Grandma's Apple Pie (as dictated by Mum)

Short Crust Pastry

Blend 125g butter, 125g plain flour and 125g self raising flour in a kitchen whiz.

Add 2 tablespoons of caster sugar and blend.

Add 1 egg yolk and combine.

Add 2-3 tablespoons of ice water (until the pastry almost combines)

Press pastry into a ball, then separate into 2/3 and 1/3 disks flattened out.

Wrap in plastic and chill for 60 minutes.

Apple Filling

Peel, core and slice 5-6 large Granny Smith Apples. Add 1 lemon, cut into quarters. Add 1/4 cup water (up to 1/2 cup).

Bring to boil and cook till softened. Add 1/2 cup sugar and stir until dissolved. Leave till cold.

Put pastry in tin and add cold apple, being sure to remove lemon. Cover with pastry. Brush the top with egg white, then sprinkle with caster sugar.

Cook at 220C for 10-15 minutes.

Turn oven down to 180C and cook for 25-20 minutes (ie, make the total oven time about 35 minutes).

Samba NAS and error code -36

I just bought a Seagate GoFlex Home NAS and was wanting to backup a bunch of files to it. I ran their installer, installed all their recommended tools, configured the server, and got a Folder on my desktop representing the "GoFlex Home Public" folder on the server.

The first thing I tried to backup was their installation software, and I got this:

The Finder can’t complete the operation because some data in “some folder” can’t be read or written.

(Error code -36)

It's taken me several hours and lots of unsuccessful internet trawling to finally work out what the workaround is, so I figure its worth a post here where Google can find it for the next guy.

The problem appears to be related to the use of extended attributes, which Snow Leopard loves to attach to files these days. I believe that there is some sort of problem writing files with the com.apple.quarantine attribute to Samba mounted disks. Whilst you can try to use xattr -d to remove those attributes from your files, its tedious and very error prone.

Similarly, I found that sometimes files got stuck on the drive - you couldn't remove them, if you tried (in the terminal) you'd get permission errors. Nothing, sudo included, would allow you to fix the permissions. Yet looking in a terminal window with /bin/ls, they looked fine.

Short answer: Don't use the GoFlex Home Agent to mount network folders.

This always uses the smb: protocol to access the server. Instead, use the "Connect to server..." command on the "Go" menu in the finder, and explicitly specify that you want to use the afp: protocol instead.

Once I switched to using afp:, all of the spurious errors went away. I was able to delete all the temporarily stuck files, and I could copy whatever I liked onto the drive, regardless of the extra attributes.

Strangely enough, when I then tried out the Memeo Backup that Seagate include in the package, it warned me that my backup volume is afp: and I should use smb: instead. Yeah right. However, it looks like one reason they recommend smb: is that the afp: volume didn't seem to auto-mount when I went back in - I had to mount it for them.

Update:

Alternately, you can just wait for Apple to release OSX 10.6.7 which "resolves an issue when transferring files to certain SMB servers". Clearly, this blog post blowing the whole issue wide open had them scared and they realised they had to fix it pronto, or face my scathing posts.

Update 2:

Hmmm, despite it "mostly" working, I keep getting errors from Time Machine saying it was unable to complete the backup - it looks to me like it fails if it has to mount the drive itself.

Moral: do not buy this drive if you want to use it for Time Machine backups.