Little Star

COMPSERV camp has been a rather harrowing experience; it’s the first camp I’ve been remotely involved in that had a painless preparation process and a rather painful ‘implementation’. It’s amazing how Security is emphasised in this time, location and day.

One thing I was preparing to start a discussion about during the committee meetings was on strategic planning. Amusingly, I wasn’t able to raise it during the Day 1 meeting, and a couple of points before I intended to try again in the Day 2 meeting, a guest and a senior started talking about that.
Maybe, it appeared better to deal with the issue instead of having their own people initiate and follow through the process to it’s completion. But, it’s that bunch of hooligans who will be around to make sure this thing works – or watch it flop.

The discussion stretched to deciding that “work” needed to be done on the corporate webs. I think that’s not enough. We’ll have to relook at the building blocks, and build something much more magnificant – something that will shock and put others in awe.
Once upon a time, Flash was a novelty and perhaps a shock. The Group has had much practice in that arcane art, but extraordinary efforts and productions have become the norm. It’s time to start something new – but I’m predicting that since the seniors didn’t mention that there, it won’t get done.

At the same time, I have extremely strong objections to the use of pain and torture to strategically locate personnel for leadership appointments. That’s what I see as belonging in ‘character building’ or concrete sandal-swallowing pits, more commonly associated with Uniformed Groups. I think that the way people behave and think (and accompanying projections) can be gauged via other means.
In any case, I’ve agreed to differ in this area – but that does not and will not mean acceptance.

Lemons

I was attempting to make some meringue-like thing (“fingers”) a couple of hours ago, and as usual something went horribly wrong.. but there’s something fun you can do to make them edible. Add a spot of flour and some cornflour, mix well, and fry like pancakes. It’s rather sweet. Consume in moderation.

For some unknown reason, I’ve been shoved into the recently vacated slot for the IJSO local prelims this week. Goodness me.

I’m reading this vaguely interesting book about locks and locksmithing.

A friend recently lambasted people who don’t practice ‘proper’ music player/earphone etiquette. Well, it just happens that many/most of the people out there don’t actually follow much etiquette – you have people whacking bus seats, making out in public places, blasting music from phones on buses, et cetera.. I think it’s not entirely reasonable (nor unreasonable) to expect these people to understand what the various ‘postures’ of listening to music imply.

At the same time, I’m very curious about why there’s this tendency to transmit the wrong signals, especially when the observee is not aware of the interpretations of certain actions. For example, reading my tendency to touch my face might equate to doubt, lies, or perhaps rejection – even when it just happens that at the moment that’s not in my mind.
Almost everything can be interpreted both ways.

bon Dieu!!!

I’m so bloody annoyed.. I’m officially a member of the My MacBook Was Cracked By Itself group on flickr now.

Photos at flickr.

Goodness knows how I’m going to convince the resellers here to replace my top case. In the worst case, I’ll skip buying the NAS and continue saving up for a new Macbook. Replacing the panel at their part and labour rates is simply not economical. I really don’t want to switch back to a PC for my everyday work.

Fingers

I haven’t written for a long time, but there are so many other things to see and do..

Last Friday when everyone was out watching Spiderman 3, I went to watch Miss Potter. I think they’ve really covered most of the really beautiful scenary at the Lake District. The house really does look like the real one.

Someone remarked to me that the air in school smelled ‘creamy’ couple of days back.

Have you tried LDAP authentication with WPMU? Nothing out there does what I want right now; if you see one that works with the latest version of wordpress-mu-1.2.1, please let me know before I start hacking WordPress =)

AD has this default 1000 results limit for browsing/searching the directory. Gotcha.

Have you seen pam_captcha?
I think turning off ’standard’ password authentication helps a wee bit too.. the number of ssh rejection lines in one of my LogWatch mails have dropped quite a bit.

Op AS is still underway, but put on hold due to other experimentation in progress. I’m playing with Apple Motion for the next two weeks.

Build

This is so absolutely geek-worthy I’m not waiting for the exams to end first before posting about it. PIPE Networks is building a datacentre in 60 days, and they’re blogging!

VolumeIcon

I’ve finally fixed that pesky malfunctioning folder icon for one of my custom dmgs. Here’s how. Developer Tools is a prerequisite.

First you need the icon file, in the Apple Icon format (ICNS).

Use Icon Composer (/Developer/Applications/Utilities/Icon Composer.app) to stuff your four images, Small (16×16), Large (32×32), Huge (48×48), Thumbnail (128×128) into the icns file. PNGs work, since you need transparency. Prepare your files – or get some from Iconfactory, or somewhere.

Once you’ve got your source files ready, start Icon Composer. Doubleclick on the appropriate box in the Image RGB/Alpha (32 Bit) column, and navigate to the correct image. Say yes to the prompt that comes up about extracting the 1bit mask. That’s for the Hit Mask in the right column, which determines which area of the icon when ‘hit’ (clicked) will be counted. Since it should be the shape and area of your main image, let it do its magic.

After populating the boxes, save it as VolumeIcon.icns somewhere. Open the containing folder in Finder, select the file and ⌘C it. Get Info on the mounted dmg from the desktop or elsewhere, click on the small icon near the top of the window (not the window bar), beside the name, and ⌘V.
You don’t have to fill up all the boxes – I left 48×48 empty and Finder interpolated something from another size. That’s absolutely normal, since you can set folder views (⌘J in Finder) to display any size of icon.

If that works, you’re done. Otherwise, fire up the Terminal and try this macosxhint.

If -that- still doesn’t work, like in mine case, you need to use SetFile to bless the folder – instructions at MacGeekery, Apple Developer manpage.

Accredition

Introducing.. the Riazhsk series. 1280/1024|960|800

The font used is Inconsolata.

Imagination

imagini’s VisualDNA is popping up all over my reading list. If I could properly search my Google Reader, I could tell you who was the first – someone posted theirs weeks ago – but no, I can’t.
The amusing thing is, it’s a 7% match with everyone’s profile I’ve seen.

The Chatter Pillow is real cool. Nice fuzzy cat too.

FuzzyClock is finally Universal. It isn’t working correctly for me, though.

Expanding RAID? Sure can do, but the ‘reshaping’ can be quite slow =) RedHat.com, Ferg’s gaff.

The phenomenon of Teachers’ Day at the School is very different from other schools. Really. Teachers don’t walk out of school (or to their cars) loaded down with soft toys, sand bottles, cards, class t-shirt (which teacher here has a class t-shirt?!), more cards, sweet smelling stuff..