Rick Cogley's Public Library

Corrupt Apple Leopard Server Open Directory Services
Thu, Oct 15 2009 22:24 | LDAP, Open Directory, tips, software, Troubleshooting, apple | Permalink
I had a Leopard Server crash and burn so that nothing was responding, and when I forced the server to reboot (as well as rebooting a bunch of other ancillary servers and services just in case), I found an ominous sign in Server Admin, along with no user accounts in Workgroup Manager. Eek! Server Admin's Open Directory showed:

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open directory apple leopard server recover crash

How to Re-associate File Types with Applications in OS X - If you are an OS X user, and you find files of a certain type, say PDFs, are opening in one applications but you want them to open in a different one, you can easily change the association using Finder.

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os x apps association file type tiger leopard snow

I got a flat the last hill of my 100 km bike trip last Sunday. Thank heavens it did not happen at km 50 or something. I went to a bike shop in Shinjuku today to get a replacement tube, and they were kind enough to tutor me on how to replace it.

How to Change that Tube

Here's the process I learned at the bike shop:

Purchase a tube, tire levers (they come in sets of three, usually) and rim tape of the appropriate size. My rims are 26 inch with 1.5 Schwalbe Marathons on them now, and you just have to be sure what you buy is the right size. If you can give them the rim size, that's better too. The tubes come with various valves, and I have "French" valves now so that is what I got. All told, the cost to buy the parts was about JPY 1300 (USD 13).

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bike cycling inner-tube change rim tape spoke

I just installed Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 with no problems after getting a replacement for a bad Family Pack install disk (the Shibuya Apple Store said that many people reported the same), and found that my EMobile Huawei D02HW USB Wireless Dialup card, which was fine in Leopard, died when Snow Leopard was installed.

Reinstalling the EMobile Huawei D02HW on Snow Leopard

Here's how I fixed it:...

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emobile d02hw apple snow leopard huawei

I noticed something interesting. The JR East Japan announcements about the next station are done in a female voice, and she used to say the station names with proper Japanese pronunciation.

The next station is, SHIMbashi.
They've re-recorded some of the announcements though, seemingly with the same "voice talent", and there's a subtle difference. She now says the station names with a "gaijin" accent.

The next station is, shimBOSSshi.
What's up with that? Were people not getting the names right? Did some consultant trying to justify their existence tell JR that they needed to say it more like "gaijin" say it? I'd say that would be gaijin of the American English speaking variety, though. How curious.

I noticed it the other day, and today it was the original way, so I am not sure what the pattern is yet. Maybe different lines have different patterns. Japanese are pretty obsessed with regional language differences, though. There's a comedy duo called "Yuji Koji" who hysterically make fun of the difference between the regions and Tokyo. Even my car Navi has a setting to make it talk with an Osaka accent.

300m saki, hidari yade.

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japan rail pronunciation announcement

Blast! was born from the Star of Indiana Drum and Bugle Corps, which exited the DCI circuit to form Blast!, a kind of indoor, theatre-based "Brass Theatre" troupe taking the high skills of the best drum corps performers, and performing a kind of greatest hits of drum corps, to thrill audiences everywhere. (Not to mention winning Tony and Emmy awards as well.)

The Japan Blast! tour features snare drummer Naoki Ishikawa, who was a champion "individuals" competitive snare player when he marched in DCI, and who is now a featured performer in the Japan Blast! show. He's got incredible chops, and they feature him well during the Battery Battle portion of the show. The video is the percussionists performing during the break between sets, on kitchen stools and a garbage pail. Humorous. :-)

The Blast! performers did all the hot drum corps favorites like "Everybody Loves the Blues", "Appalachian Spring", "Medea", and "Malaguena" as well as a number of great numbers that were new to me. Overall, the show was about 2 hours of exciting music and visual performance, which had the audience on their feet by the end.

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blast! ishikawa naoki star of indiana tokyo

If you pay any attention at all to typography, layout, type faces, fonts, leading, kerning, tracking and the like, and have ended up amassing a collection of type faces from the famous designers and font foundries, you'll end up needing some method of organization. The type face or font organizers that come with operating systems are basic, so vendors have channeled some Gutenberg and come up with replacements.

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Despite its once-poor reputation, I have been using Plaxo to keep my iCal and Exchange calendar sync'ed as well as a way to keep in touch with business contacts. I've been syncing using the Plaxo Outlook client on an old clunker of a Windows box at work, to go Outlook to Plaxo, and also using the Plaxo iCal client on Mac OS X, to go iCal to Plaxo. It also works to sync Address Book entries. My goal in using it was to be able to use the Mail and iCal software in OS X, and not MS Entourage. I dislike Entourage because it puts your mail, calendar and address items in a single large monolithic database. Hard to back that up, and, it gets really, really large after a while.

