Windows Vista File Sharing in Mac OS X Leopard

Sometimes, the Internet is not your friend.

I’d heard that Leopard made Windows Vista file sharing much easier, so I assumed it would “just work”, but when my Mac did not show up on my Vista network, I turned to the trusty Internet for help.

Turns out I should’ve just RTFM. Google-ing for “leopard vista file sharing” (or similar searches) yields nothing but obsolete false alarms about bogus problems and wild goose chase solutions involving complex regedit hacks and such.

In hopes of saving others this pain, here are the steps in Leopard’s Mac Help, which worked for me right off the bat:


To set up Windows file sharing:

1. Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, and then click Sharing.
2. Select File Sharing in the list, then click Options.
3. Select “Share files and folders using SMB.”
(This is the key – Leopard by default only shares files using AFP.)
4. Select the name of the user account that will share files and enter the password for that user.
5. Click Done.

The following step was not necessary for me – my Mac showed up in my Vista network as soon as I enabled SMB file sharing.


6. Give the address of your computer to Windows users you want to share your computer.

The other stupid user issue I ran into was not realizing that the “Drop Box” folder in my Mac’s “Public” folder is write-only, so you can only put files into it (hence the name). Files placed in the Public folder are visible to all Vista users. I did not need to authenticate or anything – it all “just works” as one would expect.

Clip Restoration with Adobe Audition

I was going through some old recordings today and found a track that had some badly clipped audio.

I was very happy to discover that Adobe has a slick audio editor called “Audition” that can restore clipping by actually interpolating the missing parts of the clipped waveform! Here’s a before & after shot that illustrates how this works:

adobe_clip_restore_before.jpg

adobe_clip_restore_after.jpg

The results are very satisfying to the ear as well as the eye. At $350 I probably won’t be buying the app just for this feature alone, but the 30-day free trial will sure come in handy. Thanks, Adobe!

Another gig @ the Carolina Coffee Shop

I’ll be playing keyboards again with a small combo called “JazzBeau” (bass, drums, keys, trumpet, & sax) at the Carolina Coffee Shop in Chapel Hill *this Thursday and next Thursday*, 7 – 9 PM. Mostly jazz standards. The players are all very good, but the sax player, Mike Hamilton, is really something special.

138 E Franklin St.
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
(919) 942-6875

The food is pretty good and they have a very respectable bar as well as free Wi Fi. Come on down!

A Trip to the Mountains


Dori and the kids are still in California staying with my folks, so I decided to head up to Burnsville NC to visit my ol’ pal Eric, with whom I traveled in China in 1984, and who now makes beautiful maps, does freelance environmental research (such as Ground Truthing in Alaska), juggles extremely well, and makes a mean breakfast (shown here).

Burnsville really is a great place to get away from the “hustle and bustle” of suburban life.

More photos here.

Really hoping it snows up there soon so I’ll have an excuse to go back! 😉

2 Films I saw on my Winter Vacation

I watched a number of movies over my Winter Vacation, but I particularly enjoyed these two, which have a common message: A Person’s A Person, No Matter How Small.

1) Horton Hears a Who (the classic Chuck Jones version based on the Dr. Seuss book, although the new version coming out in March looks like it will be very good), and

2) Autism, The Musical, an award-winning documentary about a woman named Elaine Hall in L.A. who created a theater group for autistic children who created their own full-length musical.

Both films are highly recommended. Lots of great lessons to learn, including (in Horton) that we should listen to our scientists when they warn us about imminent disasters like global warming. Timely stuff!

Programming languages and the drugs that inspired them

A coworker today said today that Larry Wall (the inventor of Perl) had been quoted as saying, in response to the question “Why are there so many ways of doing the same thing in Perl?”, “Good Weed.”

I wasn’t able to find any evidence of this (although I did turn up this great essay by Larry Wall on Perl and Postmodernism). This got me thinking though, if marijuana was the inspiration for Perl, what drugs might have inspired other programming languages?

