All posts by Mark

US standard of living

https://www.thestreet.com/story/11480568/1/us-standard-of-living-has-fallen-more-than-50-opinion.html

On several occasions, I have glibly referred to how it now takes two spouses working to equal the wages of a one-income family of 40 years ago. Unfortunately, that is now an understatement. In fact, Western wages have plummeted so low that a two-income family is now (on average) 15% poorer than a one-income family of 40 years ago.

NSA surveillance

Found this story fascinating and scary at the same time:

https://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jun/21/nsa-surveillance-metadata-content-obama

Among other things, it links to this page on a German politician who sued to have his records released to him.  He handed it over to a newspaper who put together a reconstruction of his life using this “harmless” metadata.

https://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention

Pretty scary, huh?

iCal error

If iCal gives the error “iCal can’t read this calendar file.  No events have been added to your iCal calendar.” and you’re trying to import an ics file, try using TextWrangler (or some other method) to convert the line breaks to Unix (LF).  This is near the text encoding value (e.g. UTF-8) and also present in the Save dialog box.  I ran into this error when trying to import to iCal 5.0.3 from Thunderbird 12.0.1.

Neither Windows (CRLF) nor classic Mac (CR) line breaks worked, the former was the default as exported by Thunderbird.

Links April 2012

SUV vs minivan – is bigger safer?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIKu1UDoa6s&feature=related

Here is part of the reason we have newer cars now:

I find that just fascinating – the newer car was so much stronger it didn’t even have to fire its airbags in a 35mph collision. The occupants of the 2010 model walked away from a crash that would have killed the driver of the 2000 model.

 

And of course we have the classic new v old crash test, a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu versus a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air.

Ka-freaking-pow.

I mean yeah, the steel bumper in your old ass car may be able to hit things in parking lots without getting so much as a scratch, but damned if that old car won’t royally mess you up in a crash!

Worth reading

http://www.rense.com/general95/regrets.htm

All are good, I like number five the best:

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
 
This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.
 
When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.
 
Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.

Lion Server update failure

Ran the 10.7.3 server combo update.  Come to find out it failed to properly handle network openldap info.  I see in the log files where it failed to move files from the tmp install directory.  On login I’d see the red dot and “network accounts are unavailable”.  I could still login with the local admin account.  In Server Admin Open Directory was not running and could not be started.

This server is not bound to AD, fsck turned up a clean filesystem, and I re-ran the combo update in case it was able to succeed where it had failed before.  I also repaired permissions.  In Console PasswordService was reporting “Unable to locate search base: -1” and “Can’t contact LDAP server”

The fix was to use a Time Machine backup to restore the /var/db/openldap folder.  I had to select “keep both” and then head in via single user mode.  If you’re a novice who got screwed here:

hold down command and S on boot.

fsck -fy

mount -uw /

cd /var/db

mv openldap openldap-corrupted

mv openldap\ [press tab and it will fill in the spaces appropriately for (original)] openldap

reboot

It is important the second to last command look something like mv openldap\ \(original\) openldap  I can’t remember the exact \ usage, that’s why you’re using tab autocomplete, but also remember the second openldap, which is what you’re renaming it to.

After rebooting all services were up and running again, including mail/calendar/contacts/etc.