MacPorts behind VPN that blocks tcp 873

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Because some VPNs block the rsync port (tcp 873), the typical MacPorts install doesn’t work properly.  Use the instructions below to configure your MacPorts installation to use Subversion instead of rsync, so you can keep up to date even if you’re connected to a VPN.

# Open Terminal
curl http://distfiles.macports.org/MacPorts/MacPorts-1.9.2.tar.gz > MacPorts-1.9.2.tar.gz

tar -xzvf MacPorts-1.9.2.tar.gz
cd MacPorts-1.9.2
./configure && make && sudo make install

# add /opt/local/bin to PATH
     vi ~/.bash_profile
          export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
          export MANPATH=/opt/local/share/man:$MANPATH

source ~/.bash_profile

cd /opt/local/var/macports/sources
sudo mkdir -p svn.macports.org/trunk/dports
cd svn.macports.org/trunk/dports
sudo svn co http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/trunk/dports/ .

# fix conf file
     sudo vi /opt/local/etc/macports/sources.conf
          #rsync://rsync.macports.org/release/ports/ [default]
          file:///opt/local/var/macports/sources/svn.macports.org/trunk/dports/ [default]

sudo port -d sync

# NOTE: "sudo port -v selfupdate" will NOT work - use "sudo port -d sync" instead
# "sudo port install " should work just fine

# example: install git
sudo port install git-core +svn +doc +bash_completion +gitweb

Vacation interruptus: Don’t let an office tech crisis ruin your getaway

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Vacation interruptus: Don’t let an office tech crisis ruin your getaway – Computerworld.

It’s wonderful to be loved, of course, but being  the only guy who can save the world while you’re on vacation is a major bummer (see Clark Kent at Niagara Falls).  The problem here is once again that what is good in the short term is not necessarily good in the long term – I might save a bunch of money *right now* by only paying *one* guy to know everything there is to know about our enterprise production messaging infrastructure, but when he gets hit by a truck, leaves for greener pastures, or goes on vacation, the world can end in such an amazingly expensive way that in hindsight, *doubling* or even *tripling* our costs by hiring more people to avoid this single point of failure would have saved us gobs of money.

Now part of this can be ameliorated by *useful* documentation (screencasts, step-by-step walkthroughs, or FAQs and HOWTOs actually *built* to answer questions that came up in real life, as opposed to the kind of Word document that lives on a Sharepoint server for decades without anyone actually reading past page 3), but even with all the documentation in the world, if someone isn’t actually familiar with the system (i.e., they’re an offshore “production support” resource that is supposedly an expert in the generic technology at hand but not with the actual implementation in question), they can take orders of magnitude more time to solve an issue than someone steeped in its day-to-day operation.

So what’s the answer, besides having a magical wish fairy that can simultaneously convince business to spend more money short term as well as produce a strong technical candidate who is available for the job?  I’d argue that at the *very* least, for each moment of crisis that you *do* actually face, consider that a warning from the fates and solve *that* long term – if it happened once, it’ll happen again.  The inclination will be to pass blame around, of course, but resist!  Answer the question, “what do we have to do *now* to avoid this in the future?”

T-bones Star Wars Universe – The Empire Strikes Back – Seven Pieces

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T-bones Star Wars Universe – The Empire Strikes Back – Seven Pieces.

I had always imagined I had hallucinated seeing this scene, but I distinctly remember watching ESB in Hawaii as a kid in the theaters, and seeing this scene that I never saw in any other release (DVD, laserdisc, VHS).

My current working theory is that this “cut” scene was actually stuck into a few prints that found their way into the wild back in 1980.

Anyone else who saw ESB in Hawaii theaters have the same memory?

iPad blogging

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Okay, so I finally broke down and got an iPad. I justify it mostly as a game machine, an eReader and a bedside computer for watching videos (AirVideo – a must have).

Anyway, the keyboard isn’t the greatest thing in the world, but I’m getting used to it. As a touch typist, I feel a bit hampered, but for hunt and peckers, it’s probably just right. Using the iPad wordpress app, it doesn’t look like there is any way to put in hyperlinks, but that may just be hidden somewhere not obvious.

We’ll see if this ends up being something useful for blogging. On my wish list so far – a working sametime client, a text editor that syncs with files on my MacBook, and a way to sync separate ipads with different “notes” (as it stands, multiple devices synced to the same Mac all hit the same backend for the notes app on the iPad).