Fair, Cookies, and NFS

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Kim left for Country Fair yesterday. For some reason, I thought she was leaving today. I didn't even get to say a proper goodbye or anything. Aside from cats running around and going crazy, the house has been eerily quiet. Usually Kim lets Charlotte in and out during the night. I'm sure I slept right through his mews at the door.

Last night, I made cookies. We are having a sort of underground mini-party at work today. If the HR department were involved, I am sure they would call it “teambuilding” or something like that. For us, it's a word-of-mouth cookie potluck. There is no memo. There is no invite. Everyone shows up in the lunchroom at noon with cookies to share. My cookies are a fancy sort of sugar cookie. I even picked up a cookbook specifically devoted to cookies at the Powell's cookbook store on Hawthorne last week. The cookie part itself was relatively simple, but the fancy regal icing took forever. The cookie dough is rolled out and cut with shaped cutters. The same thing is done with the icing, but because the icing is super-thick, it was hard to work with. I finished with these cookies so late last night that I didn't have time to get to the savory cookies I wanted to make (cornmeal jalapeno.)

Getting the NFS server on regular (non-server) OS X working is proving to be more difficult than expected. It took several hours to discover that the portmap service can't be launched directly and isn't under the control of a “regular” Unix service like xinetd. Apple has a special service (launchd), and a special way of starting the service (sudo launchctl start com.apple.portmap). Also, your shares aren't held in the regular place (/etc/exports), but in that NetInfo it's-just-like-the-Windows-registry-but-really-it-isn't-because-we-say-so registry thing. Also, there is no way to quickly and easily enable/disable the service. If an “exports” section is in the NetInfo registry, then NFS is started on bootup. If you later create/remove the “exports” section, you either have to reboot or launch/kill a bunch of services in nonstandard ways. Of course, I don't want the NFS server running when I am at home or at a public access point, only at work. Therefore, I “get” to write a fun little script to do the necessary mojo for this sort of thing. Of course, I'll share. For those other 3 people in all of the world that are insane enough to want nfsd on their OS X laptop.

And now, I leave you this link: American Cornhole Ass.

Posted in: Portland Software Work

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