Last night I had been listening to music on headphones using the line out jack, so I was puzzled as to what might have caused the problem. Restarting and zapping the PRAM didn’t help. Interestingly enough, though, the start up chime played at system startup. So, I knew the built-in speakers still worked. However, the login sound was muted.

When I brought up the Sound control panel, the only output device showing was digital out. The normal Internal Speakers entry was missing. So, I guessed that maybe OS X was confused about whether I was still trying to use the line out.

I started up a song in Songbird and still no sound or ability to control the volume. I then plugged in my headphones and, voila, sound worked. I unplugged the headphones, but the internal speakers didn’t take over. In the Sound control panel, Headphones appeared as the output device when I plugged in the headphones, but Digital Out reappeared when I unplugged them.

Finally, on a whim I plugged back in the headphones and clicked on the speaker icon in the menu bar that represents the volume control. While holding down the mouse button, I unplugged the headphones and suddenly the internal speakers started working on. In the Sound control panel, the Internal Speakers entry had returned. I don’t know exactly why, but that solved the problem.

Update:Problem happened again on 11/24/2010. I’m running OS X 10.6.5. Same fix worked.

Ideally, you’ll first upgrade to a 64-bit version of MySQL 5.1 or later, unless you already have. Then, follow Geert’s simple instructions for building the MySQL Python connector.

First, simplify your network setup as much as possible before the install. My laptop was initially on a wireless LAN with the server on an Airport Express that had been setup to join that network. No luck. I ended up hooking up my laptop and the server directly to a switch.

The next key step if you are using a VM is to configure networking as bridged rather than NAT’d. In VMWare Fusion, choose Virtual Machine -> Settings. Then click on Network. In the radio buttons, make sure “Connect directly to the physical network (Bridged)” is selected. I think then you have to restart the VM. Once it restarts, the VM will get an IP address on the same LAN as the server, assuming you are using a simple network config like I described above.

After playing around with the server for a while, I can’t really recommend it for a Mac only user. You get access only to a basic set of features that you can find on a less expensive NAS, although the hardware is pretty nice. It’s certainly not a bad choice.

1. Open a Finder Window to the Applications directory, or wherever you installed Eclipse
2. Expand the plugins directory
3. Scroll down to the directory starting with the name “org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.carbon.macosx_”
4. Copy the text of the name following “carbon.”. After the update, mine was 1.0.101.R34x_v20080731.
5. Right click Eclipse.app and select Show Package Contents
6. Expand the Contents and MacOS directories
7. Open eclipse.ini in a text editor
8. Look for two lines that look like

--launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.carbon.macosx_1.0.100.v20080509-1800

9. Change the part after “_” to the text you copied above
10. Close and save changes to eclipse.ini
11. Restart Eclipse

In case you weren’t aware of this, you can also edit eclipse.ini to change the vmargs Java will use when launching Eclipse. For example, if Eclipse itself is running out of heap, you might want to boost the min and max heap size with something like:

-Xms64m
-Xmx512m

Of course, you should also click “Show heap status” in the General section of the Preferences dialog so you can monitor how much heap is being used and can force a GC before a big compile. You shouldn’t boost the min heap size from the default, though, unless you blow past it pretty quick and experience initial sluggishness as the heap keeps getting expanded.

I put two Seagate 750GB ST3750330AS SATA drives in it in a RAID 1 configuration. He recommended the drives and a D-Link DGS-2205 Gigabit switch. Like I said, he does the necessary research. So far, I’m mostly loving it all. You should be able to get the NAS for a little under $200, the drives for about $120 each, and the switch for around $30. Having a GB switch is nice, since it greatly speeds up file copies, assuming your computers have Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

In addition to acting like a file server on my home network, the D-Link NAS has an iTunes server, USB print server, FTP server and a few other goodies running on its Linux operating system. Even better, since it’s running Linux, the community was able to build add-on utilities.

Though the rating on Amazon is only 3.5 stars, this is one of those times you have to read the reviews. A lot of the negative comments refer to issues that have been fixed in newer firmware versions. Though, I have to admit that the user and group permissions design is mediocre and the administration UI for permissions even worse.

