Nick Forge's dashboard

Nick Forge replied on May 28, 2009 02:48 to the question "Mint Widget gives stats with incorrect timezone" in pinch/zoom:

This is still a problem with Mint v1.3.2 and the 1.02 pepper. When it passes midnight, and Mint (and the OSX Mint Widget) starts reporting new stats for the new day, the Ego Widget still reports yesterdays stats.

I'm not sure exactly, since I don't check it regularly enough (and I'm usually asleep between 1am and 9am), but it's almost always correct by 9am.

Nick Forge replied on May 27, 2009 03:04 to the question "Mint 2.17 + Ego Helper Pepper 1.02 + Ego 1.3.2 gives "Is the Pepper installed? Error"" in pinch/zoom:

It turns out the permissions on my hosting server were 755 instead of 644 on the ego_helper PHP files. I can't recall doing that myself, but I probably did. :-)

False alarm....

Nick Forge asked a question in pinch/zoom on May 24, 2009 03:49:

Mint 2.17 + Ego Helper Pepper 1.02 + Ego 1.3.2 gives "Is the Pepper installed? Error"

I just upgraded my Mint to 2.17, and since then I've been getting "Is the Pepper installed?" "Error" in Ego. I have uninstalled and re-installed the Ego Helper Pepper (v1.02), and have ensured that the permissions allow PHP execution, but I still get the same error.

Have you tested compatibility with Mint 2.17?

Nick Forge replied on May 13, 2009 12:08 to the problem "ExpanDrive for Mac doesn't like Mac OS X spaces" in ExpanDrive:

And to add to that, if the Drive Manager was last opened in Space 1, and you open it from the menu bar while in Space 2, the Drive Manager opens in Space 1 but you are left wondering what's going on in Space 2. This is obviously not ideal, in fact it should probably be considered a bug.

Is this thread describing a different issue, or a different manifestation of the same issue?

Nick Forge replied on April 23, 2009 03:06 to the idea "Adopt Gravatar support" in Get Satisfaction:

To me, Gravatar support is an indication of internet goodwill. It means that you care about putting your users first, and making their lives easier. The silo mentality of forcing people to add a whole bunch of data to every single website they sign up to is a complete time waster, and leads to old and inconsistent data. If you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Nick Forge started following the idea "Adopt Gravatar support" in Get Satisfaction.

Nick Forge asked a question in pinch/zoom on April 21, 2009 17:23:

Mint Widget gives stats with incorrect timezone

I have Ego up and running with Mint and the Ego Helper Pepper 1.01.

When I have the Mint Widget set to "Visits Today", the "today" is not actually "today" for the timezone that Mint is setup with. My server is in the US, and I am in Australia, so this means that e.g. right now, Mint says that there are no 0 visits "Today", whereas Ego says I have 11 visits "Today".

Does the Ego Helper Pepper just not take time zones into account? Or is there a bug that's causing this behaviour?

Nick Forge reported a problem in ExpanDrive on March 19, 2009 12:29:

SFTP starts returning -1401 errors after long connection period in 1.3.4

I have an SFTP connection to a web host, and sometimes after long periods of inactivity, it will start giving an error in the Finder when I try and open a file. It says:

The operation could not be completed.
An unexpected error occurred (error code -1401).

Attempting to save a file to the drive gives errors in whatever program I use. Also, the icon on the drive in the sidebar changes from the red SFTP/Expandrive icon to a generic Folder icon, but the icon on the desktop stays as it should be.

If I cd to /Volumes/MySharedDrive in Terminal, then do an ls, I get:

ls: .: Device not configured

Interestingly, Expandrive hasn't figured out that something's gone seriously wrong, and leaves me with the ability to traverse the directory structure in the Finder - I just can't open or save any files. Annoyingly, Finder tells me that the drive is in use, and so I can't easily Eject it.

Nick Forge replied on February 16, 2009 06:53 to the question "Connect icon stays orange and nothing happens" in ExpanDrive:

As of 1.3.4, I still can't connect to my Apple TV. Any word on progress?

Nick Forge replied on February 05, 2009 00:34 to the idea "Gravatar Support?" in Twitter:

If Twitter supported Gravatars, it would help encourage other web services to play the integration game, which is good for everyone.

Having every web service exist as an isolated island of data just hurts the end users and stifles innovation.

A comment on the problem "SFTP share doesn't mount properly on first go, but works fine after that." in ExpanDrive:

This is on a wireless connection to a wired host on my home LAN. I can SSH in without any problems or delays whatsoever.

If I have the share mounted, when I put the Macbook to sleep then wake it up, the share just has a file with the name:

user@192.168.1.x cannot currently be reached
('user' and 'x' have been obfuscated)

Something I just noticed - expandrive is popping up a dialog asking for a password for my private key, even though I have a password entered for authentication.... perhaps this has something to do with me having a public/private key with a password on it? I'll try playing around with different combinations and report back.

