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I was reviewing some notes from last year and a colleague made an off-hand remark about software testing,

There is no such thing as no time, just no priority.”

Paul Graham released his language Arc, see here for the background and the January 29th, 2008 announcement.

Which brings us to this clever job posting for an Arc Developer:

Arc developer, seven+ years experience required.

It’s geek humor if you were around in the 90’s when recruiters were looking for Java developers with five to seven years of experience in a language that had only been publicly introduced in late-1995.

I have a knack for buying into removable storage that looks like it will be great but eventually ends up in the market dustbin- syquest drives, LS-120 floppy, Iomega Jaz, etc. I’ve had them all. I was digging in this collection of also-ran storage and found a Castlewood Orb drive and the Castlewood branded usb-scsi adapter. I’ve been interested in getting to one of the disks that has my 1999-2000 mboxes and other odds and ends. These are also backed up on DAT- another storage medium that should have failed- but my DAT drive is an internal, full-height model and I don’t have a PC lying around with a bay. What can I say, I sure can pick ‘em.

The usb-scsi adapter is a Shuttle Technologies eUSCSI chipset and recognized under OSX Leopard. All it took to get working was an active terminator on the drive and setting the SCSI Id to 0 (zero). That SCSI Id means no other device is going to work daisy-chained, but given the roughly 500Kb/s transfer speed I saw this is just good enough to pull my old files off and move them to another medium.

Here’s a dump from the Apple System Profiler:

eUSCSI Bridge Ver 1.11:

  Capacity: 2.05 GB
  Removable Media:  Yes
  Detachable Drive: Yes
  BSD Name: disk2
  Version:  1.00
  Bus Power (mA):   100
  Speed:    Up to 12 Mb/sec
  Manufacturer: Shuttle Technology Inc.
  Mac OS 9 Drivers: No
  Partition Map Type:   MBR (Master Boot Record)
  Product ID:   0x0002
  Serial Number:    07
  S.M.A.R.T. status:    Not Supported
  Vendor ID:    0x04e6
  Volumes:
MISC:
  Capacity: 1.99 GB
  Available:    1.2 GB
  Writable: Yes
  File System:  MS-DOS FAT16
  BSD Name: disk2s5
  Mount Point:  /Volumes/MISC

It even shows up properly in the Disk Utility and can be repartitioned.

The macports version of emacs 22.1_1 (no x11, no carbon) is broken. I use it. Fortunately, Yamamoto Mitsuharu’s patch http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.bugs/16867 allows it to build and install on Leopard x86. The bug tracker has Ticket #13942 for 1.6 and Ticket #13471 for 1.5.2 that have not been acknowledged by the maintainer.

Seems to work so I’ve slapped together a patch file and a portfile to use it until the fixes get incorporated:

• editors/emacs/files/patch-src-unexmacosx.c
• editors/emacs/Portfile

Just works! I gambled and bought an open box DuelAdapter PCMCIA-ExpressCard bridge from Sewell Direct. No drivers to load on OSX Leopard, but make sure the switch on the underside of the card is in position ‘A’ (Mac mode) like it says in the manual. That’s it. The VzAccess Manager detects the card as normal. I tried a few other Type-II cards I had lying around and they behaved as expected, which is to say, they registered but not all of them did anything, that being a matter of having an appropriate driver.

The NationalAccess service is no slower, or faster, than it was with a PCMCIA slot equipped Mac running Tiger. At home I’ve seen a peak of 310KB/s down, 105KB/s up. On the train I usually see 30-50% lower (sometimes much lower) which is still fine for ssh and casual web-browsing.

My only gripe is that the DuelAdapter is big. Not including the size of the expresscard itself, the cable is 9″ long and the PCMCIA carrier is nearly 6″ long and 3″ wide so it doesn’t fit on a standard tray table with the laptop. I’m thinking I might solve this with a piece of medium-duty velcro on the lid of the laptop which would also orient the card in a good position.