“At Last” was our dance when we got married. Etta James’ passing is sad news. At Last
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This is an interesting post on the LEARN Blog about the changing nature of reading, thanks to devices like the Kindle and the iPad. More thoughts on that here soon… The battery on my 2008 15″ MacBook Pro is dying an ugly death. Last night the battery level dropped precipitously as I imported pictures from an SD card into Aperture 3. When the battery level reached about 75%, the MacBook shut off in mid-import. I plugged the computer in and rebooted, expecting to complete the import. Not so. Aperture 3 quit unexpectedly every time I tried to launch it. I ran (or tried to run) the built-in diagnotic trio of Repair Permissions, Repair Database and Rebuild Database by holding down the Cmd-Option combo while starting Aperture. Aperture happily repaired permissions, but quit while trying to repair or rebuild the DB. I was able to start Aperture with a fresh library, so I determined that it wasn’t the Aperture prefs or executable that were causing the problem. But how could I get my 64 GB of photos back in some coherent form? Any attempt to import the contents of the corrupt Aperture Library into a new empty library resulted in “The Crash.” I right-clicked on the Aperture Library and used “Show Package Contents” to navigate to the folder containing all of the masters (original JPEGS and RAW files). I decided to import the contents of the Masters folder into a new Library. This procedure worked, but my Projects and Albums were all still toast, as were my Faces and Places data. Faced with the prospect of having to restructure my photo library from scratch, I cast about on the Internet and found this little gem, which I want to share: A word to the wise: Always backup your computer. The composition of this photo may be a little mundane, but I was impressed by this little building in Old Montreal. I was even more impressed that the iPhone 3GS was able to get such a decent photo of it, considering the low resolution of the sensor and the short focal length of the lens.  Walking around Old Montreal and spotted this interesting restaurant
I’m not getting out and about to shoot as much as I like, so I try to find interesting visuals close to home. Fortunately, the lilacs in our backyard have benefited from the recent wet weather and are in full bloom. The question: Should I just give up on writing (see below)? Thanks to Michael Tripper for the link. Technology can be used for both good and evil… To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery – NYTimes.com. After installing Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro, I quickly discovered that I had shortchanged the Bootcamp partition when assigning disk space (only 32GB). A quick search on the web revealed numerous methods for resizing, the most common procedure being to:
Ahem! Easier said than done… After deleting the Bootcamp partition, I had a horrible sinking feeling. Bootcamp Assistant kept telling me that it could not create a new partition because some files could not be moved. Following suggestions in various forums, I ran Disk Repair, Repair Permissions, defrag’d with Drive Genius, etc. all to no avail. After a few attempts, the message displayed by Bootcamp Assistant had also changed to “Please reinstall your system“!!! I spent an evening backing up my system with Carbon Copy Cloner, booted from the Snow Leopard DVD, reformatted my MacBook hard drive and then restored my Mac partition (5 hours). Now, when I ran the Bootcamp Assistant, it told me, “Boot Camp Assistant cannot be used. You must update your system software before using this setup assistant.” Oh Geez. I ran Software Update, repaired permissions and disk repair again without success. Then I happened across a forum posting that stated that Bootcamp Assistant would not work if journaling was turned off for the mac partition. Funny, The Snow Leopard DVD has formatted my hard disk with journaling off by default. Somehow, that seems very wrong. It was a simple matter to open up disk utility and activate journaling for my primary drive. I didn’t even have to reboot. And I was (happily) able to recreate a larger (80GB) partition for my Windows 7 installation. Winclone restored the system without incident and I am up and running again, but only after having spent a good 6-8 hours in total watching progress bars and beachballs.  We chose Linux as the platform for Sakai. The main reason was cost — no licenses for the server OS and the availability of low cost server hardware. We opted for CentOS 5 as the flavour of Linux. It is basically Red Hat Enterprise and has proven to be robust in the past. CentOS is easy to install. I began with a virtual machine running in VMWare Fusion on my iMac. This allowed me to walk through the install process as a dry run, test out tools and steps, and to roll back if anything broke. I opted for a 64-bit build of CentOS, so that we could take advantage of large amounts of memory later on if needed. After installing CentOS using the GUI, the next step was to prepare the system for installing Sakai from source. To install Sakai 2.5.x from source, we need several things (with caveats):
Out of the box, CentOS has both Java 1.4 and Java 6 installed. Java JDK/JRE 5.0 needs to be downloaded from Sun and installed (Note that Sun Microsystems is withdrawing Java 5.0 as of September 2009, so if you want it, download and archive a copy now). Installing a new version of Java involved unpacking the distribution in a local directory (e.g. /opt or /usr/local) and the using the “alternatives –install” command to make the system aware of the version and to select it as the default Java version. Use “java -version” to confirm that the correct java version is selected. Next: Installing Tomcat 5.5 Powered by ScribeFire.  |
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