Update: you will need to install Growl if you do not already have it installed.

Even though iTunes is slightly better about loving NAS drives than it used to be (see my post Mac Attack: Vantec loves America, OS X 10.5 Leopard) life is not perfect. For me, once my Mac loses it's connection to the NAS, such as after waking from sleep mode, iTunes cannot find the original files, even though they are there. The error reads "The song xxx could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?"

After quite a bit of investigation and trial and error, I'm not sure who's fault it is: it might be the NAS's fault, based on my "solution:" if I list all of the files in the My Music folder on the NAS, iTunes can find them again -- that is, all I need to do is acknowledge their existence and things start working.

My NAS is named "VAULT." Using the Terminal, I executed the following:

ls -R /Volumes/VAULT/My\ Music/

File and folder names streamed by for about 30 seconds, and when it was done, iTunes was able to find the original files again. Great!

Automator It

But, I wasn't satisfied -- I wanted something I could run from within iTunes to fix this when it happens. I decided to fire up Automator and create a little app that would do this for me. Jump to here to download "Find Original Files.app", but to use them you will need to edit the two files within and change some stuff (more on that later). If you'd rather make your own instead of editing my version, here's how:

1. Open Automator and create a new, blank workflow
2. Optional: Add a Show Growl Notification Action with a handy message, such as Title: "Repairing iTunes Library..." and Description: "This might take a few minutes"
3. Add a Run Shell Script Action and add "ls -R (location of your iTunes music folder)" -- example: "ls -R /Volumes/VAULT/My\ Music/"
4. Optional: Add a Show Growl Notification Action with a finishing message, such as Title: "Done!" and Description: "Hopefully your iTunes library is fixed."
5. File - Save As - Application. Give it a name and Save it in /Users/(your user here)/Library/iTunes/Scripts. Create that directory if it does not exist.

Unfortunately, iTunes will not let you run Automator apps or workflows from within it, but thanks to Jason Kacmarski's Apple Discussion response to "How do I get automator scripts into iTunes? Very frustrated" I was able to figure it out: create an AppleScript script to launch the Automator app.

1. Launch Script Editor
2. Add the following, substituting your application name and your folder names where appropriate:

tell application "Finder"
  activate
    open application file "Find Original Files.app" of folder "Scripts" of folder "iTunes" of folder "Library" of folder "(your user here)" of folder "Users" of startup disk
end tell

3 . Save this to /Users/(your user here)/Library/iTunes/Scripts

Now when you launch iTunes, you should see a little "Script" icon on the menu bar with your application it.

Find Original Files.app

Good luck, and I hope it works for you. Here is a zip file with my version if this little helper app. Unzip the following to /Users/(your user here)/Library/iTunes/Scripts.

find_original_files.zip

Remember: you will need to edit "Find Original Files.app" in Automator and "Find Original Files.scpt" in Script Editor to fix the appropriate directory paths for your particular setup! Also, if you get a Growl error, you will need to install And you might need to install will need to install Growl, too.

Ok, so, I'm about 5 years behind the curve, even though I'm a supposed professional Web 2.0 developer, but I'm just now getting into Flickr. Also, I really like taking screenshots of interesting things using CMD+SHIFT+4 and uploading those to a "Screenshots" Flickr photoset. Here's what I wanted to do to to feed my Screenshots Flickr set: Take a screenshot and have it automatically imported into iPhoto, and then upload it from iPhoto to Flickr. Will it "Just Work?" No, it does not. See my rant here.

Save Screenshots in a Special Folder

Download Deeper. Deeper is a Mac app that let's you tweak many hidden settings for your Mac. The only one I use is customizing the name of screenshot images and the location to which they are saved. I save my screenshots in [me]/Pictures/screens/ and each one is prefixed screen.

