iPad time since last full charge

I hadn't noticed this until now, but on my iPad under Settings->General->Usage, it now displays the time since last full charge.  It appears this was added in iOS 6.0.  It used to bug me that this only appeared on my iPhone in prior iOS versions.

Making high definition DVDs on a Mac

Final Cut Pro X (with Compressor) can burn a high definition video by exporting as Blu-ray and then burning directly to a DVD-R as an AVCHD disc. I prefer to save to disc images instead of burning directly.  Unfortunately, when Compressor burns to a Blu-ray disc image and then that disc image is burned to a DVD, it is not playable on the PS3 (it reads it as a data disc).

But, there is a way to turn the Blu-ray disc image into an AVCHD disc.  First, install Wineskin Winery from here (http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com).  Then download multiAVCHD (http://multiavchd.deanbg.com/) and ImgBurn (http://www.imgburn.com/) and install both in a Wineskin wrapper.  The executable that should be launched by the wrapper is multiBOOT.exe. Launch the multiAVCHD wrapper.  In the settings tab, check "Use ImgBurn with DVD/BD-R output" and "Use ImgBurn ISO mode". Load the disc image that was created by Compressor and then click Start.  Choose AVCHD Disc as the output format.  multiAVCHD will do its magic (changing the header of index.bdmv to INDX0100 and the header of MovieObject.bdmv to MOBJ0100, etc). It will then launch ImgBurn.  Change the label of the volume and be sure not to include the Certificates folder.

The AVCHD ISO that is created can then be burned to a DVD and will be playable on the PS3.

Strange router problem

My router (Cisco WRT-320N) kept getting into what appeared to be a reboot loop. Resetting the router firmware and swapping out the router with my backup (same model and version of dd-wrt) didn't help.  Eventually I discovered that if I detached the ethernet cable from the cable modem, the router would stay up until I reattached it.  Since that didn't make any sense, I tried swapping out power supplies.  That fixed the problem.  I'm not sure why the power supply would only flake out when the router was attached to the cable modem.

iOS 6 Mobile Safari debugging

One nice thing about iOS 6 is that you can remotely debug via the Safari desktop Web Inspector.  This also works with the iOS simulator that comes with Xcode.

Back to the Athens of the South

We had an early morning flight out of Athens on Air France to Paris.  For some reason, we arrived really late to the airport.  Luckily I was able to check in with George since he could check in with Sky Priority.

After arriving at at Charles De Gaulle Airport, I said goodbye to Kristen, George, and Dimitri since I had a different flight back to the U.S.  From there, I flew to Atlanta and then on to Nashville.

Grilling in Greece

George invited a bunch of his friends and relatives over and grilled some pork and sausages.

Back to the mainland

At around noon, we checked out of the hotel and headed to Poros to board the 2:30pm ferry.  We had coffee while waiting.

After arriving in Kyllini, we headed to Corinth for dinner at a pizza place.  I had a peinirli with kaseri, soutzouki, camel meat, and butter.

We had to stop multiple times on the way back to Athens since Dimitri wouldn't stop screaming. It got so bad that George's mother decided to drive so that George could sit in the back seat.  Dimitri was crying so hard that he vomited.

Drive to northern Kefallonia

We first drove up to Assos.  George's mother went for a quick swim.  Everyone had coffee or drinks.

From Assos we drove up to Fiskardo. There we had dinner. I had calamari stuffed with haloumi cheese and ouzo sauce.

We headed back to the hotel and had to stop twice since Dimitri was screaming.  George wanted to go for a quick swim at the beach, but it was dark and the beach bar was closed.  So instead we just had drinks from the hotel bar.

St. Andrew's foot

At around noon George, Leonidas, their mother, and I headed to Moni Agiou Andreu. There we saw their museum of icons and other items from other churches in Kefallonia. The church had a relic of St. Andrew's foot.

After that we visited the Castle of St. George before heading back to the hotel.

For dinner I had cod with garlic potatoes and then lemon ice cream at an ice cream place. Dimitri chipped one of his front teeth at dinner.  Kristen and George bought some Robola wine.

