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I just installed the Drupal Administration Menu contributed module, and I really like it. When you are logged in and have administrative privileges, it provides a small menu bar with drop-down menus and submenus at the top of every page in your site. It provides quick access to every admin function I’ve needed, and really streamlines the process of making changes to the site.

Here’s a screen shot of what it looks like:

In that respect, I rank it up there with the Taxonomy Manager module, which also provides a major productivity boost.

Update: Apparently I’m not alone; Administration Menu is among the modules included with the Acquia Drupal distribution. I think that lends quite a bit of credibility to this module … if my own recommendation didn’t provide a tipping point for you.

There are cases where you may want to have Launchd run a job once, and then have that job removed so it doesn’t run again. This topic came up on the Launch-Dev mailing list not too long ago and some answers were provided. In particular, Quinn the Eskimo said:

“Alternatively, don’t unload the job. Once a job is loaded, it
doesn’t depend on the plist file, so removing the plist file out from
underneath launchd won’t cause you any problems. The job will
continue to exist in launchd (until the system restarts) but it won’t
get run against unless someone specifically invokes it.”

I have been struggling with the issue of module availability in Python. While the “batteries included” nature of the standard library is great, there are occasionally times when I need to resort to a module that isn’t included with Python.

There are also times where I’m using modules whose status has changed. I expect that to happen more in the eventual transition to Python 2.6 and 3.0, because I’ve used modules that are being deprecated.

So I wondered how I could conditionally import a module if it was available, without stopping the flow of my scripts — and gracefully handle situations where it is missing. And here’s one basic answer: use a “try” block to catch the “ImportError” exception. For example, if I were concerned that DNSPython wasn’t going to be installed on my target system:

try:
import dns.resolver # Import DNSPython
dnspython_available = True
except ImportError:
dnspython_available = False

The “except ImportError” clause could specify a different module to load, or other workarounds entirely. You could map the namespaces in the “try” bock so the rest of your script doesn’t notice the change in module functions, if you have a way to work around the missing module. Perhaps, you could even try to obtain and install the module, at least for temporary use by your script.

Thanks to authors of the article Python modules – how do they work? for the assist. The information under heading 2.11, “Is my module available?” answered my question and has given me something to think about.

I have had a problem that has repeated since I first began using Entourage as an Exchange client since at least version 11.0. I’ve never been able to solve it, but let me at least explain it here, because I’ve seen other people encounter it as well. It’s error -18576, and I hate it.

The symptoms are that I have calendar events displayed locally in Entourage that do not appear to synchronize to an Exchange mailbox. The Exchange mailbox, or account, does have some but not all of my calendar events.

There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to events that are missing. Many of them are recurring entries on my calendar. Beyond that, I’ve had events I put on my calendar myself, events that have been created through invitations from others, events with and without categories assigned, events that were created manually or with AppleScript, events that are flagged private, and so on.

The sequence of events I see in a traffic capture for affected events goes something like this:

1. Entourage tries to LOCK (a WebDAV call?) the event at a URL path ending in /exchange/userid/Calendar/eventname.eml.
2. Exchange returns an “HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized, NTLMSSP_CHALLENGE” response.
3. Entourage tries to LOCK the event again, at the same URL path.
4. Exchange returns an “HTTP/1.1 201 Created” response.
5. Entourage attempts an HTTP PUT of the event at the URL.
6. Exchange returns an “HTTP/1.1 200 OK” response.
7. Entourage attempts an HTTP PROPPATCH of the URL.
8. Exchange returns a “HTTP/1.1 207 Multi-Status” response.
9. Entourage attempts to UNLOCK the URL path.
10. Exchange responds with “HTTP/1.1 424 Method Failure.”

That’s it, that’s the extent of the HTTP/WebDAV exchange between Entourage and the Exchange server. The Entourage Error Log shows an -18576 error, but as of Entourage 2008, has no further description. Entourage’s Exchange-related errors are numbered in the -18000s and are typically based on HTTP (see the Entourage Error Page; use the equation 19000 + error number to determine its HTTP equivalent.

In my case, this is an HTTP 424 error, or a “Failed Dependency.” According to RFC 4918 on WebDAV, this means “The property change could not be made because of another property change that failed.”

The end result in Entourage is an event that does not appear in the Exchange calendar, but does appear locally — and there’s that entry in the Entourage Error Log, of course. There’s one such for each attempt to sync an affected event, so they build up over time — but some events do synchronize. It’s more aggravating that I’m left with a feeling of being in limbo, not knowing whether any calendar I’m looking at is correct or not. (Is there a sniglet for that? Update: I hereby propose “calendremma.”)

It doesn’t seem to matter whether Entourage is connecting to a front end or back end Exchange server (at least through Exchange 2003). Rebuilding the Entourage database doesn’t clear up the problem, although seems to occasionally have offered some temporary respite. However, the events that didn’t sync before still don’t sync.

