Friday, June 27, 2008
Stretches. Weight training: superslow front raise, superslow lateral raise. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press. Shower. To work. Carol called in sick, so it's only me, both Erics, Scott, and Chris in the office today. Scott and Eric V both reported computer hangs around the same time. Symptoms: computer responds very slowly or not at all, portions of the screen would redraw incorrectly or very slowly or not at all, shutting down was very slow, logging in to Windows XP as a domain user was very slow, logging in to Windows XP as a local admin was speedy and as expected, Macs in our office were unaffected, Windows XP running inside Fusion were unaffected, restarting Windows XP did not resolve the problem, grc reported all ports either closed or stealthed. I called the problem in to OAAIS because I noticed that Sygate Firewall reported 4.79.142.206 as "[423] Possible P2P Botnet Worm Propagation Attempted - Nugache Variant" but later when Sarah M pointed out that that IP address was owned by grc I realized my mistake. Turns out our office server was exhibiting the same slow behavior as the workstations, so I forced power off on it, restarted, logged back in, and now everything is working now. Lunch: leftover mango beef and steamed rice. Excerpts from an email I sent to Nick M today: "I'm actually a conponent of joining Macs to the campus Active Directory. We have only 5 Macs and I've always had problems with joining to the campus domain. I personally believe Apple's implementation is not robust. ... About 6 months ago I decided to not join Macs to the domain anymore—it was too much trouble. ... i avoid it primarily because i can—with only 5 computers there isn't much advantage. if i had a lab, i'd be stuck, tho, as it would be ideal for a lab. good luck—your friends are: http://macosx.ucsf.edu/solutions/, andrew p, erik w." Continued troubleshooting Spotlight. It's now working for files on my computer, but nearly all of my files are stored on a network drive. Here's how to force Apple Spotlight in OS X (10.5.2 is what I'm using) to search or index a network drive. The short answer is that you can and you can't. As of today, June 27, 2008, Apple doesn't provide a simple way to do it yet. But, you can sort of get what you want by using the mdutil command with the -i on switch specified with the volume that you want to index (e.g., mdutil -i on /Volumes/frank). If all is working properly, Spotlight should begin indexing that volume. However, if when the indexing is complete, you'll notice that you can type Command+Spacebar and search for a file or folder known to exist on the network drive you indexed and it won't appear. However, if you switch to the Finder and press Command+F, enter your search terms, and select Shared for where to search, then it will find it. So, yes, Spotlight—the technology underlying the Finder's Find feature—can find files on networked drives, but no, Spotlight—the feature in the top right corner—cannot find files on networked drives. Apple could improve Spotlight by adding a dialog when network drives are connected asking whether you want them (permanently) indexed or not and/or by updating Spotlight's system preferences so that it's easy to explicitly include or exclude particular volumes or folders. Some web pages say you need to run the aforementioned mdutil command after each time the volume is newly connected, but I haven't tested whether that's true or not on my computer. If so, that can be scripted, but it's yet another tedious step that people should haven't to do in 2008. In the process of determining this info about Spotlight, I learned how to automatically connect volumes upon login: 1. Connect to the volume. 2. Open System Preferences > Accounts. Select your account, then select the Login Items tab. Drag and drop the volume icon into the list of login items. Answered a question for resident DS about continuation of e-mail services. PC121 website followup with Steve. We need a password reset. PharmAdMIT 2008 printing problem followup: problem seemed to be resolved by executing the reg fix as the (limited) user rather than as admin. Email management. Learned how to restart the Dock manually. Too bad you can't do Apple Menu > Dock > Restart, though. That would be much easier. Typed up meeting notes from yesterday's meeting, then distributed to Cindy and SCWG. Resolved a minor metadata problem with the strategic plan PDF. Eric V showed me a video he discovered: A day in the life of a USC pharmacy student—neat! Got the PC121 password reset, migrated the site, notified Steve K. Chatted briefly online with Nate. It sounds like he's been having a lot of beer in Utrecht. 17 items in my inbox. Dinner at home with Patrick: Chinese noodle soup with leftover duck, baby bok choy, mushrooms, egg, green onions. Watched Thank You For Smoking on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Installed Acrobat Pro 3.1.2 for Windows XP. Noticed recently that the way Facebook imports an RSS feed is kind of quirky. It only does it once, so if the feed content is updated later Facebook doesn't care. So unless I change my writing workflow people who read my blog (notes) in Facebook don't always have the latest or complete or correct information. Additionally, I found that if I delete a note, it is gone and never replaced. I thought perhaps if I deleted a note and then provided that day's content later then Facebook would update it, but no. Processed photos in Photoshop. Uploaded photos to Flickr.