Mostly Harmless

Joined twitter to whore out a tweet/twitter for free software from MacHeist. http://twitter.com/HarmlessBob

Kelly Clarkson album number 4 is on the way!

(These Amazon links aren’t quite stable, it seems. There was a playable sample for the single but it isn’t working now, and it’s hard to find these via searching Amazon. I had two different links for the MP3 but they suddenly went away. The album is still listed as “New Release (2009)” and it didn’t even have a photo for a while. It won’t be out until March 17th. The single should be out on Jan 19th.)

Lyrics and alternate audio link: Popeater

Follow the link to Amazon for an audio sample of Kelly Clarkson’s new single: My Life Would Suck Without You

Pre-order the new album: All I Ever Wanted

I’ve been burning vacation days recently (by order of the powers that be) and for the most part I spend the days websurfing, reading books, and watching movies.

I was going to actually leave the apartment tonight to see a movie and wash the car but the weather sucks so to heck with that.

The extra-lazy part of the story is that I’ve used six different iPhone apps to look up the movie showtimes (Flixster), then the weather temp (Weather), and traffic (Google Maps) — seeing that traffic was moving slowly I got more weather details from WeatherBug and the The Weather Channel app. Finally I am posting this from the WordPress application.

The only problem is that I need to move to get food… But I suppose I could order in.

I like to say that the iPhone is also a phone. I hardly ever use it for that, however.

I’m going to attempt to capture video of the wily Leap Second later this afternoon (Midnight UTC, which is in about 7 1/2 hours).

I’m hoping that my Mac will show a 60th second or at least bounce back forward a second. I’m prepping Snapz Pro X and a shell script for the momentous… moment.

Update: Victory!

I was expecting to admit defeat this morning but I checked the log on my other Mac and found this:

$ grep -A 3 59:58 logging.txt
--
Thu Jan  1 13:59:58 UTC 2009
Thu Jan  1 13:59:59 UTC 2009
Thu Jan  1 14:00:00 UTC 2009
Thu Jan  1 14:00:01 UTC 2009
--
Thu Jan  1 14:59:58 UTC 2009
Thu Jan  1 14:59:59 UTC 2009
Thu Jan  1 15:00:01 UTC 2009
Thu Jan  1 15:00:02 UTC 2009


At 9 a.m. local time, 3 p.m. UTC, the seconds jumped from 59 to 01 — and no, I didn’t just hack a line out of the log file.

I made some video captures of the Date & Time preference pane (nee control panel) yesterday but they were for naught. I tried Midnight UTC and Midnight CST but no dice.

I only caught the transition because I have a shell script logging time every hour on two different machines. My Mac Pro slept from 1:30 a.m. ’til 7:30 a.m. so I don’t know if it was supposed to jump ahead somewhere in that range. My MacBook Pro appeared to be in sync with the other Mac when I checked at 9:25 a.m. (I woke it up at 9:19 a.m.), but at 9:32 a.m. I got a +0.905406 second time adjustment. That is most likely the accumulated drift while it was sleeping for 8 hours, however. I don’t see any system.log entries on either machine that specifically mention a leap second… perhaps I’ll try it with debugging turned on in ntpd next time. (quell excitement)

For the intrepid non-programmers among you, here is a script:

#!/bin/sh
sleep 45
for i in {1..30}
do
date -u >> $HOME/logging.txt
sleep 1
done

Run that in cron at 59 past the hour to get a 30-second window around the hourly transitions. i.e.:

59 * * * * $HOME/timelog.sh

The trickiest part about this whole thing was actually getting “cron” going on my Mac running Leopard. Everything runs in launchd nowadays. I tried running the script that way first (use Lingon) but it was running at the wrong interval for some reason. I had to manually create a crontab file at /usr/lib/cron/tabs/<username> so “cron” would start (via launchd, of course).

In the end, barely worth the effort, but I captured the wily Leap Second.  And they all said I was crazy…

Sweet 401k return this year:

Your Personal Rate of Return from 01/01/2008 to 11/14/2008 is -39.9%