The events which don’t synchronize fail to appear via Exchange ActiveSync on my iPod touch, and aren’t visible in either Outlook Web Access or Outlook for Windows.

I’ve long had a problem with the search fields that are omnipresent in the toolbars of so many Mac OS X applications. My problem? I wanted to quickly jump up to them so I could enter text directly, but I wanted to do so with a keyboard shortcut.

This is particularly true in Safari and Keychain Access, two applications where I frequently want to use the toolbar search field.

It turns out that I was too lazy to look for it, and the option is labeled in a misleading way. I’ll admit, I just plain missed the keyboard shortcut.

The command can be labeled as “Find” where I’ve seen it. It may vary and carry some additional text, as in Safari where it is “Google Search” and MarsEdit where the label is “Search Weblogs,” both of which make sense when the resulting action is to jump to the search field. In both of these applications, the command is in a submenu under Edit > Find.

In Keychain Access, it’s just “Find” — so it doesn’t even match the label on the “Search” field it sends cursor focus to.

The keyboard shortcut is Option-Command-F, and appears as ⌥⌘F.

It’s sad when you can’t find the “Find” command, isn’t it? Grin.

I’m really going to have to dive into one new feature in iTunes 8: last night, I discovered that it has per-podcast settings. I’m pretty sure the settings were only available globally before, and I didn’t see anyone else talking about this change yet.

These settings can override the defaults for:

• how many episodes to download
• how long to keep episodes.

This is tremendous, although unfortunately it will lessen the opportunity for third party tools like Cast Away. (However, I’ve found Cast Away extremely complex.)

I’ve been using zsh for a while as my preferred shell. I have a hacked-together zshrc file, and yet really wanted to use it across multiple systems. Some of those systems are running Mac OS X, others Solaris, and still others Linux. Executables are in a different locations and even have different switches across this range of systems, so my cobbled zshrc was not helping me.

As I was about to fall asleep last night, it finally hit me that fixing my zshrc would be a good thing to do. I jotted down some notes about an idea to reorganize it, and did something about it today.

Of course, since I’ve checked my zshrc and other dotfiles into a Mercurial repository, I could experiment without fear.

I created three top-level functions, with one “case” statement in each. Case statements may be evil in some fashion, but they are one of the things I like about shell scripting. These statements do allow the script to make choices based on the host, operating system, or shell that it was running in. (Yeah, it’s a zshrc, but I sometimes do stupid things — like sourcing it in bash on the one Linux system that won’t let me switch to zsh. Site5, I’m looking at you.)

I separated all the important sections of my zshrc into their own individual function calls. Each of those function calls was placed into one of the applicable case statements.

The case statement functions figure out the conditions the zshrc is running in, and then run the other functions to set up my environment.

The changes tested well from first try across the various platforms and hosts I log in to. I did have a minor problem with the `hostname` command, because Solaris doesn’t have a “-s” flag for it. Eventually, I solved that — and the odd “uname: error in setting name: Not owner” error I got, even though I wasn’t directly running `uname` there — by replacing `hostname` with `uname`.

Thankfully, it works for me, and it should be a little easier to manage changes in the future.

Now that I’ve upgraded to Drupal 5.10, I’ve discovered I can no longer post from MarsEdit. I get this error upon submitting a post via XML-RPC, via Drupal’s core Blog API module:

You either tried to edit somebody else’s blog or you don’t have permission to edit your own blog.

Annoying things like this happen all too often with Drupal. I’ve had enough problems with the core BlogAPI and (practically required) Pathauto modules that I should really consider whether the Drupal platform is worth it. It feels like updates for modules are never really tested before they are put out, and so problems like this slip through.

I haven’t figured out what the problem is yet, but hopefully I’ll get this fixed soon. I hate posting through Web interfaces if I can avoid it.

And, just to be clear, all I did was update to the current Drupal 5.10 via my normal routine. I kept my “settings.php” file and my “files” and “sites/all/modules” directories, but everything else is from Drupal 5.10. I ran the “update.php” script after the upgrade. No settings were changed in MarsEdit, which worked before the upgrade.

Update 9/20: I looked in the “Access control” page of my sites’ Drupal Administration section. The “administer content with blog api” had been turned off for my user role. I re-enabled it tentatively, and now posts from MarsEdit appear to work again. I’m not sure why the “administer content with blog api” permission would have been disabled in the Drupal 5.10 update, but that’s what appeared to happen to me.

I recently took a trip to Seattle, and reminded myself of a useful practice I’d developed a while ago. When I’m traveling, I collect import URLs for that trip in my browser — URLs for my organization’s travel booking/information system, airlines, hotels, maps, conference information, etc. — and put them in Safari’s Bookmarks Bar.

