Tuesday, October 7, 2008

I can tag in stackoverflow.com

I have now massed 500 points and can tag questions in stackoverflow. Soon I'll have infinite power!

Monday, July 7, 2008

Restrict Time Machine Backup Size

Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) has a great backup facility called Time Machine. You simply specify a disk to hold your backups, and it takes care of everything else. The only problem is that Time Machine will eat all available space on disk. Luckily, I found a very simple solution that limits the size of my Time Machine backups, and preserves my backup history. Check it out!

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071108020121567

Sunday, July 6, 2008

Extending an Airport Extreme Base Station Network with a WRT54G

A few weeks ago, I purchased 7" iMate digital picture frame off of woot for about $75. I got it connected to a shared photo library on Windows Media Player 11 on my Windows XP Pro SP3 box. However, the downside was that it didn't connect to my Airport Extreme Base Station in N/G compatibility mode. The only way to get it to work was in 802.11b mode. (This can be done by holding down the 'option' key before selecting the 'modes' combo in the Airport Utility).

This annoyed me fiercely because my MacBook Pro then had very slow network access to my Time Machine backup drive on my AEBS. So, I purchased a Linksys WRT54G because I assumed iMate would have ensured they could connect to one of the most popular home wifi hubs. Luckily, I assumed correctly. However, now I had a problem: how do I hook up my Airport Extreme Base Station and my Linksys WRT54G so that all computers connected to them could see each other? This meant that I could not run the WRT54G as a NAT like I had always done in the past. Instead, I needed to use it as an ethernet bridge.

I did a lot of googling last night, and most people are daisy-chaining their WRT54G with one as a wifi client so it could extend their existing network. This is not what I wanted to do. I want separate 802.11N and 802.11B/G segments for maximum speed for my MacBook Pro.

I tried and failed to get the WRT54G to work as a router using the advnaced routing tab. Then, I found suggestions to simply attach the AEBS to the WRT54G's LAN port instead of its WAN port, and then disable DHCP in the WRT54G. This worked like a charm! Now, all my devices can see each other, and I have two separate wireless segments. My MacBook Pro's network is now screaming fast.

The downside is that I can't seem to access the WRT54G's admin page unless its connected to the AEBS through its WAN port. This is really annoying, and I hope someone can tell me how best to fix it.

Friday, February 29, 2008

Problems with Erlang R12B-1 on Leopard

I've recently been trying to set up tsung on my Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro running Leopard 10.5.2.

I tried the generic ./configure, but precept failed because I was missing libgd and ODBC. So, I downloaded libgd, and tried ./configure, but it was missing libjpeg. Of course, it hasn't been updated since 1998, which is of course will not ./configure on my super-sweet macbook pro.

Luckily, I found steps to get libjpeg to compile. They worked like a charm. Once I built libjpeg, libgd built just fine. Of course, this only took care of half my erlang problem. ODBC still didn't work. I found an email thread explaining steps to try and resolve the problem, but when I did:

./configure --enable-darwin-64bit --with-gd=/usr/local

My install did have the lib/orber/c_src/i386-apple-darwin9.1.0 directory. It had a lib/orber/c_src/i386-apple-darwin9.2.0 directory instead. At this point I just gave up and used R12B-0 instead since I found some working directions to build it. I had to modify the configure parameters slightly since I manually installed libgd:

./configure --with-gd=/usr/local