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Using Google Talk with Adium X

If you've already got a gmail account and if you've got Adium X installed, it's trivial to get Google Talk up and running.

• Go to Adium X's preferences. Choose the "Accounts" tab and add a Jabber account.
• On the account tab, use "xxx@gmail.com" as your Jabber ID where "xxx@gmail.com" is your gmail address. Enter your gmail password in the password field.
• Go to the options tab. Use "talk.google.com" as your "Connect Server". Use "5222" as your port.
• Click "OK". You're connected!

Update: if you're looking for info about write errors, look here http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/1312.

Technorati Tags: Google Talk

Process Aborts in Solaris with SIGALARM

The Scenario: You're porting your multithreaded software that works great on all kernel versions of Linux, FreeBSD, etc., but when you try to run on Solaris, at a repeatable point in the program, the process just exits with the error message "aborted". Even when you step through the code in gdb, the program exits unexpectedly. You might see something about a SIGALARM.

What's going on: Solaris, unfortunately, uses SIGALARM for both (a) coordinating among multiple threads in a multithreaded application and (b) the usleep() function in libc. So, if you ever call usleep() in a multithreaded app on Solaris (on 2.8 at least), then when the call returns, your program will abend as described above. Since it's going to be a lot harder getting rid of the multithreaded-ness of your application, I'd recommend that you just don't use usleep(). Or maybe conditionally define it away on Solaris.

Obligatory List of Must-Have Mac Software

I think I read somewhere in the Mac user's guide that everyone who has a Mac has to post a list of their favorite and/or must-have software. Here's mine.

• Adium X
• audioscrobbler
• BitTorrent
• Blue Coconut
• Chessic
• CHUD (aka Shark 4)
• Coconut Battery
• Colloquy
• Comic Life
• DarwinPorts
• Doodim
• ecto
• Firefox
• GmailStatus
• Gmail+Growl
• Goban
• Google Earth
• Internet Explorer for OS X
• PixelGlow's Graphviz
• Growl
• iStumber and the Spectrum Widget
• Little Snitch
• MenuMeters
• 2Point5Fish Mouse Locator
• NewsFire
• OmniGraffle
• OpenGL Tools
• Parallels
• PocketMac (ActiveSync Client for Mac OS X)
• PortAuthority
• scPlugin
• Second Life
• Skype for Mac
• SoundStream screen saver
• sshLogin
• SSH Tunnel Manager
• TinyAlarm
• Todo X
• VirtueDesktops
• Witch
• xScope
• Yahoo Messenger

Google Video finally posted!

The good news is that Google Video finally reports "Your video is now live on Google Video.". Yay! It also says "You may search for it here". Bummer. No results. Hope it's just a content propagation issue. Edit: it went live within 15 minutes.

Technorati Tags: Bouncy Ball, Sony Commercial

Golden Penguin Bowl 2005

Today's Golden Penguin Bowl, with its deliberate theme of good vs. evil, white vs. black, Google vs. Microsoft, was good, clean fun.  Biggest groaners among the missed questions:

• What name of a common kitchen appliance do the humans apply to the cylons in the current Battlestar Galactica series?  The Microsoft guy (Rob Curran) who knew everything about every scifi flick ever did not get this!  Dude -- you know the Nostromo from Alien but not "toasters"???  That being said, this guy seriously laid down the scifi knowledge several times.
• The Microsoft guys (Rob Mensching) correctly identified that Win32s ran on Windows 3.1, but did not get that the "s" was for "subset".
• What was the first publically released public key algorithm?  I was surprised none of the Google folks knew this one, but was happy that I was able to give the answer ("Diffie-Hellman") from the audience :-).
• Another easy miss - Why do astronomers groan when they hear the Han Solo quote about the millennium falcon "It's the ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs"?  Answer: a parsec is a unit of distance, not time.
• One that I'm sure will get followed up on is a dispute about the source of the phrase "open source".

Technorati Tags: LinuxWorld, San Francisco

Just Finished the Booth

We're at the LinuxWorld Expo, San Francisco this week in booth #463. Stop by if you'd like an in-person demo of our product (we can get you an exhibition hall pass if you need one) or feel free to check out our Splunk sandbox if you can't make it this time. We installed Splunk there and loaded a typical set of LAMP stack logs into it. There's a few hangs/failures in the logs for you to check out if you like. Be sure to try "Show Events By Time", "Show Other Search Tools", and my favorite cutesy feature "Invert".

Some perhaps non-obvious things you can do:

• See a histogram of your event types. Narrow down what you're looking at by selecting an event type.
• Narrow by source file or source file type (e.g., "just show apache logs or just show this Apache log)
• Click to narrow to an interval in the time line. Shift click to set a range. Search results updated dynamically.
• Command-Option-Click to hide results of a particular type.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Technorati Tags: LinuxWorld, Splunk

pkgmk: ERROR: duplicate pathname

The Quick Answer

In your prototype file (i.e., the thing created by pkgproto), look for a repeated filename, probably pkginfo.

More Detail

Yet another error message without a good answer out there so I'm adding it to my decode list.

If you get this error message, you might have, like me, been using the instructions at http://www.sunfreeware.com/pkgadd.html.

If so, the first time you ran through the instructions, everything probably worked great, but the second time, the recipe failed.

What happened? In the instructions, you create a file called prototype with this command:

   find . | pkgproto > prototype

The first time you ran it, everything was fine and then you added the line:

   i pkginfo=./pkginfo

to the top of the prototype file. The second time, however, because the pkginfo file existed when you ran the find, it ended up in the prototype file even before you edited it. Then, when you added the i pkginfo=./pkginfo line, you created a second entry for pkginfo in the prototype file.

Get rid of the entry that was added by the find command.

Technorati Tags: Solaris

_ZN5boost9re_detail13c_traits_base14lower_case_mapE

Another decode entry because the search engines had no results. If you are building some libraries that use boost, and the resulting library has some unresolved symbols (leading to segmentation fault or abort), and those unresolved symbols are these:

• _ZN5boost9re_detail13c_traits_base14lower_case_mapE (boost::re_detail::c_traits_base::lower_case_map)
• _ZN5boost9re_detail13c_traits_base9class_mapE (boost::re_detail::c_traits_base::class_map)

Then what's happened is that your build is referencing different versions of the boost when (a) including header files and (b) linking libraries. These symbols mean, in particular, that this is happening for the boost regex library. This is often caused by including something like "-I/usr/local/include" in your CPPFLAGS but forgetting the boost-specific include path "-I/usr/local/include/boost-1_32" or whereever your boost happens to be installed.

Technorati Tags: Boost

Bouncy Video Stats...and whence Google?

Wow! Between The Archive's instance and iFilm's instance, the bouncy ball video clip has been seen over 15,000 times! And it's currently #2 in the Just Weird Top 100.

Google is still getting around to reviewing it :-(.

Technorati Tags: Bouncy Ball, San Francisco, Sony Commercial

Does LiveJournal Comprise Half of the Blogosphere?

If you've spent much time at all in the blog world, you'll have run into both Technorati and LiveJournal. The second installment in Sifry's blog stats states that Technorati is seeing 10.4 posts per second on average. Considering that LiveJournal's posting rate is usually over 300 per minute (i.e., 5 per second), is it time to conclude that LiveJournal is over half of the blogosphere? I wonder what the breakdown is between LiveJournal and the other heavyweights (e.g., Blogger, TypePad, and the hosted WordPress crowd)?

Technorati Tags: Blogosphere, LiveJournal, Technorati