Blognote » Digital Life

How long until my Windows password expires?

Edward — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:32:25 +0000

I was wondering how long before I have to change my password at a client-site. Scripting to the rescue, scroll down to the bottom of this page, copy the code into a expiration.vbs file and start it from the commandline using start expiration.vbs

Restoring MacBook Pro using Time Capsule

Edward — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:40:50 +0000

To my horror suddenly my MacBook Pro wouldn’t display anything anymore, a blank screen was all I got. Hooked up an external monitor, no success. Searched the internet and concluded that I might have a broken Nvidia graphics “card” (it’s soldered on the board so it’s not really a card) as the batch my MBP is from contains a faulty Nvidia card http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2377
So I went to an Apple Service Center where they concluded that indeed my graphics card is broken and that repair is covered by the extended warranty. The ASC had a MBP for rent for the duration of the repair, but as I was late on the day they weren’t able to swap the harddisks.
So I took the MBP home and ventured out to restore a Time Machine backup. I have a Time Capsule so there should be a recent backup available.
The MBP booted into the installation of Leopard, after the introduction video (couldn’t bypass watching the whole video) I was give the option to do a restore from a backup. Selected the option, the MBP found my Time Capsule but after I selected a backup-set got the Spinning Beachball and nothing happening for more than an hour, I uttered a small curse.
What the heck, let’s boot into Leopard and start the Migration Assistant. Hmm, the same experience, found my Time Capsule but after selecting the backup-set a Beachball. Damn.
Read something about restoring a backup by starting the restore tool off from the OSX installation CD. So started the utilities, selected the restore, hmm it can’t find my Time Capsule. Looked up a knowledgebase article on the Apple site and found that I had to start the Wireless network by clicking the WIFI icon in the upper right corner of the utilities screen. Ok, so the backup-set can be selected, but you guessed it, a Beachball.
Than it dawned me that the backup was made with Time Machine running Snow Leopard not Leopard, so I put in the Snow Leopard DVD, started the Utilities, selected restore from Time Capsule, saw the backupset, and now was able to select exactly which backup I wanted to restore. Selected the most recent (which was from just before the screen problems started) and went to bed.
The next morning I was greeted with my trusted login-screen and everything was installed in such a way that I couldn’t tell that I was working on another machine. Great, love automatic backups. Note to Apple, a meaningful message along the lines of “Backup was created with a newer version of Time Machine” would have saved me a couple of hours.

Switching to Git

Edward — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:08:18 +0000

I’ve been using subversion for a very long time. During that period I’ve got several people and one company hooked on this version control system after I got frustrated with SourceSafe. SourceSafe was the only version control software developers on the Microsoft platform knew, if they did any. For those people subversion was a giant leap, but once they saw it in action on they’re large .net projects they were sold.
Once I moved to the Mac OS X platform subversion happily travelled along for my local version control.
I’ve always had two main frustrations with subversion:

In a local situation you are stuck with a directory on your system which doesn’t contain anything sensible: your local repository
It is not easy to convert a local directory to a working copy under version control (add/commit/checkout)

Now I’ve switched to Git and I will undoubtly find issues using it, but so far my two main frustrations are solved with three lines of code

git init
git add .
git commit -m "First commit"

iCal problem CalDAVDeleteEntityQueueableOperation

Edward — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:47:38 +0000

Just one result in Google, but exactly the problem I was experiencing
Changed the preference and restarted iCal. Problem solved.
Thanks Matt.