The Big Think

Upcoming Pixar movies.

How to make an explosive ping pong ball shooter in 30 seconds will stuff you have around the house. Heh, heh. I’m going to ambush Sean with one of these.

Best line: “It’ll usually leave a welt”

link

Finally, a respite from the recent heat. There’s a thick dark layer of clouds outside and a constant pouring rain (I’d say ‘drizzling’ rain, but some people hate that word
I love the rain here in Texas. It usually comes when it’s hot and icky outside and the rain makes everything nice and tolerable. It’s actually somewhat uncomfortably cool in the house right now. Bring it on!

Apple, in their infinite wisdom, removed standard searching in OS X. Under the new system, called Spotlight, the computer looks at every single file you have, then adds it to a universal database index. It can take several hours to index a big drive the first time, but once it’s done it’s very easy to just search the index. You can also search inside many types of files, so you could look for instances of certain keywords within a file. Pretty cool. In theory.

The problem comes when, for obscure Unix/OS X reasons, Spotlight refuses to index the drive at all. When this happens there is no index to search, no files to look through, and no way to find a lost file on your hard drives short of looking through every folder. No way.

This is a MAJOR problem for me, and is the latest of a slew of crazy, unacceptable, “it shouldn’t happen in OS X” problems I’ve been having with this busted OS. Even after a complete clean reinstall I’m having issues. If Spotlight won’t index the drive, the OS doesn’t give you a fallback search function. In other words, you’re screwed.

So Google it! Oh, believe me, I did. I looked all over the place for solutions (it seems other people have had related problems). The best I can do is to delete the current “index file” (only a few K) and force Spotlight to reindex. When I do that, Spotlight takes three or four minutes to get its stuff together and then promptly quits indexing. Actually, it says it’s done, but you can’t search for so much as the letter “A” in Spotlight. No results. So it’s creating some kind of index, but it doesn’t have any useful data in it.

May be related: Every 5 seconds or so I get a new message in the console that says:

G4-MDD mdimportserver[335]: sniffer can’t check in… 1102

G4-MDD is the name of the computer and the number in brackets increments each time. The 1102 stays the same. I think it’s related somehow because “mdimport” is the name appended to files that are used in defining Spotlight searches. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

Again… this is a brand new install of the OS. As far as I know, it has clean preferences and apps. Where do you go when Apple and Google fail you?

*Update* I got tired of trying to solve this annoying problem and just downloaded EasyFind. It’s a Spotlight replacement that doesn’t need to index the drive. Good Old-Skool searching. Downside: it’s an app that needs to run all the time (and takes time to boot at startup). Upside: unlike Spotlight, it works.

A recent report states that staying out of the sun may actually be worse for you has been preached by dermatologists. Reportedly, patients who lacked vitamin D (which our body gets from sunlight) had a much higher occurrence of deadlier cancers than those who got a normal dose of vitamin D.

The paper reports that researchers also “are linking low vitamin D status to a host of other serious ailments, including multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes, influenza, osteoporosis and bone fractures among the elderly.”

While I’m not going to go running around outside unprotected (like I did as a child, with many, many blistering sunburns to show for it), it’s nice to know that science is slowing coming around to the belief that everything in the natural world isn’t necessarily bad for us.

Make your own sugar glass!

A few years ago I was asked to do a hymn arrangement for a friend’s wedding. She had three specific hymns that meant a lot to her that she wanted arranged into the introit to the ceremony. I concocted a fun mix of all three of them and wanted to post it here (I finally got the ceremony DVD- 2 years later!).

The piece was sung by five very good sight-readers who had only had a few days to prep it. As is the case with most weddings, we only got about thirty minutes before the ceremony to rehearse it so there are some tuning issues which I hope you will forgive and the audio is from a crummy little camera mic about eight feet from the singers.

Considering the time constraints we were under I’m really happy with the performance. I hope you like it too.

Hymn Medley, by me.

Cool shadow art.

Tulsa opens a 50 year old time capsule today. So how does it feel to live in the future?

A new kilogram reference means the world’s most perfect sphere. Absolutely round down to 35 nanometers!

The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. It was a birthday gift from Barry and I’m finally getting around to reading it. What a great read! Like Barry said, it’s the book “The DaVinci Code” wanted to be.

Human Tetris Japanese game show. Man, you gotta love those Japanese game shows!

Buy.com has a sale on the Brother HL-2040 laser printer. Only $59! I bought the little brother to this (the Samsung 1710) three or four years ago and I love it. Cheap, good print quality, fast, a little loud when it’s running, but silent otherwise. I’d buy another one if I needed it.

If you’re in the market for an inexpensive printer, check it out. Review at cnet here.

