I have SuperDuper! (recommended!) scheduled to do a nightly backup of my primary drive onto an external Seagate FreeAgent drive. The drive conveniently spins down to reduce wear and power consumption after being idle for a few minutes. However, since it is left mounted for the backup to run, the Finder feels the need to access it occasionally, incurring a few seconds of spinning beach-ball time.

The solution is to leave the external drive unmounted, and mount it only while the backup is running. You’re also free to mount it yourself whenever you like using the Disk Utility application.

The first thing you’ll need to do is to figure out what the UUID of the backup volume is. Run “diskutil list” from the Terminal’s command line, and find the volume you’re interested in. In my case the one I was looking for was the second partition, /dev/disk1s2:

/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS FreeAgent Drive         999.9 GB   disk1s2

Now get the volume’s UUID with “diskutil info /dev/disk1s2” – you’ll see a “Volume UUID” line with a large hexadecimal number like this:

   Volume UUID:              01234567-890A-BCDE-F012-34567890ABCD

In the example above, the value “01234567-890A-BCDE-F012-34567890ABCD” is what we’re looking for.

In order for OS X (this post refers to 10.6) to ignore the backup drive on startup, you’ll have to tell it not to mount it. Even though it doesn’t create the file by default, OS X will use mount parameters from the file system table in the old familiar /etc/fstab file. The one we want is “noauto” and you can specify the disk to apply it to with the UUID you found above. Create the /etc/fstab file and add a line like the following to it:

UUID=01234567-890A-BCDE-F012-34567890ABCD none hfs rw,noauto

Here we’re specifying the backup volume with the UUID, “none” is the mount point so that OS X will mount it in /Volumes where you’re used to seeing it, and “hfs” is the filesystem type. The mount parameters “rw” and “noauto” specify that the volume is to be mounted writable, but not to mount it automatically at boot time.

The final step is to tell the backup system to mount and unmount the volume prior to and following the backup. OS X’s diskutil can mount disks using the UUID, so to mount the drive:

/usr/sbin/diskutil mountDisk 01234567-890A-BCDE-F012-34567890ABCD

and to unmount it:

/usr/sbin/diskutil unmountDisk 01234567-890A-BCDE-F012-34567890ABCD

SuperDuper! has an “advanced” option to run shell scripts before and after the backup is run, so that’s where I put those commands.

Now you can unmount your backup drive and you’ll no longer have to suffer through that agonizing few seconds of waiting for the Finder to uselessly spin it up! Not only that, but you’ll save wear and tear on your backup drive because it isn’t constantly spinning up and down.

1. Open the stream you want from the list on their “Listen” page.
2. In the popup window, click the link for the stream bit rate you want.
3. Right click on the popup window, and select “View Page Info” from the context menu.
4. Click on the “Media” tab and copy down the “embed” URL. In my case it is http://icy1.abacast.com/cbc-r1vancouver-96.
5. Create a plain text file called “cbc.m3u” containing only the URL from the previous step. Here is mine. Alternatively you can press command-U to play the stream directly.
6. Drag the file you created into iTunes, and you’re done!

Update: CBC has updated their stream links page, and the URLs they supply seem to work now. Continue to ignore the Flip4Mac instructions on the “Listen” page though.

Update (June 1, 2011): Darn, they broke things again. CBC now appears to be streaming their radio content using services from streamtheworld.com, which encapsulates the MP3 stream in a FLV container for playing in a Flash player. When I figure out how to get it working again I’ll post. With some difficulty, I’ve extracted the playlist for Vancouver’s Radio One live stream. In iTunes, select “Advanced|Open Stream…” and paste in the following URL: http://2513.live.streamtheworld.com:80/CBC_R1_VCR_H_SC.

Update (June 24, 2011): See Charles’ comments below for links to CBC’s updated lists of Radio 1, 2, and 3 stream URLs.

Having a few days off over the holidays means I’m able to spend time playing with code a little, so I wrote what the Processing folks call a “sketch”. Here is the result (you’ll need a Java plugin):

“Tendrils” code.

Fun stuff! And I haven’t even touched the 3D portions of the API, which look very tempting.