It’s pretty easy to collect them:

1. Right-click on the Safari Bookmarks Bar. (If it’s not on, enable it with View > Show Bookmarks Bar.)
2. Choose “New Folder” from the pop-up contextual menu.
3. Enter the name of the folder in the sheet that slides down from the Safari browser window. I usually name it something short (because despite having widescreen displays, I want to conserve space in my Bookmarks Bar) that reminds me of the trip.
4. Visit a site that I want to bookmark for the trip.
5. Add a bookmark for that site, either by:
• clicking the “+” button in the Safari toolbar when I’m there, and then choosing which folder to put it in from the list of folders in the pop-up menu, or by
• clicking the proxy icon in the URL field, and dragging it onto the folder in the Bookmarks Bar.
6. Repeat the last two steps for each site relevant to the trip.

The resulting bookmarks can be rearranged, if necessary, in Safari’s bookmarks editor. (It’s the “open book” icon in the Bookmarks Bar.)

The entire group of pages can be opened all at once by clicking-and-holding on the folder in the Bookmarks Bar. When the menu drops down for the folder, choose the last command: “Open in Tabs.” This opens all of the sites bookmarked in the folder in separate tabs in the Safari window. I find that it’s useful to have them all open while I’m traveling to my destination, since that way I can see them even if I can’t get an Internet connection — free Wi-Fi is not always available.

When I’m done with the trip, I can delete the entire folder or just some of the bookmarks it contains. To delete the folder quickly, right-click on its name in the Bookmarks Bar and choose “Delete” from the contextual menu.

The Xcode 3.1 Developer Tools install both the standard GNU compiler, gcc, and the LLVM compiler, llvm-gcc. I thought I’d try my hand at compiling something with LLVM, so naturally I decided to update my instructions for compiling Rsync 3 as a Universal Binary for Leopard. Let’s try Rsync 3.0.3!

The following set of instructions, of course, requires that you have already installed the Xcode 3.1, available as a download from Apple. To choose LLVM as your C compiler temporarily for this compile, specify the CC=“/Developer/usr/bin/llvm-gcc” variable (as explained in the LLVM FAQ).

$ cd /tmp
$ curl -O curl -O http://rsync.samba.org/ftp/rsync/rsync-3.0.3.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf rsync-3.0.3.tar.gz
$ rm rsync-3.0.3.tar.gz
$ curl -O http://rsync.samba.org/ftp/rsync/rsync-patches-3.0.3.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf rsync-patches-3.0.3.tar.gz
$ rm rsync-patches-3.0.3.tar.gz
$ cd rsync-3.0.3
$ patch -p1 <patches/fileflags.diff
$ patch -p1 <patches/crtimes.diff
$ ./prepare-source
$ env CFLAGS="-O -g -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk -arch i386 \
-arch ppc7400 -arch ppc970 -arch ppc64 -arch x86_64" LDFLAGS="-arch i386 \
-arch ppc7400 -arch ppc970 -arch ppc64 -arch x86_64" \
CC="/Developer/usr/bin/llvm-gcc" \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-dependency-tracking
$ make
$ ./rsync --version
rsync version 3.0.3 protocol version 30
Copyright (C) 1996-2008 by Andrew Tridgell, Wayne Davison, and others.
Web site: http://rsync.samba.org/
Capabilities:
64-bit files, 32-bit inums, 64-bit timestamps, 64-bit long ints,
socketpairs, hardlinks, symlinks, IPv6, batchfiles, inplace,
append, ACLs, xattrs, no iconv, symtimes, file-flags
rsync comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you
are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. See the GNU
General Public Licence for details.
$ file ./rsync
./rsync: Mach-O universal binary with 5 architectures
./rsync (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
./rsync (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc
./rsync (for architecture ppc970): Mach-O executable ppc
./rsync (for architecture ppc64): Mach-O 64-bit executable ppc64
./rsync (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
$ lipo -info ./rsync
Architectures in the fat file: ./rsync are: i386 ppc7400 ppc970 ppc64 x86_64
$ sudo make install


Warning: I have not tested Rsync 3 compiled with LLVM to ensure that it operates at all or is compatible with Rsync compiled by GCC. I haven’t compared the compilation speed against GCC’s performance, determined whether the files are larger/smaller, or have produced a more optimized binary. You use the software compiled with these instructions at your own risk.

Most of the original instructions were helpfully documented by Mike Bombich. My contributions are simply:

• Universal Binary support: four- or five-way, depending on whether you want to use “-arch i386 -arch ppc7400 -arch ppc970 -arch ppc64 -arch x86_64” (which gives specific optimized binaries for PowerPC G4 and G5 systems in 32-bit mode) or “-arch i386 -arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch x86_64” (for more general 32-bit PowerPC support, as I did in my previous article).
• LLVM compilation: use of the llvm-gcc front end, which hopefully produces a working Rsync 3.