I wrote yesterday about NTFS-3G because I was backing my MacBook to an external NTFS drive. I was backing up because I wanted to de-partition my Mac.

When I upgraded my MacBook to a bigger drive, more RAM, and OS X 10.5, I partitioned the drive. I created two 25GB partitions with the intention of putting Windows and Linux on them with BootCamp. It turns out that BootCamp doesn't like that. It wants the system drive to have only one partition, which it would shrink. I never bothered to go any further.

The disk has been filling up recently and I wanted the extra space back, to extend my primary HFS+ partition by 50GB. I found a guide to nondestructively resizing volumes with the command-line diskutil tool.

With some trepidation, I set out to reclaim the end of my drive. Happily, it turned out to be both quick and painless.

Here's the old disk layout:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *298.1 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS GeorgeR Mac             250.0 Gi   disk0s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data WINDOWS                 25.0 Gi    disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data LINUX                   22.8 Gi    disk0s4

First, I merged the two FAT32 partitions into one HFS+ partition:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ sudo diskutil mergePartitions \
    "Journaled HFS+" End disk0s3 disk0s4
The chosen disk does not support resizing, do you wish to format instead? (y/N) y
Merging partitions into a new partition
     Start partition: disk0s3 WINDOWS
     Finish partition: disk0s4 LINUX
Started erase after partitioning on disk disk0s3
Erasing
Mounting disk
[ + 0%..10%..20%..30%..40%..50%..60%..70%..80%..90%..100% ]
Finished erase after partitioning on disk disk0s3 End
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *298.1 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS GeorgeR Mac             250.0 Gi   disk0s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS End                     47.6 Gi    disk0s3

Then, I merged the two HFS+ partitions:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ sudo diskutil mergePartitions \
    "Journaled HFS+" End disk0s2 disk0s3
Merging partitions into a new partition
     Start partition: disk0s2 GeorgeR Mac
     Finish partition: disk0s3 End
Attempting resize
Changing filesystem size on disk 'disk0s2'...
Attempting to change filesystem size from 268435456000 to 319728959488 bytes
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *298.1 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS GeorgeR Mac             297.8 Gi   disk0s2

And everything is good:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ df
Filesystem    512-blocks      Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   624470624 508168048 115790576    81%    /

Disclaimer: back your disk up and read the diskutil man page very carefully before using: one misstep could ruin the contents of your disk.

After I started running Linux and then Mac OS X, in addition to Windows, I started on a quest to find the universal filesystem. I had multiboot systems and external drives where I wanted to to be able to read and write disks under multiple operating systems.

The obvious choice is FAT32, the ubiquitous, lowest-common denominator filesystem. FAT32 is supported out-of-the-box by all major operating systems, digital cameras, and PDAs, so that's a huge advantage. FAT32 also has major shortcomings:

• Maximum file size is 4GB. I have ISOs, MPEGs, and other large files exceeding this limit.
• Fragmentation happens too easily.
• Timestamps: accurate only to 2-second resolution. No notion of timezones or UTC.
• Journaling: none. Preferred for robustness.
• ACLs or Permissions. Nothing beyond R/W.

I experimented with ext3 (and its non-journaling sibling, ext2) on Windows and later on the Mac. On Windows, ext2fs works well and I used it happily for several months on a machine dualbooting XP and Ubuntu. It did not work well with Vista initially, though that seems to have been fixed since.

My experiences on the Mac were bad: ext2fsx caused some kernel panics, which was enough for me to abandon it.

There was no free solution for reading and writing Mac HFS+ disks under Linux and Windows the last time that I checked.

Both Linux and Macs natively support mounting NTFS disks read-only. The NTFS-3G project allows Linux to write to NTFS disks, and Mac NTFS-3G does likewise for Macs. I've never had a problem with NTFS-3G and it's worked flawlessly under Linux and Mac for me.

New post to the Cozi Tech Blog: Iframes: thinking outside the box.

Using an iframe to host some content turned out to be a big pain, so I came up with a different approach.

As I mentioned the other night, I introduced two narrators into the chapter of Ulysses that we're reading in June.

I'd say from the rehearsal tonight that the additions are successful, that they clarify the text for the listener, without being intrusive. I expect that I'll have to produce a third draft of the script in a few weeks, but I think the next round of changes will be minor. The second draft required hundreds of small changes.

We gained three new readers tonight. There are plenty of parts to go around, so it's all to the good. We had great difficulty initially last year in getting enough readers from the old guard, until we recruited several new readers.

