I just got email touting the new “Adobe XD CC” app, which promises:

“The future of experience design. No experience required.”

This sounds like exactly what happened when Apple set fire to their decades of usability studies and sucked on a pistol Boldly Invented New Paradigms.

Apparently the rights have finally been sorted out, and last week Penguin released Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress for Kindle. TANSTAAFL applies, but they kept it under $10.

Consolidating all my files onto the new NAS led me to find a variety of non-animated cheesecake. I don’t have names for all of these, but I’ll fill them in as I come across them.

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I don’t understand why you’re not accepting this 7-letter word…

The last bit of work involved in merging all my personal Mac files back together on the new 12-inch MacBook was FontExplorer X and all of my fonts. For the past few years, I just grabbed a few at a time from the old machine when I needed them (first and foremost being my improved version of Anonymous Pro for Terminal use), but it was time to get them all back.

Except that when I was done, there weren’t as many as there should have been. I opened up a few old Illustrator files, and got warnings about missing fonts.

Why? Because old Mac font suitcases were stored in the magic Mac resource fork, and somewhere in the various iterations of copying the font directories around, I lost all the resource forks, leaving a bunch of zero-length files. Fortunately, I not only made a disk image of the old Togetsukyō disk, I still had the actual disk on a shelf, right next to the two full backups I made with SuperDuper! when I pulled it from the dead machine.

After that, it was trivial to merge over only the files that were zero-length on the new disk. cp handles resource forks just fine, so I massaged the output of find into a quick shell script, and all was well.

Side note: I have way too many fonts, and that’s not even counting the old shovelware CDs that came with CorelDRAW! back in the day (including the early one they got their asses sued off over).

Oh, dear, I found more fonts…

Just remembered that I saw a Fonts directory on one of the really old external drives I copied to my new NAS. When I opened it, I found another gigabyte of old fonts. This one does include the old CD4 fonts, plus my old Type On Call purchases and everything that was bundled with Illustrator 7 and 9. I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap with what I’ve already got loaded, but best to be sure.

Okay, I don’t need those fonts…

The CorelDRAW 4 fonts have some novelty value (this was the set of Bitstream fonts they licensed after the pirated fonts in CD3 got them sued), but the 26-year-old font archive that predates my arrival in California looks like a steaming heap of shovelware. I don’t even remember where they came from originally, and I already have the DynaCom shovelware CD if I wanted ripoff fonts without decent kerning tables.

And I’ll just delete the disk image labeled “Font Folio 8”. However I acquired it back in the Nineties, it wasn’t by purchasing the product personally, and I can get legit modern versions of pretty much everything on it from Typekit as part of my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. (besides, it’s more resource-fork suitcase fonts…)

So, what exactly is the point of reporting 2^63 - N as the number of free inodes in df output on a Mac? You could at least abbreviate this nonsense in scientific notation, if you can’t report a meaningful number.

Sometime this morning, someone rebooted a KVM server. We don’t know who, yet, but this would only have been a minor problem if it weren’t for the fact that another unknown someone had accidentally deleted the disk images for some of the VMs running on that server.

A month ago. No one noticed because they kept running on the unlinked open files…

Daily full backups are your friend!

Update

NetworkManager: threat or menace?

Seriously, who even configures a server with it, and who came up with the idea of instantly taking down the interfaces the moment you save ifcfg-eth0 to switch from NM to static config? Fortunately, IPMI meant that I didn’t have to physically plug a monitor into the server to get back in.

(although Neal did have to plug in the IPMI interface for me; the perils of setting up new servers in a hurry…)

Several years ago, the personally-owned MacBook Pro (Togetsukyō) that I used for work went flaky, and I didn’t feel like spending the three grand or so that it would take to buy a fully-tricked-out replacement. So I had my boss buy me the best he could get approved, which was the 13-inch model with 16 GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. I named it Hello!Party, inspired by Scott’s ‘favorite’ song, and carefully downsized onto the smaller SSD.

It served me well for three years, but around the same time AppleCare gave out, so did the right-side USB port. So he ordered me a new one, and the approval process didn’t require so many compromises, so I ended up with the 15-inch touchbar model with 16 GB and a 1 TB SSD, which I named Macchi: it’s not headless, but it’s formidably proportioned. Apart from the mind-bogglingly terrible keyboard and the mostly-just-annoying touchbar, it’s a spiffy thing, and the extra space gives plenty of room for VMware Fusion virtuals.

But there was a problem: a bunch of data from Tog never fit onto H!P, and was only available in an archive on the house server, a refurbished Mini named Melwin. I’d also decided to keep a cleaner separation between work and home, so I had two accounts on H!P, one with all my work stuff, one with personal email, iTunes, Yojimbo, etc. For more fun, H!P was bound to our AD domain, so the work account had funky permissions. For even more fun, when I got Macchi, I only moved the work account, so I had to carry H!P if I wanted access to personal stuff.

Ten days ago, I noticed that Apple’s refurbished store had just gotten a new batch of 12-inch MacBooks in stock, which seemed like the perfect opportunity to clean up my personal/work accounts once and for all. Buying refurbs directly from Apple is actually the best way to get a reliable machine with a full warranty, as clearly explained by the folks at MacRumors. Brand new hardware is a crap shoot (especially models released in the past 3-4 months), and no one else’s refurbs are eligible for AppleCare. It’s got a Core i7, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD, and I kept the name Hello!Party.

TL/DR, I’ve spent the last three days figuring out how to merge the best bits from multiple accounts on three machines to create a fully-populated personal account where everything actually works and has the correct ownership, while stripping out the last of the personal stuff from the current work machine.

(well, the naughty personal stuff, for sure; unlike most of the people who certified that they’d read the employee handbook this year, I actually read the employee handbook…)

Side note: after I scrubbed and reinstalled the 13-inch MBP, the right-side USB port seems to work again. Sigh.