Allen J. Hall

Well, recently I had a hard-drive corruption occur due to my use of TechTool (as shipped by Apple with their extended coverage- Apple, please ship DiskWarrior with your extended coverage!!!). Since then I’ve been worried about the health of my main os drive, and just learned about S.M.A.R.T. (which is supported by ATA/IDE drives in OsX).

The S.M.A.R.T. status for your drive can be checked in DiskUtil.app (where I’m not sure- couldn’t find it with a cursory check). You can also check it in the command line by typing the following (did you know Disk Util was available in the command line?)…


diskutil info /dev/disk0


Of course you may have to check which drive is the drive you hope to check the smart-status on, but disk0 is most likely your boot drive.

To get this as a visual reminder of your disk status, add the following code into GeekTool:

diskutil info disk0 | grep Verified > /dev/null

Then turn on GeekTool’s Icon mode, which uses logical output from the commandline to select an icon to display on the desktop. I used the “default” icons (green or red dot). (This last step comes courtesy of beerguy in the comments area of MacOSXhints.com of this article.)

So, there you have it, a little icon on your desktop which can warn you of impending doom for your hard drive. [See the upper left corner of this blog post.] Very helpful for thesis writers. Of course, impending doom may be too late- so you better have a good backup solution in the works. Oh, and I suggest either adding a title for the icon (try another little mini geektool item) or placing it somewhere (where your drive usually resides) so that in the future you don’t have some odd green or red dot which has no meaning, but which you are sure must be important.

It appears that the latest version of the Apple iPhone and iPod software (2.2) breaks the current release of Fring. Currently Fring users who have updated are finding they can no longer connect to the Fring servers. I’ve been wondering for quite some time if Apple doesn’t syphon all IP traffic through a central hub, then off to the internet, but it’s just my own head. The reason being that Apple could control malicious software if they controlled the iPhone and iPods in this manner.

In anycase, Fring on the iPod and iPhone currently is inoperable. I wish the dev team luck in finding a solution. I even ordered a mic for the iPod in order to use Skype and/or Gizmo (currently only 1 VOIP server can be used at a time) with my iPod. So, it appears I have to either deprecate my phone (may be very difficult to do), or hope that Fring solves this quickly.

Here’s a thread I came across on Fring’s forums describing the issue: iPod Touch and version 2.2 issue.

Update! Fring says they have a fix and it should hit the AppStore soon! Excellent. (See Above Thread on the Fring forums.)

I may be doing a few posts here and there about a few applications for the iPod touch. But, I want to add information that will make these posts helpful, so expect each one to have a few examples, if possible. In the least, I hope to describe at least 1 missing feature you might find important.

First, Apple for some reason did not include the ability to search LDAP servers into the iPod / iPhone Mail application. A horrible omission for someone who’s used to having To: field searches available at his fingertips. So, what to do? Well, you could use an online search (if your organization has one) via the web, or you could look for an application. I looked for an application. I found: LDAPeople by Neoos Software. [See in iTunes Store.]

To read about how to setup LDAPeople for the UIUC Campus, and more about it’s interface etc., click “more”…
(more…)

This post is not exactly the status quo for this blog, but I wanted to share with you two things. First, that there are some wonderful companies out there that are very helpful. Second, that sometimes spammers do anything they can to spam.

I’ve been receiving a few SMS messages from number 83960 that were pretty much junk, nothing useful there at all, and I wasn’t sure what was going on. Perhaps it’s a company I recently decided to try out (beta software for phone productivity applications), or perhaps it’s a spammer. My bet right now is a spammer.

This is a tale of amazing customer service, and what the real skinny on 83960 is… (read more by clicking through below)

(more…)

A very quick one for today. I’ve recently attempted a compile of the open-source program QCad (Community Edition). Unfortunately, even with QT3Mac installed (via Fink) and a patch applied, QCAD is still not compiling under 10.4.7.

I was hoping to use it to edit and draw CAD files for the machine-shop. I may have to use the 10minute demos of the professional version to get the job done quickly. Sad, as I was really looking forward to a good open-sourced CAD software package. I use it infrequently, and definitely don’t need AutoCad.

Here’s the error I recently received. [Will edit this post with more info as I get it...]
main.cpp: In function `int main(int, char**)':
main.cpp:233: error: parse error before `(' token
make[1]: *** [obj/main.o] Error 1
make: *** [qcad] Error 2
Building qcad binary failed