I work in an environment where all the machines are tied to a single sign-on system and all the users, be they Mac, PC or Linux, have their home directories mounted from a server at login. Right now, OSX Lion won’t work in that environment, so all our Macs are running 10.6 or 10.5.8.

But what if I want to use my iCloud calendar from work via iCal (or another CalDAV capable client**)? It’s pretty damned easy, actually, I’m happy to say.

Maybe this is published somewhere, maybe not. But I figure a couple of my peeps might benefit from me posting this up. So here goes.

1. Get your calendar set up and up to date in iCloud first. Don’t monkey with doing that after the fact.
2. It just got easier. Skip to step 10 and ignore the steps below that says [SKIP]
3. [SKIP] Open icloud.com in a web browser and go to your calendars. Click on the circular ‘wireless’ icon to the right of the name of the calendar you want to use. The calendar you want to use must be shared.
4. [SKIP] Note the name of the server right after webcal:// (example: p02-www.icloud.com)
5. Open iCal 3. (I’ll be referring to iCal from here on, I can’t say for sure how other CalDAV clients will respond).
6. In iCal, go to Preferences -> Accounts and click the add account button (+)
7. Select CalDAV as the account type.
8. Enter your iCloud username (for instance, steve@mac.com) and password
9. [SKIP] For server address you need to slightly modify that server name you jotted down in step 3
   If the server was p02-www.icloud.com, you would replace www with caldav and enter p02-caldav.icloud.com
10. For the server address simply enter “caldav.icloud.com” (I don’t know when this started working, but it does.)
11. Click create. If presented with a choice of two possible servers, choose the one that says caldav.icloud.com, not cal.me.com — IF YOU GET AN ACCESS NOT PERMITTED ERROR then you’ll need to use the greyed out instructions instead.
12. Live large. Your now have your iCloud calendar and reminders in iCal. You might want to change how it refreshes, if you’re like me and want control over that. Push may not work as well in iCal 3. Otherwise, it’s a full CalDAV implementation; add, delete, modify, etc.

** Update: I haven’t been able to get it working in Lightning/Sunbird yet. But it’s most likely a matter of forming the URI correctly. It should be somehting along the lines of:
https://pXX-caldav.icloud.com:443/[unique ID]/principal/
or some variation thereof. I’ll try to work on this more tomorrow.

Update 2: It appears they’re also using CardDAV for contacts (hooray for standards!). The path for that would start https://pXX-contacts.icloud.com/[unique ID]/carddavhome (Thanks MacRumors forums!)
As of 10/15 6:30pm EDT I have NOT been able to get this working in Address Book 5. If you want to take a stab at it, I do know that Address Book 6 uses a URI like:

https://[username]%40mac.com@pXX-contacts.icloud.com:443/[unique ID#]/carddavhome/card/[long srting].vcf
(The %40being necessary as you can’t have two @ in there but need to include an email address as a username.)

Update 3: So they’re not using a SRV record to do it as far as I can tell (but they are using Akamai so there’s at least one layer of abstraction). Next…

Yours in nerdery,

Maggie

First, this is a great post from William Tucker at WSJ. Two thumbs up. Also, if you’d like to follow the basic facts minus the hyperbole, please visit the NEI page on the current situation at Fukushima Daiichi.

Second, I thought I’d share some comments from one of the professors from my department. Prof. Richard Wilson (bio) has been active in humanitarian aide, outreach and education for many groups and has been especially vocal about arsenic poisoning and cancers from man-made problems (including radiation exposure). That said, he’s also a realist about nuclear energy, having worked in and around the field for decades. (FYI – He will be on NECN tonight at 6 and 9) In an email to all re: the Fukushima situation, he’s said:

The reactors all shut down at the earthquake automatically unlike Chernobyl. The problem then is to cool the core since the circulating water through the steam turbine has stopped.

Just after shut down the power level is 8% of full power (plus an extra 4% in neutrinos ). This drops in a well known way. (The Wigner Wey law of 1949) Roughly exponentially. After 10 hours it is about 1% and on to 0.1% after a year.

