TimeMachine & Samba

Time Machine in Leopard is great for backing up your stuff! (especially as most External/Network drives come with only Windows software for automated backups!!) The problem is, you can’t seem to configure it backup to a Network drive. DOH!

I’m not posting a moan here.. but a solution! Oh yes!! Open a terminal and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Open the TimeMachine system preference and you should now see the drive! Yay!

The only other caveat is, you should eject the disk a couple of times before backing up to it as Leopard seems to have some difficulties with Samba (or similar) NAS drives and files tend to go missing?! :S

Cygwin won’t read .bashrc?

Add the following line of code to the very bottom of /etc/profile

. "$HOME/.bashrc"


This will execute the .bashrc file from your home directory.

If you are not sure where your home directory is type the following into a cygwin console:

echo $HOME

If your user folder contains a space; you may have to place the .bashrc file into the root directory and you may still have the calling line into /etc/profile.

Integrate Yappd (A Twitter wannabe) into your build script

I have always thought these Twitter style sites are a little pointless… “Brian is in the Diary Room”, “Matt is eating Marmite”, it’s almost as bad as watching Big Brother?!

However I finally found a use for these sites.. Our company has a build machine which churns out a build every evening when I’m tucked up in bed. When I get to work in the morning there is an email reporting the build has failed/succeeded and attached is a log file. The pain is my inbox gets full very quickly and these emails are just noise which pop up when I don’t need them.

So I changed the build script to email a Twitter wanna-be site.. Yappd.com.

I attach an image to the email which contains a cross or a tick depending on if the build passed or failed, and I can visit this site when I want to know the build status or just to make sure the build machine is behaving as expected.