aug: you know the decommission script we have, since forever?
diamond: oh yeah, i wrote the first version
aug: oh! then it’s your fault!
diamond: eh?
aug: in all that time, it’s been misspelt. there were 3 s’s in it. no-one noticed until last week, when ciaran went “wtf?”
aug: and when we renamed it, we discovered that its (misspelt) name was all through the documentation
aug: so we had to update all of that as well
diamond: oops. that certainly sounds like me

I wrote that script a year ago. Sigh.

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.

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.

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.

• climbed out a window
• at the top of one of the highest buildings in the country
• to pry a dead fox with a plank of wood
• so that we could open a door

My day was awesome. Thanks noirin -)

Instead, this post is composed from a couple of things i’ve been meaning to put up here for ELONGTIME.

Firstly, the checkers book. It’s real name is “The Practice of System and Network Administration”, which is a bit of a mouthful if you’re going to refer to it in speech. It’s an excellent book, it’s considered to be the definitive textbook on the title subject, and rightly so. It’s just the name that irks. So, taking inspiration from one of the quotes[1] on the official website, i’ve taken to calling it ‘the checkers book’. This here is my bid to try and spread that a bit -)

The second thing is anonymous samba share browsing for windows clients (it seems like i’m not so good at naming things either). For years it’s been niggling at me that i have been unable to figure out how to get a samba share that windows would be able to browse anonymously. I finally figured it out last summer, and have been meaning to document it ever since. Here’s how it goes.


[global]
...
security = user
map to guest = bad user
...
[sharename]
...
browseable = yes
guest ok = yes
...


So, when a windows user tries to access the share, so long as their windows username is not the same as an account on the samba server, their user will silently be mapped to the guest user by the samba server. Without this, windows will throw up a dialog requesting username/password to access the server, and will never try connecting to the share as guest, meaning you can’t see the share without authentication. The bit i had been missing for years was map to guest = bad user.

And that’s all (s)he wrote.

[1] “Despite sporting a title that sounds about as interesting as The Longest Checkers Games I Ever Saw, Thomas Limoncelli and Christine Hogan’s The Practice of System and Network Administration is an exceptionally valuable book.” The original review that it is from is here.

• Moved into the new apartment with niall
• Spent most of the christmas holidays doing IT support at home
• Went to zurich for a week on buisness. Motorised beds, that’s all i’m saying.
• Went on the company ski trip to italy
• Went snowboarding for the first time. In jeans. Didn’t die
• Planned and booked my second snowboarding adventure
• Stepped down from the Vice Presidency of skynet
• Had ~E1.6k taken from my credit card in fraudulent transactions
• Went to the opera for the second time. To see what i thought i had seen the first time
• I was wrong
• Went to SkyCon. Enjoyed
• Entered my first programming competition, set and judged by Alan Cox
• Won. Cheekily.
• Jumpstarted more cars than i cared for
• Watched Aladdin. Admitted it wasn’t awful
• Started playing Guitar Hero
• Bought a new desktop (aisling)
• Upgraded fluff (my server) at last
• Have only been back in balbriggan once
• Tried to donate blood, got rejected
• Got a performance review which noted that ‘Becoming known for truly terrible puns is no bad thing.’
• Reduced my medication back to 50mg, which is where it was 1.5 years ago
• Went to the dentist for the first time in 10 years. Apparently i’ve gotten away with it by having ‘very good oral hygiene’
• Read all of the Sandman comicbook series
• Oh, and got engaged tonight. Yes, to noirin