… and the Mac OS X laptop (hostname: shiny… I'm sure you can understand why) where I've just been letting things pile up was whining that it didn't have enough disk space left for swap-in-FS. “Lessee… 55 GB drive, 230 MB left; whoops! Oh, hey, look at that… I've got 768 MB of RAM, which means… yeah, my vmmap must be a total trainwreck at the moment. Good on ya, Darwin, for not even remotely crapping the bed. I'm sorry, baby, shiny.”
So I decided it was time to maybe use that “combo” drive in there that, so far, has been used to read maybe five CDs and at most 2 DVDs.
I think I'm pretty much the (er, one of the many, I guess I should say) ideal Mac OS X user. I was, lo these many moons ago (before
Anyway, this means that I have a reasonable amount of trust in Apple's Doing the Right Thing most (definitely not all) of the time, and find it usually saves time to at least give them the chance first. But, in the event that they do screw Fido, I know enough to go figure out what went wrong.
In this circumstance, I've got a bunch of nearly-700 MB files (of… my data, you don't need to know what's in them, shhh) which I would like to put on these 80 minute (700 MB) CD-Rs. The obvious thing to do, taking the computer as a tool that should Just Work, is to put the CD-R in the computer, wait for it to give me a window, copy some files into that window, and eject the CD-R. This premise actually works quite well: Mac OS X auto-detects the blank CD-R, asks if you like to hand it off to the Finder, to iTunes (presumably to copy music from a digital format to an audio CD format), or to another application of your choice. I choose Finder. It goes and allocates a chunk of temp space (I believe this is “create a hybrid ISO, mount it), presents that as if it were the CD-R on the desktop, you copy files, you click the little radioactive symbol (cute; get it, burn?) where there'd usually be an eject icon, and it writes the CD. Even if you play ultra-dumb user and just eject the CD-R after copying things in there, it says, “Sure you don't want to burn that first, sport?” (Yes, it removes the ISO after it's written to CD-R successfully.)
BUT: the Finder has no conception of 80 minute CD-Rs. It just assumes what you've got there is a 74 minute CD-R. So none of my almost-700 MB files will fit. Grr. Enter, again, Mr. Internet, who pointed at hdiutil, which rocks! It's cdrecord, but without the user-abusive interface!
shiny:~/Movies% hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o Kill_[REDACTED]_Vol1.iso Kill_[REDACTED]_Vol1 Creating hybrid image... ............................................................................... shiny:~/Movies% hdiutil burn Kill_[REDACTED]_Vol1.iso Please insert a disc: Preparing data for burn Opening session Opening track Writing track ............................................................................... Closing track Closing session Finishing burn Verifying burn... Verifying ............................................................................... Burn completed successfully ............................................................................... hdiutil: burn: completed
Yeah, it'd be nice if they'd teach the Finder about 80 minute CD-Rs (not necessarily an easy task; I'm not sure you can really get much of a volume notification off a totally blank CD-R, but letting me, the user, who knows how big it is say so would be sufficient and appreciated), but I'd really rather do things this way than through goopy GUI windows, even as relatively inoffensive as the Finder's directory listing windows are.
Oh, and I'm on-call this week, and will probably top, this week, my 92 hour total (that was caused almost entirely by project work; didn't go on-call till Thursday, 28 April) from last week, even taking all of Friday as comp time. So that's why it's been a bit quiet 'round these parts. But, at this point, insomnia's become a way of life again (just like back at swarthmore.edu), so hey, whatever.
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