On Friday, the Iowa Supreme Court struck down their state's gay marriage ban. Today, the Vermont Legislature legalized gay marriage.

It's been a great week for fairness. We still have a long way to go: 29 states have constitutional amendments banning gay marriage.

I'm sure the right wing are beating the fund-raising drums for all they're worth. We can expect more Proposition 8-style backlashes, I'm afraid.

But the news still made my day.

Moments ago, I completed the second draft of the Circe Part I script for this year's Ulysses reading.

The chapter is couched in the form of a play, making it relatively straightforward to convert to a staged reading. There are, however, huge numbers of “stage directions”, often ironic, generally unactable: A vast, detailed procession in Bloom's honor; Bloom burning at the stake; camels offering mangoes to Molly; and much, much more.

In addition, there are over one hundred characters, most of whom have a line or two, then disappear. They need to be introduced somehow.

So I added two narrators to handle all of this. They steer the reading along, adding much-needed context to aid the audience who won't be nearly as familiar with the text as we are.

Next rehearsal is Wednesday, when I'll get to hear the changed text for the first time. I'm confident that most of the changes that I made will work, but I'll probably need to produce another draft in a few weeks.

In Seattle, it is said that moss grows on the north side of the rain. To be sure, moss thrives in the shadier parts of our yard.

On a cold, dry February day, I rented a pressure washer with the intention of scouring the moss from the ground and the flaking paint from the garage walls. Although it was quite effective at removing moss, it made a godawful mess. There were muddy flecks of moss everywhere. Against the flaking paint, it made little impression and I still have to deal with that. I had dealt with perhaps a third of the moss when the pressure washer died. I got a partial refund, but didn't feel like renting another one.

The following weekend, I scraped up more moss with a shovel. Not messy, but not wholly effective either, leaving small, low patches of moss that are starting to return.

Today, I took on the exterior basement stairs. They are always in shade and the moss carpeted the steps. I used an old grill brush that had grown too foul with grease to be used on the grill. It did an excellent job; I've never seen those steps look so clean. The scraper peeled most of the moss off the ground and the brass bristles ripped up the roots with ease.

Bloody hard work, though.

It's been a long, dreary winter in Seattle. After a horrible, wet Saturday, last Sunday was glorious, the first nice day in weeks. Then the cold and rain came back. It snowed on April 1st, for Pete's sake.

And now we have another lovely weekend, with promised highs in the high Sixties tomorrow. I did some yard work today and cleaned the grill and outdoor furniture. We've invited a handful of friends over for dinner tomorrow night.

I am greatly heartened by today's news of Iowa's Supreme Court unanimously striking down the state's gay marriage ban. The passage of Proposition 8 in California was a setback. The Iowa Court made a strong ruling, gutting the arguments against same-sex marriage.

It's hard to believe now that interracial marriage was illegal in many states until 1967. President Obama's parents could not have married in those states. We look back at that now with bemusement and a little horror. The opposition, then as now, was led by cultural conservatives, making religious arguments.

Someday soon, we'll look back at the gay marriage debate with the same bemusement and wonder what all the fuss was about.

About three weeks ago, I answered a question on StackOverflow about generating the most readable color of text on a colored background.

I suggested flipping the top bit of each component, (r ^ 0x80, g ^ 0x80, b ^ 0x80). This has the same effect as adding 128 if the component is less than 128, and subtracting 128 otherwise.

Another way to think about it is to imagine the 256x256x256 color cube. Inside that cube, erect another cube half as wide. One corner is at your original color and the diagonally opposite corner is the one computed above.

The questioner liked my answer the best, but I decided to experiment further. I wrote some JavaScript to compute that color. As you can see in the table of 549 colors below, it works well most of the time, but it's not perfect.

Someone else suggested an earlier SO question on good-looking font colors. Looking at that thread, I decided to try inverting the HSL value to (h + 180, s, l + (l < 0.5 ? 0.5 : -0.5)). That works well too. Generally, it yields different colors than my first approach. It looks like one of the two always contrasts well.

I found that the most effective approach was to compute the gray-level intensity of the original color, (0.30*r + 0.59*g + 0.11*b). If it was dark, use white; otherwise, black.

Really, though, unless you have a requirement to work with arbitrary colors, you should pick your color scheme carefully. I found a really nice site this afternoon, ColorSchemeDesigner.com

Here's the source of my colortable.

I love Spring. The winter recedes, the weather grows warmer, the young plants appear, the dormant trees bloom, and all is right with the world.