Note there the first thing we need to set straight: The plants shut down as expected and nothing was breached. It’s a cooling issue, full stop. Chernobyl had no containment and this more modern (but still not ‘modern’) plant does. If this were “a Chernobyl”, hundreds would be dying right now.

In Japan, there was no power from the grid to operate the pumps. Emergency DC power worked for a short while. Emergency diesels started up as planned but failed after 8 hours in one plant and longer in another due to flooding. In the absence of cooling the water cooling the core began to evaporate. At the power plant there is now basically no electricity. It took perhaps an hour or two for the top of the core to be uncovered and heat up (this time must be known but I do not know it). Then the core starts heating and the chemical reaction begins between the zirconium cladding for the fuel rods and water. This disassociates the water and Hydrogen is released.

You can see where this is going.

At TMI [note: TMI = Three Mile Island] cooling was interrupted by stupid manual action almost at once and 2 hours later hydrogen was produced which caused an explosion INSIDE THE CONTAINMENT at about noon (exact time in my files) 8 hours after the initial accident. In Japan the hydrogen and other gases were vented and the explosions were OUTSIDE (where they did no important damage) and much later

Cooling of the reactor is now maintained by sea water flooding the containment. (maybe also the reactor vessel but I do not know this) This can cool the reactor core by conduction through the pressure vessel. But the water is not circulating and stem is produced which is being vented. It is claimed that there is filtering for radioactivity but I do not know this for certain.

It seems to me that this can be continued indefinitely at least until electricity is available at the site.

No ‘Chernobyl’. Not even close. Not even in the same ballpark, much less the same type of incident or type of reactor.

Note that there are still TWO (2) barriers to release of radioactivity even if the core has completely melted which I believe is unlikely.
(1) the pressure vessel which seems intact
(2) the containment.

I believe that both these will continue to hold and the only problem will be in the controlled realease. Noble gases will be released but these do not interact much in the body (you breath them in and then breathe them out) Of these krypton is the longest lived.

Cesium is normally solid and even if the containment fails, the cesium may not evaporate . (Indeed at Chernobyl which was very hot very little of the strontium evaporated and did not contribute appreciably to the radiation dose.)

The highest recorded dose so far in the region of the plant is 150 mrem/hr (1.5 mSv per hour ). The natural back ground is about 300 mRem/yr Acceptable one time dose for accidents is 80 Rems for an astronaut and 20-40 Rems for a clean up worker.

And, finally, Dick’s prediction:

MY PREDICTION
No one in the public will get acute radiation sickness and probably no one in the reactor staff either
No 0ne will have problems from iodine ingestion
There will be minimal cesium releases and not one fatal cancer will be CALCULATED (using the standard pessimistic formula) from the doses to the public.

This is to be compared to 1,000-10,000 direct, measurable and definite deaths from other earthquake problems

So, to all the Chicken Littles out there saying we have to stop and ‘review’ our nuclear programs (“ohmygawd ohmygawd!”) because of an incident that its so far outside the norm as to be unique, let me remind you of two things:

1) We’re CONSTANTLY reviewing our designs and programs. That’s how science works. And safety is THE primary review concern in nuclear energy production. Do you seriously think they’ve overlooked earthquakes??? That’s why we’ve gone on to design new and safer plants… so they’ll be as safe as possible. And they can be as safe as you’re willing to allow. Unless you also want to be stingy and would rather continue to dump pollutants into the atmosphere until we run out of oil.

2) “As possible” – Nothing can be made 100% safe. Everything is a weighing of risks against needs. That said, I didn’t see anyone calling for the halt and review of petroleum energy when BP polluted miles of ocean and coastal regions. No one’s called for a halt to automobile and coal pollution to review the deaths it causes each year.

I’ve heard several people toss out the “but what about a worst case scenario???” to which I want to shout “THIS IS THE WORST CASE SCENARIO!” And so far, it’s being contained despite the age of the technology and the crumbling of the infrastructure around the plants. This quake was unlike anything before it, and yet, despite the events leading to it being ‘worst case’, the crisis at the plants is not worst case.

