Jaharmi’s Irreality renewable hyperlinks with 0% transfat since 1999

“Life Balance 3.x customers with Macintosh licenses can upgrade to version 4 for just $59.95,” claims Llamagraphics, the purveyor of the fine time management application, Life Balance.

This sounds like a great deal! Until I remember that the only reason I want to upgrade from version 3 to 5 (not 4) is for compatibility with the new iPhone version of Life Balance! So to get them both, I’d be spending:

Compare that to my current cost for Life Balance — which I’m not currently using because my Treo repeatedly made me want to throw it forcefully into the ground (loved the Palm, hated the defective phone!) and the desktop software looks like crap — which I’ve summarized below:

That’s right, folks. After an investment to date of $89.95 in this software, I’d have to shell out another $79.94 to stay current and get the application on the mobile device I currently use. I’d be paying more for the Mac upgrade than I’ve ever paid for any single purchase or upgrade from Llamagraphics in the past!

I’m surprised I’m even thinking about this. However, Life Balance has always made the most sense of any task management application, and has always done the best job of helping me prioritize. (Of other current applications, OmniFocus doesn’t make sense to me, and Things was great for entry but felt horrid at showing me what I needed to do next.) At the cost of Life Balance, despite how it worked for me, maybe it’s simply time to try something else.

The least expensive overall, and perhaps most interesting because it supports task sharing, is to go with Remember The Milk. I’m not sure I want to use a Web or “cloud” service for this, and there’s no desktop application per se, but I’m at the point in my life where sharing to-do’s with others (and outside the work environment) is compelling. The new Remember The Milk iPhone application may tip me in that direction.

Here’s an example of how you can use the DirectoryService dscl utility to find which local user accounts have UIDs greater than 100. These users are by convention most likely to be non-system accounts, and therefore of interest for some tasks in a tool like Applejack. (I pulled this example from some comments in the Applejack 1.4.3 source.)

$ dscl /Local/Default -list /Users UniqueID | awk '$2 >= 100 { print $1; }'
supersecretadminaccount
christen
jeremy
elijah
demoguy

What’s going on in this example?

I’m getting a list of users from the default local DirectoryService node, whose path is /Local/Default. The output of this step gives you all of the local user accounts’ short usernames, followed by their UIDs, because that’s the property I was requesting. The data is arranged in two columns.

A drop into awk can make quick work of processing this columnar data, so I pipe the output of the first command in. Taking the output of dscl, I wanted to find whether the number in the second column was greater than or equal to 100, so I compare $2 to the desired number. When the UID column’s data matches, I print out only the short username from the first column, $1.

This gives you a list of usernames whose UIDs are greater than or equal to 100. The output is one per line, which is what you want if you have further processing steps.

“UniqueID” is the DirectoryService record type for UID. You could also use “uid” instead, and in this instance I’ve found that it works equally well.

$ dscl /Local/Default -list /Users uid | awk '$2 >= 100 { print $1; }'
supersecretadminaccount
christen
jeremy
elijah
demoguy

Substituting “uid” for “UniqueID” may not always work. It probably will in most cases, since the output is formatted similarly, but it depends on what subsequent processing steps are expecting. If those steps are splitting the columns/fields by whitespace, they should be fine either way.

$ dscl /Local/Default -read /Users/jeremy uid
dsAttrTypeNative:uid: 503
$ dscl /Local/Default -read /Users/jeremy UniqueID
UniqueID: 503

Another point of interest would be accounts greater than 500, as the Mac OS X Setup Assistant and Accounts System Preferences pane create local accounts starting with UIDs 501 by convention. Whether you choose greater than or greater than or equal to 500 is up to you. I’ve come across some situations where ID 500 gets used (somewhat unexpectedly), so you may want to find such UIDs or GIDs if it suits your purposes.

The difference between those accounts whose UIDs are greater than or equal to 100 and those greater than or equal to 500 would yield a list non-system accounts that are hidden by default from the login window or Accounts System Preferences pane. While you could generate two lists and compare with sort and uniq, you could just add to your awk statement.

$ dscl /Local/Default -list /Users UniqueID | awk '$2 >= 100 && $2 < 500 { print $1; }'

On most Mac OS X systems (as of this writing at least), there will be no accounts listed from the above statement. So, you’ll just get your command prompt back.

This should work in Tiger and Leopard, since dscl first became available in Tiger and replaced the NetInfo nicl utility entirely in Leopard.

The price of a barrel of oil closed today at $100.01. The number, by itself and not adjusted for inflation, is historic. I like history. So I’m writing this post about it. And now I’m done.

I’ve decided to follow Sthomas’ referral to Site5, taking them up on their $5 hosting deal. It simply came down to a price I was willing to pay.

I figure that I’ll probably save around that much electricity per month by not having to run my server at home. I’ll regain some upstream bandwidth on my Internet connection, which can be put to other uses. And, my son will not have so many whirring fans running in his room, since we haven’t finished remodeling the room all the technology is moving to.

I had been hoping to get:

• a several GB storage allotment
• a high bandwidth allotment
• High or unlimited hosted sites
• Full DNS control (for potential use with DNS-SD, perhaps)
• Dedicated IP address
• SSL
• Greater than 5 hosted databases (well, just because)
• SSH/SFTP
• Shell access
• Python 2.3 or later, preferably with mod_python (using FastCGI seems to be a big workaround)
• WebDAV
• QuickTime/Darwin Streaming Server
• Reliable, consistent server performance
• Good customer service (even if you never need it, it should be there)

I had to compromise on several points, but ultimately the price point was important to me. I had to balance some items that I wanted versus what I felt was needed, and consider some items which could be added onto an account locally rather than by the hosting provider.

It’ll take a little time for me to sort it out, but I’ll be moving this site to my new hosting account shortly. Hopefully, I can make it happen without an outage.

I had also considered the following hosting companies, and each had compelling offerings that were just not outweighed by $5 per month. I’ll list some of the benefits and drawbacks for each of these well-reviewed major hosting firms.

• Dreamhost: WebDAV, QuickTime/Darwin Streaming Server, more quota space
• WebFaction: considered very good for Python (including mod_python, which seems to be a rarity) and open source hosting, but had some of the most limited stats (like only three hosted dynamic sites for $7/month with a two year commitment)
• Bluehost: considered good for Python, good stats.

In the future, I'm still considering some arrangement with Rsync.net or another off-site backup/storage provider. I think it’s an interesting time to be on the Internet, when you can really start to take advantage of some truly useful hosted services.