The age of iCloud is rapidly approaching. We MobileMe users have an easy migration path, and until next summer to migrate. The idea with iCloud is that you need log in to only one service for everything. This makes sense: the idea is that you have everything bound to a single identity. You log in to that and you get all your email, calendar, backups, media, apps etc. Shiny. Except…

The MobileMe-iCloud migration FAQ makes it clear that accounts can’t be merged. This is Apple’s historical policy – whatever opinion one has about it, it’s not unexpected. Generally the opinion one has about it is that it’s somewhat lame, especially when the merging of iTunes and MobileMe is the entire *point* of iCloud (other than gaining distance from the now-embarrassing MobileMe brand and using the word ‘cloud’ in something).

The trick is that they also don’t make it clear whether you can do a ‘manual’ merge. If I close my MobileMe account, I don’t know whether that will make my email address available to attach to my iCloud account. I’ve just spoken to Apple’s MobileMe support and they don’t know either, though iCloud is still in developer beta so it’s likely they just haven’t been given details at the consumer support level yet. I have previously investigated the possibility of moving my iTunes purchases’ “association” to the MobileMe account. Apparently that can’t be done either.

So now it seems that MobileMe users in this situation might end up having to manually switch between accounts depending on whether they want to send email or watch a movie right now, or sacrifice their existing MobileMe address and pick a new one for iCloud. This is really my main concern: I’ve used that address on so many sites I have lost track, so it’s really not feasible to chase them all down and change them. More to the point, I don’t want to and I shouldn’t have to.

My hope is that there’s a gap in my knowledge and some path will be open to merging or migration. It seems a little unfortunate that when Apple are finally starting up an online service that is free and, hopefully, reliable, they are causing more headaches for the people who paid to support its overpriced, unreliable predecessor.


perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LC_CTYPE = "UTF-8",
LANG = "en_GB.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").


There are a variety of causes – usually locales not being generated properly or incorrect environment variables.

Lately I’ve been getting these a lot of these, but only some of the time. After some messing around I eventually discovered the problem wasn’t on the server itself. The problem only occurs when I’m logged in over SSH from a Mac. The default sshd on Debian copies LANG and LC_* variables from the client. The LC_CTYPE variable was set on my Mac, apparently by default, to “UTF-8″. While this seems to work on MacOS X, it’s not a valid value for Linux.

The easiest solution was just to add the following to my ~/.profile on the Mac:


export LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8


That fixes it, and doesn’t appear to cause harm on the Mac.

You need to stop saying things where real people might come across them, and then you need to crawl quietly back under your rock.

Good arsehole.

My desktop box at work runs Debian, and I wanted the same behaviour there to stop me getting split-brain and dribbling a lot. There was a time when a quick change in xorg.conf to ZAxisMapping "5 4" would do this, but it’s not so the modern age of HIDs and evdevs. After a bit of messing about I figured out how to flip the scroll wheel. This will probably work for Ubuntu too.

• Open the file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf
• Look for the section with MatchIsPointer "on". It’s at the top by default.
• Add this line:
  Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 5 4 6 7 8"

Add more buttons if you need them for your mouse. The section should look like:

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "evdev pointer catchall"
MatchIsPointer "on"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver "evdev"
Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 5 4 6 7 8"
EndSection

That’s it! Just restart X.