Month: July 2011

Fixing Samba shares in Lion

My parents’ Mac mini is their media centre — it’s hooked up, via a ridiculously long ethernet cable, to a modded (classic) Xbox in the living room running a horrendously outdated early build of Xbox Media Centre (now [XBMC](http://xbmc.org)).

With my usual cautious upgrade habits, I updated the Mac mini to Lion the day after release. (What? It was _a whole day_!) It installed fine, but broke media sharing between that and the Xbox, as Apple had dropped Samba networking from Lion (should’ve read [this article](http://www.tuaw.com/2011/03/24/apple-to-drop-samba-networking-tools-from-lion/) earlier). For current XBMC users, this shouldn’t be a problem, as newer builds should be able to read NFS shares… but my super-old box is super-old and not conventionally upgradeable*. Thankfully, someone figured out how to fix it by reinstalling the samba3 package, and I’m just reposting the link here in case anyone needed to stumble across this solution.

(The media centre used to be a Linux desktop, until the fan broke and I got tired of fixing X11 problems every 3 weeks. A slight pity, though, that I can no longer tell people my parents use Linux.)

\* I vaguely recall that these builds weren’t legal, and I had to FTP into some secret server after jumping through a few hoops to find a username and password. Fun times. Also, nobody cares about the legality of modding the original Xbox any more, right? …right? Umm.

Ruined by antibiotics

I’ve been having a cough. It’s one of those super annoying ones where you lie down and are ready to go to sleep, and then your throat relaxes and you proceed to cough your brains out.

So I went to see the doctor, and picked up this set of antibiotics that I’m supposed to take before meals.

Medicine bah

But wait! Not _just_ before meals — that would be too simple — _half an hour_ before meals.

This, naturally, drives me insane:

* I mean, what am I supposed to do if I forget, and eat first? Do I stop eating, take the medicine, and wait half an hour looking sadly at my food going cold?
* What if I don’t wait a full half hour before having my meal — does that render the medicine ineffective?
* Or, if I tried to plan it out, what if I take the medicine, _expecting_ to have food in half an hour, but then I _fail to procure anything edible_? Can I snack on something, does that even count? But it’s not a meal, and the instructions say “before meals”!
* Also, when does the half hour countdown start? From when the pill enters my throat? But I have to take _two_ — do I start timing from the first or second? Should I take both at the same time? What if they don’t reach my stomach at the sae time? Wait, that’s right, what if the timing’s not from the point of swallowing, and that’s just an estimate for when it reaches the stomach? WHAT IF MY OESOPHAGUS IS ABNORMALLY LONG??!

My life is now an endless tormented guessing game. Thanks a lot, doctor.