Automatically Import into iPhoto

iPhoto cannot "watch" a folder and automatically import images dropped into it. Instead, and disappointingly, you must become a pseudo-programmer and create an Automator workflow to perform this action for you. Automator is a program that lets you create workflows to, well, automate repetitive tasks, such as importing images into iPhoto. Here's what you do:

1. Download Deeper, mentioned above, and configure it to save your screenshots to a Folder. I chose Pictures/Screens
2. Open iPhoto and create an album to hold your screenshots. I called it Screens, too.
3. fire up Automator, which lives in Application/Automator and create a new Custom workflow.
4. Add "Get Specified Finder Items" to the list and use the Add... button to add the folder where your screenshots will land when created
5. Add "Import Files into iPhoto" and choose Existing album and Screens
6. Save it as a Folder Action: File - Save As Plug-in... and give it a name.
7. Choose Plug-in for: Folder Actions and Attached to Folder: screens or wherever your folder new screenshot folder resides.

Now, take a screenshot and see if iPhoto fires up and imports the image. If so, great! If not... well, maybe I messed up, maybe you did. I'm that helpful.

It will not Just Work. Why? Mostly because iPhoto is the single worst Mac app ever written. I love my Mac. It rocks. Wouldn't give it up. But iPhoto is just about the most counterintuitive and restrictive app Apple has ever written. It does not Just Work. I could go on and on and on, and to their credit iPhoto '08 has copied many feature from Picasa, my favorite photo management app (Windows only :( ). Perhaps one day I will enumerate everything wrong with iPhoto, but right now I wont.

Why? Because I don't know. That's the thing about Just Works: it Just Works: you really don't know why. It is the principal of least astonishment: you should not be surprised by whatever happens when you use a program. It's not that you are happy, it's that you are not unhappy. With iPhoto, I am constantly astonished. When I hit the ESC key, I usually say to myself "Whoa, what was that?". Tab? Surprised. Right-click? Surprised by what is not there. Multi-select images to batch-process them? Good luck.

And integration? Not with Flickr or any other non-Apple photo site. Ordering prints? From Kodak only.

There is a fix for the Vantec Nexstar LX which will allow it to work with Leopard. To skip all of this drivel and download it, click here

My NAS drive works with Leopard! As chronicled here in my other post, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has well-documented issues working with network attached storage (NAS) hard drives. Namely, no worky. The drive and its top-level folders will occasionally reveal themselves in Leopard, but they incorrectly appear to be empty.

Sad. After emailing Vantec USA, the manufacturer of my Nexstar LS NAS enclosure, regarding the issue, Vantec Technical Support replied that their development team is aware of the problem and is working on a new firmware to resolve this issue:

Our development team is aware of the problem and is working on a new firmware to resolve this issue.

Cool, but, you know... we'll see. I'm a rather jaded person when it comes to promises from tech support when they are too far away for me to walk over to and hand them a bottle of Wild Turkey as motivation to fix my problem. But, then again, I did get an email, and they do have a history of blowing my mind by actually helping me. Start the flashback machine an delay the satisfying ending to this story!

The Little Tapeworm

In 2005 I bought a Vantec hard drive enclosure -- not a NAS, just a regular ol' external enclosure. While swapping drives in and out of the thing the IDE cable shredded.

Where was I going to find a little bitty cable like that? I had about 10 full-sized cables, but the would not fit inside the enclosure, monster tapeworms that they were. So I thought, what the hell --- I'll just ask them to send me a new one.

Me:

Several days ago I bought a NexStar 2 HDD Enclosure (Model NST-355U2). Despite very gentle and careful handling, the ATA cable ripped apart and the connections on one end broke into several pieces while I was removing a hard drive from the enclosure.

Please send a replacement ATA cable to: (My address)

And 2 days later, from Vantec:

Joseph, your replacement cable was mailed out today via USPS.

BUWAAAAAAAAAAAAAA? No way. But yes way! The cute little thing arrived a couple of days later. Amazing -- actual human contact, and solutions!

