Deer on a dune-top

If you do not want to spend much money on upgrades for software you hardly use, just because you are running the latest Mac OS, try a Mac OS emulator! These are free and run nice and fast on the new Macs.

Let's take FileMaker Pro 6 for example. A piece of software I need, for a regional tree foundation I do some work for, but rarely use. And I do not want to upgrade - too expensive for the infrequent usage. So I looked at installing it on Windows in Parallels, since I have that software anyway - but that is a bit too much overhead just for running FileMaker 6. WINE did a bad job so I ditched that. Then I got a 500MHz G4 Cube! The advantage was that it runs all my older software too, like the Starwars Episode 1 Racer. But it is a bit much work turing that Mac on and off, just to do some administrative work in FileMaker 6.

So I still want to be able to run FM6 on my iMac, in Mac OS 10.8, because it is simply more convenient. I tried SheepShaver a long time ago, but then it did not work for me, somehow. But today I came across it again while searching for Mac OS emulators for Moutain Lion, and saw '2012' in the SheepShaver's blog, so that means it is still actively supported. I gave it a try and it works fantastic! And it runs my FM6 applications - and some old games, of course, like BreakThru! Really cool!

If you want to try it too, download SheepShaver and download a ROM file and the OS9 System. READ and follow these instructions and you should be ok.

A few weeks ago, while shopping at ALDI in my hometown, I came across this wine. Lucky for them I was in a good mood and spend €12 on this wine, just this once.

Well, turns out it was a very good wine!

But, not worth the price. I have had similar quality for just about €8 a bottle. Now I am waiting until the last ones of their stock get a yellow sticker with a reduced price - maybe then this wine gets interesting to buy again.

If you can get it for a reasonable price, I suggest you try it!

iMac going crazy

Lately my /tmp folder was piling up with files (krb5cc*) without any signals that these files were regularly deleted. A bit of googling showed that these come from the Open Directory Server, but that's something I cannot control. So I went to investigate why the daily script would not delete them. I googled a bit again and found out where the parameter file for the daily, weekly and monthly cleanup-scripts is located: /etc/defaults/periodic.conf. There, I found these settings for /tmp :

# 110.clean-tmps
daily_clean_tmps_enable="YES"           # Delete stuff daily
daily_clean_tmps_dirs="/tmp"            # Delete under here
daily_clean_tmps_days="3"               # If not accessed for
daily_clean_tmps_ignore=".X*-lock .X11-unix .ICE-unix .font-unix .XIM-unix"
daily_clean_tmps_ignore="$daily_clean_tmps_ignore quota.user quota.group"
                                        # Don't delete these
daily_clean_tmps_verbose="YES"          # Mention files deleted

The one to look for is where it says "3". This indicates that the routine should clean up old files not accessed for 3 days. But it did not - and the files were not mentioned in the ignore-parameters. Even rm -rf krb5cc* returned immediately an error that its argument list was too long. Therefore I started reading what the exact values for this parameter should be.

Well, it turns out that the value needs a qualification, like d(ays) or m(months), etc.. I found that out by reading /etc/periodic/daily/110.clean-tmps and studying how find uses -atime, -ctime and -mtime and how to add or subtract values. Here are a few find-commands, copied from /etc/periodic/daily/110.clean-tmps, which I tried to make sure that what I just read was right:

$ cd /tmp
$ sudo find -dx . -fstype local -type f -atime +1h -mtime +1h -ctime +1h
$ sudo find -dx . -fstype local -type f -atime +1d -mtime +1d -ctime +1d
$ sudo find -dx . -fstype local -type f -atime +2d -mtime +2d -ctime +2d

Further reading suggested to use override-files, so I sudo'd into vi to create the file /etc/periodic.conf with the following contents:

daily_clean_tmps_days="2d"

Yes, 2 days. Three days is too long for a server, in my opinion. The file's attributes look like this:

marcvos @ ~ $ ls -l /etc/periodic.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 27 Oct 25 16:38 /etc/periodic.conf

Next, delete the file daily.out:

$ sudo rm /var/log/daily.out

Reboot the server. Check your /tmp folder and /var/log/daily.out the next days.

With me, I now finally saw all those files getting deleted.
 

Fossile Fish

We gingen fossielen zoeken bij Cadzand-Bad en eindigden uiteindelijk bij Het Zwind. Daar hebben we een middag lopen speuren en daarbij vond ik o.a. deze versteende vissenkop. De bek en het oog zitten ook aan de andere kant, maar of het inderdaad een vissenkop is.....?

---

We went looking for fossils at Cadzand-Bad but ended up at Het Zwind. There we have spent the afternoon hunting for fossils and then I found, a.o., this fossilized fish head. The beak and eye are also visible on the other side, but if it actually is a fish head....?

In het weekeinde van 22 en 23 september 2012 was er een grootschalige reünie georganiseerd voor en door oud-Multihousers. Grote sponsors van dit idee zijn Inventive en Grand Hotel ter Duin geweest. Het hotel, de bar en het restaurant vond ik echt super! We hebben er heerlijk gegeten, gedronken en geslapen.

Alles over de reünie is te lezen op de website van Inventive. Hieronder vindt je een overzicht van de meegebrachte memorabilia en een hele kleine impressie van het hotel en de reünie - ik heb veel gekletst en weinig foto's gemaakt.

Als je op de memorabilia klikt, wordt er een 12MB grote foto geladen waarop alles wat beter te zien is. Als de foto dan geladen is, kan je met de meeste browsers er nog eens op klikken en dan wordt de foto vergroot tot de werkelijke grootte. Dan kan je alles nóg beter zien.

Flower

A very long time ago my aunt gave us a comic poster about our national airport, Schiphol. We all love it and it has had its times while it it was hanging on the wall. Our kids used pens and pencils on it, tore it accidentally off the wall, etc. when they were little. Now it was so damaged, we could not show it to visitors anymore so we tore it down and to preserve it, I digitized it in pieces and stitched them together with Photoshop. Amazing how good and smart Photoshop is with this stitching!! After that I also removed, as much as I could, all our children's pen and pencil drawings but I left the damaged, taped corners and all the creases, which add some life to it.



The big one, ideal as a desktop background, is contained in this ZIP-file: schiphol-poster (17.2 MB)

This time I felt like implementing PTViewer inside a blog-post just to see the effect. The photo is a panorama of Baldeneysee, which was also on Panoramio (Panoramio is shut down by Google).

Update 2018: PTviewer.jar doesn't run anymore in webbrowsers, due to security restrictions.
So here's the photo in it's full:



Click to enlarge