OS X: Fix Argentina DST October 2009
Well, at almost the last minute, DST was cancelled in Argentina this year. And this broke things, mostly computers. (Not for the first time either, the same thing happened two years ago here).
The debian folk came out with a fix at the last minute: so that fixed the linux machines, but OS X is a slower beast to move, so it’ll be a while before any change works its way through. In the meantime, Mac users in Argentina are left with broken clocks.
I am no Mac expert, and this isn’t entirely tested, so be warned.
Anywho, this is how to update the tz data (aka zoneinfo), which should, in theory, fix the problem:
mkdir tzfix
cd tzfix/
curl ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2009n.tar.gz | tar -zxvf -
vi +219 southamerica
Change the two lines:
Rule Arg 2008 max - Mar Sun>=15 0:00 0 -
Rule Arg 2008 max - Oct Sun>=15 0:00 1:00 S
to the following
Rule Arg 2008 2009 - Mar Sun>=15 0:00 0 -
Rule Arg 2008 only - Oct Sun>=15 0:00 1:00 S
(i.e. just two words to change). If it makes you feel better, here’s a diff.
Ok, save & close, and then compile it as follows:
sudo zic southamerica
The sudo is necessary because you’re changing /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires.
And that’s mostly it. Verify that it worked as follows:
zdump America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires
America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires Sun Oct 18 20:43:42 2009 ART
(note that the timezone is now ART, not ARST as previously).
So that fixes things for most of the command-line stuff. But you’ll notice that the clock on your desktop, iCal, and others, are still incorrect. We need to fix the ICU database also. Thankfully the latest sources are available for this from apple itself:
curl -O http://www.opensource.apple.com/tarballs/ICU/ICU-400.37.tar.gz
tar -zxf ICU-400.37.tar.gz
cd /ICU-400.37/icuSources
ICU doesn’t come with the tzdata, but the readme in tzcode helpfully notes that if we place the tzdata*.tar.gz file in tools/tzcode/ it will be compiled automatically. You can pack up your own tzdata2009n.tar.gz that we used earlier if you wish, or use the one I prepared here:
cd tools/tzcode/
curl -o tzdata2009o.tar.gz http://brickybox.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/tzdata2009otar.gz
cd ../../
./runConfigureICU MacOSX --with-data-packaging=archive
gnumake
sudo install -o root -g wheel -m 0644 -Sp data/out/icudt40l.dat /usr/share/icu/icudt40l.dat
And that’s it. We have a new ICU database. Reboot to see the changes.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Mika – Grace Kelly
“You only want what everybody else says you should want” – my sentiments exactly.
There aren’t many people in the world who could pull off an act like this.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Ireland: A Country of Sheep
Posted by Bricky in Uncategorized on October 3rd, 2009
Voters in the Lisbon Treaty Referendum 2009
Popularity: 2% [?]
Ricky Stone’s Two Fingers to DJ Mag
Ricky stone has extended a 2 finger salute to the DJ Mag poll. The spot says it all I think:
Popularity: 6% [?]
Copy mysql table between servers/databases
Posted by Bricky in Programming on July 20th, 2009
This is one of those reminder-to-self style posts.
To copy mysql table tablename from database1 on server1 to database2 on server2, issue the following command (on either server)
mysqldump -h server1 -u user1 -ppassword1 database1 tablename | mysql -h server2 -u user2 -ppassword2 database2
user1, password1, user2, and password2 are the respective usernames and passwords to use on server1 and server2, respectively. Note that there is no space between the -p and password (unlike the other switches).
Popularity: 8% [?]
Wolfram|Alpha
Posted by Bricky in Uncategorized on May 14th, 2009
Following from yesterday’s post about Google’s inference engine, someone directed me to a similar project called Wolfram|Alpha which is going live next week.
This is an incredibly interesting video (if a little drawn out):
Popularity: 8% [?]
Google’s Inference Engine: The Google IQ
Posted by Bricky in Uncategorized on May 13th, 2009
Something that’s been on my mind for a bit, brought to the fore today because Google is launching a new product based on it:
Inference Engine
One of the wonderful concepts of artificial intelligence is the inference engine. It’s a kind of computer algorithm that allows computers to reason things. Even in a very simple form, it can achieve (what we perceive as) quite complex reasoning.
If it knows:
- Barrack Obama is the US president
- The US president lives in the white house
then it can infer that
=> Barrack Obama lives in the white house.
So the system can know a third “fact” by knowing the first two. It’s kinda smart.
If you add more facts, the system gets smarter, learning just like a child. And the more facts you add, the smarter it gets, just like a child. This is the basis for most modern forms of artificial intelligence. So what stops people making a super-intelligent inference engine? Someone has to teach it the facts. And, considering the number of facts required to make a system usefully intelligent (in a general sense) – it’s not worth the effort.
Enter the Internet, and Google
Google trawls the internet every day, which contains billions and billions of facts – waiting to be reaped. Up until recently, it just stored the content of the pages, so if you searched for words, it showed you the pages that contained those words (or had links containing your words pointing to them). But, as of late, it has started using some kind of inference engine (I noticed this lately when searching for a company director, it gave me the location of his company). And today, Google announced that they do in fact use an inference engine, and will be using it to help searching in their future products.
So, here we have an incredibly large source of information, containing most of mankind’s knowledge, and an inference engine that is reading it, and gradually getting smarter – based on its knowledge. In time that inference engine will be very smart indeed. Which would be fine, if it weren’t for its source of knowledge: the internet is not fair, just, true, or moral.
This system is currently in its infancy. Do we want it to grow up having learnt everything it knows from the internet?
Popularity: 8% [?]
An Ode to Scrubs
Posted by Bricky in Uncategorized on May 11th, 2009
As the third best show on TV (the 2nd is Lost, and the number one slot goes to House) comes to a close, I feel it is time for me to express my deep sense of regret in poetic form.
Oh Scrubs,
Scrubs,
Scrubs,
Scrubs,
Scrubs,
We’ll miss you.
After eight glorious years the funniest show on TV has come to an end.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Windows 2003: Prevent user login via the console
You’d think that “Deny logon locally” would do it right? Even the documentation suggests that this is the case. But of course you can’t apply that policy to administrator account (presumably because any user called ‘administrator’ must be dumb), so it’s completely useless.
The perfectly obvious and not at all in any way obfuscated way to do it is actually to add the user in question to ‘Remote Operators’ group.
Wonderfully clear isn’t it. Windows I mean.
Popularity: 8% [?]