Processing also has a lively community, including a Flickr group which has a lot of beautiful Processing-generated images. The brilliant John Resig of jQuery fame has even ported the language and large portions of the API to Javascript, using the canvas element available in modern web browsers.

One of jQuery’s best features is the ease with which it can be extended with simple plugins. This post on customizing jQuery selectors inspired me to write the following selector extension, which matches text content in the current element set with a regular expression. Remember how I said it was simple? More like effortless, you could easily squeeze this down into a half dozen lines or so if you were so inclined.  The only slightly difficult bit is figuring out what the “a”, “i” and “m” parameters mean in the jQuery selector source.  From the looks of things “a” is the element to match, “i” is the index in the list of matched elements, and “m” is the regexp match for the selector expression where “m[3]” is the value of the parameter supplied to the selector function.

[code lang="javascript"]
(function ($) {
     var match = function (a, i, m) {
         return RegExp(m[3]).test(a.textContent || a.innerText || $(a).text() || "");
     };

     var match_ignore_case = function (a, i, m) {
         return RegExp(m[3], 'i').test(a.textContent || a.innerText || $(a).text() || "");
     };

     $.extend($.expr[':'], {
                  containsmatch: match,
                  containsmatchi: match_ignore_case
              });
 })(jQuery);
[/code]

With the above code loaded, “:containsmatch(<regexp>)” and “:containsmatchi(<case insensitive regexp>)” will be added to jQuery’s already generous set of selectors. For example, [code lang="javascript"]$('p:containsmatchi(^the)')[/code] will case insensitively match any paragraph element with text content beginning with “the”.

Today I ran across a post on the excellent Language Hat blog which laments the fact that the term “manicule”, meaning a bullet-like symbol shaped like a pointing hand used to direct the readers attention, has disappeared from contemporary dictionaries. The word was a new one on me, and had immediate appeal. I’m not the only one that likes it: it has its own WikiPedia entry and even a Flickr group.

From now on I’m referring to the pointer cursor as the “manicule”, and I encourage all right-thinking CSS users to do the same.

[CC Photo by Mykl Roventine]

Qila and baby Tiqa

We made a trip to the Vancouver Aquarium this morning, and found out that the five month old beluga calf has been named Tiqa since the last time we saw her. She’s a cute little grey torpedo with a big beluga smile.

[code lang="perl"]
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Getopt::Long;

my $encode_mp3 = 1;
my $encode_wav = 1;
GetOptions('mp3!' => \$encode_mp3,
	   'wav!' => \$encode_wav);

my $WGET = '/usr/bin/wget';
my $MPLAYER = '/usr/bin/mplayer -nojoystick -nolirc';
my $LAME = '/usr/bin/lame';
my $TMP = '/tmp';

my $ramurl = shift;
my @ram = `$WGET -q -O - $ramurl`;
my ($rtspurl) = grep(/^rtsp:/, @ram);
$rtspurl =~ s/\&.*$//;
$rtspurl =~ /\/([^\/]*)\.r[ma]/ or die("Can't parse rtsp URL: \"$rtspurl\"");
my $filebase = $1;
print("Opening stream at " . localtime() . "\n");
system("$MPLAYER -dumpstream -dumpfile $TMP/$filebase.dump $rtspurl");
my $wavfile = $TMP;
$wavfile = '.' unless $encode_mp3 && !$encode_wav;
$wavfile .= "/$filebase.wav";
system("$MPLAYER -ao pcm:file=$wavfile $TMP/$filebase.dump");
unlink("$TMP/$filebase.dump");
if ($encode_mp3)
{
    system("$LAME $wavfile $filebase.mp3");# or die("Couldn't convert to mp3");
}
unlink("$wavfile") unless $encode_wav;
[/code]

Pass the script the RAM URL as a command line parameter, and if all goes well it should dump the stream to a WAV, then convert it into an MP3 file. You’ll need mplayer and lame installed.

(And if all else fails, the CD should be released in a few months…)

On our quick trip to San Francisco, we discovered they weren’t exaggerating about the fog – or the steep hills.  Coming from North Vancouver, it was pretty easy to adjust though.

[Via]