Paul Codding's Weblog » OS X

Time Machine

Paul Codding — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 04:17:53 +0000

Ever since Time Machine was unveiled in the latest OS X release, I’ve been very impressed with its feature set. To be honest I’ve only had to use it to restore 2 files on my machine…both of which were critical. The most important time that I”ve had to fire up the Time Machine was to restore my id_dsa ssh key after accidentally deleting it from Terminal. I did not want to have to gen a new key pair and go around and change my authorized_keys files on many remote machines…so Time Machine did the trick.

Last week my wife’s MacBook took a turn for the worse. The hard drive was making the “click of death” sound, so off the NewEgg for a new 120GB HDD. Four days later the drive arrived at my door, and I was itching to see just how easy it was to restore from Time Machine. The process was pretty easy…the only thing that I would have to add was that the process of getting your new HDD to show up in the list of drives to restore to wasn’t the most straight forward. I had to first partition the new drive and then reboot the laptop for it to recognize the new HFS+ partition. Once that was done, the rest was easy. I hit the restore button, and when I emerged from my basement an hour or so later it was ready for a reboot. Once it was rebooted, it was like nothing had ever happened…except for the 2 weeks of lost data because my wife isn’t the most diligent about plugging in her external Time Machine backup drive. With that in mind I envy those of you with Time Capsules…but I don’t envy the price tag.

Upgrading a large RoR Project from 1.2.6 to 2.0.2

Paul Codding — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 04:23:12 +0000

This evening while upgrading a large Ruby on Rails application that I’ve been working on for the past year and a half, I ran into some issues upgrading to 2.0.2. As you may know actionwebservice has been ousted from rails in favor of REST. For those of us that depend on using SOAP for interoperability with other applications, we need it to work. After spending a great deal of time googling to remove the following error:

`report_activate_error':
RubyGem version error: actionpack(2.0.2 not = 1.13.6) (Gem::LoadError)

I found this very helpful article about getting actionwebservices to run under Rails 2.0.2. I’ve yet to see the issues that some other users have seen when using actionwebservices with Rails 2.0.2, but we shall see in the coming days of using it. One thing I had to do that I didn’t really like was to freeze the rails gems into the project. I would rather not have them in my subversion repository.Another issue encountered was with installing gems that needed compilation on my OS X Leopard machine. Luckily I found a great article detailing the use of the ARCHFLAGS environmental variable. So to install my postgres gem all I had to do was this:

$ sudo -s# export ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386"# gem install postgres

After that, the gem was installed and I no longer received any compile time errors. This stems from the universal binary support mechanism in OS X.

Project in the works

Paul Codding — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 14:35:40 +0000

Well, I was able to spend some time this weekend to get my OpenBSD firewall back in action after a major HDD catastrophe. After getting my internal network back in order, I’ve decided to begin work on a few projects I’ve been thinking about.

The first project involves the use of Growl, the notification system written for OS X, and snort. Snort is a great little IDS that I’ve been working with for quite some time. Ever since I checked out growl, I’ve been really excited to get something going that utilizes it. Luckily the project with snort is perfect for it. In short the project will use ruby to monitor the snort IDS alert logs for alerts and use Growl to send a notification to the user. Growl does have ruby bindings…hence the choice of ruby. I could use Objective-C, the only problem with that is that I don’t know the language . So, ruby it is. I will keep everyone posted on the progress/caveats.