@lindsay.at

I'm planning on going to the Music Hack Day in London in two weeks. I'll be waving the flag for The Echo Nest and their fabulous APIs. There's a lot being said elsewhere about it, but I wanted to send out a special welcome to French and Belgian hackers.

The hack day is being held at the Guardian's offices neat Kings Cross, London. That puts it just a couple hundred metres away from the Eurostar terminal in London. So, for precisely the price of a round-trip fare to London, you can hop on an 8am train, get fed throughout the event, housed on Saturday night, and return Sunday evening. Nothing else to worry about. Well worth considering if you're close to Lille, Paris, or Brussels. Oh boy, what I would have given for a weekend like this when I was living in Brussels...

So register right away: the spaces are now filling up fast!

And we can get up to antics like this:

(Which is just the Dissociated algorithm applied to video in synch with the audio, in the latest versions of the Echo Nest Remix API. In my opinion, it moves the image of the subject from being quirky to having serious battles with mental health.)

So, after weeks of dithering, talking with my colleagues and hearing their enthusiasm for the event provided me enough impetus to attend BBC's Mashed. It's HackDay 2008, basically, and it really felt like I missed something special last year. I've been getting my hack-fu together, and it felt like it would be nifty to go as a team.

But no, said colleagues dropped out almost immediately.

Mother-in-law came to the rescue, though, in offering to take Helena for the weekend, un-prompted. Great! (What? She's now expressing mixed feelings?…) So, I'm committed to going, even if I'm not going to approach it as the young man's game it appears to be. I have a hotel, I have a train, and I will attempt to treat myself right in the process. I want to hack, but I'll be fairly happy soaking up the atmosphere and giving out most of my remaining LOLCODE stickers, if people are interested.

For the rest: we shall see what we shall see.

I'm trying to set down the steps that I did to enable me to do Time Machine backups to an AFP store on top of ZFS running on OpenSolaris. It just happens to be the combination I'm running. There's no real need to combine all these steps as they apply to you: I just want to make note of what I had to do.

First, I installed netatalk, mostly working from the instructions listed at confessions of a unix junkie. Since Leopard strongly deprecates sending AFP passwords in the clear, I had to build with OpenSSL. Since I used pkgsrc to build the dependencies, my ./configure command looked more like:
LDFLAGS=-R/opt/local/lib RANLIB=echo CC=gcc ./configure --prefix=/opt/local --without-pam --disable-ddp --disable-tcp-wrappers --disable-srvloc --with-bdb=/opt/local/include/db4 --with-cnid-dbd-backend --with-ssl-dir=/opt/local

The Diffie-Hellman Exchange UAM (uams_dhx.so) is fairly critical to use with Leopard, so the "unix junkie" recommendations for the cleartext password should be ignored.

With that accomplished, set up the backing store. For me, it's a ZFS dataset (filesystem) on a centralised mount point. Make sure that the owner points to the user who will be using the AFP share (with a chown). Make sure the AppleVolumes.default entry for each share points to the right directory and user, such as:
/Storage/atl-backup "TimeMachine" rwlist:atl allow:atl

Once the mac could connect securely, there were only two steps needed. Allow Time Machine to deal with unsupported AFP shares:defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1and tickle the mounted share into being recognised for this unsupported hack:
touch /Volumes/TimeMachine/.com.apple.timemachine.supported

That was enough to get the backup started. As I'm still running the initial backup, I have no idea of the stability of this solution, but I hope to be able to report back. I also notice that reports say you must mount the "sparsebundle" disk image manually in order for the Time Machine recovery GUI to be of use.