What does your call for a ‘moratorium’ hope to do? Address the obvious? Ask the same questions that are asked every day in meetings and design reviews which seek to create safe, clean energy? No, it’s histrionics seasoned with a little bit of good ol’ political grandstanding. The incident at Fukushima is certainly worrisome, but it’s not an indictment of nuclear energy.

And it’s certainly no Chernobyl. Humans & Science 1, Histrionics & Emotion 0.

Boring. GimmeGimmeGimme. NowNowNow.

I don’t want to disable drive sleep because the machine does sit idle sometimes. So what’s a girl to do? Google the pmset options and figure out how to fix this annoyance, that’s what. Turns out, it’s totally configurable (when you have “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible” enabled):

sudo pmset -a disksleep 40

You can take a look at what your basic settings currently are with:
sudo pmset -g

Now my disks won’t spin down for 40 minutes. So if I wander off to lunch, they will spin down. If I’m just taking a bit too long to get back to an ingest/capture/encode, I don’t have to wait for each drive to spin up and the volume (and machine) to become ready. This works for any drives that are directly controlled by the machine (be it a Mac Pro or a laptop). It’s not relevant to any RAID which is hung off a controller card or enclosure with an in-built controller.

Just thought I’d share. Especially since I haven’t posted anything here in ages…
M

I made an off-the-cuff remark that they’d been taking customer service lessons from AT&T; a demeanor often described as “we’re not happy ’til you’re not happy”. But, that’s actually a bit harsh in that, frankly, I don’t think they’re even thinking about their ‘front-facing’ appearance at all. I don’t follow RED like I used to (mostly because the product I am/was interested in hasn’t shipped yet) but I still watch with interest when they make announcements. They are unique in their customer interfacing practices. And this time… I don’t think it’s gone very well. So, RED, here’s a favour from me to you:

My idea of a better reply to RED customers about the removal of large storage options from the RED store before any replacement option is available. Let me see if I can help you lads with some ‘empathy for your customers 101′.

(JUST TO BE 100% CLEAR: THIS IS ME WRITING, NOT RED. I DON’T WORK FOR RED.)

I’d like to try to answer some of your criticisms and concerns as best I can. While it’s clear that, by the very fact that you as customers have raised this issue, there’s a real concern over the recent removal of RED-DRIVE and RED-RAM from our store, we want to explain as best we can why this was necessary. As you know RED has traditionally been on the bleeding edge of camera technology and we do this with a small staff compared to other companies. As such, sometimes we have to make decisions that shift our focus and this sometimes means moving engineering and product work to focus on new, better technologies for the future.

As most of you no doubt know, we’re right on the cusp of releasing some new hardware that will change how many of our existing accessories relate to the overall line. And may change many things about shooting with our cameras, not the least of which are storage requirements. Part of our change of focus, along with the normal supply issues we face with accessories that require outside vendors (drives, flash, etc.) has caused us to, some feel prematurely, stop taking new orders for RED-DRIVE and RED-RAM (we are still fulfilling existing order and providing servicing). We want to assure you that relief is on the way in the form of larger 64GB CF cards as well as some new storage technologies we can’t discuss just yet. We hope you’ll understand the latter and trust us on that.

We’ve often asked you – our working customers who, we understand, have immediate needs in your day-to-day work – to wait, to be patient and trust us and that we would make it all worthwhile in the end. As with the RED-ONE, which was a long but ultimately fulfilling wait for many of you, we hope you’ll bear with us through this growth bump as we re-tool for an even more awesome future. Please watch the site and forums and we’ll keep you posted when new storage solutions are ready to shop.

Thanks,
RED

Oh, we’re all clever Dicks and Janes when we talk about backing up data as it comes off the camera. We like that stuff. It’s immediate. It’s grubby. It’s ‘field work’. Makes us feel like video farmers. “Gimme that G-Drive, mistah. Gon’ hook me up some Fahwahr and offload this hya video.” I suck at New England accents in person too. Sorry. But when that data gets home… we turn into suburban farmers instead. You know… the ones who plant that garden in spring and then… say “screw it” by the fall and it becomes an ugly shameful scar in the back yard that mommy doesn’t like to talk about so stop asking me.

