Geert JM Vanderkelen

Happy Bad Poetry

Once furled, today we awake
The dark days take a turn into Spring
Here comes the sun, sparkling in the lake
Unfolding our hearts and make us sing

People walking, talking, running around
Dogs bark and chase imaginary game
The ice cracks, snow makes way for ground
The melted water overflows the drain

In between I am running and burning fat
With Mr. Lazy lurking me back to bed
Saying hello to each one, but feeling sad
I'm contemplating this bad poetry in my head

The two, new features in iPhoto '09 I was interested in turned out to be uninteresting, for now..

• Places: Only works if the camera has GPS tracking. My Canon 450D and 30D don't have that. You can put a photo on the map, but you can't move the pin to the exact location.


• Flickr Uploader: Really, really lame! FlickrExport for iPhoto is much more superior!

I'm wondering with the Faces feature: if I'm splitting up my iPhoto library into years, can I share the Faces information between libraries? Faces is also not really worth it BTW. Nice toy though.

I'm unimpressed with iPhoto '09 .. They should have put more work in it. Wasted 79 EUR. I should have waited for the '10 version or so.

And you still can't make a smart album with a filter saying 'Event IS <name here>'! Grrr.. 'Contains' is not good enough!

Yesterday I restored my iTune library from a backup after an external drive gave failures. The only thing that changed is the firewire drive is now 1Tb instead of 250Gb. At the moment of restore I could still see old backups from months ago.
Today, Time Machine complained about it not having enough space. So, I opened up the Time Machine interface to remove some very old stuff.. Surprise! All backups are gone! Only a full backup from yesterday night is there, from which I restored my tunes..
Very, very annoying. Looking around, I can't find anything back in Finder or in the Terminal. My Air's sparse bundle is still there (backed up through network), but before 2009-02-21 it's all gone. Did I say this was annoying? I'm not trusting it to much anymore (you should never trust any backup anyway).

Waking up this morning I found my external rugged, firewire Lacie drive giving an error. It said: "The disk '' was not repairable by this computer. ..." Did I panic? Of course not, I have Time Machine backing up my stuff! The problem: I had no room to restore it and it failed to restore on the external driving giving a weird 'Error 0'. I bought a new external Western Digital 1TB drive, but how to restore from Time Machine on this new disk?
Well, it's a simple trick really.

1. Note the name you gave the failing disk and eject it.


2. Plug in your new disk, format if needed, and give it the name of your old disk.


3. In Finder, select the new drive and open Time Machine (should bein your dock, otherwise go to Applications.


4. Once in Time Machine, just select what you want to restore, and restore it!
   
5. After a while (which could be long), it should be there!

I had to restore my iTunes library!
BACKUP! MAKE BACKUPS! BUT! MAKE SURE YOU CAN RESTORE THEM! Test your Time Machine, or whatever solution you use, restoring old files from time to time.

Yesterday I started playing around with Last.fm (bit late maybe..) and tried out the Last.fm Mac application. It's updating or scrobbling what I'm playing in iTunes to my account on Last.fm.
Now, there is a feature which imports your playing history from iTunes. After digging a bit, I followed a tip clearing my Listening Data. This, however, didn't help.
After looking around in the application I found Diagnostics which allows you to view the log of the application. That made it all clear:

  Could not open iTunes Library
      "/Users/geert/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml" 

I'm storing my iTunes library on an external drive so I can move it around easily.
To make the Last.fm application import my history I just made (or recreated) the /Users/geert/Music/iTunes directory and copied over the iTunes Library XML file naming it iTunes Music Library.xml. Starting the Last.fm application again, it asked me if I would like to import the history data: that worked perfectly now! If it doesn't work for you, check out the logs in the Diagnostics.
I'm not sure if you can scrobble the iTunes history without cleaning up your listening data first. I'll leave that to the reader to find out.

The manual of VirtualBox has a section called Using a raw host hard disk from a guest which explains in detail how to use raw disks from the guest host. However, it's a bit tricky on Mac OS as you have the disks automatically mounting. Here is a small HOWTO showing how to mount a USB stick (using Mac OS 10.5) so it can be used as the IDE Primary Master in VirtualBox.

Warning: this is probably for more advanced users. Careful what you do with mounting and umounting manually!

Start by inserting the USB stick and see if gets mounted in Finder. If you would Eject the device, it gets u(n)mounted, but you can't use it anymore in VirtualBox. The trick here is to use diskutil (which replaces disktool) in a Terminal session. I assume the volume (e.g. USB stick) is empty.

