njr 3.0

Last year I worked on NCIDpop, a network caller ID client originally written by Alexei Kosut. I recently spent a day or so doing some further hacking on NCIDpop to fix problems I and others had noticed. My changes have now been incorporated in an official release.

What’s new:

• Address Book reverse lookup support: NCIDpop will display the caller’s name, phone number label (e.g., “mobile”) and picture instead of the caller ID if the information is available in the Mac OS X address book. Also, when you double-click a caller entry in the call log, it’ll open the corresponding Address Book card rather than doing a reverse lookup.
• Don’t reformat non-numeric 10-digit numbers (e.g., turning Vonage’s click2call into (cli) ck2-call).
• A few small memory leak fixes, thanks to the Clang Static Analyzer.
• Updated reverse lookup URL list (some providers had consolidated or changed their URL format).
• Bug fix: handle NCID servers specified by IP address instead of hostname.
• Bug fix: properly reconnect to the NCID server on wireless network changes (SCNetworkReachability behavior is…interesting, and I had only tested 0.9.14 with wired networks).

Once again, if you’re wondering “why use NCID when I already have caller ID?” If you have SIP service (e.g., Vonage) at home, NCID/NCIDpop gives you caller ID on the first ring on every computer display in the place, which can save a lot of unnecessary running around to try to find the phone.

Of course, it’s just in time for me to consider giving up phone service at home as I’ll be spending much less time there in the fall. I’m overdue for a new mobile phone, but I can’t decide between an iPhone 3G S, the Palm Pre or perhaps waiting for a future Android device. I haven’t played with the Palm Pre yet; that’s on my schedule for next week.

Also: Jython 2.5 (final) was released today! It’s been a long while coming. We’ve still got a lot of work to do, particularly on performance and Java integration.

2:33 PM | Computing, macOS
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If you use a persistent screen session on a machine running OpenAFS, you’ve likely experienced long delays and confusion when your tickets and tokens expire.

The Screen and Kerberos patches will create a credentials cache for your screen session and automatically renew tickets. That’s a start, but your tokens still expire.

A relatively simple modification simply runs aklog after renewing your tickets. The patch for this is here; Debian packages for acm-screen, incorporating Kerberos and AFS patches, are here.

However, this still leaves a problem when your tickets exceed their renewable lifetime. For that, I wrote a zsh function which wraps screen and re-kinit/aklogs if there is less than a day remaining before they expire for good.

screen() {
  # note: this breaks if you have >1 screen session
  cc=(/tmp/krb5cc_scr_$(id -u)_*(N[1]))
  [[ -n $cc ]] && (( ${#@} )) && {
    local princ=$(klist -5 $cc | awk '/Default principal:/ { print $3 }')
    [[ -n $princ ]] && {
      local expiry
      zmodload zsh/datetime
      strftime -r -s expiry '%D %X' \
        "$(klist -5 $cc | awk '/krbtgt/ { getline ; print $3 " " $4 ; exit }')"
      (( expiry - EPOCHSECONDS < 86400 )) && {
        kinit -r7d -c $cc $princ && screen -X screen aklog || return 1
      }
    }
  }
  =screen $@
}

Enjoy.

10:22 PM | Computing
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ICeCoffEE 1.5b5 is out. The only remaining known bug I plan to fix before 1.5 final relates to disabling localized services.

This version includes bug fixes and compatibility updates (particularly for Safari 4 Beta), as well as no longer doing anything if you ⌘-click outside text on a Web page in WebKit/Safari.

1:49 PM | Computing, macOS
4 Comments

For several years, I’ve been using a combination of Screen and NX as a detachable research environment. Since I started working on Jython and using Mercurial, I’ve been able to do more work on the Mac locally (especially with Eclipse, which isn’t fun in NX) then easily sync up to our Linux research machines when necessary for timing runs, or to use Pin or Simics. So while my need for NX has been reduced, I still need it several times a week.

I’ve very much had a love-hate relationship with NX. It works so much better than the alternatives such as VNC, RDP or using TRAMP with Emacs. But NX is also flaky and fragile, with bugs like insisting on a specific ordering of bit depths. NX forks OpenSSH and various X components, then fails to keep up to date with recent changes in each. Coordination between the various components is haphazard at best. The Mac NX client front end is still a PowerPC app compiled against an ancient version of Qt.