Is Expandrive supposed to explicitly use password auth if you have entered (and saved) a password? It doesn't seem to be for me.... – Nick Forge, on February 02, 2009 02:31

A comment on the problem "SFTP share doesn't mount properly on first go, but works fine after that." in ExpanDrive:

This is using password authentication (I entered a password in Expandrive), although the client/server pair also have a pub/private key set up. I'm not sure about the ssh connection speed thing, and yes, I am using Bonjour. This is slightly different to the other Bonjour issue though - in this case, Expandrive claims to be able to connect, but has a file in the share mount saying that the host is unreachable. It only happen occasionally, so it's very hard to diagnose exactly what is going on, but I'll try switching some of my shares to static IPs and I'll let you know if that stops this particular issue as well. – Nick Forge, on February 01, 2009 00:27

A comment on the idea "Please allow me to specify volume size." in ExpanDrive:

Yes, df would be just as good. I only saw mention of 'quota' in your post above, not 'df', and I've never used df before. As far as I can tell, quota doesn't do anything on a standard non-server OS install where you don't have specific quotas set up.

Also, I think you're probably correct, diskutil is only good for dealing with local disks. – Nick Forge, on January 31, 2009 04:21

Nick Forge reported a problem in ExpanDrive on January 31, 2009 04:06:

SFTP share doesn't mount properly on first go, but works fine after that.

When I connect to an OS X 10.5.6 SFTP share, it often takes quite a while for Expandrive to connect, and when it does, it gives a "host cannot be reached" message (I can't remember the actual message, sorry) in the mounted drive, and none of the share's files are listed. If I disconnect then re-connect, Expandrive will very quickly re-connect, showing the actual contents properly.

This is using Expandrive 1.3.4. There are no unusual Expandrive messages in the console.

Nick Forge replied on January 31, 2009 03:57 to the idea "Please allow me to specify volume size." in ExpanDrive:

On OS X 10.5, you can run the following shell command:

diskutil info -plist /

(you can use other mount points instead of "/" I think)

And you will get an XML property list dumped to STDOUT that tells you the disk size and free space. I'm not sure if the same command works on OS X {10.x | x < 5}, but most of your mac users would be on Leopard anyway.

Nick Forge replied on January 29, 2009 04:10 to the problem "Bonjour lookup fails after mac has been asleep" in ExpanDrive:

Yeah, I can easily connect via IP address. Some of my macs have static DHCP IPs, whereas the rest (such as those that belong to housemates) have dynamic DHCP IPs. Using a static IP address doesn't solve the problem of a macbook that has Airport, but occasionally connects with ethernet. I would have to have separate entries in Expandrive for each NIC/IP address.

That workaround slowly moves away from the "transparent" nature of Expandrive.

Are you able to give an indication of whether or not this is an issue with Bonjour itself in OS X, or a problem with Expandrive's usage of it?

Nick Forge reported a problem in ExpanDrive on January 16, 2009 02:49:

Bonjour lookup fails after mac has been asleep

Sometimes, when I attempt to connect an SSH share using its Bonjour address, if that computer has just woken up, it won't resolve the address properly. If I ping the Bonjour address, the ping will resolve successfully, and then re-trying in ExpanDrive will connect properly.

Here's the sequence of events that makes it happen for me:

Mac A has Mac B (let's say it is macb.local) as an expandrive share.
Mac B is asleep.
Mac A attempts to connect to Mac B - but it fails since macb.local cannot be resolved.
Mac B is woken up.
Mac A attempts to connect to Mac B, but continues to fail saying that the name cannot be resolved.
Mac A pings Mac B using "ping macb.local", and the name is resolved.
Mac A can now connect to Mac B with no problems.

It seems as though some system level Bonjour cache gets updated by a ping, but not by ExpanDrive properly. Oddly enough, sometimes I cannot ping macb.local after it wakes up, even after 4-5 minutes, even though Mac B instantly shows up under "Shared" in the Finder. There's some part of the Bonjour system that's not working - is it OS X's fault, or ExpanDrive's?

I'm using 10.5.6 on Mac A, and 10.5.5 on Mac B.

Nick Forge reported a problem in ExpanDrive on January 15, 2009 23:36:

The keyboard shortcut for Cancel should be ⌘+.

As of 1.3.4, Expandrive uses the same shortcut for Delete and Cancel (while a drive is connecting), which is ⌘+⌫. OS X already has a shortcut for "Cancel", which is ⌘+. Both Safari and Terminal use this to cancel the current operation. If ExpanDrive adopted this shortcut, it would help it fit within the OS X ecosystem as well as reducing the ambiguity of having one shortcut do two different things.

Nick Forge shared an idea in ExpanDrive on January 15, 2009 23:31:

ExpanDrive should let you organise your drives into groups

It would be great if you could add "dividers" in between drives in the drive list, so that you can group associated drives together.

Nick Forge replied on January 12, 2009 01:56 to the problem "Expandrive 1.3.3 crashes on reconnection to SFTP server." in ExpanDrive:

The beta seems to be working for me - and it no longer does that thing where it would connect with a "xxxx cannot be reached" file/message, only to work when I re-connected.