I dread Spring. My nose itches, it runs, it blocks up, it explodes.

This year, my eyes itch too. A lot. It's really, um, irritating.

Our neighborhood was built in spurts. The brick Tudors, like ours, were built in the 1930s. The houses adjoining mine were built in the years after World War II.

There's a house for sale a few doors down that's very like ours. We snooped around on Sunday during the open house.

Our house was built in 1931; the other, the year before. Ours is slightly deeper, but the floor plans are very similar. Theirs has no eyecatching yellow brick trim. Our kitchen was remodeled in the sixties, taking over part of the next room. Theirs never was and it's tiny. Our basement is half finished and it had a bathroom added in the seventies. Their basement is unfinished. Our dormers upstairs are walk-in closets; their dormers are unfinished attic. Our living room and dining room windows were replaced with picture windows, while they still have leaded panes.

Dark wood trim predominates in their house, the electrical outlets and light switches look like the originals, and the paintwork was shabby. In short, it had changed little in the eight decades since it was built.

Quite an eerie experience, seeing our house much as it started out.

The Cozi Tech Blog needed some love, so I wrote a post on augmenting Python's strftime.

Title: Black Dossier: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 3

Author: Alan Moore, Kevin O'Neill

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: America's Best Comics

Copyright: 2007

ISBN: 1401203078

Keywords: graphic novel

Reading period: 28 March, 2009

England, 1958: an alternate universe where famous fictional characters really lived and the regime of Big Brother has just come to an end. Sixty years ago, the British Crown gathered together the Murray Group, extraordinary adventurers charged with sensitive missions. The remnants of the group fled England in World War II. Now they've come back to steal their dossier from MI-5, a dossier that could lead the Government back to them, a dossier that details the exploits of earlier groups over the last 300 years.

LXG3 pulls in everything, from Gulliver's Travels to James Bond, Orlando to Fanny Hill, Prospero to Toyland, Dan Dare to Billy Bunter, and Bertie Wooster and Jeeves battling Cthulhu. It's way over the top. Mostly it's fun.

Title: By Myself

Author: Lauren Bacall

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: Knopf

Copyright: 1978

ISBN: 0394413083

Pages: 378

Keywords: autobiography, movies

Reading period: 10–28 March, 2009

Betty Bacal is an only child, abandoned by her father, raised by her Rumanian Jewish mother in New York. Stagestruck from an early age, she takes acting classes for years but gets little stage work. Modeling work is a fallback. A cover shot for Harper's Bazaar leads Howard Hawks to bring her out to Hollywood. Within months, Hawks' protogée, now Lauren Bacall, is the lead in “To Have or Have Not” and falling in love with her costar, Humphrey Bogart. Bogie is 45 to her 20, but it doesn't matter. He's married too; that doesn't matter either. They marry, of course, and have a dozen great years together until Bogie's death of cancer in ’57. She's devastated but she has two young children. On the rebound, she takes up with Frank Sinatra. It's not right for either of them and Sinatra dumps her. She spends the Sixties married to Jason Robards. Like Bogie, he's a drinker and that marriage falls apart, leaving her with a son. Her movie and theatre career has been hit or miss for years, but revives in the Seventies with a long-running stage hit in Applause (the musical version of All About Eve).

Bacall writes frankly about her life and shortcomings, looking back with hard-earned wisdom from middle age. She spends half of her girlhood at a high emotional pitch. When she plunges into something, it's total commitment; no holding back, for better or worse. Her early screen persona was as a knowing sexpot; in reality, she was unsure and inexperienced. The “Look”, her trademark upward tilting look with her chin pressed against her chest, was born of the need to still her nervous shaking.

She tells a good story, pulling the reader along. She drops many big names, having moved in high-powered circles all her adult life. The Hollywood elite of the 40s and 50s are there. Katie Hepburn becomes a close friend after The African Queen. She was close to Adlai Stevenson when he ran for President in 1952. Bobby Kennedy was a friend. The book becomes most affecting when she writes of the death of Bogie and of her beloved mother in 1969, of those last, lingering months of denial and her wrenching pain afterwards.

Highly recommended.

I've been to a few Toastmasters competitions in the past. Tonight was the first time that I helped out at one, as one of the timers. It was the combined Area 35 and 36 competition.

A typical Toastmasters competition has two parts, a speech competition and an evaluation competition. In the speech competition, the competitors give a prepared speech on a topic of their own choosing. Some speech competitions are humorous; tonight's wasn't. In the evaluation competition, the invited speaker gives a speech heard by all the competitors. They are taken out of the room, then one at a time, they come back in and evaluate that speech.

