Big Trapeze

I believe in Karma. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of evening things about, but you can only be so bad or so careless for so long that eventually the world rights itself and pays you back. In high school I was one of the guys that went out on Halloween and smashed pumpkins with my friends. Karma has paid me back tenfold in my adult years. Every Halloween when I walk to my front porch and see my great carvings smashed along the curb, I can only give a knowing-nod to Karma and shrug it off–it’s my own fault.

And I can’t wait until the NFL world pays back the New England Patriots and Bill Belichick for being complete sports jerks. I’ve never liked Belichick, mainly for superficial reasons like his sloppy hoodie and grandma-like looks (seriously, just look at him). But now I have real reasons, like cheating and running up the score on people just to pad stats and break records. I hate the Patriots so much that I actually cheered for my second least favorite team, the Eagles, Sunday night against the Patriots. It felt weird, like cheering for Stalin in a cage match against Hitler. Speaking of Stalin, Tom Brady isn’t off the hook either. He’s been slowly taking on the persona of his coach and turning into a complete tool. By the end of his career Karma will take away the supermodels and aspiring political career and hand him back an average Stepford wife, a minivan, and a sideline gig at a Punxsutawney Phil showing.

That’s why it’s only fitting the Miami Dolphins lost last night to the Steelers. The Dolphins were the last team to go undefeated, and now that the Patriots are on the same road, it would be poetic beauty if the Dolphins’ first (and only) win this season came against the Patriots on December 23rd. Whenever or wherever it happens (and it will happen), Karma will exact its toll on the Patriots in a wonderful way, and the world will once again be right.

Disclaimer: REALLLLLLY boring topic (but this took me a while to figure out so I hope it helps someone):

Leopard uses a directory in the root called "home." This is different than a user’s home directory, and it has something to do with NFS shares and/or a new “autofs” feature. I’m not going to pretend I know what this does Update: autofs makes using network shares a lot more stable, but it doesn’t really affect me–I’m really just a designer/developer, and don’t get into the inner-works of the OS much.

What I do know is that I don’t want it using that "/home" directory because in one of my development projects I had used that directory to store a website. Now that Leopard has been installed, I can’t write to that directory, and I need to to avoid changing up my development project.

Long story short: To fix this “problem,” you can edit the "auto_master" file in your /etc directory.

Change the line

/home auto_home -nobrowse

to

/your/directory/here auto_home -nobrowse

Reboot and you will have reclaimed your /home directory.

I try to stay away from just posting someone else’s work, but Coding Horror has a good article on the art of hyperlinking we could all benefit from. I posted it because it’s a good reminder to keep links simple and intuitive, and because I really really really (really) hate SnapShots-styled links like this:

First–Leopard is fine. This isn’t a rant about Leopard, more of a rant against myself for doing breaking a very simple rule (again): Never mess with your development machine when you’re trying to launch a product.

Leopard came to my doorstep at 10 AM on the 26th, and being the early-adopter I always am, it was promptly on my machines by 2 PM. It is now a week later, and I still haven’t gotten all my development stuff fixed that I broke as a result of the upgrade. Basically, if you already have

• Name Based Virtual Hosts (NetInfo Manager, which made this easy, is gone…)
• SSL
• MySQL, and
• GD support

a Leopard upgrade will probably hose it. MySQL was easy enough to get going, but it’s taken me an shameful amount of searches to get the first two issues fixed (see all the searches), and now I’ve just stumbled on a 30+ step guide to getting GD support back, which looks like will require recompiling Apache, and probably break the virtual hosts and SSL support I just got working.Again, it’s my fault–never do a major OS upgrade on your development server in the middle of a big project–it’ll cost you.