There is an especially annoying permission issue if you are using Windows. When you connect to the NAS, you can’t edit the username in the login dialog. So, you have to create a user with the same name on the NAS. This is especially bad if you have multiple Windows boxes on which you use different usernames. At least, this is what happened on my neighbor’s Windows boxes. When I connected to a file share on the NAS from my Fedora Linux desktop, I could change the username. Same for my Macbook Pro.

One of the biggest negatives for me is that the iTunes server won’t serve up Ogg Vorbis encoded music files, and I’ve encoded most of my collection that way. Grrr. I’ll have to look at other community built software for streaming audio or hack the GPL’d source from D-Link, since the iTunes server is also GPL’d. It’s based on mt-daapd by Ron Pedde. I’m kind of puzzled, since the ogg.c file in the src I downloaded makes it look like it should work. It’s successor, Firefly, definitely supports transcoding ogg files.

Fortunately, the Unix utility sed is a great tool for problems like this. My file had the character string “\n” between all the parts that were reasonable to split into separate lines. The following command did the trick:

$ cat source.txt | sed 's:\\n:\
:g' > dest.txt

First, I used the cat utility to pipe the contents of source.txt into sed. Then, I used the substitute command to replace \n (the extra backslash is needed to escape the special treatment of backslashes) with a carriage return. The \ at the end of the first line escapes the literal new line character that causes the shell to go to the next line. The g tells sed to make this substitute globally throughout the file. I then redirected the output into dest.txt.

Sweet, sweet, Unix.

If you’re using Pydev in Eclipse, be sure /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages is in the System PYTHONPATH. Bring up the Preferences dialog, open Pydev in the tree, click on Interpreter – Python, click New Folder to the right of System PYTHONPATH, and then add the directory, if necessary.

Update 12/27/2009: With MySQL 5.1.41 and Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), you no longer need to create the lib/mysql directory with symbolic links as described in the above article. Also, since Snow Leopard comes with Python 2.6, the path above for Eclipse should be /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages. I found Geert’s instructions to be quite helpful for Snow Leopard. There’s also a lot of useful info here.

One problem I ran into is that I initially built the MySQL Python connector with a 32-bit version of MySQL 5.1 installed. After upgrading, I forgot to delete the build directory to force the connector to completely rebuild. When I then tried to run “import MySQLdb” in the interpreter, I got the cryptic message “ImportError: dynamic module does not define init function (init_mysql)”. If I had read all of the comments in that last article before figuring this out, I might have gotten a hint from the comment mentioning that not even “setup.py clean” would delete the build directory if you left off the 64-bit architecture flags.

Update 4/5: On top of all the many other mentions in the press, Eric and Jesús got mentioned in an article by David Pogue in the New York Times.

One NetGear WG511T 108 Mbps Wireless PC Card (purchased on sale at Amazon for $50) and one copy of OrangeWare Wireless Driver for Mac ($15) later, I’m in heaven.

The range with the NetGear card is vastly improved over the Apple Airport card, and the speed boost is amazing. Not only was I able to switch my NetGear router from 802.11b to 802.11g, but I was also able to take advantage of the TurboG feature of the Atheros chips in the router and the card. Of course, most of the speed boost is just from having decent signal strength in the living room.

The OrangeWare Wireless Driver for Mac was everything it was advertised to be. Within five minutes of starting the download, I had installed the software, configured it and was browsing the web from the living room at speeds indistinguishable from the wired connection on my PC back in the office. After confirming that everything was working, I gladly clicked the Register button and paid for it.

Using the Speed Meter at 2wire.com, I was averaging 2.81 Mbps on the PowerBook when in the room with the router and 2.77 Mbps from the living room. We’ll have to see what happens once I add the new laptop, which has an Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 card, to the network.

Since Xine was a no-show in Fink Commander and it was already getting late, I checked out VLC (sometimes known as VideoLAN Client), which I had always been happy with on Linux. VLC played Office Space Wars flawlessly.

Given my luck with the wmv file, I decided to try an AVI file that had not played properly in QuickTime Player. Windows Media Player refused to play it all, claiming it was in an illegal file format. With the free version of QuickTime Player, the audio was unlistenable and the video didn’t appear at all. I downloaded the 3ivx MPEG-4 toolkit, which got the video working in QuickTime Player, but didn’t fix the audio problem. VLC played the AVI file flawlessly.