The speech competition is always fun. You get to hear several good speeches. I heard speeches tonight about a teenage boxing experience, watching a mother's peaceful death in a hospice, our collective obsession with "better", and choosing a high school for a son.

In the evaluation competition, it's interesting to hear different people's take on the same speech.

For various reasons, I hadn't cycled to work in about three weeks, just before the clock went forward.

It was very pleasant to cycle home in broad daylight for a change. Very pleasant.

On a StackOverflow question about favorite Vim plugins, I learned about Ack, a replacement for grep that's smarter about searching source trees.

Ack is written in Perl. The built-in :vimgrep is rather slow. It seems to have some Vim-specific overhead, such as creating swap files and executing BufRead autocmds. Ack is noticeably faster, though somewhat slower than GNU grep.

Which would you rather type to search a tree, ignoring the .svn and .git subtrees?

$ ack -i -l foobar
$ grep --exclude='*.svn*' --exclude='*.git*' -i -l -r foobar .

The ack takes 6 seconds to search 4500 files, while the grep completes in 2. This does not count the time that I spent trying to figure out the correct syntax and argument quoting for --exclude. The help says both --regexp=PATTERN and --exclude=PATTERN, but the latter is a glob (file wildcard pattern).

On Windows, I wrapped ack with pl2bat.

When we bought our house in 2000, our interest rate was about 8.5% on a 30-year loan. A couple of years later, we refinanced it down to 6.875%, which reduced our monthly payments by several hundred dollars.

Today, we signed the paperwork to refinance it again, down to 4.75% over 20 years. That drops our monthly payment by another $300, which is most welcome, as Emma's unemployed.

All of these are fixed-rate mortgages. We're really not fans of adjustable-rate mortgages: too many horror stories about people starting out a low rate and not being able to cope when the rates go up.

We went through the same guy each time, Sanjay Pitroda of MetLife Home Loans in Kirkland.

Exuberant Ctags is an essential complement to Vim: it generates an index of symbol names (tags) for a set of source files. In Vim, just place the cursor on a function name and type C-] to go to its definition.

Ctags works well for most of the languages that I deal with, but falls down badly on modern JavaScript. Its built-in parser simply doesn't handle declarations like these:

Sizzle.selectors.filters.animated = function(elem) { // ...
ajaxSetup: function( settings ) {

I came across Unbad's workaround earlier tonight. His code didn't work for me, so I hacked on it until it did:

--langdef=js
--langmap=js:.js
--regex-js=/([A-Za-z0-9._$]+)[ \t]*[:=][ \t]*\{/\1/,object/
--regex-js=/([A-Za-z0-9._$()]+)[ \t]*[:=][ \t]*function[ \t]*\(/\1/,function/
--regex-js=/function[ \t]+([A-Za-z0-9._$]+)[ \t]*\(([^)])\)/\1/,function/
--regex-js=/([A-Za-z0-9._$]+)[ \t]*[:=][ \t]*\[/\1/,array/
--regex-js=/([^= ]+)[ \t]*=[ \t]*[^"]'[^']*/\1/,string/
--regex-js=/([^= ]+)[ \t]*=[ \t]*[^']"[^"]*/\1/,string/

Simply add the above to ~/.ctags or $HOME/ctags.cnf.

Title: No Country for Old Men

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: Picador

Copyright: 2005

ISBN: 033044011X

Pages: 309

Keywords: fiction

Reading period: 20–22 March, 2009

Rural Texas, 1980. Llewelyn Moss, out hunting in the middle of nowhere, finds the remains of a drug buy that went wrong: dead bodies, shot-up cars, black tar heroin. And a satchel with two million dollars in cash. Moss takes the money and runs. He knows it's stupid, he knows that people will come after him, and he does it anyway.

Anton Chigurh is the worst of the killers on his trail. Relentless, remorseless, untroubled by conscience, and offended by the wrongness of Moss's act. He and Moss will be locked in a dance of death.

The bodies were found in Sheriff Bell's patch. Ed Tom Bell is near retirement, an old-school lawman at odds with modern life. Bell is slow, deliberate, and perceptive. He wants to catch Moss before Chigurh does.

McCarthy's prose is spare and evocative, as dry as the harsh landscape. These men are laconic, not given to frivolous chitchat.

Highly recommended. I'll have to get around to the Coen Brothers' movie soon.