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plaxo davmail fee sync

The third Monday in July is "Marine Day" here in Japan, called "Umi no Hi" (海の日) in Japanese. It was established in 1996, a few years into my life in Japan. It's common knowledge that the day marks the return of the Emperor Meiji from a boat trip. More specifically, it's the day of his return to Yokohama port in Meiji 9 (1876), from a royal light-house inspection tour to the northernmost prefectures, on a Scottish-built schooner called the "Meiji Maru".

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umi no hi marine day japan

Twitter user @faa has created a "Twitter Meishi Generator", or, "TMG", which you can use to create a Twitter business card with your last tweet or bio, a QR code of your URL, in an assortment of delightful colors. Click the image to see an annotated version of this Twitter Tool.

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@faa rick cogley twitter meishi generator business card

My wife and I did our yearly "kenkoshindan" health check via our insurance provider the other day. If you are on the national insurance plan or one of the big alternative providers, you're supposed to get this kenkoshindan once a year. My wife and my secretary at work badgered me into submission, so I finally took the plunge and got the big one-day "ningen dock" (人間ドック, and kind of like "human dry-dock" in its meaning).

So What's this Ningen Dock?

Glad you asked. Being over 40 (ok, ok, I'm 43), this time I signed up for the standard ningen dock set, instead of the wimpy blood and urine test only. Once you get to the center, after NOT eating breakfast, they give you a nice top/bottom to change into, so you to to a locker room, strip to your skivvies and put that on. It's not a paper gown like you might see at an ER, but a proper outfit much like pajamas. The arms were short and the bottoms were held up by a drawstring. They include socks too, in case you wear the ones with the holes (like me!) on the big day.

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kenkoshindan health check japan

My family has a shared iMac G5 running Leopard OS X 10.5.7 and iTunes 8.2 (both the latest as of 13 July 2009), and recently I noticed we were running low on disk space, so I did some digging via du at the command line. I found that we were eating space by ingesting CDs into iTunes, which would get copied to our respective local user folders.

After a little research, I found the Apple KB article that describes how to have a single storage location for music, so I set that up and made some other discoveries in the process. I thought I'd share how I did it.

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productivity itunes shared library music

The site motto says it best: "The #1 Site for Learning about Home and Project Studios."

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tweakheads studio electronic music sequencer

The other day I was asked by a friend to see a Ken Watanabe TV show we had recorded, because the friend had missed it. A long saga ensued of us trying to give our friend a DVD of the recording we took with our Sharp Aquos DVD / HDD Recorder. You'd think that you would just be able to play such a DVD in any DVD player. Well, you can't. Long story short, in the end we could not provide our friend a DVD with this show on it.

At first, when we gave our friend the DVD, she returned it saying it was broken, and that she tried it on her normal DVD player and on her Windows PC. I tried it on a Mac and on a Windows PC, and indeed, it would not play back.

I accessed the created DVD as a data disk, and was able to retrieve a 4 GB file with a VRO extension. I found out that VRO is an MPEG-2 format, so I purchased the MPEG-2 playback plugin for QuickTime. After the installation, QuickTime would open the file, but nothing appeared in the QuickTime viewer screen.

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Japan DVD HDD VRO Recorder Incompatibility

At least that is what they tell me! I like Japan and have had some interesting, enjoyable and indeed unique experiences here, otherwise I would not have stayed in this country since 1987. But over the years, I've had an earful of people telling me directly or indirectly how unique Japan and its people are, and I've had to burst more than one person's bubble. Sometimes incorrectly.

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rick cogley nihonjinron culture japan intestines snow pregnancy

Mezamashi TV had a segment on the lastest gyaru language. If you're not familiar, gyaru are the sort of schoolgirls who hang out in Shibuya or Harajuku, dress in the latest fashion and speak in a sort of code. Here's the three I remember:

* ムカTK mukaTK - mukatsuku, to be pissed off. The original's just as easy, ladies.

* モレる moreru - um, to be dressed up, with your hair in a bun with cute accessories. Comes from "moritsukeru" to decorate.

* シカメ shikame - from shikato and meeru, ignore mail. To have blown off answering someone's text message. I hear that a large percentage of schoolkids get really stressed about "shikame", in all seriousness.

