fsync(2)

I released RADUM 0.0.1 on RubyForge this weekend. The RubyForge project page contains more information. I have also placed RDoc information on this website. The wiki page has been updated with more links and a small example program. I am glad the first release is done, but apparently ruby-net-ldap does not work with Ruby 1.9, and I also discovered that String objects pulled out of the ENV hash are frozen as well. I think the next version of ruby-net-ldap will change my dependence on the NoMethodError being raised when an LDAP attribute has no value (instead returning an empty Array), but I am sure I can deal with that. Right now the SVN trunk for ruby-net-ldap does not seem to work with Ruby 1.9. I hope ruby-net-ldap is updated soon so that I don’t have to try and fix it myself.

I also had fun trying to copy an audio CD this weekend. I don’t like to use original CDs in my SUV because I leave them in there for months (some I’ve not taken out since I bought it actually, so a couple of years). I believe that this required third party software in Windows, but I figured this would be easy in Mac OS X. Well, it turns out that it is and it isn’t at the same time. I can’t use Disk Utility to do it because it claims not to know how to make an image of an audio CD. Really? Yeah, I doubt it. It turns out that when you insert an audio CD, it is mounted and all audio tracks are presented as .aiff files. This is what I did to burn an audio CD:

1. Install Burn.
2. Insert an audio CD you want to copy.
3. Close iTunes as it won’t help you with this specific task unless you import as lossless, and who the heck does that for their iTunes library?
4. Copy the mounted CD to a folder. Mac OS X happily mounts the audio CD and presents a folder with .aiff files that you can burn. How nice, right? How about letting me make an audio CD in Disk Utility?

   cd <destination folder>
   cp -R /Volumes/Audio\ CD\ You\ Own\ And\ Should\ Be\ Able\ To\ Copy .
   

5. Start Burn, select the “Audio” tab, and drag the copied folder onto the window.
6. Click the Burn button. Ignore any warnings about the data being too large to fit on the CD. Yeah, it fit on a CD before, so it’s fine. Just burn it anyway. I am not sure why I got that warning.
7. Enjoy something that is way too much of a pain to accomplish. There’s no way I am spending money on Toast!

For a task I am trying to do on Mac OS X, this seems way to hard. I expected Disk Utility to deal with this, and I think in the past it could. Anyway, I don’t do this very often at all. All of my CD slots in the SUV are occupied.