Assumption #1 – Backup means that the files you love and can’t live without are stored in more than one place and that a failure of one storage medium is not a catastrophic failure. Sorry, but I have to be frank here… if you think that “everything on a new external hard drive” is equivalent to “safe”, you’re living dangerously.

I’ve handled a lot of drives in my sordid career, and I’ve had brand new drives fail mere seconds after they were powered up. True story: Guy on the Internet, who we’ll cleverly refer to as GuyX, pitched a fit in a support forum for a well-known drive manufacturer when the nearly new external drive he had stored ’10 years of his life on’ went belly up and he was adamant that he was not the one at fault. Drives fail. Grow up. Every drive is a whirling dervish full of failure waiting to happen. Copying your life’s work to a single drive is not a ‘backup’, it’s a screwup. Two copies equals one backup. One copy equals ticking time bomb. And in the immortal words of networking guru and chicken owner Selena Deckelmann, “What part of ‘ticking time bomb’ do you not understand?!?” (Blatant old friend plug. What up, S!)

So, you’re not that guy. Or girl. Who’s not that guy. You care. But… in case he drops in, I feel we need to cover this base first so we’re all on the same page, as the boys in Polos and khaki with their holstered Blackberrys like to say. (Yes, the plural of Blackberry the mobile device, not the actual berry, is Blackberrys.)

Assumption #2 – Your house or place of business may burn down in a fiery spectacle that will leave your neighbors talking about ‘the big one’ for months to come. Just imagine it! No, really. Do it. Imagine all the data you stand to lose. “Gaw-lee! That girl’s house burnt like the fires o’ Hell for near’bout two whole days!” You will be well and truly screwed if your prized data and your backup are both housed in that horrific-yet-now-enthralling display of nature’s wrath that burns so hot you end up with one side of your face a bright red.

OK. Stop thinking about it. That’s freaking scary, no? So store your backup — heck make it two now that you’re freaked out by the vision you just had — elsewhere if at all possible. If it’s not possible… then… Wait, what? Where do you live? The arctic shelf? Prison? The Moon? Even on the moon you could find an off-site crater to tuck a drive into. Talk to a friend and suggest, like (blatant plug #2 ahead!) Dan Benjamin did, that the two of you can create a new symbiotic relationship vis-a-vis your respective backups. Swap drives/tapes/whatever on a regular basis and protect each other’s most valuable possession: your video files and pictures of that girl who broke your heart after graduation and I’M NOT BITTER, SHARON, I’M NOT! Sorry…

No, don’t ask the pyromaniac in the apartment upstairs, but do ask your co-worker or your mom or your Call of Duty partner (HOORAH!). Or, simply, just take a drive to work and stick it in your desk drawer. When doing either, I highly recommend that you encrypt your drive/data, if it’s personal or sensitive, and definitely label it clearly as to who owns it and what it is. You don’t want your friend peeping your shameful video letter to the Stargate SG-1 fan club or a co-worker taking the drive from your desk because his Dell dropped a kidney on Sunday and he needed a ‘spare’ hard drive post haste to finish stalking someone on Craigslist. (Hang on, you over there going “What about ‘The Cloud’???” I’ll get to you.)

Where was I? Ah. Two copies and, hopefully, two locations. And, finally before we move on to the ‘how’ part, having a RAID storage device is not a backup. If you’ve got a nice new workstation with a built-in RAID or a deskside enclosure, good on you. It’s a wonderful life. But… BACK THAT THING UP! And store that backup off-site. Word.

OK. Now… how the heck are you gonna accomplish this? Well, what can you afford? Don’t beat yourself up thinking you must pay some service to vault your video or that it will cost an arm and a leg to to do this. You’re a rebel! Let’s start cheap and work up to ‘you got too much damned money, you’re no rebel!’

Bare Drives
Oh, yes. Oh, baby. Drives are cheap these days. Damned cheap. You can buy a 1TB drive for well under $100 if you shop around. And 1.5TB to 2TB drives aren’t that much more. If you add a drive dock like this or this to your rig… BAM! Instant backup system.

