Tgr::Box

It was time for the boys to see the vet. It had been a little while and Daisuke had been itching a lot. We used to go to a place called Animal Health Network (now renamed Animal Hospital of Diamond Heights) up in Diamond Heights and we thought about going there but I understand that there had been a lot of turnover (not a great sign) and the two vets we really liked were gone. So I hit their review page on Yelp and was more than a little underwhelmed about the apparent current state of affairs. If that one review is right (you’ll know it when you see it) that place is no longer getting my business.

So one of the reviews mentioned one of the former tenured vets there that we used to like, a Dr. Calvin Lum. So I figured, why not search a bit and see if I can find where he is now. And lo and behold, it woudl seem that he’s currently running his own housecall-only practice called San Francisco Veterinary Housecalls. So I figured since this was not an emergency (we use Pets Unlimited for that), why not give it a spin. And to put my reviewer hat on for a moment, I will say I’m pleased with the results. He was as nice, attentive and good with the animals as I remembered and when I got the final bill, I can’t say that it was significantly more expensive than a normal vet visit (caveat: for multiple animals). There was a little extra hit since this was our first time and so we needed to do the new patient consultation. But after a checkup and a round of two shots for three cats and some over the counter drugs, the final result fell in line with a regular vet visit other than the $70 housecall charge. That charge was for the whole deal, not per-cat. I’ll easily pay that for not having to haul their three ungrateful carcasses around. And he was with us for two whole hours. Nice.

The only downside – which I certainly can’t blame him for – is that it’s just him and you, rather than him, you and a trained vet tech. Fred is getting old enough that it was time for him to get a blood panel so we attempted to get a little blood from him. He came prepared with specialized gear and said that 95% of the time, it’s not a problem. So we attempted to soldier on. Step one was getting Fred into the Cat Bag. This happened with mostly minimal hassle.

Fred (and his anger) in the Cat Bag.

The Cat Bag, as you see, is a nylon bag with a zipper and velcro collar that you somehow wrestle the cat into and then seal it up. This will demilitarize four out of five of their pointy parts. I foolishly thought that this would be the hard part but we were able to bait and switch him and get him in the bag. Step two was putting on the little kitty Hannibal Lector mask to seal off the fifth pointy part and to help control their head (they take blood from the jugular as it turns out).

As it turns out, that part was just not going to happen even with the rest of him in the bag and the two of us not. It was astounding. I am no stranger to handling the cats, but I am also not a vet tech. So we needed to bail on that. Dr. Lum said that his 95% batting average just went down this afternoon.

So, obviously anything involving medical machinery or the need of a vet tech aint happening in the home setting. But for everything else, this seems like a great service run by a cool vet, and I look forward to being a repeat customer. If anyone out there in the SF zone might be interested in such a service, he is worth trying.

Since the old website design tool that I used to use was too much of a pain in the butt to update regularly and blog, I’m turning everything over to Wordpress now.  Rapidweaver was pretty good for what it was actually, but I think that this will work much better since the intent is to actually, you know, write stuff now. I re-purposed and back-dated some stuff I had written before, dusted off my resume and jammed it all into WP.

So this content-free little post is my version of the default hellow world page that Wordpress so nicely gives you.

I upgraded my Mac OS X from Tiger to Leopard yesterday. Overall I got nice things to say offset by one big honkin’ rant. Read on if this may concern you in the near future.

First off and most notably, it took a long time. I mean over an hour to just upgrade the OS – not counting installing all the development tools and running the software updater to get fresh patches. Probably two and a half hours door to door. I don’t remember the Tiger upgrade taking so long. However I do applaud that the installation disk verifies its own integrity before installing. You don’t want a bunk disk failing during upgrade thereby trashing your current installation. So after upgrading, restarting, installing more crap, restarting, installing patches, restarting and finally upgrading the firmware in my Airport Extreme/Express units, I was apparently good to go. So I did some looking around to make sure some of my crucial settings were still in place.

Cue the rant…

I had made some custom modifications to the firewall – opening up certain ports to accommodate certain things. So I went looking for that to make sure all was well. First I found that the firewall settings are no longer to be found where they were. I tracked them down under the “Security” pane in System Preferences. They re-did things a bit and here is what I saw:

So first off, the firewall is disabled by default. And that is so not OK. Next off, what do those other options actually mean? Especially the second and third options? Are they independent or do they work in tandem? I did some poking around and found an excellent discussion that shed a little light on the subject. First off, “Block all” does not actually do that. It sort of does. So, most importantly, hit the Advanced button and enable Stealth Mode. Then it actually functions like a proper firewall. You want this enabled for whatever mode you want to run the firewall in. But what if you want to open up ports for specific apps? Well, then that’s what the third option is for. When you run in this mode, if an app (a torrent client, doing point to point file transfers using a chat client, etc) attempts to start up on a port and accept connections, you will get a dialog box asking if this is OK. So one may allow or deny certain services through the firewall. Unfortunately, when you shut down the app in question, the firewall does not close the port. Moreover, it’s rumored that the OS digitally signs the apps that it opens up the ports for, so if they change – it all breaks. A for effort security-wise but D for execution.

