Mac OSX. A powerful open Unix with a cool interface and a very closed philosophy behind it. If Steve thought it was not needed, it is not in the system. So mounting an external harddisk formatted with EXT2 or EXT3 (journaling mostly Linux filesystem) on a Mac is not an option... By default. Because a couple of mouseclicks and a Unix command made it possible or me to mount my external EXT3 formatted harddisk on my iMac.

Start with MacFuse and download it. Macfuse is a very powerfull framework that makes it possible to mount all kind of drives; from amazon S3 to SSH (scp) mounted disk. And it is also plugable so once you have installed it, download fuse-ext2. Do not be fooled by the name, it can mount ext3 disk as well.

Once you have both installed, open a terminal and type for example:

This is needed to make a volume that is mounted. In my case I wanted temporary to mount a 1 TByte external USB disk, hence the name.

I only needed to get data off the disk , so to be sure I mounted it Read Only. To find what device name your disk is using, best to power of the disk and press [tab] twices to see what devices are in /dev/. Now power the disk, wait and redo to see what drives have been added. IN my case it was disk2s1

And you now have mounted a EXT2 or EXT3 formatted disk under /Volumes/temp1TB

Note that Macfuse can do lots of other stuff as well, see the video! Happy hacking.

You are looking at Drupal's next release, with the internal name D7A4. It was found lost in a bar in Antwerp, Belgium. Camouflaged to look like an ordinary Drupal 6 on an USB stick. We got it. We disassembled it. It's the real thing, and here are all the details.

While Drupal may tinker with the final packaging and design of the award winning CMS, it's clear that the features in this lost-and-found next-generation Drupal version is drastically new and drastically different from what came before. Here's the detailed list of our findings:
What's new

• Better security
• Usability enhancements
• database abstraction layer
• Better Documentation in core
• Several Performance Improvements Implemented
• Beter themes
• Better file handeling
• Better image handling
• Custom fields

What's changed

• Color module now usable by themes other than Garland.
• Usability improvements including re-weightable roles and saner Forum module defaults.
• A variety of optimizations made to data import-related functions to make migrations faster.
• Lots of previously missing documentation for hooks has now been documented. Hooray!
• Increased test coverage, particularly core Tokens.
• Lots of smaller bug fixes, security patches, and improvements.

How it was lost

Dries Buytaert—a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering graduate of the University of Ghent and talented amateur photographer—is a Drupal Software Engineer working on the core Drupal Software, the little program that enables communities to florish. A dream job for a talented engineer like Buytaert, a PHP fan who always wanted to meet Rasmus Lerdorf.
On the night of April 27, he was enjoying the fine local ales at a pub, a nice Belgian beer garden, in Antwerp. He was happy. The place was great. The beer was excellent. "I underestimated how good Belgian beer is," he blogged on his next-generation CMS he was testing on the field, cleverly disguised. It was his last blog post update on the secret Drupal version. It was the last time he ever saw the USB stick, right before he abandoned it on bar stool, leaving to go home.

The Aftermath

Weeks later, Boerland.com got it for $5,000 in cash. At the time, we didn't know if it was the real thing or not. It didn't even get past the Druplicon installer screen. Once we saw it inside and out, however, there was no doubt about it. It was the real thing, so we started to work on documenting it before returning it to Buytaert. We had the software, but we didn't know the owner. Later, we learnt about this story, but we didn't know for sure it was Buytaert's USB stick until today, when we contacted him via his phone.

Dries Buytaert: Hello?
Bert Boerland: Is this Dries?
Dries Buytaert: Yeah.
B: Hi, this is Bert Boerland from boerland.com.
D: Hey!
B: You work at Drupal software, right?
D: Um, I mean I can't really talk too much right now.
B: I understand. We have a device, and we think that maybe you misplaced it at a bar, and we would like to give it back.
D: Yeah, I forwarded your email [asking him if it was his USB stick], someone should be contacting you.
B: OK.
D: Can I send this phone number along?
B: [Contact information]

He sounded tired and broken. But at least he's alive, and apparently may still be working with Drupal software—as he should be. After all, it's just a stupid USB stick and mistakes can happen to everyone. The only real mistake would be to fire Dries in the name of Drupal's legendary impenetrable security, breached by the power of Belgian beer and one single human error.