Copy your preciouseses to this drive and then haul it off-site for storage before the pyro upstairs drops that fateful match. Or, better yet, automate it. I use the awesome (some claim ‘super’) SuperDuper to do this. Find what works for you. And remember, you’re a rebel. Spend what you need to, not what some captain of industry says you need to.

Tapes
Yep. Magnetic media. Look, it’s not dead. Ask any studio. And tape doesn’t ‘head crash’ and can be forensically recovered at less expense and with greater success than hard drives. And… well, OK, it costs more. So… you have that to think about. But, search around on eBay or Cragslist and maybe, in between the Star Wars collectibles and ‘misc romance’, you can find a used LTO drive or even a DAT drive for cheap. Sure, tape backups take a long time, but they work.

Just make sure to verify your backups (nothing ruins your world like a blank tape, pal) and clean your heads regularly. And by that I don’t mean “pop ’round the pub for a beer”. Well, yeah I do, but not in relation to cleaning your tape drive heads. Do that sober.

The Cloud
Don’t overlook the possibility of relying on the kindness of strangers. The Internet is full of both porn and companies trying to solve the online storage conundrum. Dropbox. Amazon S3. Mozy. Rackspace. Box.net. Elephant Drive. MobileMe. Idrive/Ibackup. There’s a metric buttload of these things out there. And they all want to offer you the use of their storage (usually in exchange for some of your moneys if you want much storage). Just pick carefully and try not to lean too heavily on them. They are, after all, on Teh Internets. A wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Keep in mind that the upload speed for Teh Cloudz will be even slower than tape. So plan well and give it some time. But, if you go this route, you can check off ’2 copies’ and ’2 places’ with one stroke of your imaginary pen. Or pencil. If you’re one of those people. And if you’re even more of a rebel… build your own cloud! If you do your rebellious work somewhere that’s not home, set up a shared drive at home that you can access and backup your stuff. Or get one of these and slap a drive on it. Be creative. Be a rebel. Go on. Be one. Off with you.

Summation
Sure, what I’ve just covered amounts to, in hindsight, common sense. But every day I talk to people who, whether they admit it or not, I am certain have not archived their very important assets. Some will admit it, some will just shuffle their feet and look at the ground as they give a sideways answer. If Newton had been a technologist, he probably would have posited that “a backupless user tends to stay backupless unless acted upon by an outside shaming force”.

I am that force. Boo! Go back up your data now! Do it! No more excuses. Today is the first day of the rest of your good backup habits days. And the 16th as it just passed midnight here. So, it’s now tomorrow. You’re late already! Go, you rebel you! Go and be safe.

First, some background. The kernel is the heart and soul of your computer’s operating system. It’s quite resilient on its own, but we pile heaps and heaps (hehe… sorry… nerd joke…) of stuff on it in order to make our computers useful. But, if some near-catastrophic situation occurs where the kernel finds itself unable to continue/perform, it will ‘panic’. A panic is basically a software work stop. It’s saying to you “something is seriously wrong and I can’t (or won’t, for your protection) continue.” The problem could be hardware or it could be software. Let’s try to figure out which, shall we?

