I’m back, and with a mammoth episode for good measure: a whopping 57 minutes that will guide you through the intricacies and nuances of how everything man-made gets old, and how we can learn to avoid the frustration caused by being unable to update a phone we bought just a few years before.

I focus mostly on technological devices, but I also compare them with cars, fridges, and even a Boeing 787 aircraft just because I love planes and I actively look for any random excuse to talk about them.

Don’t forget to “like” the new Facebook page for Avian Bone Syndrome!

Links of interest mentioned in the episode:

• Moore’s Law
• The timeline of Microsoft Windows releases
• The timeline of Apple Mac OS X releases
• The specifications of the 2006 iMac
• How plane crashes are getting weirder, and why
• The Phoebus Cartel

So, you’ve got the shiny new iOS 4.2 on your iPhone 4 and you have enabled AirPrint sharing on your Mac, using either the free Hacktivator or one of the commercial packages. You are very satisfied (albeit a bit doubtful about actually using it in the future), except for one thing: it prints in color, and you really wish it could print in grayscale, because toner is not cheap.

When printing on the Mac this is easy: in any application’s print dialog, you change the specific settings of your printer to convert to grayscale and save a new preset. Then you just select “use last selected preset” and you forget about it, limiting yourself to changing it to color whenever you feel like wasting money (or printing money, if you’re that kind of naughty boy.)

AirPrint, on the other hand, just doesn’t have any setting, aside from the number of copies. You can’t even choose which pages to print. It’s either all or nothing. And it prints in color. It all seems lost, but fear not! OS X’s print subsystem is based on — or rather, it actually is — CUPS, which stands for Common Unix Printing System. Therefore all you need to is fiddling with it to change the actual default settings. How do you do that? It’s very, very simple.

Go to http://localhost:631/ (the CUPS configuration runs via a pseudo-webserver on port 631; don’t worry, this only works on your own machine for your own machine), and click on Administration on top, then click on Manage Printers. Click on the name of the printer in question, and in the Administration pull-down menu choose Set Default Options. What you see now depends on the actual printer you have, but it should very closely resemble the options you get in the OS X print dialog. In my case, the General tab shows a setting called  Color Mode that lets me choose between Color and Grayscale. I set it to the latter, clicked the Set Default Options button, typed in my username and password, and off I went.

Note that you must have administrator rights, and you have use your short username, the one in lowercase with no spaces. It’s the same one that gives the name to your own home folder.

(Many thanks to Marco F. for the input.)

Keep in mind that this is for my own printer, and that I use OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” Results may vary with different printers and/or operating systems, so make your own tests. If your printer outputs pages “face down,” this will probably work as it is. Most ink-jet printers on the other hand output prints “face up,” so some adjustments will be necessary.

In any case the steps for my own printer are very, very easy (once you’ve figured them out correctly):

1. Print all odd pages in normal order
2. If the total number of pages is an odd number, take the last sheet and put it away for the time being
3. Take the (remaining) sheets and put them back into the tray after rotating them 180°. Do not flip them in any way!
4. Print all even pages in reverse order
5. If you put the last sheet away in step 2, put it back at the end of the stack
6. There is no step 6

Enjoy.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, virtualization is exactly what it sounds like: an entire computer is created in software, possibly with some help from the hardware. In practice, what this means is that you are able to have a “computer in a window,” as if it were any other program. The actual physical computer is called the host, and the virtual machine is called the guest. Note that virtualization is radically different from emulation; the former takes place when the host and the guest share their architecture (e.g. x86/amd64), the latter implies that they are different (e.g. a PowerPC host with an x86 guest.)

A very retro-futuristic word to describe the virtualization software on the host is hypervisor. Go figure.

My host of choice is, as it should be clear by now, MacOS X. As for my hypervisor, I like Oracle’s VirtualBox. It lacks Bootcamp support and is less polished than its commercial cousins, but it is distributed for free. With the current state of affair, that’s nice. Besides, I only need it for the occasional Windows test and for Unix-like guests, so I don’t have to rely on any fancy 3D acceleration (which VirtualBox apparently supports, anyway.) One last thing to note: VirtualBox runs on MacOS X, Linux, Windows and Solaris. I am going to refer to its OS X version, even though it shouldn’t be that different on other platforms.

Let’s get to the point. When you run a virtual machine (VM from now on) you usually get the “computer in a window” I described earlier. That’s great for graphical operating system such as Windows or Linux with X, but if you are running a text-only system such as Linux without X, what’s the point? You could save precious CPU and GPU time on your host by not having it display anything, effectively by running in the background, and accessing the VM through SSH or something similar. That’s when you want to use a headless VM.

