This requires a bit of hacking, but its not too terrible.

Start by opening your ‘Terminal’ program. You can find it in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal

At the command prompt, type this (all on one line):

sudo nano /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

Find these two lines:

<string>-Dapp=CrashPlanService</string>
<string>-Xmn10m</string>

And insert a line so that it now looks like this:

<string>-Dapp=CrashPlanService</string>
<string>-d32</string>
<string>-Xmn10m</string>

Optional: A little further down the file, you will see this line:

<string>-Xmx512m</string>

You can change that line to be:

<string>-Xmx150m</string>

This will restrict CrashPlan to AT MOST 150 mb of ram. According to CrashPlan tech support this is perfectly safe (and you could go even lower if aren’t backing up 120gb like I am), but you might need to monitor CrashPlan for out-of-memory errors and such. If you see errors, just change that 150 back to a 512, and everything should be fine.

Now save the file and exit by pressing “Control-O”, Enter, then “Control-X”.

You are almost done.

The last step is to reload and relaunch CrashPlan with these commands:

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

Now CrashPlan should be using much less memory.

Update: I neglected to point out HOW to check how much memory Crashplan is using. You can use Activity Monitor to do this, you can find it at /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor. Look for a process called ‘java’, started by ‘root’. There might be more than one ‘java’, so you might have to do some digging to figure out which one is Crashplan. I can’t find a specific way in Activity Monitor to check this, but one hint is to close any applications you have running and see if other ‘java’ instances go away. In my case, I normally just have the ‘Crashplan’ java running.

• Makers, by Cory Doctorow
• Saturn’s Children, by Charles Stross
• Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman

I highly recommend all three, although Makers struck me a bit too much like a remake of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

I find myself wishing there were graphic novels available in eBook format.

I’m still not sold on functional programming, these minor changes took me more hours than I care to admit and gave me a crazy headache, but that could just be because I’m unfamiliar with the language.

I also uploaded the code to GitHub, because I figured where’s the fun in learning a new algorithm in a new language without tossing in the risk of losing all your code to an silly mistake with an unfamiliar version control system?

Luckily no data was lost, and if you have any interest in Clojure, Clojure-Java integration, or A-Star search, check it out here:

http://github.com/jbcpollak/AStar-Clojure

My next steps are going to be more rigorous unit testing and perhaps some benchmarking. I’d like to see how this implementation does against a large graph.

Frequently, say, one out of 10 times, when I try and log back into my Mac from the screensaver, or when I wake it from sleeping, I will get a spinning beachball and be unable to type my password. Other times I will be able to log in, but I am prompted to enter my password multiple times for various applications, and invariably one of them (usually gconsync) will get stuck after I enter my password with a spinning beach ball. I can still use most applications, but application that needs keychain authorization locks up.

I happen to be using a very handy tool called SSHKeychain, which turned out to be the culprit.

If you are using SSHKeychain, this post will walk you through fixing the unstable-wake-from-screensaver, and also solves the problem of having to type your keychain password 3-5 times when I returned to my computer.

The Solution

1. On your Mac’s menubar, near the clock, look for SSHKeychain, it looks like a keyring with three keys.
2. If you have that, click the keyring, and choose “Preferences…”
3. On the security tab, make sure “Use custom security settings” is checked.
4. Set all the drop downs to “No action”
5. Close the window and you are all set.

Note

This is a bit more insecure, since your keychain will be unlocked, but its protected by the password for your screensaver (you do have a password on your screensaver, right?). There may be a security hole if people gain shell access to your computer, I’m not sure if the keychain memory is encrypted, but overall I think your keychain information is still pretty safe.

Second, make sure you have the latest XCode installed, and make sure you have installed the optional 10.4 SDK. In my case, it appeared that the 10.4 sdk was installed, but it was either corrupt or out of date, resulting in many strange errors like the following:

Issue 993

(out/target/common/obj/JAVA_LIBRARIES/framework_intermediates/javalib.jar)
Docs droiddoc: out/target/common/docs/framework
Could not load 'clearsilver-jni'
java.library.path = out/host/darwin-x86/lib
make: *** [out/target/common/docs/framework-timestamp] Error 45

host C: emulator <= external/qemu/distrib/zlib-1.2.3/adler32.c
host C: emulator <= external/qemu/distrib/zlib-1.2.3/compress.c
host C: emulator <= external/qemu/distrib/zlib-1.2.3/crc32.c
host C: emulator <= external/qemu/distrib/zlib-1.2.3/deflate.c
host C: emulator <= external/qemu/distrib/zlib-1.2.3/gzio.c
In file included from external/qemu/distrib/zlib-1.2.3/gzio.c:601:
/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/include/stdarg.h:4:25: error: stdarg.h:
No such file or directory
external/qemu/distrib/zlib-1.2.3/gzio.c: In function ‘gzprintf’:
external/qemu/distrib/zlib-1.2.3/gzio.c:610: warning: implicit declaration
of function ‘va_start’
external/qemu/distrib/zlib-1.2.3/gzio.c:628: warning: implicit declaration
of function ‘va_end’