1. Remove and then re-seat the RAM. The memory modules in your Mac are pretty easy to remove. Refer to Apple’s support pages or the booklet that came with the machine. If you have canned air, it wouldn’t hurt to blow out the socket too, but that’s low on the scale of ‘probable cause’. But RAM modules can work loose and just one less-than-adequate connection, especially if it’s intermittent, can cause no end of havoc for your computer. This is especially true of laptops.
2. Do you have AppleCare? If so, boot from the CD that came in the box (hold down the “c” key at startup) and run the test utility included. If your kernel panics are constant and you don’t get one when booting from the CD (or a OSX disc), then your hard drive (or the OS install on it) have moved up the suspect list. Hopefully the utility will identify the culprit.
3. If you can’t boot the machine without a panic, try booting in safe mode. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455
   If this works, then you’ll likely need to reinstall OSX at this point… You have a backup, right?
4. If you can boot the machine (from hard drive or AppleCare CD or OSX CD/DVD), check your hard drive’s SMART status with Disk Utility. Click on the drive and look at the bottom of the Disk Utility window. If it says anything other than ‘Verified’, start cloning your data off this drive now, if you haven’t already. A little mild panic is allowed in this case. Got SuperDuper?
5. If you can boot the machine (from hard drive – you don’t have SuperDuper on your CDs…) and have done all the above, clone your drive now. Hopefully you’ve already done this, but it bears pointing out. At the very least, have a backup of your data somewhere (via clone or Time Machine or whatever). Boot from the cloned drive (hold down the option key at starrtup and select your clone drive) — try it several times if the kernel panic is intermittent. If the kernel panic ceases, we can start suspecting your hard drive and not OSX. Otherwise, or if you don’t have a bootable clone, just a backup, let’s move on.
6. If you can boot the machine from hard drive (your kernel panics are intermittent) and nothing above has worked, have you recently repaired permissions? Before we get into things that might make some people nervous (single user mode, etc.), let’s eliminate a simple permissions issue (or, maybe Disk Utility will error out and show that it’s the hard drive at fault). If you haven’t repaired permissions in a while, open up Disk Utility and do so now. With any luck, you won’t have a panic during this. But we have a clone/backup to fall back on, right?
7. OK, I lied about single user mode. We’re not going there. If you’re familiar and comfortable with single user mode and fsck and and the like, you probably stopped reading this about 3 bullets ago. You may now panic. But only if you don’t have a backup. If you have a backup, it’s time to try the last-ditch-effort: reinstall OSX and restore your user data. Annoyed? Yes. Panicked? No.
8. If reinstalling OSX does not help, it’s time to hit the Genius Bar or call AppleCare. There are other things you could attempt, but this is what you paid for. It’s time to let someone who gets paid to do it take your burden away. Deep breath… and repeat after me, “I’m so glad I got AppleCare.” You did get AppleCare, right? Oh, yes. Right. Let’s try that one too, “I’m so glad I’m still under warranty.”

There are other things you could try, but they’re outside of the scope of this post (i.e. – I’m too lazy at this point to type it all out). Good luck!

Dear Rep. Capuano,

I’m writing you to ask you to please support the Great Ape Protection Act which has been re-introduced.

We have the ability to convince ourselves of many things. One of those little lies we tell ourselves is that great apes are ‘just dumb animals’. And we tell ourselves that, like other animals which we use for our food and our daily toil, we have should complete dominion over them. But the great apes are not dumb animals. The kinship we share with these intelligent creatures is evident to anyone who looks into their eyes, communicates with them or hears them laugh with one another. Knowing how we treat them in labs all across America, it’s all the more heart -breaking to watch these bright creatures tickling one another, causing fits of laughter, an act we assume is specific to us humans. And then to look into those same eyes, no longer laughing – but now frightened and alone- and see a soul pleading with you, you who it recognizes as being another self-aware being, to please… please just release it from the cage where it’s trapped and feels nothing but isolation and pain… That will truly break your heart in a most excruciating way.

Please Mr. Capuano. Support this act. It will force us to face up to our responsibility to these intelligent creatures and to stop treating them like something they’re not: dumb animals.

Thanks for hearing me out.
Maggie McFee
Cambridge, MA

PS – A quick update for those who watch this space for disk info. I’ve had 1 complete failure of a WD10EACS and one with severe SMART errors. Not good. Also, after keeping an eye on them, I find that the Samsung HD103UJ run 3-5 degrees cooler than the WD10EACS. Another strike against the Western Digital disks.

I’ll be posting the results here in two batches as they’re completed:
1st batch will have results for all 4 models in the single disk and 3@RAID0 tests.
2nd batch will have results for the top two performers in additional configurations (4 disks and E-SATA).

The drives being tested are:
Western Digital WD10EACS Caviar GP
Seagate ST31000340NS Barracuda ES.2
Hitachi 0A35772 Ultrastar A7K1000
Samsung HE103UJ Spinpoint F1 RAID
(all are ‘enterprise’ class 1TB SATAII drives)

Stay tuned!