They said that they would need to hold onto my laptop for a day or two, but what I wanted to do was to basically have it replaced while I waited for it. My basic position was that I knew that the work itself only took a few minutes to complete and that a lot of time is spent with some post-upgrade diagnostics. If they skipped the memtest, then they could just swap it out, turn it around and be done. At some point, my “place in the repair queue” would be up and I just wanted to drop my laptop off then and wait for the repair.

The plan was to show up at 9 this morning and they’d take care of things. I got there early (as I always do for everything) and they took my laptop at 8:45. I played around with an iPad for a while and by 9:05, I was back in my car headed to work with my repaired MacBook.

I have to say, they were really accommodating and really took care of me.

Definitely winning some loyalty points even I think it’s far too soon for a rarely-used DVD drive to fail.

That allowed me to upgrade to Snow Leopard and install Parallels — which makes me feel a bit better about the whole deal since I’m not sitting on software that I can’t use/install.

I’ve been running Snow Leopard for a few days and I’ve been happy with the changes thus far.

The big usability change was migrating from VMWare Fusion to Parallels and I’ve been nothing but happy with it. There was a bit of a learning curve, but nothing that’s not easy to overcome.

At this point, I’m just waiting to hear from the Apple Store that my new optical drive has arrived and try to set up an appointment with them to get my laptop fixed while I wait instead of having to leave it with them for hours (or worse — overnight).

The first trip was yesterday. I went in because for the past couple of months, the batter/HD cover wouldn’t fit on my Macbook Pro. A few months back, I had to go in because a screw kept falling out. This was due to a bracket that the screw fit into being stripped. They replaced the bracket easily enough — it just required that they open up my laptop to replace it. Pretty easy stuff. I assumed that there was some connection between the two issues and presented this information to the tech.

After reseating some screws and after I mentioned that the battery still didn’t sit properly in the space, he took a look at the battery and noticed that it had bubbled out on the bottom. There was probably a capacitor that was getting ready to burst. I filled out some paperwork and got a replacement battery and left a happy customer.

I didn’t have anything going on today and decided that I wanted to upgrade to Snow Leopard and get a copy of Parallels. Easy enough – just a quick trip and that was done. Ran some other chores while in the area and headed home.

Here’s where the problems began — when I dropped in the Snow Leopard upgrade disk, it got spat back out shortly thereafter without the disk mounting. Then I remembered about a week and a half ago that I tried to watch a DVD on my laptop that the same thing happened. I had assumed that it was a problem with my DVD and was too busy to think about it anymore. This is when I knew my day just took a downturn.

I looked up a few articles and finally decided that, for the second time today, I had to head to the Apple Store and ultimately get a new DVD drive.

Drove back, walked over, got signed up and got seen immediately. After some quick diagnostics, the prognosis is exactly what i expected — I need a replacement. Unfortunately, they don’t have any and they’re going to have to order some and call me when they have it. Sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday, I should get a call and I’m going to try to arrange to have the drive replaced while I wait.

The tech that I was talking to was very forthcoming with a lot of the details and why things take so long. One tip is that after the replacement, they have a bunch of diagnostics that they run. The longest of these is a memory test. I’ve ran various memory tests and they do take forever. On a host with 4G of RAM, that will almost certainly take longer than the optical drive replacement. I just need to tell them to forgo the memtest and that’ll hopefully keep me from having to wait too long.

These are the aspects of having a laptop that I’m not a fan of.

A few Google searches have revealed this fun tool: cleanup-maildir.

USAGE
cleanup-maildir [OPTION].. COMMAND FOLDERNAME..

DESCRIPTION
Cleans up old messages in FOLDERNAME; the exact action taken
depends on COMMAND.  (See next section.)
Note that FOLDERNAME is a name such as ‘Drafts’, and the
corresponding maildir path is determined using the values of
maildir-root, folder-prefix, and folder-seperator.

COMMANDS
archive – move old messages to subfolders based on message date
trash   – move old message to trash folder
delete  – permanently delete old messages

There it is in a nutshell. Not only will this let you totally cleanup a maildir mailbox, but since it’s just a single python script, it’ll let you automate any archiving or deletion tasks to your heart’s content — either as a single user or as an admin keeping an entire system under control.

It’s worth bouncing off of the project page for some examples and for a direct download link for the script. Just “save as” and copy the script to the host with your mailbox.

