number 9

Firefox and me have been best friends for years, but lately it’s been messing me around.

Clint, what’s Russian for ‘just fire the fucking missile’?

I’m on a PowerPC OS X machine, and if I don’t shut it down overnight it’s leaked all free memory by the morning.
Plus it tends to sit and drool just when an auction is about to close, or a Wii turns up on game.co.uk, or you
just want do some work.

Firefox 3 fills me with dread.
I’ve heard it will be ‘faster, stabler and with more features’ which is a ‘pick 2’ situation if ever I heard one.

going native

Another reason used to be cross platform muscle memory, but I’m due a new laptop soon, and it’ll be a Mac
(because it’s the best laptop OS, that’s why. You may disagree, but you are wrong, please don’t waste everyones time saying so out loud).

I’ve tried Safari a few times, but there are a few things it can’t do that I need.

1. del.icio.us integration
2. your homepage can be multiple tabs (so they all open ot once)
3. keyword support (the real must have)

Today, Firefox forced my hand by breaking its own del.icio.us extension. The keyboard shortcuts no longer work, which for me means it might as well not exist.

exit strategy

I’ve fixed all the showstoppers above like this.

1. just use the standard del.icio.us bookmarklet
2. make a ‘hometabs’ bookmark folder and enable ‘Auto-click’. This loads all the folder contents, one per tab,
   when you click the folder name
   • (’Bookmarks → Bookmark all these N tabs’ does the same thing, but it’s easier to edit a folder)
3. use Sogudi

Sogudi was the real saviour here. I’ve found several projects that claim to do the same thing, but they either
involve hacking the search box or (shudder )the binary. More importantly, they just hack the ‘Google’ search box., instead of the location bar.

Runs fine on Leopard, and converting
all my Firefox keywords
just involved choosing ‘Safari → Sogudi’ and pasting them in.
Just remember to replace all the ’%s’ with ‘@’.

does whatever a spider can

Ceri also recommended Webkit . It’s a drop-in
nightly build of the new rendering engine, which is handy if you need to raise bugs etc.

It’s a lot less daunting than that sounds.
Shows up as a second Safari icon you can click to run Safari under it
(generally when the main icon is having trouble with a particular page).

Just upgraded my work mac to Leopard. Took an hour, worked flawlessly.

Of course, the first thing I did was stick in a USB stick with holds half a zpool from my Solaris Express box at home:

  planb:~ $ zpool import
    pool: sticky
      id: 4692054964394431575
   state: FAULTED
  status: The pool is formatted using an incompatible version.
  action: The pool cannot be imported.
  Access the pool on a system running newer
    software, or recreate the pool from backup.
   see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-A5
config:

    sticky          UNAVAIL   newer version
      mirror        DEGRADED
        dsk/c6t0d0  UNAVAIL   cannot open
        disk3       ONLINE
planb:~ $ zpool import sticky
cannot import 'sticky': pool is formatted using a newer ZFS version

i.e. ” I know this is half of a mirror, but it’s a newer ZFS version than Apples”.

what’s new pussycat?

So I reformatted the disk on my Solaris 10 update 4 box:

vera / # rmformat
Looking for devices...
...
...
     3. Volmgt Node: /vol/dev/aliases/rmdisk0
        Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c4t0d0p0
        Physical Node: /pci@0,0/pci8086,4c43@1d,7/storage@7/disk@0,0
        Connected Device: Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 PMAP
        Device Type: Removable
vera / # zpool create sticky c4t0d0p0

This is how it looks on Solaris 10:

vera / # zpool status sticky
  pool: sticky
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        sticky      ONLINE       0     0     0
          c4t0d0p0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
vera / # zfs list /sticky
NAME     USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
sticky    85K  1.87G  24.5K  /sticky

So I copied a bit of data on, zpool exported and stuck it back in the Mac.

planb:~ $ zpool import sticky
planb:~ $ zpool status
  pool: sticky
 state: ONLINE
status: The pool is formatted using an older on-disk format.  The pool can
    still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Upgrade the pool using 'zpool upgrade'.  Once this is done, the
    pool will no longer be accessible on older software versions.
 scrub: none requested
config:

    NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    sticky      ONLINE       0     0     0
      disk3     ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
planb:~ $ zfs list
NAME     USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
sticky  30.8M  1.84G  30.7M  /Volumes/sticky
planb:~ $ ls -l /Volumes/sticky/
total 3
dr-xr-xr-x+ 4 root  sys  6  7 Nov 00:10 local
planb:~ $ touch /Volumes/sticky/bummer
touch: /Volumes/sticky/bummer: Read-only file system

Much better.

pussy galore

Now for the crazy conspicacy theory bit:

planb:~ $ zpool get all sticky
cannot get property 'name': pool must be upgraded to support pool properties
cannot get property 'bootfs': pool must be upgraded to support pool properties
cannot get property 'bootfs': pool must be upgraded to support pool properties

i.e. “this zpool format doesn’t support bootable volumes. but I do.”