The Fix

Flashback over -- back to the NAS drive. Three days ago I a received the following email from Vantec Technical Support, also know as My Homie:

We just received the new firmware this morning. I'm including the new firmware with this email... Please let us know if this help in resolving the Leopard problem with our LX enclosure.

And the firmware was indeed attached. I used the Nexstar's Windows-based firmware updater (different machine), rebooted the NAS and CHA-CHING MONEY MONEY MONEY! When I mounted the drive (and I kinda want to) the NAS worked like a charm -- all of my files, including my iTunes library were finally available again.

All is not quite perfect, though. Normally a NAS drive will show up in the "Shared" area in the OS X Finder, but mine does not. I have to manually mount the drive by either hitting CMD+K or Finder -- Go -- Connect to Server... It does not show up under "Network," either. I'll let them know, but I'm a satisfied guy considering that the NAS is fixed and Vantec kept it's promise.

Here it is, the firmware. Use it at your own risk!
Vantec Nexstar LX NAS Firmware with OS X 10.5 Leopard Fix

Update 01/27/2008

Vantec fixed it! Check out my post about the fix.

Update 12/10/2007

Well, I'm not crazy. Apple has acknoledged that the SMB bug is real and that my bug report has been classified as a duplicate of an existing issue (#5586069, for what it's worth.) It looks like they truly are on the case.

Hello Joseph,

This is a follow up to Bug ID# 5624281. After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering. This issue has been filed in our bug database under the original Bug ID# 5586069. The original bug number being used to track this duplicate issue can be found in the State column, in this format: Duplicate/OrigBug#.

If you have any additional questions related to this bug or wish to check on status of the original issue, please update this bug report or send an email to devbugs@apple.com, referencing your Bug ID# 5624281.

Thank you for submitting this bug report. We truly appreciate your assistance in helping us discover and isolate bugs.

Best Regards,

Apple Developer Connection
Worldwide Developer Relations

Update 12/03/2007 @ 13:00

Vantec, the manufacturer of my Nexstar LX NAS, has replied to my email about this issue and confirmed that the Nexstar is not completely compatible with Leopard, and they are working on new firmware to fix the problem. Thanks for the response, Vantec!!

Hi,

Our development team is aware of the problem and is working on a new firmware to resolve this issue. Currently we do not have an ETA when the new firmware will be ready, but hopefully within the next few weeks. At the moment, our LX enclosure is not fully supported under Mac OS X 10.5. We are sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused you. If you have any further question, please don't hesitate to ask and we will do our best to answer them.

Regards,

Technical Support

Vantec Thermal Technologies

Original Post on 12/01/2007

Ok, Apple, this is getting outrageous. Seriously. I'm not kidding. Now? Nope, still not kidding. Not now, either.

After upgrading to Apple OS X 10.5 Leopard, I cannot read or write to my Vantec LX NAS drive via SMB -- I can connect to the drive, but it appears empty, even though it is full of wonderful stuff. In English, no more iTunes Library for me unless I pull my drive out of it's hiding place and plug it into my Mac.

This is a fairly well documented problem in Mac discussion forums around the world, including this Apple Discussion thread and this one in Australia's Mac Talk Forums.

Here I am connecting to my NAS's 'vault' folder Notice the processors spiking to 100% and the wireless connection is dead. I think that's NetAuthAgent crashing.

Now, my poor NAS looks empty. So Sad.

I was really disappointed that the 10.5.1 patch that came out about a month after Leopard was released did not fix this. I've finally filed an official bug report about this. I'll post updates as I get them.

Console Output

You might see this Console Output (Applications - Utilities - Console) if you have this same problem. It looks like NetAuthAgent crashes, producing com.apple.netauth.useragent[851] NetAuthAgent(851,0xb0147000) malloc: *** error for object 0x16c4e050: Non-aligned pointer being freed (2) and com.apple.netauth.useragent[851] set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug.