Keep in mind that you need python installed. I’m currently testing it with version 2.4.5 and I’ve not run into any trouble.

Definitely a good tool to keep around for just these situations!

A few weeks ago while in LA, I was shown Sequel Pro. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for. It’s kinda like a Macified SQL Query Analyzer tool – which is awesome. Oh, and it’s free!

One of the greatest features is that when you’re configuring a database to connect to, you can specify an SSH host to tunnel through for the connection. This is great because it allows you to prevent having to open up your MySQL privileges to everyone (especially useful if you connect from multiple networks or if the IP of those networks changes) and you can specify separate credentials for the SSH tunnel and the database login (since most people will have different accounts and passwords for each.

Sequel Pro has definitely earned a spot on my dock.

Looking for another solution, I opted for a basic while loop — which is a shell command. My basic command is going to look something like:

while echo "This prints every 5 seconds" ; do clear ; sleep 5 ; done

It’s not as useful as watch in that you don’t have the additional time output, but it definitely works and doesn’t require any additional installs to get the data from the command line.

For the creative and motivated, it probably wouldn’t be difficult to make a very simple wrapper script to more closely match the watch output by leveraging a while loop. You’re probably better off just getting a compiled binary at that point, but it might be an interesting exercise regardless.

Unfortunately, there isn’t an OS X version and running it under a VM of some description would be a real PITA for me. I’ve also been unable to find a (free) app that does what ID3 Renamer does.

The good news is that I’ve found two apps that handle the two tasks well.

ID3 Management

Musorg is a really small and streamlined app that lets you manage ID3 tags. It’s that simple.

mp3 Renaming

TriTag handles the mp3 renaming based off of ID3 tags. It would be perfect if it had a mature tag editor, but you can give it a mask and rename the mp3 files based upon the data in the tags.

Not iTunes

Some people use iTunes for tag management, but I’m not a fan. It’s fine for small tweaks here and there, but not for large scale editing and management — plus it won’t do the file name management. While a lot of people don’t care about file names as long as iTunes displays the ID3 information in its library, it’s something that’s important to me.

While at the end of the day I’d love to have one app to handle both of these tasks in the way that ID3 Renamer works, I’m happy with the TriTag + Musorg pair to handle the work.

Everything’s back up now, but I don’t know if any email was lost. External mail servers should try again a few hours later, so maybe some stuff will trickle in. It’s not that I get a ton of mail — I just don’t want to miss anything that might be important due to a stupid server outage.

All of this has me considering dropping the whole VPS setup and finding a place to host my own physical host. I’d need to find a DNS hosting service (DynDNS used to be super cheap per domain, but that price has sky rocketed), but I’m more than capable of actually administering the box myself.

We’ll see if I actually go through with this or if I’m just pissy due to the outage this morning. It’d be a lot of work up front, but not a bad deal in the long run. It’s not like the VPS is the cheapest thing ever.

It’s worth it to stage all of the upgrades so that I don’t totally FUBAR the production box, but it definitely makes the task run a bit longer.

Luckily, most of the plugins don’t tend to have crazy updates, so I just need to get a diff of my changes and basically apply it to the new version of code instead of having to re-engineer the functionality against a new code base.

If anyone finds anything odd about the site, feel free to holler at me via the contact form. Though everything’s looking good right now.

Oh, and I’m back from a very productive trip to LA that was 100% related to BME. As a totally unrelated, but exceptionally cool, aside, I’m still overjoyed that I got to hear the space shuttle’s sonic boom on its way to land on Saturday.

That aside, I’m definitely seeing a lot of junk that I probably can/should delete since I’m never going to use it anymore. As a rule, I don’t delete images that I shoot unless they’re just really bad shots. I also save all of my email and random documents — anything that’s volatile. But I also tend to save lots of apps and installers for various tools.

While I’m definitely a pack rat at heart, I know that I don’t need a copy of PowerDVD 4 for Windows. Nor do I need a copy of 1stPage v2 that has been sitting there for years unused. There’s more than a few examples of stuff like that. SQL Server 2000? Yeah, definitely don’t need that anymore.

Most of it dates back to my more Windows-centric days. My workstation is now OS X and I use various linuxes at work exclusively. I just don’t need this software anymore.

I’ll do a big purge sometime this weekend after I’ve gotten everything sorted and copied over.