I was interviewed a few months ago for Austin’s Caught in the Act magazine, the magazine for the Austin film and television trade. They interviewed me as a composer and audio guy and I got to share about the importance of (quality) music and (understandable) audio. You can check it out in this month’s issue.

The 100 best adventure books of all time. Feeling like a road trip. Robert?

Not that you care, but for the internet archives.

I did a google search and discovered that the “Illegal name” issue was due to an Illustrator file. I had installed Illustrator last night and it installed a folder called “legal.txt” or something. In that folder were a bunch of localized files for czech, german, italian, etc. The file name on the vietnamese file had some illegal characters that caused OS X’s Disk Utility to freak out. Tossing the whole folder and emptying the trash fixed the problem. I ran Disk Utility (from another OS X partition) and it cleaned up the mess.

I don’t get the “Illegal file” error any more, but I still have that annoying 128 MEGAbyte partition cluttering up my desktop. Are there any cool Unix commands I can use to permanently disable or unmount an unwanted partition? I’d rather do this than reformat the whole drive and start over.

Barry blogs about his 40th birthday and a very fine bottle of port. Yes, indeed. Very fine.

I’m at the end of a three day computer rebuild. My old system was giving me all sorts of problems (random lockups, much slowness, etc) and it’s been a few years since I’ve raked the thing down to raw metal and rebuilt it. When I do a rebuild I generally do it from the ground up instead of one of the quick and easy ways that you can do it. This way, all the pref files are new and there’s no way for the old problems to crop back up again.

Which doesn’t mean new ones can’t appear.

The system is up and running but I’m starting to see odd behavior that I can’t fix. I wiped one of the drives and made it my new boot drive, installed OS X on it, and got everything working. It worked great this morning but I started to see some little weirdnesses when I tried to install OS 9 onto my new business partition. For one thing, the software refused to install. I believe its exact words were “Can’t install on this computer. Please see documentation”. Gee, thanks. So I gave that up and booted back into X to Carbon Copy Clone my old work partition over. I’m not crazy about this since I’ll essentially be using a 4 year old system, with all its accumulated detritus, to run my business. I’d much rather start afresh, but when the system refuses to even install I don’t have much choice.

When I booted back into X I ran Disk Utility and noticed the the new drive suddenly had a 128mb ghost partition called “Uluru”- the name of the old partition that was on that drive. That’s weird. I had wiped that partition before creating the two new ones. And only 128mb? How useless is that? The undead “Uluru” partition was greyed out in Disk Utility and the only way I could access it was to erase it and make it a mountable partition. Now I have a useless 128mb stub hanging out my desktop.

To make matters worse, when I ran ‘verify disk’ in Disk Utility on my main OS X partition, I got an “Illegal Name” error and the dire warning that the disk needed to be repaired. Naturally, Disk Utility couldn’t repair it. Sigh.

So I’m at a brick wall here. I’m going to try and reboot into my old old old original drive, which is still around, and try to fix things from there. If that doesn’t work, the only recourse I can see is to go buy another new hard drive and start this whole farce all over again, this time using a known wiped drive. This really sucks.

If anybody out there has seen behavior like this or can offer advice, I’d appreciate an email. Something other than “OS X isn’t supposed to do that”, which is the most common frustrating advice I’ve been getting lately.

Sorry about the lack of posts, folks. I’ve been busy the last couple of days rebuilding my hard drive and reinstalling everything. Had a bit of a set back this afternoon when OS X decided to delete my entire applications folder (D’OH!). I’m less of an apologist for OS X now that I’ve been in the past. I guess I’ve regurgitated some of the Kool-Aid. When it works, it’s great, but it can still be a pain.

Oh, and when it nuked the Apps folder for no reason, it hashed up the permissions on about half of the files on the drive. Disk Utility caught and supposedly repaired tehm, but at this point I don’t trust it. Plus, some of my system apps just wouldn’t run.

Reinstall again! Ugh.

By the way, I’m trying to track down my MarsEdit password for the blog so I’m posting this within the web interface. So posting might be light for a day or so.

So now that I’m almost finished with the studio (see the post below) I finally got to do some actual work in it today. I spent about 3 hours putting together a big orchestration for a project I’ve been hired to do. It was a good test run for the studio and I have to say that it was a huge success. All those hours thinking about my workspace needs and space issues came to fruition. The new studio is everything I wanted it to be. The only thing it lacks is the second monitor (and the space for it). I think I’m going to do some minor fiddling with the space here to try and gracefully shoehorn one into the space. While working in Finale I had 25 measures and about a dozen staves visible at one time at 75% magnification. It was great but I had to cover up the score with all kinds of windows and menus. A second monitor would be much appreciated.

I’m thrilled to have all this ROOOOOM on my desktop, too. Can’t wait to show y’all the pictures.