Apple remote desktop + vnc 2008 September 16 18:25
Posted by diamond in : Random , add a commentI’ve been using Apple’s in-built VNC server for the past year or so to control the g4 powerbook we have hooked up to our tv. Unfortunately, the VNC server, which is part of Apple Remote Desktop, is a piece of shonky tat, and regularly crashes. This is ‘easily’ fixed by restarting the remote desktop service, except, of course, that requires going over to the machine, thereby defeating the entire purpose. Finally, after it crashed twice in 5 minutes, i was motivated (read: enraged) enough to spend the 45 mins or so necessary to hunt down a way of restarting the services remotely. And here, for the sanity of anyone else in the same situation, is the answer:
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -restart -agent
As usual, trying to find documentation is like pulling teeth.
diamond@zrh:/tmp/accom$ cd ~ 2008 August 15 20:27
Posted by diamond in : Random , add a commentToday we had the handover of our new apartment from the estate agency. Despite all our worries that they might be mean, things went smoothly, and we’re now the proud possessors of a shiny set of keys for said apt. As we saw in the newspaper yesterday, out of the 206000 apartments in zurich, only 57 were vacant at one point in June. So, not only were we lucky to get an apartment at all, we were also extremely lucky to get our first choice, and after only one day of looking at that. Our (wonderful wonderful wonderful) relocation agent, Aline, has never had clients get a place so quickly. I think she was in even more shock than we were.
This marks a major milestone in our whole relocation saga. Tomorrow we are due to receive our airfreight shipment (which took a week longer than expected) which was meant to contain essentials to tide us over until we found a place and our main (surface) shipment arrived. Now, of course, we’re suddenly in need of things like crockery and towels and bed linen etc, and it could well be weeks before that stuff arrives. I guess that’s our fault for getting accommodation sorted so quickly ,-) We’re off to ikea afterwards to try and buy the bare essentials in furniture to start with. Coming from a country where all rental accommodation is furnished, it’s quite a shock when you have to buy things like light fittings and curtains as everyone is expected to supply their own.
Anyway, we have an early start as the shipment is being delivered at 07:30 tomorrow morning (it was a choice between that and wait another 10 days), so i’d better head off to bed.
Attachment 2008 July 25 18:40
Posted by diamond in : Random , add a commentLast night, Noirin decided that my attachment to this planet (and life thereon) could be adequately summarised by the utterance “Yaaay planet!”. I can kinda see her point.
Have i mentioned Zurich? 2008 June 3 13:32
Posted by diamond in : Random , 3 commentsSo, Noirin has gotten a job with google in zurich, and i’m transferring over there to be with her. We’re both starting in google.ch at the beginning of august (2008). Time to start learning german i guess.
How you know when a book predates widespread internet availablilty 2008 May 3 20:57
Posted by diamond in : Random , add a commentWhen the book suggests using GNU Emacs1 and the footnote says:
1Available from Free Software Foundation, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Retro.
The book in question is COMMON LISP: An Interactive Approach, published in 1992. I’ve tried learning lisp before, but the book i tried went about it all wrong, for me at least. Too much of the code snippets was in the to-be-explained-in-much-later-chapters category, which grates after a while. The above book, though old, is spot on in it’s approach. The first (short) chapter is dedicated to how to start the lisp interpreter, how to deal with errors, and how to exit it. The dealing with errors in particular was something that had never been explained in the previous book (Practical Common Lisp), and given that clisp will drop you straight into a debugger when you make a typo, this is highly relevant to those new to lisp like myself.
Lisp truly is an elegant language (and not just because xkcd says so). Once you get past how weird the syntax looks compares to most modern languages, it really starts to grow on you.
