This is a little bit of a transition period for me. I’ll probably be rejiggering this site to reflect that.

Friday, 3/13

• I Love You, Man (excellent)
• The Snake (satisfactory)
• Ong-Bak 2 (satisfactory)

Saturday, 3/14

• 45365 (satisfactory-plus)
• Pulling John (satisfactory-plus)
• Moon (excellent)
• Troll 2 (excellent)

Sunday, 3/15

• The Way We Get By (excellent)
• Modern Love is Automatic (satisfactory)
• Women in Trouble (satisfactory-plus)
• Drag Me to Hell (excellent)

Monday, 3/16

• Best Worst Movie (satisfactory-plus)
• The Slammin’ Salmon (satisfactory-plus)
• Observe and Report (excellent)
• Lesbian Vampire Killers (satisfactory)

Tuesday, 3/17

• New World Order (satisfactory-plus)
• Objectified (satisfactory-plus)
• Four Boxes (satisfactory)
• Trust Us, This Is All Made Up (satisfactory)
• Grace (satisfactory-plus)

Wednesday, 3/18

• Afterschool (satisfactory-plus)
• Winnebago Man (excellent)
• Anvil! The Story of Anvil (excellent)

Aside from being a terrific lady, Becky has a great taste for Web design. It was fun to work with a client who lives so nearby.

This is a somewhat long post, but the point is this: I have a new 1TB Fantom GreenDrive (attached via USB) which I cannot partition the way that I want to. I want to allocate 300G for a Time Machine backup partition and the remainder as a partition for everything else. For some reason, I’m only able to partition the drive so that it has two equal-size partitions. While this isn’t terrible (the 300G figure was somewhat arbitrary), I’m curious to see if anyone knows what’s going on here. As part of my tale, I list three “mysteries” that have really stumped me.

For at least a year now, I’ve had two external USB drives attached to my machine through a hub. One (a Fantom Titanium-II 500G drive) was for Time Machine, and the other (a LaCie 150G drive) was for other files. These drives were almost always connected to my machine, and they were almost always powered on. About three weeks ago, the Time Machine drive started unmounting, seemingly randomly, from the computer. When I tried to verify it in Disk Utility, it gave me an error, and the drive would again unmount. At the same time, I started having problems with the LaCie drive – when I plugged it in, the Mac gave me a message saying that the drive wasn’t working properly and that I had to back up everything on it.

This all seemed too coincidental to me, and so is the first mystery of my saga. However, I saw the GreenDrive on sale and decided to pick one up, rather than trying to fix the two drives. When I connected the GreenDrive to the computer, it was formatted at NTSF. When I tried to format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), Disk Utility gave me an error.

If I booted the Mac into Windows, I could format the drive again as NTSF, and it would work fine. When I went back into the Mac side, it worked there, too (that is, I could read from it and write to it). Also, I could use Disk Utility to format the drive as MS-DOS (FAT). Of course, I needed to format the drive for the Mac so that it would work for Time Machine.

When I went into the Time Machine preference pane and selected the GreenDrive for Backup (which was still formatted as MS-DOS (FAT) at the time), and did the erasing from within Time Machine, I was able to get the drive formatted as one large Mac OS formatted partition. Why I was able to successfully format it from Time Machine, but not from Disk Utility (which I believe is what Time Machine uses for the erasing, anyway) is the second mystery.

So, now I had a 1TB hard drive set up a single partition. I still wanted to divide it in two. However, when I tried using Disk Utility to partition it the way I wanted, I got an error saying the partition failed. Just as a test, I tried partitioning as two equal-size partitions, and this worked. Why it would let me partition in this configuration, and not the way I wanted, is the third and final mystery.

In the end, I’m almost where I want to be. I had to spend a little bit of money, but I have more total storage space available, and it seems to be working fine. Also, I was able to format the LaCie drive, and it seems to be working well, so it wasn’t a total loss. Still, any answers you guys can provide would be greatly appreciated.

The biggest trap for the unwary is overestimating how much you’re actually able to handle. In Spring 2009 there at least a dozen courses I am highly interested in taking. Realistically, I probably can’t take more than four of them and still able to absorb anything that I’m supposedly learning. But the temptation to load up is strong. I’ve seen many other people do it, and by this point in the semester, they almost always regret it.

I have until December 1 to “pre-register” through Columbia’s rather Byzantine system. Until then, I’ll be playing with my course-selection spreadsheet..

This was my first foray into WordPress theme development. Basically, I modified the default “Kubrick” theme so that it is closely (almost identically) modeled on the clean design of softwarefreedom.org. After a bit more experimentation, I plan on making the theme available for public use.

Perhaps my favorite “feature” of the iPhone is having a decent (though some would call it sub-par) camera with me at all times.  What’s really cool is that the iPhone includes GPS tags for every photo that you take.  This allows you to create albums like this one of my recent trip to Golden Gate Park.  This is arguably useful, but it’s definitely really, really cool.  Unfortunately, from what I can tell, iPhoto lacks the ability to create these maps, either natively or through an iPhoto plug-in.  It seems silly that I need to upload my photos to the Web to accomplish this, and thus I hereby declare my First iPhoto Wish.

My Second iPhoto Wish also relates to the iPhone and a Web service which takes advantage of the phone’s capabilities even better than its applications do.  It seems to me that Photos is Facebook’s really killer app so far, or at least the one that draws the most eyes to the site.  I’m a fairly active Facebook user, and when I log in, what I’m most interested in seeing is the list of updated photos; it’s more interesting than, say, your recently-updated list of favorite music, or the non sequiturs on your Wall.  What makes Photos especially cool is its ability to tag friends in your photos.  At this point, I would go so far as to call it uncouth to not tag the people in your photos.  Unfortunately, while Facebook provides an iPhone application which allows you to directly upload photos from your iPhone, it doesn’t allow you to tag the photos with friends.  So, you need to upload the photo to Facebook (via your phone or computer), then log in with a browser to actually tag people.  This is silly (as is the ability to fulfill my First iPhoto Wish in an analogous way by viewing a map on Facebook) and should be corrected.

An alternative would to rely upon the iPhone’s Photos application to do the tagging.  What would be nice about that is that it would let you sync the tag information to your iPhoto library, which is helpful if you’re slightly uneasy, as I am, about entrusting your photos to Facebook.  The problem there is the iPhone and iPhoto don’t know your Facebook friends – they only know the contacts on your phone and computer.  Perhaps Apple could use the Facebook API to get around this limitation.

My Third iPhoto Wish is for the ability to assign photos taken on the iPhone to an album before syncing to the computer.  As I understand it, the current sync procedure is this: when you plug your iPhone into your Mac, iTunes handles backing the phone up and also syncing audio and video files, calendars, contacts, and applications, and also uploading photos to the phone.  iPhoto is used to download photos from the phone.  While this makes a certain degree of sense, it’s not terribly convenient when you’re like me and only take a handful of pictures per day.  I have to plug in the phone, wait for iPhoto to open, import the picture, assign it to an album (and tag the people in it, via the Title field), and then confirm the deletion of the original from the phone.  It would be much better if I could take a picture using the phone, immediately assign it to the “San Francisco” album, and just let everything be synced automatically.