What does it mean for you

After consulting our lawyers, we decided to test the next version o this Drupal CMS and to offer a free download link so you can enjoy the works of this Drupal engineer as well. This so you can get familiar with the new slick industrial interface and the new API's. We higly encourage you to download the software and help test drive it.

And for those not getting satire, please read this bad checkbook journalism

Yes, the very fast Opera browser on the iPhone proxies all request! In normal language, every webpage you visit from your iPhone with the opera browser is send towards Opera. Thereby, they get al the information from you. If you submit a form, it is send to Opera. If you search in Google, it is send to opera. If you login to a website, your password is send to Opera!

They wil claim the need to do this because of the prorpietary way they handle images and HTML to speed up a website. And it is a speedy browser:

I think part of the speed comes form the fact that they proxy all traffic and some funky stuff with preloading images. However, it is absurd that a browser gets /all/ the data I send, all the websites I visit, all the passwords I submit, all the search queries I do. It might not be spyware but sure gets close to this.

How did I found out?

I visitied Facebook on Opera and got this message from facebook:

Then I visited Facebook form my iMac and saw:

Then I did a test on my own host and grepped the logging:

Ans here is the code:

pimsbb2@newborn:~$ sudo tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log | grep -i test
[sudo] password for pimsbb2:
94.246.126.161 - - [17/Apr/2010:21:05:24 +0200] "GET /test HTTP/1.1" 404 500 "-" "Opera/9.80 (iPhone; Opera Mini/5.0.0176/764; U; en) Presto/2.4.15"
^C
pimsbb2@newborn:~$ whois 94.246.126.161
% This is the RIPE Database query service.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
%
% The RIPE Database is subject to Terms and Conditions.
% See http://www.ripe.net/db/support/db-terms-conditions.pdf

% Note: This output has been filtered.
% To receive output for a database update, use the "-B" flag.

% Information related to '94.246.126.0 - 94.246.127.255'

inetnum: 94.246.126.0 - 94.246.127.255
netname: IPO-OPERA
descr: Opera Software ASA

I am not the first person to finds out about it, see for example pcworld.com. But I am the person to tell you that you should be aware that you send all your data cleartext towards Opera when using the app (https is fine however). And I am the person to tell you I will not use the app anymore. Bad Opera! Bad! No cookie.

Apple. You got to love the company for bringing one of the best user interfaces to Unix and for bringing Unix to one of the best user interfaces. But I also hate Aplle every now and then for doing this in a non Unixy way; closed, not transparant and complex.

The other day I could not start any new programs on my mac. All applications I started gave me an error
system was unable to start the program because of a -10810 error.

True, I do not reboot my Macs unless needed and have many many applications (and tabs in browsers) open. I do know a bit about Unixes so I am not the kind of type that will reboot his machine to get it “working” again since I do like to dig in a bit deeper.

But how do you troubleshoot if you can not type a command (any command) in a terminal? I started with googling (remember, having enough browsers and tabs open cab be a good thing :-) ) and found this blog post. When I closed a couple of less needed (okay, non needed) programs I could use the command line again. Tailing my system.log gave me lots of
Kernel[0]: proc: table is full messages.

It turned out that the process list was full. I did have some spotlight issues earlier that I solved but most likely in a way that caused this problem.

All you have to do when you get this message is open up a terminal (quit some programs if you can not open a terminal) and type
sudo service bootps stop

Since it is a deamon with the noHUP flag, it will restart itself and will clear the process list. Solved.

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As you might know, I am a big fan of using EyeTV as well as Plex on my mac mini hooked to my telly. Plex is the best mediacentre for the mac, EyeTV a way to view live TV on your Mac with EPG and much more.

Sometime ago I posted about integrating them, watching live or timeshifted TV on your mac within Plex on this post. Though the code is very rough and far from finished and seems to be orphaned already, I would like to suggest a cool feature.

Wath EyeTV in Plex and have Plex look in to the EGP and searches for tweets about the program you are watching, live or timeshifted. I do not watch much TV let alone live TV, but part of the joy of watching TV is seeing what others have to say about this via twitter. And watching this on a TV with live tweets updates about the program you are watching sure sounds something that TV's will have in half a decade.

BTW: follow me on twitter on @bertboerland.