Java, for example, was obviously inspired by caffeine, if not stronger stimulants. The sheer amount of energy required to do even simple tasks with Java attests to this, as well as the name (though to be fair, the original name “Oak” conjures images of gentle, overweight druids rather than wickedly-smart, annoyingly attractive twenty-somethings in 1999, fresh out of college, amped up on Starbucks, and ready to Change The World.



   She’s refactoring.

So what about python? Another colleague suggested Absinthe, which most people who’ve actually tried it describe as “a more lucid and aware drunk”. I do tend to think of python as a more “laid back” language, with its weak (excuse me, “dynamic”) typing and lack of compilation concerns. Certainly Guido strikes me as a pretty mellow guy who probably enjoys a pint now and then. So maybe python is beer-inspired… after all, if you can solve your problem with 3-5 times less code than Java, that leaves a lot more time for drinking beer.

I’ll leave it to my readers (is anybody out there?) to suggest other language/drug connections. Time to sleep… perchance to dream.

Whining about air travel



One of the things i really hate about airports is that they rarely make power outlets available to people needing to charge up their devices. It almost seems they do this deliberately… to save on their electric bills, perhaps? Who knows. Here’s an example from my trip back from visiting my parents in Palm Springs – this was taken in the Houston airport.

Contrast with this photo from the Southwest Airlines gate at the Denver airport:

And another thing… does anyone else feel ripped off having to pay $8 to get online, even just for a few minutes?

And Continental – whose ads proudly tout their in-flight meals – apparently considers 7:25 PM “past dinnertime”. Apparently they’re having a hard time finding people who can manage to handle baggage properly as well… my suitcase ended up in Ft. Lauderdale. I hope it’s at least getting a nice suntan!

Ah well, I suppose it’s all a small price to pay for the ability to travel distances that would have been unthinkable a mere hundred years ago in a matter of hours.

Why do so few companies observe Martin Luther King day?!?

Martin Luther King Day falls on Jan. 21st this year (3rd Monday of January). It’s an official Federal Holiday. Schools will be closed, the Post Office won’t be delivering mail. It’s a holiday honoring arguably one of the most important Americans who ever lived. And yet, very few private companies actually give their employees the day off. None that I’ve worked for since the holiday was established have. Anybody reading this work for a company that does?

I, for one, will be using one of my precious vacation days to honor this man who gave his life in sacrifice to end racism in America. i think it’s the very least one can do. And besides, the kids will need looking after.

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John Mellencamp inducted, Eric Rosser convicted

I just found out (via my IU Alumni e-newsletter) that John Mellencamp (we knew him as “Johnny Cougar” back in the ’80’s when I was playing keyboards in bars throughout the Midwest) made the Rock ‘N Roll Hall of Fame.

Good for you, Johnny!

This made me curious about Cougar’s old keyboardist, Eric Rosser, who I met in Bloomington on several occasions.
So I for some reason I Google’d him, and holy cow! Turns out he was extradited from Thailand back in ’02 on six counts of producing and distributing child pornography! Salon.com had an article about him in which they claim “Rosser hid [a video camera] in the school’s toilet, and aimed the other to shoot under his students’ dresses as they played the piano.”

Ewwwww!!!

According to America’s Most Wanted, Rosser was sentenced to 16 years and eight months in prison and fined $20,000. Too light a sentence if you ask me! Such a shame.

making pyunit’s TextTestRunner more verbose

After much unfruitful Googling, I finally found a way to make pyunit’s TextTestRunner class more “verbose” when running command-line unit tests.

In my unit tests the only output from pyunit was:

====================
Ran (X) tests in (N)s

OK
====================

… which wasn’t terribly helpful since you can’t see which tests are being run unless you add your own print statements.

However, if you initialize your TextTestRunner object like so:

====================
runner = unittest.TextTestRunner(verbosity=2)
====================

… pyunit will print out which test it’s running, which is quite helpful.

I have no idea what setting higher levels will do, as this feature isn’t well-documented.

Hope this helps someone!

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