I’m not here.

It used to be Mac upgrades were straight forward and safe, but no longer. I’m continually experiencing some problem or another, though fortunately most are pretty easy to remedy — here’s another and my most recent.

I have an extensive backup strategy which includes backing up to two different external drives. When I upgraded to 10.5.6 I had no issues with Time Machine on the first of the drives but when I got to work today I was greeted with this lovely and informative message:

You do not have appropriate access privileges to save file “.0022xxxxxxxx” in folder “Island”.

It’s an easy fix, open iTerm or Terminal and follow along:

$ cd /Volumes/{volume name}
$ sudo chown $USER {file name}

And the snow melts and the winter rains return. Compare the angle of the limbs of the big trees in this photo with the first photo in the previous post (or mouse-over this photo) — these trees can shoulder a heavy load, until of course they fail and try breaking one of my benches.

When we bought our house our realtor said the sellers wished to leave a number of benches if we agreed, to which we did, visions of Smith & Hawken beauty decorating our yard. What we found instead were a random assortment of benches in various stages of decay and, oddly, some 50’s diner chairs. We then did what any good landowners would do, we hid them in the woods and forgot about them.

Well, apparently the big trees hate the benches because every time they rifle off a limb it inevitably crashes into a bench.

This one came down in the fall during a big wind storm. I was outside in the garden when I saw a limb flying down elsewhere in the yard and came inside “for safety”. When I walked the yard later I found the first evidence of my bench-hating trees.

Given the weight of the recent snows I’m not surprised some limbs fell but two-for-two on hitting a bench, and this time crushing it, has me wondering. I heard this one hit the bench from inside the house but I didn’t know at the time the thunderous crashing sound was the bench meeting its demise.

As a kid, I fancied myself an Olympic caliber cross-country skier — I wasn’t, but I fancied it anyway. I would sneak out of the house during snow storms to ski at the nearby golf course while pretending I was Josh Thompson, America’s biathlon hero.

For various reasons, not the least of which named “Chicago,” I haven’t skied much over the years. Since moving here I’ve been longing to get some skiing in and today longing became reality.

So after a morning of playing in the snow with the family, a trip to the attic and a quick waxing I set out for a short ski.

I pass by this barn a lot when I run and had never seen it in the snow. The red really stood out in the still heavy snowfall. I found it was a bit tricky to photograph in the snow, on skis, along the road. Biathlon is about pegging your heart rate and then calming yourself enough to shoot a rifle accurately — it wasn’t a rifle I was shooting but it was functionally equivalent.

The apples still on the tree look like ornaments.

My destination, Gazzam Lake Park, is home to bear, owls, coyotes and a lake.

And, here’s the swamp lake. Notice the ski tracks going into the lake, they are not mine. Since I hadn’t skied in so long I wasn’t absolutely confident in my ability to stop in time from what’s a pretty decent descent from the trail to the lake so I took my skis off and hiked down — clearly someone else should have thought it through too.

After the Lake I skied over to where I know there’s an owl’s nest but saw no activity. I took a couple more photos, feared my camera was getting too wet, it was getting too dark and headed home.

On the way there were no cars coming so I skate skied right down the middle of the snow covered road. Just shy of home a car appeared so I went over to the side to give them room. As they passed I could see the passenger had been taking photos of me skiing down the road.

I love living here.

I returned to the Day Road farms last Sunday for my first Farm Walk.

The walk, 2.2 miles in total, covered a number of different properties under various stages of development, from actively being farmed to actively being reclaimed by the forest.

We started at the farm stand and made our first stop at the historic water tower recently moved from Winslow.

The pumpkin field, tilled and covered in snow, under the watchful eye of a bald eagle (the black speck near the top of the tall tree).

Betsey Wittick, of Laughing Crow Farm, uses horses in lieu of tractors for hauling and other field work — it’s a site to behold.

The group made its way past Betsey’s fields toward Akio Suyematsu’s raspberries growing in rows and, like us, standing tall against the winter cold and snow.

On to M & E and the site of yesterday’s work party — looking much the same except for the blanket of snow.

Snow makes an evergreen more majestic.

From M & E to Perennial Vintners — the view to the South takes in the Morales property, new home of the greenhouse.

The Morales property offers hope of affordable housing for farmers and farming interns though much work, time and money will be needed to bring that future to fruition.

I really enjoyed the walk and intend to make this a seasonal event.

(Check out color photos of the same walk at the TWL website.)

For some time I’ve wanted the equivalent of Java’s ability to dump the stack trace of all currently running threads in Python as a means for debugging some hung processes. I finally found a solution and wired it up to the services’ http console:

import sys
import traceback
from pygments import highlight
from pygments.lexers import PythonLexer
from pygments.formatters import HtmlFormatter
 
def stacktraces():
    code = []
    for threadId, stack in sys._current_frames().items():
        code.append("\n# ThreadID: %s" % threadId)
        for filename, lineno, name, line in traceback.extract_stack(stack):
            code.append('File: "%s", line %d, in %s' % (filename, lineno, name))
            if line:
                code.append("  %s" % (line.strip()))
 
    return highlight("\n".join(code), PythonLexer(), HtmlFormatter(
      full=False,
      # style="native",
      noclasses=True,
    ))

The magic happens with sys._current_frames() which returns exactly what I wanted. The only outstanding issue is how to get the thread’s name to display in addition to the ident.

I’ll probably hook this up as a signal handler as well so headless applications can have the same functionality.