It’s hard to diagnose problems when NX fails by refusing to resume, losing, or worst of all, destroying your session. A multitude of log files exist—for the client, look in ~/.nx/temp—but require you distinguish expected brokenness from unexpected brokenness, only possible if you have a working setup to compare against.

Fonts are a particular sticking point. The NX developers really want client-side fonts to go away, but both of the X clients I tend to run in NX (rxvt and Emacs) use client-side fonts, so I don’t really have a choice. Some points to be aware of:

• If an X client is using a font and it isn’t available to the local X server (NX client machine) when you try to resume a session, in the best case you’ll get a font like fixed substituted or see a bunch of boxes in place of your characters. In the worst case the session will be destroyed. Be careful.

  

• The documentation claims you must have the same set of fonts accessible on both the (NX) client and server, in order for them to be accessible and usable. Don’t forget to run mkfontdir—on OS X, this sometimes runs for you. However, sometimes a font can appear in xlsfonts because it used to be accessible; in this case it’ll either display a scaled bitmap or a substituted font.

  

• At least on the Mac, there’s no guarantee that a font which appears in xlsfonts locally is actually available to NX. I don’t quite understand what’s going on here, but if you put your font in one of the default font directories (what’s displayed when you run xset fp default; xset q), run mkfontdir and xset fp rehash if necessary, then attach your NX session, it’s likely to work. On one of my Macs and user accounts, I can get it to work for custom font directories too, but I have no idea how to reproduce this.

The other major NX annoyance I run into is clients that either don’t start when they’re supposed to, or whose windows never appear when the session resumes. In the former case, sometimes the initial client I ask NX to run (a small rxvt) never starts, but the NX session is up, so I can start another rxvt if I notice before NX destroys the session from a lack of clients. In the latter case, the clients are there, so for example I can use emacsclient -e '(new-frame)' then C-x 5 1 to rescue my Emacs session and close all the unavailable frames. I haven’t found a more general fix for this one.

Random bonus for anyone who doesn’t follow my Twitter stream: ggplot2 is an amazingly well done plotting package. Having spent quality time with Jgraph, PyChart, matplotlib, Mathematica, Excel, Numbers, etc. I’ve never found one that did what I wanted as quickly. Highly recommended.

12:01 AM | Computing, macOS
1 Comment

After replacing the drive in my iMac, next came a restoration from backup. Once again, this is covered pretty well elsewhere on the Web, but I’ve got a few comments about the process. Sorry about the lousy image quality; it’s late and I was too tired to mess with my camera.

I’ve got two backups on my drive; one of my iMac and one of my MacBook Pro. The restore utility identifies them both, but not in a particularly understandable fashion. Why does the MacBook Pro backup get a Time Machine icon and the iMac backup a FireWire disk icon? Why does the MacBook Pro’s machine name appear but not the iMac’s?

Once I selected the first disk, for some reason it defaulted to showing me an ancient backup I didn’t even know I had, rather than the most recent backup available (why?)

I never reinstalled Mac OS X, just renamed the disk after upgrading the iMac from TIger to Leopard, but that seems to be enough to throw off Time Machine.

Ah yes, the day the hard drive died while I was far away in New York.

The restore utility took quite a while to “calculate space required to restore data”. I’m not sure why it bothered—the backup drive is actually smaller than the new destination drive, and in any case, when calculation is complete, it doesn’t even display the results and proceeds to erase the destination disk.

The time remaining indicator was wildly incorrect: after initially climbing over 8 hours, it didn’t take more than a couple of hours to perform the restore.

Once the restore was complete and I rebooted into OS X, nearly everything was fine. The usual culprits (Mail caches, Spotlight, MobileMe syncing) were understandable, but I lost a few odd things like my input method configuration (Spell Catcher came up though I had it disabled) and Spaces keyboard shortcuts (not even the defaults were selected; I had no way of navigating Spaces until I reset them).

2:31 AM | Computing, macOS
6 Comments