The guys at Universal News on 14th and 5th are on it today! I was in there for about 30 seconds tops. They had my bagel and bowtie ready to go. Hassan and crew and doing it!

The guy sitting next to me on the train this morning was so awesome. He saw me in a state of total misery due to my allergies, and just before he got off the train he nudged me with his elbow and said ‘here - try this’ and gave me a halls menthol lozenge. It totally helps! I feel a million times better! Thanks guy! You rock!

Am I the only person in the world that finds it poetic that a gentle old man is asking the world for peace from inside a bullet/bomb proof mercedes benz?

If you have a mac and use wireless to connect, you might expect that it will automatically join your wireless network after you tell it to “remember this network”. I know on my old powerbook it did, and on my girlfriend’s macbook it auto-joins too. So I started wondering why my macbook pro just wouldn’t do it. I searched the keychain and found my network in the login keychain, so I thought something really bizarre was going on. When I checked console (the console app in /Applications/Utilities) it said my network wasn’t in the system keychain!

To make a long story short (as my mother would say), I found a solution here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6757490

It turns out that when I moved System Preferences to /Applications/Utilities it broke my mac’s ability to add networks to the system keychain! I moved it back to /Applications, deleted the network from my network preferences and keychain and then joined the network again. This time the network was added to the system keychain and all is well!

UDG - Ultimate Dog Gear.

The DHCP server at my office was reconfigured yesterday and it started forcing my macbook pro to change it’s name. I like having my host name remain constant for various reasons, so I asked in #macosx and some kind user there pointed me to this blog post:

http://www.elharo.com/blog/software-development/web-development/2005/11/29/setting-a-permanent-host-name-in-mac-os-x/

It works on leopard, in case you’re wondering! Solved my problem after a reboot.

Hot & Crusty was such a disappointment this morning. The people behind me in line got served before me, my bagel was burned, the coffee is bitter. The price is higher than ever. Hot & Crusty used to be a Tuesday treat for me. I could stop there at Grand Central Station and get a great bagel and coffee fast and cheap. Now it takes long, the staff is confused, the prices are high, the bagels are burned, the coffee is bitter. It’s so sad. I’m considering not returning.

If you installed Security Update 002 for leopard and suddenly ssh tells you “bus error”, the answer lies here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6863360#6863360

Apparently the guys at rogue amoeba have some work to do - we need instant hijack!

If you are too lazy to read that thread, the fix is:

sudo /usr/local/hermes/bin/hermesctl unload

thereby uninstalling instant hijack and fixing the problem. Somehow…

… and here’s the fix from Rogue Amoeba:

http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2008/03/19/security-update-2008-002-compatibility-fix/ 

While on vacation in North Carolina I stumbled upon a radio station that plays a great mix of tunes. If you’re in the Raleigh area you can tune in to 93.9 WKSL - but otherwise you will need windows media player to tune in by clicking the “listen now” link at the 93.9 website. Yes it even works on my mac (check http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/flip4mac.mspx or http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/windowsmediaplayerformacosx.html)

What makes this station so good? Well it’s all about the mix - in the last half hour I’ve heard music I love from the Motown era, the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and even a song I don’t really like that came out this year (some pink or fergie song… I dunno). There is no station like this in NYC right now so I am bearing with the fact that all the 93.9 ads and weather & traffic updates are local to NC

If you’re looking for a radio station (yeah I said it - a radio station. I know you have mp3’s - so do I) that plays a great mix of stuff - I suggest you check it out. Beware though - the site is hideously ugly and slow.

A friend of mine keeps an OpenBSD box up so that we can use it for a shell if we need one (it’s come in handy on more than one occasion, let me tell you!). I was logged in the other day and wanted to add a package. My zsh startup files make it a rather simple process most of the time, partly because of the fact that I set the PKG_PATH variable dynamically. Part of that dynamic value is taken from the OSTYPE variable.

To make a long story short(er) I couldn’t add a package via pkg_add -i, and the reason was that OSTYPE was returning openbsd4.1 even though uname reported “OpenBSD isis.beyondnormal.net 4.2 GENERIC#375 i386″. The local mirror I use doesn’t keep packages around from old releases, so that was part of why this failed. So why was OSTYPE returning 4.1 even though it was OpenBSD 4.2? The answer is that OSTYPE is set at compile time.

Apparently, after upgrading the OS, the packages from OpenBSD 4.1 will work ok with OpenBSD 4.2 (at least in the case of zsh-4.2.6). All I needed to do to get OSTYPE to be correct was to uninstall the zsh package and install the package that was released with OpenBSD 4.2. Now let’s see if we remember when OpenBSD 4.3 is released…