system-log:tyr

If like me you use a Mac Mini as a media centre underneath the TV you may have a number of USB drives attached to it. Since upgrading to OS X Lion I’ve found these are getting spun up at least once an hour even when the system is entirely unused, which is noisy, a waste of power, and probably shortens the drives life. After some digging around I finally managed to fix this. Read on for more details.
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To use mod_proxy_html on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard you can do this.

Download it from here.

Unpack it then run

$ sudo apxs -ci -I /usr/include/libxml2 mod_xml2enc.c
$ sudo apxs -ci -I /usr/include/libxml2 -I . mod_proxy_html.c

Then update you httpd.conf to include


LoadFile /usr/lib/libxml2.dylib
LoadModule proxy_html_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy_html.so
LoadModule xml2enc_module libexec/apache2/mod_xml2enc.so


Also take a look at the proxy-httpd.conf file that ships with mod_proxy_html for additional config you may want.

For many years I’ve used an install of Gallery to manage my photos online, with a customised front end written for AxKit, and I’ve also been using Aperture to manage my photo library. Managing two separate libraries became a chore and meant that photos weren’t been uploaded for friends and family to view. I tried the built in Aperture web gallery functionality and found it to be rather inflexible and it didn’t handle hierarchies very well, the other option was to export to flickr or something similar, which I wasn’t keen on as I’d rather host the images myself.

So instead I decided to write my own exporting tool, you can see the end result at http://photos.tyr.org.uk the default view is a match of the project/folder/album structure within my Aperture library and the ‘quilt’ view (see top right) is just for fun.  To export photos to the website I just tag them with the ‘Web’ keyword then run the export/sync script, it couldn’t be quicker and certainly much less hastle than maintaining two libraries.

Read on if you want to know more about how it was put together

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‘Your Next Bus’ is the system used in West Yorkshire (and other regions) to provide live bus timetables. Some time ago I wrote a Dashboard Widget to display live timetables on a OS X Dashboard. I had a request to develop this for the iPhone and so I knocked something together with Dashcode and came up with tyr.org.uk/bus. Browse to in in your iPhone and see it in action, requires Version 2.0 of the OS.

Please feedback with any bug reports or feature requests.

Read on for some of the behind the scenes info.
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VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta is out. It’s a free upgrade for all current VMware Fusion users. Notable updates include Multiple Monitor support and Direct-X 9 Shader Model 2.

To give the Shader Model 2 a whirl I fired up Half Life 2. It had refused to run in any previous VMware Fusion release but this time it runs! Ok, it’s runs but it’s nowhere near playable as it’s getting about <5 FPS. However it’s a promising development.

Recently I posted about installing Solaris Express on a Mac Pro. This morning OpenSolaris was released, the first release of what was Project Indiana. Prior to this release the outputs of the various OpenSolaris projects were available within Solaris Express, however now they have their own distribution which has several differences notably the use of a new packaging system called IPS (Image Packaging System).

I will look further into the workings of OpenSolaris in some future posts but for now I thought I’d take a quick look at how the install ran on a bare metal Mac Pro (2006 version).

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I thought it was time I gave Solaris Express a whirl on my Mac Pro (2006 version), as the bare-metal OS, rather than just virtualizing in VMWare Fusion. The main motivation for this is so I can give the xVM technologies a whirl. xVM is basically Sun’s spin of Xen. (more…)