NSLog();

So the wife and I visit a Subaru dealer in Erie… we'll call them "Old Motors" to keep it anonymous. 😉

We wander around the parking lot looking at Foresters for 20 minutes. Finally someone comes to see us. We tell him what we'd like, and we test drive a car.

Several times he tells us "now, I could be fired for telling you this, but…" before telling us things like "you can get a hitch installed cheaper down the road at a mechanic shop instead of here." Or "you don't have to pay that environmental fee we have listed here on the sticker."

We tell him we're probably going to buy a car on Monday, and if he can write down his best price, we'll leave to consider it, and then we'll either be back on Monday or we won't.

While he checks with his sales manager we use our iPhones to look up invoice on the Forester and find the figures. He comes back and gives us a figure that's over $1800 above invoice. He tells us "I was able to take $500 off, and now you're only $400 over invoice. That's our best offer. You might be able to get that $400 off on Monday, but not if we have to locate a vehicle for you and send someone to get it." We tell him what we saw for invoice price and he tells us "oh, that must be for the manual models."

Uh huh.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 401); »

For several years I've run psync to clone my drive, each night, to a bootable backup:

/usr/local/bin/psync -d -q / /Volumes/Backup

I ran into some problems compiling psync on Intel Macs initially, but then things went well.

Now I'm having trouble building MacOSX::File on Snow Leopard. The end of the process (whether I just install or force install looks like this:

make[1]: *** [Catalog.o] Error 1
make: *** [subdirs] Error 2
  DANKOGAI/MacOSX-File-0.71.tar.gz
  /usr/bin/make -- NOT OK
Running make test
  Can't test without successful make
Running make install
  Make had returned bad status, install seems impossible
Failed during this command:
 DANKOGAI/MacOSX-File-0.71.tar.gz             : make NO

Any tips? Any ideas? Any suggestions? Perl isn't my thing, to put it politely.

P.S. Downloading and building manually also fails.

Hold down the option key:

Incidentally, this is the first time I noticed that screenshots aren't named "Picture 1" in Snow Leopard.

An update to this post about our car search. Now we're looking at the Subaru Forester.

Any Subaru Forester owners out there with comments?

Specifically, we're looking at a 2010 2.5X Limited for about $26,500. The only incentives right now are 4.9% financing (yawn), and invoice is $24,335 + $695 destination + a few options and location fees.

Second option remains the Jetta SportWagen (either SEL or TDI). It lacks AWD but supposedly it should handle okay in Erie, PA winters according to a quick web search.

Rivet 2.2.1 is out. It adds a option to turn off generating thumbnails and also fixes an issue with the thumbnail caching. Grab it - it's a free update.

As we all know, too, Snow Leopard comes out in a few days. I'm happy to report that all Cynical Peak software, like Rivet and Scorecard work just fine. From that link, Brad says:

We've been running the developer builds for awhile now and have test all of our apps on it. Cyndicate and Scorecard have no known issues with it.

Rivet will also run and work correctly on it, but there is one small known issue right now. For some video files, QuickLook is not correctly returning a thumbnail. So when viewing you list of videos, you might get some generic placeholder images. We're currently working with Apple on the issue and hope to have it resolved soon. The issue does not affect streaming of any media and will not prevent you from using Rivet like you normally do.

I'm personally looking forward to installing Snow Leopard the day I get it. I've been the one staying back on Leopard while Brad plays with the dev builds of Snow Leopard, and he raves about it. Unfortunately, having pre-ordered from Amazon.com, I expect to see my family installer arrive sometime in mid-September. 😛

I got two of the Kontrol Freeks - two of each kind, that is - for the Xbox 360 and I must say they're pretty nice. I can't wait to try them out in Forza 3.

I've pre-ordered the Sennheiser ew 100-ENG G3 wireless mic system. I'll be hooking it into my Canon 5D Mark II for some video production I'll be doing in a month or so.

I just hope the thing(s) ship soon. B&H has them on what amounts to a pre-order.

A unique perspective compares universal health care (by way of universal health insurance) to universal auto insurance. Summary: didn't work there, won't work for health care.

Thanks Daniel.

My wife's looking at a new car. I mentioned this a few weeks ago when she was thinking about the CR-V.

Now we're throwing the car search wide open. Carey wants a 2010 (or 2009) version of the Aztek and the features it has: good handling, lots of room, great gas mileage ((The Aztek, though rated much lower, consistently gets 28-29 MPG highway and 25 in regular usage.))…

The Element has removable rear seats, for example, but gets worse mileage than the Aztek and has a crappier engine ((Figure that one out???)). The CR-V feels like "a bigger car" to her.

So, what's the closest thing to a 2009 version of the Aztek? And I don't mean something like the Buick Enclave - I mean something that leans more towards the "sporty/outdoorsy" features?

Name anything - we don't care if it's Hyundai or Subaru or whatever.

Question for the Rails developers out there…

Suppose you have a video file (a .mov or .mp4 or .m4v or whatever) and you're going to use JWPlayer or another flash-based application to "play" the video on a user's browser, but you want to obfuscate and hide the actual location of the video so that the user cannot download the source video.

How would you go about doing this in a simple way that's relatively safe?

In PHP, I'd create a "middle man" script that first verifies that the movie is being used in a proper web page (perhaps with an encrypted password if you wanted to keep things simple) and then would pass through the data from the movie file to the flash application. The movie filename and path would never be revealed and attempts to access the "middle man" script directly wouldn't work as the secret password wouldn't within the variable namespace.

If you could, please speak in very general terms as I'm not a Rails developer. Thanks.

The game will also be the first game on the Wii to feature "demo play", where players will be able to pause the game, let the game complete the level for them, and resume play at any time by unpausing.

So, how many can I get for a couple of quarters?

Why on earth can't stacks show labels?

Oftentimes I'll put a folder of TV shows down in the dock. Or movies. I'll click and want to watch one I've not already watched. The way I differentiate them? Green label = watched it.

And yeah, I've filed the request. Marked as a duplicate, of course.

For the past several years, I've spent all of my major championship Sundays (golf's majors, that is) here in front of the TV, live blogging the final round.

I'll be doing the same today - here - and if you enjoy golf or want a chance to win a free copy of Scorecard, check it out.