Waxing Lyrical

I officially feel like a numpty. For reasons I won't go into I was absolutely exhausted the other day and made the stupid mistake of trying to repartition my macbook pro and put bootcamp on it. Needless to say i manage to cock up the whole thing and wipe my drive.

To my credit, I only said three bad words.

I hadn't been reconnecting my external hdd as often as I should have been but still I had a number of backups using leopards Time Machine feature - and as it turned out a full system restore was incredibly easy. I just put in my leopard cd, chose to restore a time machine backup and picked the latest date - an hour or two later bob's yer wossname and my system is restored. Add to that the fact that my business email runs through gmail's domain accounts now, I used the "recent:" login feature to get back the last 30 days of my mail ( I had a backup from only 10 days ago anyway) and I've lost almost nothing!

Ok so now I'm going to be regularly keeping my external drive plugged in for backups, but the experience has made me seriously consider getting a timecapsule - it's an external hdd with wireless that can be used for seamless automated time machine backups, which I can imagine might save my bacon some time in the future.

For now I've moved my itunes library and my virtual machines onto the same external hdd so that will make sure I have it plugged in at least a few times a week, and I'll try to get into the habit of always plugging it in when I'm at a desk. In short though, Time Machine is absolutely f'ing brilliant.

The other stupid thing I did was write some blog posts. I wrote a few of them, while away at Philip island on a weekend away without internet connectivity (first time in years - it was... unsettling) I noticed the text file of these bloggages on my desktop today and felt stupid again as I realized I never got around to posting them on the actual blog... I feel a partially connected air app coming on!

There's a simple and easy way to control CF instances on OSX (or flex / jrun for that matter). Get a little program called Lingon.

1. Once installed, run it and click the "New" button (top left).
2. Choose "Users Daemons"
3. On the resulting screen, set the "Label" field as something like "CFMX Service"
4. Use the plus icon to the right of the "Program Arguments" box to add the following arguments. These arguments should be in order, and each should be added as a seperate entry in the list (by clicking the little plus button again):
1. /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.4.2/Home/bin/java
2. -server
3. -Djava.awt.headless=true
4. -jar
5. /Applications/JRun4/lib/jrun.jar
6. -start
7. cfusion
5. Cick "Just save" or "Save and Load" and you're done.

As you might imagine, you can change the last argument from "cfusion" to "flex" or whatever you named the instance of your FDS setup to create a service for starting your flex instance.