fixing automounted fat16 fs permissions

April 18, 2008

The old FAT filesystem, still used by many USB mass storage devices like my new USB key drive, does not have a good concept of permissions. That is: not even as good a concept as UNIX. It’s common that the default behavior when mounting a FAT filesystem on unix is to set everything a+rwx. I’d rather not have files mounted a+x, so normally I could set a mask in my fstab options. On OS X, though an automounter is used that doesn’t seem to be configurable on a per-filesystem-type level.

syncing all my git repositories

April 18, 2008  🔀 🧑🏽‍💻

Inspired by my recent adventures in on-plane USB flash drive git repository swapping, I ordered a USB storage device. It seemed like getting a micro SD reader would be fairly multipurpose and expandable, so I ordered a teeny tiny micro SD reader that came with a 2 GB card and adapters for mini and regular SD. This thing is tiny. If I put a quarter on top of it, you can barely see it.

yard work continues

April 14, 2008

Yesterday, Kip (and the rest of his clan) came over and we finished Phase II of Project Better Back Yard. I’d already dug up quite a bit of the earth around the two posts. I was “thrilled” to find that just beside the post nearer the house, there was another post! It had probably been cut off before the still-there post was planted, but I was still gobsmacked. It had a much more reasonable base, only a few inches across, and the concrete was awful. I broke out most of it with a hand sledge.

addex, mutt, and ascii

April 12, 2008  🐪 🧑🏽‍💻

After my last set of poking at making Addex do 7-bitization of funny characters, I did some more poking around and learned some things that helped me get everything working just fine. I’ve made a new release of Addex and the Apple address book plugin, so now anyone can have his friend José show up with an alias of jose by updating his Addex config to include:

release testing for module::install

April 10, 2008  🐪 🧑🏽‍💻

As threatened, I have written and uploaded an improved replacement for Module::Install::AuthorTests. It’s Module::Install::ExtraTests. It’s scary and probably somewhat ill-advised, but it seems to work just fine. It takes away some of the configurability of AuthorTests, but it’s way more useful, I think.

making addex talk american real good

April 10, 2008  🐪 🧑🏽‍💻

Look, I respect the diversity of foreign cultures and everything. I try to pronounce silly foreign names correctly, and I have learned to stop referring to Holland as “the Netheregions.” In turn, could everybody please officially transliterate their languages to 7-bit? Honestly, it would make everything a lot easier… at least for Addex, which is the top world priority, right?

tap and yaml diagnostics

April 10, 2008  🐪 🧑🏽‍💻

For fun, I patched a copy of Test::Builder to do YAML diagnostics, which were discussed quite a bit at the Oslo QA Hackathon. It uses a mechanism that Schwern said would be unsuitable for real use, presumably due to threading or some other case that I don’t care about. (Or, at least, that I don’t care about for playing around with.)