Using SymbolicLinker Symlinks to enable SMB share of an iMac OS X attached external drive

OS X Aliases are not useable by SMB clients (Windows machines). They appears as an unrecognized file type. BSD Symlinks, which you can create with SymbolicLinker, on the other hand, are visible to SMB clients. That's useful by itself, but that's only part of the trick I just learned.

I moved the 9 GBs of our image server (slideshow for several machines) JPEGs from my iMac to an external drive to reduce backup of redundant data (the images live in iPhoto Libraries as well) and to provide a bit of redundancy (images live on a separate drive as well as multiple other backups). That was fine for the iMac, but the SMB clients couldn't see them. Default SMB shares only work for the user directory.

Symlinks to the rescue! I used SymbolicLinker to create a symlink to the external drive folder (drive is set to ignore permissions) and put that symlink in my iMac user directory. When I access the symlink from the SMB machine it nicely resolves. The Symlink works below the level of OS X at the BSD level, so it brings BSD Unix behaviors to the file sharing process. That's what I wanted.

Slick indeed.

Scanning negatives: a workflow

Writing for O'Reilly Micah Walter describes a film scanning workflow. He's using Aperture, so he runs into Aperture's ridiculous limitation on editing timestamp metadata. Still, it's a good overview.

I'm surprised that no scanner vendor has really thought much about how to make this process more efficient.

Silverlight: WMV for OS X Intel

MS is porting a media centric portion of the .NET framework to OS X. This is Microsoft's Flash-killer. Nothing for Linux, but a Mac client is promised. Alas, the next version will be Intel only, no PPC support.

The lack of PPC support is revealing. This is a project to kill QuickTime/Windows and Flash. Once that is done Microsoft will abandon the Mac.

Google spreadsheets - keeping portions private

This is a handy Google Spreadsheet feature. You can now share just one worksheet in a files. So if you're using Google Spreadsheet for your baseball team you can share the page that has positions, but not the page with phone numbers and email addresses.

Now if only I could figure out how to use the Lookup function to reference a range on a different worksheet ....

OS X annoyances: user switching and the iPod

Apple does some things well, but it has its share of persistent defects and annoyances.

A search of Apple's kb on "user switching" iPod iTunes doesn't find any articles as of 5/07, but anyone who's switched users (accounts) on a machine with a connected iPod knows bad things can happen. The iPod is bound to a user account, not to a machine. When a new user takes over, the connected devices is passed to the new user -- and the OS offers to fix the corrupted device.

Yech.

This is a non-trivial problem to fully solve, but Apple could have done a lot to mitigate it. The OS should suggest dismounting connected iPods on logout or switch, and iTunes should be smarter about how it responds to a connected iPod post switch. Apple hasn't fixed this because only a small minority of their customers have multiple users on a single machine. In other words, they don't have enough family customers.

Grrr.

Update 9/9/08: iPhone/iTouch 2.0 finally fixed this problem! They are fast-user switching safe on OS X.

Shimo a GUI for the Cisco OS X VPN client

Shimo is an OS X app that constructs calls for the Cisco VPN command line client.

JavaScript: a modern update

Coding Horror reviews JavaScript. The links are particularly interesting for up-to-date sources. CH is somewhat Microsoft friendly, so I'm surprised they missed the chance to point out that Microsoft (gulp) made two very large contributions to AJAX. They established the asynchronous XML data exchange and they forced JavaScript into the standards world.

It's one of the great ironies of computing history that Microsoft's actions, which were in part efforts to torpedo Netscape, instead enabled Gmail.