Point one: what the fuck Apple? Leaving the firewall disabled by default? What gives with that? Point two: I get trying to streamline exposing pinholes in the firewall, but what reason is there to remove a power-user option to configure port exceptions manually? Not many people need to use it, but the ones that do need that. The feature existed in Tiger, so why remove it? Argh! So yeah, if you upgrade, tidy up that firewall. The link above give a more in-depth discussion of what’s going on under the hood. God bless the people that have the drive and the time to tinker and write it up for the rest of us.

So after I got done frothing and foaming about the firewall issue, I got down to tinkering around with all those nifty new features. Gotta say, pretty slick at points. Apple has a video that goes over much of it (worth watching if you upgrade) but some comments of mine:

The hacks to the finder – the new Cover Flow browsing mode coupled with Quick Look – are really nice. Plus the whole Stacks thing (another desktop/finder tweek) also looks really slick and could be potentially very useful for re-organizing the messy desktop. I just watched the video of those features and giggled and the sheer Apple-y-ness of the finder hacks. Spotlight is quite a bit faster now and it really speedy if you use it as an app launcher – so you Quicksilver users may not need that anymore. The iChat app has lots of multimedia eye candy jammed into it. Meh. Use Adium instead. Preview got a facelift and a bunch of nice (most PDF oriented) features added as well. The terminal no longer lets you set an image as a background. Boo to that. The Mail app got a slew of new cool features. I like the Notes and To Do features – the To Do notes also tie into the iCal app and that is slick. Notes take any sort of media you care to jam into them and can get all the sticky notes off of one’s desktop. The mail reading window has some neat additions – if there is something in the body of the email that looks like an address or email address or chat handle, it makes it easy to suck it right into the Address Book app. Nice job with that.

However, as a long time UNIX user, I’m mostly stoked about having real native virtual desktop support (Spaces) rather than having to rely on the other ones that have their problems. They even mapped the desktop movement hotkeys to Control-Arrow – just like we did it back in the day. Spaces is hands-down my favorite thing about the new upgrade. Furthermore, Spaces plus the Growl notification app is a win.

I’m not going to go on about all the new features since you can read about that anywhere. Overall, It looks like a worthwhile upgrade and it went painlessly. It just takes a while to accomplish it all, and the sins with the firewall left a bad taste in my mouth that has not gone away yet.

Cheers all.

about fixing the RSS feeds problem with iWeb using Apache RewriteRules. Here is an update for those using a web hosting environment where they do not have godly power over the Apache configuration files. I’ve recently transitioned to the former situation from the latter and I’ve had to adapt my strategy for dealing with this little bug a bit.

Side rant: WTF Apple? This RSS feed publishing bug is well known and well complained about and from a programming point of view is trivial to fix. People bitch about it in the forums, and it’s wrong, even though some of the forum dwelling sockpuppets keep saying that it’s perfectly alright to have to upload your site twice to make up for the broken links produced by otherwise nicely functioning software. So look, either your hosting service is broken or your software is broken. Just fix it.

Rant off.

So anyways, won’t work in an .htaccess file driven hosting environment. It has to do with the URI-to-filename translation handler phase of the Apache request chain. In my last commentary I suggested a RewriteRule (henceforth: RR) that looked like this:

RewriteRule ^/Example/(.*) /$1 [R,L]

To remove the spurious “Example” (or whatever you named your site in iWeb) string from the URLs in the RSS feeds, and the links pointing to the RSS feeds. If you put that in the server configuration file that’s fine. The RR short-circuits the URI mapping phase and will happily redirect things from the URI-segment “Example” even though it does not exist (because iWeb does not create it, which is the whole reason for this little exercise). However, when including these directives in .htaccess files, this approach will not work because the URI-to-filename translation handler has already started and when it does not find the directory “Example” in your document root, it fails out.

There is a solution however. How it is executed depends on how you push out files to your hosting environment. What need to happen is that one needs to create a directory at their DocumentRoot called “Example” and place an .htaccess files in this empty directory with the following directives:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*) /$1 [R,L]

Using this approach the same thing will happen. Apache will find the bogus directory from the buggy URL and then the RewriteEngine will then take over and translate your paths such that they resolve properly.

It should be noted that while it might be tempting to just create this directory and .htaccess file on your local disc in your ~/Sites/sitename directory, there is a problem with that. Every time you publish your site, it will get over written by iWeb. So it has to be placed on your web host machine some other way. I just wrote a bit of shell script to create the directory and .htaccess file .

But really, iWeb should just be fixed so this is irrelevant.

I’m currently looking at RapidWeaver. This is becoming foolish.