make clean && make

Unfortunately, I’m still stuck with this build error I haven’t gotten past yet:

host Prebuilt: libSDL (out/host/darwin-x86/obj/STATIC_LIBRARIES/libSDL_intermediates/libSDL.a)
ranlib: file: out/host/darwin-x86/obj/STATIC_LIBRARIES/libSDL_intermediates/libSDL.a(SDL_getenv.o) has no symbols
ranlib: file: out/host/darwin-x86/obj/STATIC_LIBRARIES/libSDL_intermediates/libSDL.a(SDL_malloc.o) has no symbols
ranlib: file: out/host/darwin-x86/obj/STATIC_LIBRARIES/libSDL_intermediates/libSDL.a(SDL_qsort.o) has no symbols
ranlib: file: out/host/darwin-x86/obj/STATIC_LIBRARIES/libSDL_intermediates/libSDL.a(SDL_stdlib.o) has no symbols
ranlib: file: out/host/darwin-x86/obj/STATIC_LIBRARIES/libSDL_intermediates/libSDL.a(SDL_audiodev.o) has no symbols
ranlib: file: out/host/darwin-x86/obj/STATIC_LIBRARIES/libSDL_intermediates/libSDL.a(SDL_mixer_MMX.o) has no symbols
ranlib: file: out/host/darwin-x86/obj/STATIC_LIBRARIES/libSDL_intermediates/libSDL.a(SDL_yuv_mmx.o) has no symbols
ranlib: file: out/host/darwin-x86/obj/STATIC_LIBRARIES/libSDL_intermediates/libSDL.a(SDL_nullmouse.o) has no symbols
host Prebuilt: libSDLmain (out/host/darwin-x86/obj/STATIC_LIBRARIES/libSDLmain_intermediates/libSDLmain.a)
host Executable: emulator (out/host/darwin-x86/obj/EXECUTABLES/emulator_intermediates/emulator)
Undefined symbols:
  "_xml_builtin", referenced from:
      _xml_builtin$non_lazy_ptr in gdbstub.o
ld: symbol(s) not found
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [out/host/darwin-x86/obj/EXECUTABLES/emulator_intermediates/emulator] Error 1

So if anyone has any tips on that, I’d appreciate it!

This project was intended to:

1. Refresh myself on how to do functional programming
2. Refresh my knowledge of A* search
3. Help me learn Clojure
4. Demonstrate Java interoperating with Clojure
5. Demonstrate Maven as a viable build system for Clojure

Once downloaded, unzip the zip file and open a terminal.

You now have three options:

Review the Source Code

The meat of the code is all in Clojure, here:

src/main/resources/com/example/clap/astar.clj

There is a bit of boot-strap Java code in the following file, but I can’t say its all that interesting:

src/main/java/com/example/clap/App.java

Running from Source

If you are on a Mac, or you already have Maven and Java installed, just run the following:

cd astar && mvn test

Maven will download all the needed packages and then compiled and execute the demo.

Running from Binary

If you are on Linux, or have cygwin installed on Windows, you can run the following:

cd astar/bin/ && ./run-astar

After upgrading to Snow Leopard on my Mac, I noticed this was happening with email in my Dreamhost IMAP account.

I’ve been running with the ‘IDLE’ option turned off for a day, and it seems to be working correctly again.

After a brief websearch, I found the appropriately titled using-jogl-as-dependency-in-maven, unfortunately, it appears to be a private blog, so I can’t see if the information is useful or not.

I did find on mvnbrowser.com that jogl-1.1.1-rc6 (as of this writing) is on the dev.java.net Maven2 repository, but I couldn’t find a usage guide.

Oh well, I’ll keep looking. For now its not a hugely pressing issue, so the one developer who is using has just hacked his Eclipse setup.

This would effectively let me see my business meetings on my Android-based cell phone.

I had tried various tricks and tools before, but nothing ever quite worked. But today I tried BusySync, and it seems to work great.

All you need to do is setup iCal to access your Exchange server, then in BusySync’s Google tab, check the off the calendar you want to upload in the ‘Publish to Google’ list.

There are two problems with this solution however:

1. Changes made to the calendar on Google aren’t synced back to iCal, and worse, they seem to be lost from Google.
2. The calendar name shown in Google is pretty awkward, its currently ‘Calendar[<user@exchangeserver>]’.