issue. Thankfully, everything went well and they’re doing fine now. Apologies for the unreturned phone calls, slow email and the delayed release of the next beta of Joe’s Filters. I’ll be back in New York tomorrow morning.

I need to rethink the main column width on this page. Probably also need to think about using fewer words.

iPhoto and Image Capture suddenly stopped importing from my digital camera. Same problem using the camera as a reader or my little thumbdrive adaptor. Plugging in my Fuji F10 would immediately crash the Mass Storage component of the Image Capture thingie. I was also having all kinds of trouble sharing my iPhoto library and movies downloaded from the camera would play until the last frame, which was inexplicably all white and would crash QuickTime player. Before figuring out the following I was afraid my camera was broken or the xD card was defective.

It took me a bit of sleuthing to determine that Flip4Mac was causing this. First, I confirmed it wasn’t hardware; the camera worked fine on Michelle’s nearly identical PowerBook.

To try and figure out what was preventing the camera connection from working, I opened Activity Monitor, made sure “All Processes” was selected at the top (I always have that option selected) then sorted the list by Process ID descending. Because Process IDs count up, whatever launched next would appear at the top of the list.

Plugged the camera in and watched. MassStorage popped up, then disappeared, followed by CrashReporter. Fine, now I knew what was crashing. Off to the Console.

In the main console.log, I saw the following lines:
Jan 22 22:57:52 joemaller-powerbook crashdump[295]: MassStorage crashed
Jan 22 22:57:53 joemaller-powerbook crashdump[295]: crash report written to: /Users/joe/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MassStorage.crash.log

These confirm that MassStorage had crashed and show the location of the log file. Use that path to navigate through the log listings in Console.

Crash Reports are 90% meaningless unless you wrote the application. However, they are full of clues. Scroll up from the bottom until you see a line of asterisks, these are the beginning of the last crash report. Below that are some details about the application and a thread-dump of the crash. Below the listing of threads are the components active at the time of the crash.

There were several third party binaries near the top of my list. I unloaded them in order, restarted then plugged the camera in again to see if it was still crashing.

• iGlasses – fine. (very cool video iChat gadget, fun and useful)
• DivX: fine, but I use VLC anyway. Deleted, not reinstalling.
• Flip4Mac WMV Import: Bingo!

Flip4Mac was installed in “/Library/QuickTime/”, with a bunch of other codecs. Removing it solved all the problems I listed above. Later I noticed they included an Uninstaller, here’s yours.

Flip4Mac is a recommended replacement for Microsoft’s discontinued Windows Media Player. There’s a tired old joke in there somewhere. In the meantime, tons of people are complaining about various problems related to this. One posting somewhere claimed the problem was related to DivX being installed, but I still had issues after removing DivX. Something to remember for future troubleshooting; bizarre problems, check for Flip4Mac.

Integrating Windows Media files as Quicktime Components is long overdue. Microsoft deserves some credit for recognizing how good Telestream’s product is and for spending the money to support their work. WMVs have never played as well on my machine before this. However I am worried this instability might be a precursor of things to come, and I hope Flip4Mac won’t break in strange new ways with each subsequent QuickTime point relase.

Telestream has released a v2.0.1 update which claims to fix these issues. After making sure everything was working without Flip4Mac, I installed the update and immedately checked my camera connections. Happy to report it’s all working.

Update: Spoke too soon, movies from my camera ended with white frames again. Uninstalled Flip4Mac and they play fine. 2.0.2 anyone?