While I self-describe myself politically as centrist–financially conservative but socially liberal–I typically lean towards supporting Republicans over Democrats. However, I have to admit that an Obama/Biden victory sounds interesting. But, the novelty of a black senator and one with a sob story is going to wear thin when they accomplish nothing positive of note like every other recent President and Vice President, and we’ll be stuck with them running the country. I will likely support them in the upcoming election, but before I do, I seriously need to find an answer to the question, “Can they possibly make things worse?” While it seems hard to believe they could, the only thing inifinte in this universe is stupidity.

On the subject of stupidity, I want to share this image with you:

Clearly, McCain is taking a play straight out of Bush’s playbook. Why?

• Both are clearly underqualified for the position.
• If elected, no one would want the President to pass away for fear of the ascension of the VP to that esteemed position.
• They are both physically attractive.
• Both say things that are inconceivably stupid.

I’m sure there are even more similarities that aren’t even obvious yet, but if anyone doubts, just remember this worked back in 1988–just 20 short years ago. But, 20 years is a generation already; young, impressionable voters today are weren’t alive when the Dan Quayle play was run (think about that for a moment) and are just as stupid as the Vice Presidential candidate presented so they can better relate, and they all like a pretty face.

Tags: Election 2008

So, after years of hacking custom changes into Movable Type 2.6, I’ve finally had enough. I’ve switched to WordPress 2.6.

Part of the move included exporting my old posts and comments from MT and importing them into WP. For that, I wrote a small Tcl script that reads the MT database and writes it out in WXR format. I stored my MT data in a SQLite database, so the script expects its input from a SQLite DB–it would be a bit more work to read the data from a MySQL DB, but it’s definitely possible.

I’ve kept the essence of the previous blog design in my WP theme, but it’s cleaner markup and CSS and I’ve tried to make the ads less intrusive.

I really don’t want to get into a whole rant about why the public school system in America is severely broken. But, towards the end of last year, I asked my daughter why she got something wrong that I knew she knew and her response made me cry.

“I did it because someone teased me about getting everything right.”

If you’re a parent of school-aged children, or have been, I don’t think I need to say much more than this. You should already understand why I despair.

I do all I can to educate my kids at home. I offer them as many learning opportunities as I can afford. But, all that work can be undone and my only remedy is to get my kids out of public school.

I wish I made enough money to keep my kids in private school.

Tags: education, epic fail

So, the AOLserver.com site, which has been hosted at SourceForge for years, is effectively “down” right now as requests to it are returning a “Error establishing a database connection” error. I’ve been a paying subscriber for SourceForge since 2004 because they claim to provide “priority support”–whatever that means.

Well, I went and opened “priority” support tickets to try and get the AOLserver.com site back online. To put it gently, the response I received was less than useful. I mean, three hours before I get a response–a canned response–which doesn’t even resolve my problem?

I recognize there’s not much I can do at this point, but what I can do is “vote with my wallet” … I’ve cancelled my SourceForge subscription today:

The clock is now ticking: they have just under a year to show that they can seriously run a valuable service correctly, or I won’t be renewing my subscription next year.

Update: Jacob Moorman, Director of Operations at SourceForge.net, emailed me to point out that the IP addresses for SourceForge’s VHOST had changed. Sadly, the DNS for aolserver.{com,net,org} had been set up as A records instead of as CNAME records. So, I’ve sent a request to have the DNS updated.

Tags: SourceForge, subscription, cancelled

One of the things I’m trying to do is mount remote filesystems on my Mac using MacFUSE and sshfs. In short, the idea is you use ssh/sftp to connect to a remote system and “mount” its filesystem (using the SSH connection) so that it appears as a mounted volume on your local machine. In general, this works great; you only need SSH access to the remote host–not SMB, CIFS, or any other standard, but perhaps firewalled, network file sharing protocol.

But, what if the remote filesystem you want to mount is actually a mounted SMB share? You would think it should “just work,” right? It kind of does, sorta. But, only sorta.

I start out by using sshfs to mount the remote filesystem:

dossy@shiny:~$ sshfs foobar:/share x -o volname=x

Nothing surprising: this just works as you’d expect. I’m mounting the subdirectory /share on foobar to my local mountpoint named “x” as a Mac volume named “x”. Lets make sure we can write to it:

dossy@shiny:~$ cd x
dossy@shiny:~/x$ ls -la
total 8
drwxrwxrwx  1 root  wheel  4096 Sep 13 20:40 .
drwxrwxrwx  1 root  wheel     0 Sep 13 18:23 ..
dossy@shiny:~/x$ echo "This is a test." > test.txt
dossy@shiny:~/x$ cat test.txt
This is a test.

There, we can write to this remote filesystem just fine–this is great! But, this was all from the shell, what about from the Finder? Ahh, this is where things start to suck hard. I create a small test file called “suckage.txt” and try to copy it to the sshfs mount:

Attempting this copy operation results in this error dialog:

Say what? I don’t have sufficient privileges? Finder, you’re crazy. Watch this:

dossy@shiny:~/x$ cp ~/Desktop/suckage.txt .
dossy@shiny:~/x$ ls -la
total 16
drwxrwxrwx   1 root   wheel     0 Sep 13 21:49 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 35 dossy  staff  1190 Sep 13 20:57 ..
-rw-rw-rw-   1 root   wheel    20 Sep 13 21:51 suckage.txt
-rw-rw-rw-   1 root   wheel    16 Sep 13 20:45 test.txt

Looks like I had privileges just fine–why couldn’t Finder copy the file? I suspect it has a lot to do with the crazy AppleDouble nonsense that Finder messes with, none of which happens when I just copy the files in a shell.

I’ve spent at least an hour playing Configuration Option Bingo (you know, when you try turning on and off all the various configuration options until you get the permutation that solves your problem, at which point you want to jump up and shout out “BINGO!”) … with no luck. I’ve tried “-o noappledouble” and the other obvious things. I’m now giving up and blogging this, hoping that someone out there has figured this out and might share their secret; I sure couldn’t turn up anything useful by Googling, that’s for sure.

Tags: Apple, MacOS X, MacFUSE, sshfs, Samba, smb, fail