Ishida Tech Solutions, Ltd.
The personal and professional home of Brad Ishida

When I create cross-platform children’s educational games on CD-ROM, it’s important to be able to fit a Mac version and a PC version of the game on 1 CD-ROM. The best way to do this is to create a hybrid CD-ROM that will work on either Mac or PC. If you can keep much of the “bulk” of the game in external folders (such as folders of audio files), then these folders only need to exist once on the CD-ROM and both sides can access them–saving lots of CD-ROM space in the process.

To create a cross-platform CD-ROM, you will need a Mac and some CD burning software that supports the hybrid format. Roxio’s Toast is your best bet. Toast has supported this feature for many versions. This example will use Toast Titanium 8 on Mac OS 10.5.3.

Step 1

Create a new Mac disk partition. Use the disk utility found in Applications->Utilities. You will put all the Mac files on this partition including any of the folders you intend to share with the PC side (like the “sound files” folder). When you choose a size for this partition, you need to stay under the physical limit of your CD-ROM, but since the Mac side will house the shared data, it can take the lion’s share of the space.

Step 2

Create a folder to store the PC files you plan on burning to CD-ROM. Determine what you want the PC side to be able to share on the Mac side and then create an alias (Command+L) on the Mac side of each file/folder you want to share. Copy the alias to the PC folder. Make sure the alias has the exact same name as the real file/folder–to do this, you may need to remove the word “alias” from it since Mac OS automatically inserts that on a new alias. Delete the aliases on the Mac side.

Step 3

Open Toast and click on the “Custom Hybrid” format on the left side. If you do not see this as an option, go to your Toast preferences and “enable legacy formats”. You will see 2 buttons–1 to select Mac files and 1 to select ISO 9660 files. Click the “Select Mac” button and then drag-and-drop the mounted disk image you created in step 1. Click the “Select ISO” button and then drag-and-drop the contents of the folder that contains your prepared PC files and the aliases to the files/folders on the Mac side. On the PC side, make sure the “Resolve Aliases” box is checked on. On the Settings tab, you will probably need to specify “Allow Macintosh Names” unless all of your PC files and the shared files/folders are 8 characters or fewer. This setting is basically just letting you use long file names that are supported by modern versions of Windows anyway.

Step 4

Burn your CD-ROM and then insert it in a Mac and insert it in a PC and make sure you only see what you would expect. The significant part is that the PC side that has the shared files/folders–the aliases look like real files and folders and the sharing of that data is completely seamless.

This fix was performed using sendmail 8.13.8, FreeBSD 6.2 and listserv classic 15.5.

L-Soft makes one of the oldest email list management tools there is–listserv. In fact, the word “listserv” is often improperly used to refer to any software that sends email to lists. Similarly to how one might ask for a “Kleenex” or have something “Xeroxed”–listserv has become a generic term for all email list tools whether they have anything to do with L-Soft or not.

If you want to use sendmail as your MTA (or you need to because the L-Soft MTA is not offered on your platform), you will need to recompile sendmail to handle the listserv probe that handles bounces so they can be caught and logged by listserv. There was a time when somebody named Valdis Kletnieks was distributing an actual patch file, but I haven’t seen an updated version floating around the web for a while. He should certainly be given credit for the hard part of this fix. You could use the information below to make your own patch if you would rather manage it that way.

The patch makes a couple small changes to alias.c and then you’re ready to recompile. You can grab a copy of my alias.c file here.

If you’re using FreeBSD, you’ll likely find your alias.c file here:
/usr/src/contrib/sendmail/src/alias.c

After you get your updated alias.c file in place, you’re almost ready to recompile. You need to pass a LISTSERV flag to the c compiler. One way to do this is to add it to the Makefile in /usr/src/usr.sbin/sendmail/Makefile. Find the CFLAGS variable in the Makefile and then add this line:
CFLAGS+= -DLISTSERV

You can see a copy of my altered Makefile here.

Now recompile sendmail:
1) cd /usr/src/lib/libsmutil
2) make depend && make all
3) cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/sendmail
4) make depend && make all install

Restart sendmail and you’re ready to go:
1) cd /etc/mail
2) make stop
3) make start

Welcome to my new site! My name is Brad Ishida and I like tech–a lot. Whether it be business or personal, my life tends to center around technology in one way or another. Creating a site to manage both sides only seems to make sense.

The first order of business for the new site was to create a suitable WordPress theme. My goal is to maintain a high information density for this site, so a minimalist theme seems appropriate. You may notice the lack of graphical components to this design. This is in stark contrast to Programming Art–my other company’s website. I’m sure the theme will continue to evolve, but at this time, I’m really enjoying the fluid layout that should accommodate any browser size and the nearly instant load time.

There are some new words on the About page. Since I went to all the trouble to talk about myself in third person for an entire page, it would be great if you went there now and read it–thanks.

Email? One nice thing about having a new domain name like this one is not having to deal with 1000’s of spam messages every day. Even though SpamAssassin does a fine job at keeping the trash sorted, it’s still a chore to scan for those rare false-positives before deleting 5000 messages at a time. I’m sure the lack of spam is a result of not having any email addresses published on this site to be crawled. So… let’s see how long this holds them off–if you want to contact me, use my last name as the first part of the address and use the domain of this website as the last part.