12/1/07 10:41:39 AM com.apple.netauth.useragent[851] NetAuthAgent(851,0xb0147000) malloc: *** error for object 0x16c4e050: Non-aligned pointer being freed (2) 
12/1/07 10:41:39 AM com.apple.netauth.useragent[851] *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug 
12/1/07 10:41:39 AM com.apple.netauth.useragent[851] NetAuthAgent(851,0xb0147000) malloc: *** error for object 0x16c4e051: Non-aligned pointer being freed 
12/1/07 10:41:39 AM com.apple.netauth.useragent[851] *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug 
12/1/07 10:41:39 AM com.apple.netauth.useragent[851] NetAuthAgent(851,0xb0147000) malloc: *** error for object 0x16c4e052: Non-aligned pointer being freed 
12/1/07 10:41:39 AM com.apple.netauth.useragent[851] *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug 
12/1/07 10:41:39 AM com.apple.netauth.useragent[851] NetAuthAgent(851,0xb0147000) malloc: *** error for object 0x16c4e053: Non-aligned pointer being freed 
12/1/07 10:41:39 AM com.apple.netauth.useragent[851] *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug

Here's a quickie -- I love my MacBook Pro, but it has a completely totally absolutely unconditionally useless key taking up space on the lower-right hand side of the keyboard: the enter key. Who the hell cares about the enter key? I have a return key, and it does me just fine.

So, after some Googleage, I found a cool app that lets you remap your enter key to something useful, ctrl in my case: DoubleCommand. Check it out.

Today is June 29, 2007... also known as the Day of the Jesus Phone. The iPhone was released at 6pm and the whole geek/style world went ape-shit. For several days our office of elate metro-sexual geeks have been salivating of the prospect of the thing, but today the Jobs hit the fan. Hardly a moment went buy when we were not talking, speculating, arguing, or fantasizing over the iPhone. We sent time watching demos, watching live Gizmodo coverage, Justin.TV coverage, finding loopholes in our competing cell phone contracts, and negotiating with those same company's customer service reps to wriggle out of our contracts. We spent time photographing the San Francisco iPhone campers (those with iWait t-shirts) and even shooting videos.

All of this obsession has sparked a strange thought in my brain: what was the GNiPL today? The Gross National iPhone Product Loss? How many millions, perhaps billions of dollars were lost today due to iPhone mania? Since most of today's elite geek neurons were allocated to processing iPhone fantasies, was money not lost?

Well, just wait until those neurons are focused on actually using the iPhone. And you thought that praying to the Blackberry God was a time-sink...

I've had my MacBook Pro for a few months, and I really enjoy it. Since then, a few friends have purchased MBP's as well, so I've decided to update the list of Mac apps that I use on a regular basis, and also the list of those that I thought I'd like, but decided to remove.

Apps I Still Use Often

• Quicksilver: My God, it's full of stars. QS actually reminds me of developing with a powerful IDE: who cares where stuff is when you can search? Just find it. For me, it's Command+Space and start typing. Wonderful app. Much faster than the build-in Searchlight.

• MenuMeters: Displays CPU, memory, and other system status information discretely in the menu bar. I display memory and CPU, but skip the disk and network info.

• Witch: Allows you to ALT/OPTION+Tab through all of your application windows, not just the main application itself. For example, I have 3 Mail windows open and I can ALT+Tab to all of them.

• NeoOffice Pretty free office applications. Gotta have at least one. Don't use it much but I feel better knowing that I have it.

• Eclipse: Yeah yeah, I know there are many Eclipse haters out there, but it's a free IDE with lots of handy plugins. Maybe I'll buy TextMate, but free is free is free.

New Apps I Now Use

• Jumpcut: One of my new favorites! From the site: Jumpcut is an application that provides "clipboard buffering" — that is, access to text that you've cut or copied, even if you've subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut's interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard's history.

• VLC media player: Media player that plays Flac files. Much better than Cog in my opinion.

• Gmail Notifier: If only it supported multiple email addresses...

• TextMate: The text editor I'm using right now to write this! A great all around text editor. One of the 2 apps I've actually had to pay for.

