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A few days ago my (brand-spankin-new-top-of-the-line) MacBook Pro Retina 13 started giving me the error "Could not load Users and Groups preference pane." From any of my accounts. With no system changes that I deliberately made.

I bought a new battery for my 13" Black Macbook yesterday from BattDepot. The Apple replacement part goes for $159, I've seen third party replacements in stores for $129, but BattDepot lists theirs for $47.99 plus shipping and handling. After taxes, it comes to just under $60, almost $100 less than Apple's suggested retail price.

It seems that BattDepot is a reseller for Dr. Battery, so when I selected the "Pick up from warehouse" option ($5) I was given the address of the Richmond warehouse of Dr. Battery. The battery fits nicely, and is a good though not perfect match for color and texture. It is reported by System Profiler as a 5125 mAh battery at 12566 mV, once fully charged.

The past couple of weeks I've been sampling the recipes from a book my sister gave me (Mes petites papillotes)

The recipes are (almost) all based on cooking "en papillote" which I must confess intimidated me for a couple of months until I actually tried it: you assemble the ingredients for individual portions, place them on an oiled sheet of cooking parchment (available by the roll at supermarkets and cooking stores), fold the parchment closed and staple together, and put the whole thing in the oven for a few minutes. The result is beautifully fresh and delicious - everything steams in the package, and delicate flavours are nicely brought out. You can serve the portions in the parchment, and even very simple recipes acquire a certain excitement - who doesn't like unwrapping presents?

I finally sat down and figured out what was behind the errors I was getting every time I tried to sync my iPod. I'd plug my iPod Touch into my Mac, iTunes would pop open as per usual, and the device would start to sync. After a few seconds, I'd get a dialogue window with the message "iTunes could not back up the iPod "iPod" because the backup session failed".

Using a ramdisk can significantly improve the performance of many disk-intensive applications. In this post I'll describe how to set up a ramdisk for MacOS X 10.6, which will persist across system sleep and wakeups, and even reboots.

Note: 22-Mar-2011: I've updated this article with some significant improvements.

I was motivated to look into this while running unit tests for Drupal development. This is a very database intensive operation, and running a full suite of tests takes many hours on a typical laptop. This is a perfect situation for deploying a ramdisk.

Setting up a Ramdisk

A little bit of googling led to this page, which describes how to set up a ramdisk for MacOS 10.6 (and 10.4/10.5, which I won't discuss here). This worked beautifully. Here's how to set up the Ramdisk:

I got my new glasses this morning, ordered online at Clearly Contacts. I can see! No more blobs of glue on my frames. The new glasses fit nicely - as my friend Roland mentions in his comment, the key is to supply the dimensions from an existing set of frames. Yay for open standards. Along with the glasses came a hard case (a little too precious for me), two little storage bags of the variety I usually lose within a week and find later under a big stack of books, a cleaning cloth, and a little screwdriver. I was very impressed that I ordered these on Sunday afternoon, and received them Wednesday morning - all for under $90, including high-index lenses and FedEx shipping.

I ordered some glasses online yesterday from Clearly Contacts. I've been wandering around with stereotypical nerd glasses, held together with blobs of epoxy, since last September when my rimless titanium frames gave in to metal fatigue and snapped.

I ran into an odd error upgrading Drupal from 7.0 RC1 to 7.0. The following is the message in apache's error log:

[Mon Jan 17 13:49:47 2011] [apc-error] Cannot redeclare class queryconditioninterface in 
/var/www/drupal-core/drupal-7.0/includes/database/database.inc on line 1648.

I speeded up page load times for my Drupal site by a factor of at least 10 with a couple of simple tweaks.

This was one of those days where you set out to do something, and something else you've been meaning to do jumps in the way and gets done instead. I put off my blog post about setting up SQLite for testing on MacOS and fixed my Twitter module/OAuth setup instead.

After I posted my last blog entry about devoting Tuesday mornings to Drupal, I realized (for the n-th time) that my "Announce posts to twitter" feature wasn't working, and of course hasn't been working for a while since twitter has moved to oauth for its API authentication. Now, I'm all for that, and open/user-centric id and authentication in general. I even have a few trivial commits to the first incarnation of Drupal oauth module, and a bugfix in for Andy Smith's first OAuth PHP library. Still, broken is broken. General busy-ness and apathy had kept me from diving in there and trying to fix things...

Of course, with a rockin' community like Drupal's , coming back to something later often means that someone else has done some good work in the meantime, and this was no exception. The issue with Drupal's twitter module and OAuth authentication (especially comment #106, by designerbrent) clearly documents the setup required. After a bit of head-scratching (due to my not having paid attention to the required version numbers! You need OAuth module 2.02...), the new twitter and oauth modules (after applying the patch mentioned in the issue) have this all working beautifully again, much nicer than before, really. It would be really nice if the patch in question got committed :)

Thanks, Brent, Hugo Wetterberg, voxpelli, Rok Žlender and of course walkah and eaton.