There were a couple of solutions that cost a couple bucks, but turns out there is also AirPrint Activator which seems to work just fine as magical airprint glue for either local or shared printers. I just run that from my desktop (which is running more often than not) and we can print from all our random iOS devices – not that elegant, but the price is right.

Still happy with the FreeNAS box, swapped motherboards to a sandy bridge based gigabyte board and put in a i3 2120t since I don’t need that much umph to serve our family and its running even better than the old phenom II. Tempted to update to full FreeBSD so I can dink around more with it … nah, it works and don’t have the time.

The Good:

• ZFS. Pools! Snapshots! RaidZ! Doesn’t take that much reading to get dangerous.
• Time Machine. Works well with Lion even, was having problems with ubuntu before where it was a hassle to get working.
• You install on a flashdrive, leaves your ports open just for storage.

The not so good:

• Miss my print sharing, the only other feature I was using from running a full server distro. 8.2 maybe?
• The piece of @#$@# Asus motherboard I’m using doesn’t like to boot automatically off the flash drive, I need to select it each time on restart or it hangs due to a bug. Good think I don’t restart often, thats ridiculous.

find . -d -name .AppleDouble -exec rm -rf '{}' \;

First of all, after you download the command line tools and start to get familiar with them if you’re like me you also want a graphical tool in your pocket. If you’re just messing around you might not want drop a lot (or any) cash either on something like Tower either. If thats the case, I’ve found SourceTree works decently, looks nice, and is the right price (free). Too bad I grabbed it from the App Store, looks like there are some issues with the upcoming restrictions there and you’ll have to grab it straight from their site instead.

Next, you might want somewhere external to host. Of course everyone has heard of GitHub and thats great if you have a few open source projects you would like to share, but what if you just want something for your personal stuff? GitHub wants $7/mo minimum in this case  but for up to 5 collaborators, BitBucket gives you unlimited repos for free. Nice!

*Atlassian: I still wish you hadn’t removed wiki markup from Confluence…grrr

//If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3

//or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

//Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

import scala.actors._

object Adder extends Actor {

var sum = 0

def act() = {

react {

case (num: Int) =>

sum += num

act()

case “REPORT” =>

Console.println(“Total = “ + sum);

}

}

}

object ProblemOneRunner {

def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {

Adder.start

for(i <- 1 to 999) {

if(i % 3 == 0 || i % 5 == 0 ) {

Adder ! i

}

}

Adder ! “REPORT”

}

}

It starts out looking something like a Java program with an import statement, although Scala uses the _ notation to import everything instead of * since * is an identifier. Scala supports a lot of flexibility in its import statements, they can show up anywhere and you can use them to remap names or set up exclusion filters – but lets not get to far astray.

Next, you’ll notice that my program has two objects and no classes. Its not that Scala doesn’t have classes, its just that Scala classes don’t have the Java concept of static – if you want a singleton object, you use the object keyword. The solution I have above uses one singleton as the main program entry point and another Adder singleton that extends Actor. This is just so I could play with Scala’s built in multithreading and message passing support – obviously this problem doesn’t really require it but I thought I’d try it out anyway for fun.

The Adder has its own sum variable it uses to keep track of the numbers it will add up – Scala uses the var keyword for variables that can be reset and val for ones that can’t. You’ll notice the lack of any type declaration here, its not that Scala variables are not typed, its just that it uses type inference to figure out what they are. Also, Java users will notice the lack of semicolons – semicolons are optional in Scala in most cases. The Adder overrides the act method, the entry point for threads, and then calls react which will look for a message in the actor’s inbox and if it doesn’t find one, put the actor to sleep. Unlike some of the other constructs Scala provides for Actors like receive, the thread will die at the end of react instead of looping so we have to put a call to act() at the end of the int message we send it to keep it alive.

In the main method, we start up our Actor thread, then loop through 1 through 999 looking for numbers divisible by 3 or 5 to send to our Adder, then once we are done we send a message to the thread to report and finish its loop. Again, Java users will notice the easy condensed for loop and the ! message passing syntax.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of Scala here, I’ll try to get a couple more problems done and posted that likewise abuse language features as I get time.

The next thing I did was to hack on support for the application to read and write its flash card data to other files. When the application would start up it would prompt the user if they wanted to open an existing file or start a new one. Only one file could be open at a time but it was the least invasive way to get multiple file support without changing a lot of code (and how the user interface works). It worked but I wasn’t really happy.

Thing is, there is way to this the right way. You base your application off NSDocument and Cocoa provides all sorts of functionality for you. It was really bugging me that Cerebral Imprint wasn’t acting like a normal document-based application for the Mac should behave so I decided on perhaps a overly drastic course of action – I started from scratch with a totally fresh NSDocument application and imported code as I needed from my old project. It took a lot of time but ultimately it was worth it since as I imported the old code I took the opportunity to scrub cruft going back in some cases to 2004 that was no longer being used and really clean things up.

I also added some new functionality along the way. For instance, I’ve been playing around with flash cards apps on my iPhone but haven’t felt like tackling writing an iPhone app right now so I’ve added export functionality so I can export my cards into apps like Notecards to tote with me.

As usual, you can check out the films over on the SIFF site or over at the Stranger guide – nice twist, this year you can download an iPhone app too.

I won’t detail how to setup a dualboot system, there are enough tutorials out there if one searches for them. When I first setup my laptop I installed ubuntu  8.10 and quickly ran into  two annoyances  – an error message about my keyboard layout and the fact that by default the machine is very hard to use since the touchpad causes the cursor to jump around randomly while typing. Not in a mood to research them at the time, I got distracted and sadly it wasn’t until 9.04 that I tried again. Both these problems persist with Jaunty so if you want to run it on your it on your macbook, you are going to run into them.

The first issue manifests itself as an error message stating “Error activating XKB configuration” everytime you log into X. This is related to xorg not apparently knowing what to do with the macbook keyboard variant – there is an umbrella bug ubuntu uses to capture all these types of errors you can find here. The solution is to modify your xorg.conf file to give X more information however I haven’t dinked around with this yet since its just a minor annoyance.

The issue with the trackpad just about renders the machine unusable for anything but the most simplist tasks however its luckily easy to fix (or at least mitigate). In Jaunty, just add a startup application that looks like this:

syndaemon -d

This will start up a program in the background every time you login that will disable the trackpad while you type, preventing it from causing the cursor to jump all over the screen. Syndaemon has a couple more options you can play with such as how long to disable the trackpad for but so far I’m finding the default settings to work ok.

A couple more random hints:

• If you upgraded Jaunty and are now having problems with flash sites like Hulu telling you need flash 9 when you _know_ you had flash installed, try using synaptic to complete remove and then reinstall the flash-installer package – thats what it took for me  to get it working again on my living room media box.

• If you are a quicksilver addict, check out Gnome Do – very slick and the keyboard shortcuts are even the same by default.

JavaBat

I went ahead and cleaned up the code enough that I’m not *totally* embarssed for other people to check it out so I added a page dedicated to the application as part of my wordpress site and added the source code to a free subversion hosting service (www.assembla.com).