• Parallels: All the cool kids are using machine virtualization.

• Adium: Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.

Removed or Never Use

• VirtuDesktops: Multi-desktops. I feel like I'm supposed to like this, and I sorta do, but I don't use them much yet. Usually crashes on me after a while.

• Cog: Replaced with VLC media player.

• XTorrent: Kept expiring, forcing me to upgrade to the newer one. The search feature was handy, though.

Installing Rails on Ubuntu and Windows XP at the same time under Parallels

Now that I have my Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP virtual machines running in Parallels (see Street cred? No: Geek cred (Part 1 of 2)), it's time to set them up to run Ruby on Rails. Why? You know... because.

Again, I'm not going to go into excruciating detail, but instead reference the sites that helped me with this and the problems I faced. Luckily there were only a few.

Windows XP + Ruby on Rails == Easy

Here I pretty much followed the instructions on the main Ruby on Rails site. As much as the Rails community loooooooooves their Macs, getting Rails up and running on Windows is much, much easier and faster than any other OS. No ports, no compiling, no apt-get install voodoo. It's just double-click and next-next-next-next-next...

• download and install using the ruby windows .exe installer. Make sure you select "enable gems" when asked!
• download and install mysql
• gem install rails -y
• gem install mysql -y
• gem install mongrel_cluster -y

Ubuntu Linux + Rails = Funkadillio

The guide to installing Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu Dapper Drake at Urban Puddle was a very good guide, but I still had troubles. The issues had the same theme: I needed development/compilation tools, which I had not installed as part of the Ubuntu install process. Here are the other things I needed to do:

Ruby Dev Library

I got the following error when trying to gem install mysql -y and gem install mongrel_cluster -y:

extconf.rb:1:in 'require': no such file to load - - mkmf (LoadError)

Solution: install ruby1.8-dev:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev

make And gcc

The mysql and mongrel gems also complained about make and gcc not being found:

make
sh: make: command not found

and

make: gcc: Command not found

If you get this, install them both:

sudo apt-get install make
sudo apt-get install gcc

Mysql Client Dev Library

I ended up installing this, too, but I'm not sure if it actually fixed anything.

sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient12-dev

That's it so far. I'm planning on setting up the Ubuntu image as a Capistrano deploy target and treating it as a test server.

I'm finally getting around to playing with Parallels Desktop for Mac, specifically the free release candidates for the next version. My geek-meter is rising with every moment. Here are some of the cool things and problems I found along the way. I'm not going to detail a complete install guide, but I will reference the ones I used and give credit where credit is due.

Windows XP on Parallels

The Parallels Release Candidate includes this nice feature: if you already have a Windows installation on your Mac from using Boot Camp, Parallels will let you run it in a virtual machine. This gives you the best of both worlds: a true hardware-accelerated Windows install for games (why else?) that you can also fire up in Parallels when you want to see if your CSS works in IE6 how badly your CSS is broken in IE6.

Problems with Windows XP on Parallels

Parallels wouldn't start my Boot Camp image immediately, instead giving me this error:

Parallels Desktop cannot find necessary drivers to configure your Boot Camp partition. Please refer to Help> Parallels Desktop Help>Using Boot Camp Windows XP Installation for troubleshooting*

... and so I did. Help> Parallels Desktop Help>Using Boot Camp Windows XP Installation suggested the following:

1. Boot into Windows XP via Boot Camp
2. Insert Microsoft Windows XP installation disc which was used for this Windows XP installation.
3. Locate the folder i368 on the disc and open it. Copy the following files: driver.cab and any of spN.cab files (sp1.cab or sp2.cab, etc depending on service package installed) to the folder: C:\WIndows\Driver Cache\i386.*

... and so I did. The virtual machine worked fine the next time I ran it, no problems.