Running it is astonishingly simple. VBox gives specific terminal commands to handle any aspect of the VMs. A list of available VMs can be obtained as follows:
octavarium:~ jollino$ VBoxManage list vms
Oracle VM VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.2.6
(C) 2005-2010 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.

"Windows 7" {933835d0-d0d8-4bfc-83bc-85531e756cdd}
"Slack" {3a4f9f6a-da6b-40b5-8f4d-850937ffcd21}
"Debian" {2a0647aa-6444-4429-b022-42e76ee1bade}


The string in quotes is the human-readable name (that the user chooses when creating the VM), and the funny numbers are a unique ID for that machine.

Starting any of them in headless mode is as simple as running the VBoxHeadless command:
octavarium:~ jollino$ VBoxHeadless -s Slack &
[1] 425
octavarium:~ jollino$ Oracle VM VirtualBox Headless Interface 3.2.6
(C) 2008-2010 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.

FreeTSD: failed to destroy key: Undefined error: 0
VBoxHeadless(425,0xb058b000) malloc: *** error for object 0x11c700: double free
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
Listening on port 3389.

Note that it doesn’t fork to the background by default. Forcing it to do so avoids abruptly stopping the VM should the terminal itself be accidentally closed. The errors mentioned are harmless.

If you need the “computer in a window” function, you can access the VM by using any RDP client and having it connect to port 3389 on the host. On OS X, I suggest CoRD. It’s important to make sure that the RDP client’s configuration matches the video output of the VM. I stumbled on this at first: CoRD expected a 1280 x 1024 screen, but the Linux console was set to 1024 x 768. This led to weird visual glitches, since VBox doesn’t seem to correctly communicate the screen resolution to the RDP client. The nice thing is that the RDP pipe is active even when the machine rebooting, because it’s handled by VBox itself.

Of course, if you run a VM in headless mode, you’ll typically only use RDP when needed. SSH works just as fine, and trust me, the whole thing feels faster without a chunky VM window in the way!

The current version of OS X, 10.6, is called Snow Leopard, while 10.5 was Leopard. Biologically, they are indeed different animals, but Apple’s goal was to make it clear that 10.6 was visually not too different from its immediate predecessor, and that many of the improvements happened under the hood.

As is common in the world of Apple-related rumors, much speculation about the code name of the still-unannounced 10.7 release. It seems that Apple is running out of big cats:

• 10.0 — Cheetah
• 10.1 — Puma
• 10.2 — Jaguar
• 10.3 — Panther
• 10.4 — Tiger
• 10.5 — Leopard
• 10.6 — Snow Leopard

So will we have Lion, or maybe Lynx? Certainly not Ocelot, since it’s not a big/wild cat.

Is Apple saving the name “Clouded Leopard” for a subsequent release that will be focused on, well, cloud computing? That would be neat indeed.

Cougar, of course, would seem out of place, given its sexual implications in American English. But keep in mind that we’re talking about a company who actually named a product iPad, which kind of proves that don’t have any women in their marketing department. Not that iPod makes much sense either, but come on, iPad?

Yet… think about it: OS X is quite a mature operating system at this point, and it will certainly love new machines. So bring it on, OS X 10.7 Cougar!

Installing the module alone doesn’t work, because MAMP installs no headers; and copying the headers from the vanilla MySQL distribution doesn’t help either, because a few of the required files are generated on the fly during the installation of MySQL itself.

The solution, it turns out, is relatively simple. Follow along.

Step 1: download the latest MySQL Community Server in DMG format for x86-64 from this page, and install the main package. Worry not: nothing is going to be started on boot, so this is not going to mess with your pre-existing MySQL installation. The package is going to be installed in /usr/local/mysql-5.1.45-osx10.6-x86_64/, with a handy /usr/local/mysql/ symbolic link.

Step 2: download the latest MySQLdb Python module from this page, and unpack it somewhere.

Step 3: set the $PATH environment variable to include /usr/local/mysql. That’s because the module’s setup.py is going to need to call mysql_config, and you want it to find the one you just installed, as it comes with all the stuff it needs.

Step 4: do the classic build and install dance, making sure you prepend the commands with ARCHFLAGS=’-arch x86_64′. This is because you want to compile a 64-bit module.

In short:
tar vxfz MySQL-python-1.2.3c1.tar.gz
cd MySQL-python-1.2.3c1
export PATH=/usr/local/mysql:$PATH
ARCHFLAGS='-arch x86_64' python setup.py build
ARCHFLAGS='-arch x86_64' python setup.py install

If all went fine, you should be able to do this without getting any errors:
octavarium:~ jollino$ python
Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Feb 11 2010, 00:51:29)
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import MySQLdb
>>> print MySQLdb
<module 'MySQLdb' from '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3c1-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg/MySQLdb/__init__.pyc'>

Enjoy!