The caves of Kefallonia

After breakfast we headed toward Sami to see the Drogarati cave and then Melissani Lake. After that we went to the white pebbled and blue watered Myrtos Beach.

For dinner I had rooster and pasta at a restaurant in a hill above the beach.

We were going to have dessert sometime after arriving back at the hotel, but I fell asleep while waiting.

Lost with sheep in Kefallonia

At around noon we stopped by Argostoli and walked around a bit. Then we went to Costa Costa beach.

In the evening we headed to Poros to pick up Leonidas. We had dinner there as well.

On our way back to the hotel the caravan got lost and we ended up taking a dirt road. We unexpectedly encountered a huge flock of sheep which caused everyone to laugh uncontrollably except for Dimitri who woke up and started crying since he had no idea what was going on. Unfortunately, I didn't get a good picture since the chaos all happened too rapidly.

Ferry to Kefallonia

We checked out of the hotel at around noon and then headed to Ancient Olympia. Afterwards, we headed to the port of Kyllini to get on a ferry to Kefallonia.

We arrived at the port of Poros at around 8pm.  We got somewhat lost driving to the Avithos Resort, but eventually found it and had a late dinner.

Greek wedding

After having breakfast at the free breakfast buffet, we drove to the Temple of Epicurean Apollo at Vasses.  The road was quite windy.

In the afternoon we sat by the pool and Dimitrios and George went swimming.

In the evening we headed to Sotirios's wedding and then the reception.

Driving to Kyparissia

We waited a little bit for Antonis and Alexandra before heading out.

On the way to the hotel in Kalo Nero, we first stopped at Ancient Mycenae to see the Citadel of Mycenae with its Lion Gate. At the site was also the Tomb of Aegisthus. Nearby we visited the Treasury of Atreus.

We then went to Nafplio for lunch. I had moussaka. After lunch we headed to a seaside cafe for Greek frappes.

We arrived at Kalo Nero sometime after 8pm and checked in. My room had two stories.  In the lower level was a sofa bed, bathroom, kitchen sink, stove, refrigerator, and small oven. Upstairs had a combined pair of twin beds and another bathroom.

Kristen didn't want to do anything, so I headed back to my room. I went to a nearby store to get a chocolate filled croissant and some cans of soda.

Dimitri's baptism

Today we went to a couple of pharmacies and a grocery store looking for Gerbers baby food.  None of them had any.

For lunch we had kefetedes and French fries.

Dimitrios's baptism was at 7pm followed by dinner.  A lot of George's relatives and friends attended. Dimitri was exorcised at the beginning of the 30 minute ceremony. His clothes was removed before he was thrown up and down in the holy water and anointed with olive oil. In the beginning Dimitri was sleeping, but he was screaming and crying when he was dunked in the water.  Supposedly Kristen had a shocked expression on her face.

Amongst the dishes at dinner was kokoresti, pork, and lamb.

Trip to the center of Athens

We went to a Carrefour grocery store in the afternoon. They didn't have any Gerber's baby food for Dimitri but at least I was able to get some Euros from the ATM.

After dropping off Kristen and Dimitri, George and I heading to the metro station and traveled into Athens to go to the New Acropolis Museum. Afterwards, we walked through Plaka and Monastiraki. There was an icon vendor who said they could make a Ladder of Divine Ascent icon in about a week for 250 euros. I declined.

When we arrived back at George's mother's house, George's cousin Maria and his aunt were visiting. George and I snacked on some moussaka, phyllo cheese triangles, and little Greek meatballs.

Later we went to a cafe next to the church where Dimitri will be baptized. I had a Greek frappe with Baileys. Almost everyone else had beers.

Arrived in Greece

Today I arrived in Athens, Greece, via Atlanta and JFK.  On my flight from JFK to Athens, I sat in the row behind Kristen, George, and Dimitri.  Everyone on the plane thought that he was a very good baby.  And then he chocked will drinking from his sippy cup and vomited on George.

George's mother picked us up at the airport.  Everyone was tired and took naps.  George's mother made moussaka.  Leonidas, Antonis, and their girlfriends stopped by later in the evening to see Dimitri.