Ubuntu Linux on Parallels

Nothing very exciting here. When creating the virtual machine, I created a "custom" installation of "Linux/Other Linux kernel 2.6"; this worked fine (mostly... keep reading.) Download yourself an ISO disk image from Ubuntu's download site or bittorrent one. I'm using Dapper Drake (6.06 with Long Term Support). When prompted to "Insert Linux Kernel 2.6 installation CD," choose "More Options" and specify the location of your downloaded ISO.

Problems with Ubuntu Linux on Parallels

I had to install it twice for some reason, which means that I had to delete the first virtual machine I crated and start from scratch. There was some kind of fatal error that I didn't pay attention to at the time, and thus I cannot tell you what it was; now unhelpful of me.

Next up: setting up the virtual machines for Ruby on Rails development.

*Text is most likely © Parallels. Hopefully they will be nice and let me help people help themselves and also sell more of their product.

My Macbook Pro is almost all set up, thanks in mostly to the large Cult of Mac contingent in the office. After asking for many suggestions and doing a bit of digging myself, here's what I'm running:

• Quicksilver: My God, it's full of stars. QS actually reminds me of developing with a powerful IDE: who cares where stuff is when you can search? Just find it. For me, it's Command+Space and start typing. Wonderful app. Much faster than the build-in Searchlight.

• MenuMeters: Displays CPU, memory, and other system status information discretely in the menu bar. I display memory and CPU, but skip the disk and network info.

• Witch: Allows you to ALT/OPTION+Tab through all of your application windows, not just the main application itself. For example, I have 3 Mail windows open and I can ALT+Tab to all of them.

• XTorrent: Free (for now) bittorrent client that also includes searching for torrents. Great for finding all of the that wonderful Creative Commons content.

• Cog: ... and now that you have torrented all of that CC'ed .flac and .shn audio, play it with Cog. Actually I don't like it much, since I can't seem to sort by file name, which is annoying. I'm looking for an alternative.

• NeoOffice Pretty free office applications. Gotta have at least one.

• VirtuDesktops: Multi-desktops. I feel like I'm supposed to like this, and I sorta do, but I don't use them much yet.

• Eclipse: Yeah yeah, I know there are many Eclipse haters out there, but it's a free IDE with lots of handy plugins. Maybe I'll buy TextMate, but free is free is free.

Other Handy Stuff I've Done

• Windows/Mac hard drive sharing: I followed one of many many many instructions on the net to share my Windows hard drive with my Mac, and visa-versa. Rather handy for harvesting all of that stuff I've been collecting for the last forever.

• NAS Enclusure: Fry's has a great selection of NAS (network-attached storage) hard drive enclusures, so I picked up a NexStar LX which seems to be working fine. Same theme as above: now I can more easily share content between my Mac and Windows machine, plus this will be a good place to park backups.

Dashboard Widgets

Holy crap these suck a lot of memory. But, if they are worth the RAM, then install like mad. The only one I keep up is iStat Pro widget which shows lots and lots of system info in a pretty interface. I checked out the Wikipedia widget and Rdoc widget widgets but didn't find them so useful when you can just open Firefox and hit the sites themselves.

And another one joins the Borg -- I bought a MacBook Pro. Though using a Mac is rather slow for me at this point since my keyboard navigation is hard-wired into my nerves system, I see to many advantages to avoid it any longer. Speed, the fact that it's a hard-core Unix system, stability, cool-kid factor... the list goes on and on. But this was the real ringer: a coworker of mine is working at a client with several hard-core sysadmin hackers, and guess what they have switch to? No, not a Dell or ThinkPad with some crazy, hand-compiled version of Linux, but Macs.

On a non-techie note, buying this thing was a wonderful experience. I have been watching the Apple Refurbished Store for the latest Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros and they started appearing a few weeks ago. Same warentee, so why not save a few bucks? Anyway, I dropped the hammer on one yesterday morning, it shipped that same afternoon, and was delivered the next day, all for free shipping. Good service!

Now I have to install Ruby, Ruby on Rails, MySQL... oh boy.