It’s been nearly 3 years since my mother has passed away; this special day has since been marked with a sense of happiness, sadness and numbness.  Thinking how, at the very least, a phone call always bridged the greatest distance; remembering all the silly, memorable and special gifts that was lavished on her; remembering the special meals prepared by us; and the flowers that would likely die the next day, brings back so many memories of joy and happiness.  Mom cherished these times, soaked them up as if they didn’t last long enough or frequent enough; I’m not certain I understood this growing up.

Much of what I didn’t understand back then has changed lately as I now have a son.  Even while it’s not Father’s day, the comparison can still be made because I’ve been contemplating (thanks to a pastor’s sermon last week) just how much our Father cherishes us.  As a sinner, I am unable to give to my Father anything that would make Him love or cherish me more, even my efforts are seen as dirty rags.  Yet, He sent His one and only Son, someone who He cherished, to die for the penalty of my sin and now He cherishes me as much as He cherishes His risen Son.

I think a mother’s love is remarkably similar to this.  Mom cherished us, more than I could even have imagined, and while on this one day that we honor and remember our mothers with a phone call, flowers, and silly gifts she didn’t cherish these things nearly as much as she cherished her sons.  The attention we lavished on her on this special day was only the icing on top of the cake.  So, it seems to me that her children were the substance of what she cherished and she couldn’t ever get enough of that (and who could get enough?).  The difference is that our silly gifts and preparations will always be precious memories to her and it does add to the sweetness of what is really important.

Moms are very special people!  They endure so much, not just in pregnancy and labor, but throughout their children’s lives;  they are shields over the harshness of this world, and often don’t get much in return except a few silly gifts, the occasional “I love you”, and 1 day (out of 365) to be honored and cherished.

Just as it is with our mothers, our Father cherishes us so much more than we can even imagine.  He soaks up the time we return back our affections, but it doesn’t make up the substance of why He loves me, that comes from the atoning sacrifice his Son endured to pay the penalty for my sins.  He sees that perfect effort when He looks at me.

So, this Mother’s day I am honored with the prospect of creating some new family traditions in how we will honor a new mom.  It will likely include some silly gifts, flowers, and a meal.  However, these things are less important to me now, what is important is showing my wife and son that they are cherished by me, teaching my son what it means to cherish his mother every day of the year, showing both of them just how much their eternal Father cherishes and loves them, and remembering that no matter what disappointment I feel regarding my regrets, my mom cherished and loved me despite my shortcomings more than I could ever had imagined (though perhaps that is becoming more clear).  I believe my mom would have read this and agreed that this is what she would have loved to see her children to have learned (though she probably knew it was in us all along).

While my son won’t be able to meet his grandmother in this life, I truly hope he will experience just how much he is loved through his mother and I because of the way our mothers have been such wonderful examples of what it means to lavish love on their children.

I will always wish I could share a few more moments with my mom even if I know she is at home in a much better place (perfectly experiencing the love from our Father), just so I can show and tell her just how much she is cherished and loved by me, but the sting of death has been replaced by the joy of life and of hope for a new day where death will be conquered and we will be reunited with those who have gone before us.

It’s a hard world to live in without a mom.

1. Prepare your NAS device and make sure you can access it
2. Mount your NAS device as a drive
   • From Finder: APPLE + K
   • Server Address: smb://NAS-Device
   • Select which folder you want mounted.  In my case it was called “Back Up”
3. Open up Terminal and Prepare Time Machine to use the network drive mounted above by typing:
   defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
4. Create an empty disk image that will be used on the NAS device to contain your Time Machine backup by typing:
   hdiutil create -library SPUD -megabytes 400000 -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE -volname “backup” “backup.sparsebundle”
   • This creates the empty sparse bundle disk image of a size of 400 Gigabytes
   • It also creates a volume name of “backup” and the file name of “backup.sparsebundle”
5. Move “backup.sparsebundle” to your NAS device location
6. Open up the Console application.  I have yet to figure out a better way to do this, but we have to start a Time Machine backup and let it fail in order to name the “backup.sparsebundle” file that was moved to the NAS device properly because Time Machine is unable to requisition the name properly.  The Console application will contain the appropriate name.
7. Open up your Time Machine Preferences
8. Click “Change Disk” and select your the mounted drive
9. Start a backup (it will fail)
10. In the Console application click on “All Messages”
11. Look for text that reads something like: /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[8818] Creating disk image /Volumes/Backup-1/Joe User’s MacBook Pro 15″_0016cbc9be62.sparsebundle
12. Copy this line to your favorite text editor
13. Go into your NAS device and rename the file to “Joe User’s MacBook Pro 15″_0016cbc9be62.sparsebundle” (replacing it to your exact text…of course <grin>)
14. Stop the backup if you haven’t already or if it hasn’t failed yet
15. Restart the backup
16. You should see Time Machine accepting the sparsebundle and it should properly backup