At any rate, remembering these is one thing, but using them is another, so remember this: if an "oyaji" (middle-aged guy) like me uses gyaru-go, he's ostracized by his daughters and subjected to the "uzai" label for all time. :-)

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gyaru Rick Cogley harajuku shibuya

I went to a Softbank shop in Shibuya, Tokyo and asked how much it would cost to upgrade an iPhone 3G to an iPhone 3GS. The clerk told me that for the 16GB model it would be an additional JPY 780 per month for 24 months, totaling JPY 18,720, assuming the continuation of my current contract. That sounded about right to me, given the US prices.

I wanted to see if I could just buy one outright, and slipped into another general electronics store that was selling iPhones from Softbank and other phones. Unfortunately, the clerk in the second store told me that the "discount" you get with a new contract is not valid for the upgrade, so you end up paying a total of about JPY 70,000. Additionally, you cannot just buy a phone in the US and have it activated for use here.

Yep. That's a whopping USD 700.00 for an iPhone 3GS from Softbank Japan, and the "after discount" pricing is only for new contracts, not for upgraders. Wow, I'm stunned (while at the same time I'm hoping I'm wrong) at being penalized for wanting to upgrade. What a way to engender loyalty, Softbank.

I guess the only thing to do is to wait until Softbank change the pricing, which they eventually did for the 3G, after some time had passed.

I feel like a lifeless husk that's been trampled on and ground into dust. :-/
Rick Cogley

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iphone 3GS gadgets softbank expensive unfair upgrade japan

Japan morning TV reported that "One Coin" (ワンコイン) services are all the rage these days in Japan, due to the down economy. What this phrase means is that you can buy a good or service with a single 500 yen coin, or about USD 5.00.

Indeed, you can see them here and there:

* "Makudonarudo" McDonald's has a 500 yen value set.

* "One Coin" lunches at salary-man lunch joints.

* Short foot massages for 500 yen.

* "Test Esthe" at Miss Paris Esthetic Salon for "one coin".

* Yoshinoya and Matsuya meat bowls for 500 yen.

Next time you're out and about in Tokyo, keep an eye out for "one coin" ワンコイン services.
Rick Cogley

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trends Engrish 500 ワンコイン economy inexpensive

Artist Bunpei Yorifuji (寄藤文平) is creating a series of manner posters for the Tokyo metro, around the theme of "Do It At Home". Yorifuji was born in Nagano Prefecture, Japan, in 1973, and founded Bunpei Ginza in 2000 to specialize in mainly Art Direction, Illustration and Book Design.

Yorifuji's manners posters address the most common complaints heard by the Metro, such as people who apply makeup, party, sit on the floor, take up too much room, jump through the closing doors at the last minute, wear Everest-assault-sized backbacks and so on. I have to chuckle at the rather awkward and sometimes double-entendre Engrish, but that's what gives them charm, I suppose. I even found a spoof poster. See the thumbs below for the spoof poster and the official website.

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Bunpei Yorifuji Rick Cogley manners posters Tokyo Metro

Sounds good, if it will eliminate the numbness. —Rick Cogley || From the site: What is an ISM saddle? - The original ISM saddle was designed to create a seat that would eliminate, or at least reduce, the discomfort most riders experience on a traditional bike saddle. The concept was patented by 1999. In 2008 alone, ISM has seen success with 11 Ironman wins, 2 Olympic silver medals, 1 World Duathlon Championship, 1 Lifetime Fitness Series overall win, and countless age group victories. Pros and amateurs alike are finding riding and competing comfortable again.

Why is an ISM saddle so comfortable?

Our patented saddles are unisex and remove pressure off the pudendal nerve and arteries in both male and female riders for un-paralleled comfort.
Click here for more information: FAQ ISM.doc Click here for set up instructions: adamo_setup.pdf Ready to order a saddle? Email us at : info@t1bicycles.comshapeimage_2_link_0shapeimage_2_link_1shapeimage_2_link_2

Race Saddle JPY 19,000

Peloton Saddle JPY 14,000

Medical Information:

On an annual basis, bicycle riding involves several hundred million people worldwide. Studies have linked perineal pressure caused by straddling traditional bicycle seats to numbness, urinary tract and yeast infections, prostate inflammation and impotence. For male riders, in addition to the discomfort and numbness associated with a traditional saddle, there is an increased susceptibility to restricted blood flow, which can lead to arterial occlusion and permanent erectile dysfunction. For women, the restricted blood flow and hardening of the genital arteries can lead to an inability to reach orgasm. It has been found that as little as 11% of a person’s body weight can compress the genital artery!

IN 2004, Dr. Frank Sommer at the University of Cologne tested the ISM saddle. Dr. Sommer is a noted expert in the area of arterial occlusion resulting from bicycle saddles.

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ISM Adamo Saddles t1bicycles roppongi perineal pressure