Resuminator

It looks like something changed as far as how application resume works with either Safari 6 or Mountain Lion.  Before, applications like TextEdit and Preview would resume their previous application state when launching but Safari would start fresh.  Now, Safari re-opens the windows that were opened when it was closed when launched.

To fix this (i.e. have Safari no reopen windows that were opened when it was last closed), either run this in a Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.Safari NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

Or, download Resuminator from here.  Another option is TinkerTool.

Strange iCloud issues with Mountain Lion on my laptop

A couple of strange things occured when I installed Mountain Lion on my work laptop.  For some reason, there seemed to be a phantom iCloud account which I couldn't initially get rid of.  In Notes, I could see the second account which caused all notes to duplicate, but I couldn't remove it.  When I removed the account from the "Mail, Contacts, and Calendar" preference pane, it would reappear.  Eventually I was able to get things working by some combination of removing the iCloud related keychain entries using Keychain Access, and manually deleting the data files which Notes uses (which I found via the lsof command).

I also had some problems sending iCloud email.  Removing the old Mobile Me smtp setup and removing and re-adding iCloud email seemed to fix it.

I didn't encounter any of these problems in my Mac Pro.  One thing that was different during the install was I didn't get prompted to login into iCloud on the MacBook Pro while I did on the Mac Pro.

Intitial OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Notes

The installation was uneventful.  One nice touch during the installation is that you setup different accounts for iCloud and the iTunes store.

A couple of things that I have noticed so far:

• Web Sharing is no longer available in System Preferences.  Apache is still installed so it can still manually be started/stopped from the command line.  A 3rd party preference pane is available here: http://clickontyler.com/blog/2012/02/web-sharing-mountain-lion/
• X11 is no longer included.  If you have a pre-existing X11.app icon, it'll prompt you to install XQuartz from here: http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/

The location of the Notifications menu bar icon annoys me.  I would prefer that the Spotlight icon be in the top right corner of the screen.

Terminal bell in Ubuntu 12.04

I got a new HP PC at work to replace my approximately 5 year old Dell that is running Red Hat Enterprise 5.x.  Since I no longer support any servers running Red Hat and the stuff I work on is deployed on Solaris boxes, I decided to switch to Ubuntu.

One of the problems I discovered is that the terminal bell doesn't work.  It appears that when they decided to disable the PC speaker beep (which I actually sort of prefer in some cases), they also disabled the terminal bell without providing an easy way to re-enable it.  I was able to get it to work again by running the following:

pactl upload-sample /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/bell.ogg bell.ogg
pactl load-module module-x11-bell display=:0.0 sample=bell.ogg
xset b 100 

After doing this, I could hear the bell when doing "echo -e '\a'", when doing tab completion, or hitting Control-g in a non-windowed Emacs session.  Unfortunately, there is no bell sound in windowed Emacs sessions, though.

Open Blu-ray discs with VLC 2.0

The Open BDMV folder doesn't work for me.  The only way I could get a Blu-ray to open is via Open Network and using an MRL like "bluray:///Volumes/Greece 2008".  The Open BDMV folder UI adds the BDMV subdirectory to the MRL which seems to cause the playback failure.

innerHTML and IE

I needed to insert a large chunk of html returned from an Ajax call to a pre-existing CGI script.  Everything seemed to work fine under Chrome, but under IE I was getting an Unknown Runtime Error.  I was able to get things to work by using a regex to grab only the table element that I was interested in and inserting that to my document via my div's innerHTML.  This seemed somewhat fragile.  I found a better solution in the comments to this blog post.

This is what I ended up doing (where data contains the html returned by the Ajax call and flowDiv is the id of the div I am inserting into):
  

var oldDiv = doc.getElementById('flowDiv'); 
var newDiv = doc.createElement(oldDiv.tagName); 
newDiv.id = oldDiv.id; 
newDiv.className = oldDiv.className; 
newDiv.innerHTML = data; 
oldDiv.parentNode.replaceChild(newDiv,oldDiv);