Some Caveates and cleanup items:

1. It will take a long time for the initial backup to finish, so it’s a good idea to run this over night.
2. The Sparsebundle name must be exactly as you find it in the console.  I’ve not found a better way yet to retrieve the drive name that it is looking for.
3. Delete the original “backup.sparsebundle” file from your local harddrive
4. It may be a good idea to clear the Console logs before starting the Time Machine backup the first time through, it’ll make finding the proper drive name a little easier.
5. If you’ve gone through these steps and it’s still not working reset the Time Machine defaults: defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 0. And then go through the steps again.
6. I chose a 400 gig sparsebundle file because the harddrive size was close to 375 gigs.

Hopefully you’ll find as much success as I have with this process.  I’ll be updating this posting soon with actual screenshots to help make it clearer.

Recently I’ve begun to experience corrupted workspaces in my Eclipse IDE.  It generally coinsides to my Tomcat server unable to stop in a timely fashion.  Generally I have to kill Eclipse and restart.  Most of the time the workspace won’t restart.

Steps to recover from a corrupted Eclipse Workspace:

1. Shutdown/kill Eclipse
2. Open up a command prompt or terminal
3. Navigate to your workspace
4. Navigate to /.metadata/.plugins/
5. remove org.eclipse.core.resources (in terminal rm -r -f org.eclipse.core.resources)
6. Navigate to your Eclipse home directory
7. Run eclipse -clean
8. Launch the corrupted workspace
9. Re-import your projects; you should be able to re-import all projects straight from the workspace directory
10. Let the workspace refresh…DONE!

Clearly what this does is remove some Meta Data from the workspace.  By re-importing that Meta Data is restored.  I must say though that this is quit a number of hoops to jump through.  I’m just glad they aren’t firey hoops!

Hopefully someone will find this useful!

I rebooted several times, went to the apple support site, and couldn’t find a single thing.  So, I turned to Google…

Surprisingly enough, there were thousands of hits!  I started from the top, clicked on the first one, and the incantations I had to go through didn’t help.  I started to work my way down the list which had various modifcations to the same original incantations, chants, mumble, mumble with no luck.  So, I did a reset.

That’s all I needed a simple reset.  I suppose I should have thought about that first, but I was convinced that that wouldn’t work.  It’s a good reminder that the simplest approach is generally the best.

On windows:

1. Open a command prompt
2. Navigate to your eclipse.exe location
3. run eclipse -clean

On mac/unix:

1. Open a terminal window
2. Navigation to your Eclipse installation
3. run eclipse -clean

I knew from the start that I had the .NET 2.x framework on my machine already, which was a plus. I also knew that I had to install IIS because the solution is web based. So that was easy enough.

I installed the solution, configured it according to the documentation, and attempted to run it through a browser. <BAM>”Failed to access IIS metabase.” error was triggered. Digging way back into the recesses of my memory, I did recall something about this (something about running a command), but again my memory is slightly outdated. Thankfully having full access to the internet provided me the solution.

c:\<path to .NET Framework version root>\aspnet_regiis -i

Give Credit where Credit is due:

http://blog.devstone.com/Aaron/archive/2006/05/08/1586.aspx

Perhaps I’ve been doing development too long because I could not remember for the life of me how to get around this problem. After a few quick searches I was reminded of the the syntax “\\.\” and this solved my problem. I wanted to remove everything from the root folder of the application.

To remove folders and files:

ex. rd “\\.\c:\Path to long directory” /s /q

To removefiles

ex. del “\\.\c:\Path to file”

Give credit where credit is due:

1. My good friend Jeremy Simmons
2. Microsoft Support
3. Where my memory was jogged: IT News Group.NET which is simply an alias to: microsoft.public.windows.server.general

I’ve been blogging off and on for some time now, but lately have been far too busy to maintain a good blogging habit. Then a friend introduced me to WordPress.

Life has been very busy, interesting and exciting lately, so I will do my best to maintain this blog much more consistently.