New WD Passport Drive .. with FireWire 800

rae — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:43:57 +0000

WD Passport Studio

Woo, there’s a new WD Passport drive (the drives we use at gaming on Friday nights), and not only is this one bigger (500 GB), but it also sports a FireWire 800 port. It’s called the Passport Studio.

WD Media Player

Also new from Western Digital is an HD Media Player. [buy.com link]

Alas, Costco Canada doesn’t seem to have any of this new WD stuff yet.

Mac OS X command-line gotcha: path_helper

rae — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:58:37 +0000

Ran into an issue where my terminals were coming up **really** slowly. It ended up being a line in the script /usr/libexec/path_helper.

It turns out Apple has set up a whole process for modifying users’ PATHs by adding text files in /etc/paths.d, which is really a good idea, since install/uninstall scripts can just add/remove text files instead of mucking around with users’ login scripts. For some reason it was taking about 30 seconds to execute this line of bash:

[[ /Users/t_ellir/bin/Darwin:/Users/t_ellir/bin/Darwin-i386:/Users/t_ellir/bin/noarch:/Users/t_ellir/bin/osx-rae:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/lib:/Developer/Tools:/usr/X11/bin:/Applications/ccollab_client:/Users/t_ellir/mudbox/dev/bin/macos:/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin:/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/bin:/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin:/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/bin = *(*:)/usr/local/bin*(:*) ]]

But it had no problem zipping through other directories, e.g.:

[[ /Users/t_ellir/bin/Darwin:/Users/t_ellir/bin/Darwin-i386:/Users/t_ellir/bin/noarch:/Users/t_ellir/bin/osx-rae:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/lib:/Developer/Tools:/usr/X11/bin:/Applications/ccollab_client:/Users/t_ellir/mudbox/dev/bin/macos:/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin:/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/bin:/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin:/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/bin = *(*:)/usr/sbin*(:*) ]]

so it has something specifically to do with it being /usr/local/bin. I didn’t have that directory so I created it, but that didn’t help. I finally kludged around it by removing the directory and then patching the script to test for the existence of the directory before trying the test:

--- path_helper 2008-11-04 11:54:18.000000000 -0500
+++ /usr/libexec/path_helper    2008-11-04 11:54:47.000000000 -0500
@@ -15,6 +15,7 @@
        for f in "$DIR" "$DIR".d/* ; do
          if [ -f "$f" ]; then
                for p in $(< "$f") ; do
+                       [ ! -d "${p}" ] && continue
                        [[ "$NEWPATH" = *(*:)${p}*(:*) ]] && continue
                        [ ! -z "$NEWPATH" ] && SEP=":"
                        NEWPATH="${NEWPATH}${SEP}${p}"

Props to kilala.nl for having a blog post about this.

Long-term storage

rae — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:45:09 +0000

Iain always tells me I should just get a hard drive and copy things to it for long-term storage.

Even though it’s more expensive per gigabyte (see “Media Costs“) it’s a lot faster and easier to deal with. It saves you tons of time, too. Backing up hundres of gigs of data to 4.4 GB DVD’s gets really old after a while.

However, it occurred to me that there is a very good reason not to use hard drives for long-term storage: connectors change over time.

SCSI and IDE are getting more and more rare these days. Some day the same thing will happen to SATA. Yet, even the most modern optical device — the Blu-ray drive — can still read the very first optical format: the CD.

Tech Tok

New WD Passport Drive .. with **FireWire 800**

Mac OS X command-line gotcha: path_helper

Long-term storage

New WD Passport Drive .. with FireWire 800