Mc-Kenna.com

I was trying to get SVN set up as a daemon on my OSX 10.4 (Tiger) machine when I started running into this error upon connection:

bash: line 1: svnserve: command not found
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly

Some searching later I really couldn’t find anything that might have been causing the problem, other than the obvious notion that the path was not working correctly. A little fiddling later I discovered the problem - the ssh daemon was by default configured to not load any user environment files (which are used to set the command path, etc). To fix the problem I had to first enable the option PermitUserEnvironment and then restart the service:

sudo nano /etc/sshd_config

Search (control-w) for the string “PermitUser” then uncomment the line (remove the # sign) and change the the “no” to “yes”. Then all I had to do was restart the ssh daemon and it was good to go:

sudo SystemStarter -v restart SSH

Et voila!

Today at work Entourage 2004 decided it had enough of life and didn’t want to start. Not having had this happen before I did a quick Google to discover that if you hold down the option key while double-clicking it (or single-clicking the dock icon) to start it will pop up a database repair utility which will hopefully be able to fix any problems. Cool!

In 2005 (IIRC) Microsoft released a media initiative called Plays For Sure along with a number of both device manufacturers and online music stores. The idea was that you would be able to buy any number of devices from different companies, then buy music from different stores and be sure the music would work with the player. Well, it seems Microsoft has had enough of this idealistic “partnership” or “play nice for the consumers” thing and is going back to their old practice of locking everyone out: their new Zune players are incompatible with music bought for the old stores and the old players will not be compatible with music from the new Zune store. Yeah, that’s why people still buy Microsoft products / services, they like having to re-buy everything every two years. Good on you, MSFT!

Now, lets compare that to Apple’s iPod and iTunes Store: every single iPod sold since the beginning is still able to play music from the store today, and every new iPod is still able to play music bought from the store on day 1. Yes, it is vendor lock-in, but at least they tend not to give their customers the shaft quite as often. And they have BSG ;-)

At home I use the wonderful Gallery2Export plugin for Apple’s iPhoto photo catalog program into a Gallery2-based online album. It has generally worked great, but yesterday when I was trying to upload Halloween pictures it stopped working. Some fiddling later, including going through the hassle of trying another plugin (iPhoto2Gallery, which also failed), I finally upgraded the website from PHP 4.4 to PHP 5.1, and… it magically started working! Hurray! I’ve no idea if that was the actual problem or if it was just sheer luck, but its working again and now I can get back to the fun of sharing pics with my family :-)