Preparing the volume:

1. Launch the Terminal application


2. At the prompt do: diskutil list
   
3. Look for your device in the list, probably at the end. In my case it was /dev/disk4
   
4. Now lets u(n)mount it (not eject!): diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk4


5. At this point, your Finder window might disappear. But that's not a problem.

To make the volume available to VirtualBox we need to create a VMDK file. This is described fully in the manual, but here it is in a few steps:

1. Launch the Terminal application


2. Go to the location where you store your Hard Disk images, e.g. cd ~/Virtual


3. Execute (on one line, changing filename and the actual rawdisk): VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ./USBStick.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk4


4. Open the VirtualBox application, and from the File Menu launch the Virtual Media Manager


5. Click Add, and locate the file you created, e.g. USBStick, and click 'Open'.

At this point, you should have the new Virtual Hard Disk available which you can use to make a new virtual machine. Use the disk you created as the primary hard disk just like you would do with hard disk images.

Some errors you might run into:

• VBoxManage reports VERR_DEV_IO_ERROR: this means the volume is still in use by Mac OS. You should first unmount it using diskutil (see earlier in this post)


• Mac OS keeps mount the volume: I didn't find a good solution for this (i.g. using /etc/fstab is no good, and scripting was to much work). I just kept unmounting it using diskutil until VirtualBox locked it.


• VBoxManage reports VBOX_E_IPRT_ERROR, and lots more: This is when storage format could not be read. I'm not sure why this is reported, but the RAW host disk VMDK was created successfully in my case, and can be used.
  

A caveat doing the above: you'll need to remake the VMDK file if the disk is on a different device. This can for example happen when you first insert a DVD, and then the USB Stick. Maybe there is a solution for this using /etc/fstab or similar in Mac OS.

I had to do the above to make an installation on a USB stick. Ubuntu somehow failed during the installation (not sure why..); now I'm trying OpenSolaris.

Whatever you do, make sure your USB Stick is fast: I got a slow, cheap one now and it takes forever to format..

Got to love unicode! Importing Ken Ishii's Jelly Tones album (btw, I won it at Studio Brussel in Belgium sending an email through BBS, somewhere in 1995!) I saw following in iTunes:

Found it pretty cool that ケン・イシイ shows up! I'm leaving as is. The Composer field is filled with 'Ken Ishii', so looking it up still works.

We've added some new options in MySQL Cluster 6.3.22 which makes it possible to selectively restore tables. The new options for ndb_restore are:

  --include-databases=name 
      Comma separated list of databases to restore.
      Example: db1,db3
  --exclude-databases=name 
      Comma separated list of databases to not restore.
      Example: db1,db3
  --include-tables=name 
      Comma separated list of tables to restore. Table name
      should include database name. Example: db1.t1,db3.t1
  --exclude-tables=name 
      Comma separated list of tables to not restore. Table name
      should include database name. Example: db1.t1,db3.t1

To demonstrate in a few examples, lets assume you have the following tables:

 mysql> SELECT TABLE_SCHEMA AS `Schema`,TABLE_NAME AS `Table`
   FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA LIKE 'db_';
 +--------+-------+
 | Schema | Table |
 +--------+-------+
 | db1    | t1    | 
 | db1    | t2    | 
 | db1    | t3    | 
 | db2    | t2    | 
 | db2    | t3    | 
 | db3    | t1    | 
 | db3    | t4    | 
 +--------+-------+

If you need to restore table db3.t4 and the complete database db2 you should do the following on all data nodes (some important options are omitted!):

 shell> ndb_restore [...] -r --include-tables=db3.t4
 shell> ndb_restore [...] -r --include-databases=db2

In a similar way you can exclude. For example, if you need to restore all database but db1:

 shell> ndb_restore [...] -r --exclude-databases=db1

To exclude the table db3.t1, and restore everything else:

 shell> ndb_restore [...] -r --exclude-tables=db3.t1

I helped making the initial patches for this feature and hope there are not to much bugs! Maybe some more suggestions on how to improve it?
Of course, all this is documented in the MySQL manual.

Just a small tip for using Bazaar on OpenSolaris: set the BZR_SSH environment variable to openssh if you don't have the Python module Paramiko installed.
For example, in your ~/.bashrc:

export BZR_SSH=openssh

Could be useful if you're pulling MySQL stuff from Launchpad and use (Open)Solaris. Could also be useful on other Unix-like operating systems when the default is missing (Bazaar uses Paramiko as default).

Today I gave an introduction talk of MySQL Cluster at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels. The room was full and I didn't see anyone dozing!
A good feedback later on was to show more usecases. This a good point and I think on working on a talk showing less how it works, but how it can be used. Doing both technical details and use-cases is hard to do in 50 mintes.
I feedback is appriciated!

BTW, slide will eventually come online somewhere..