August 13, 2004

Telus Blocking Port 80

So I was trying to setup a webdav bookmark syncing for this extension to Firefox with my home machine as the webdav server. It was working fine at home but I couldn't reach my home server from anywhere else but at home. So I was checking my ipfw rules and apache settings but they all seemed fine. Then I though, what if Telus is blocking port 80 now. So i moved apache to a non 80 port and it worked fine! A little googling confirmed my suspicion that Telus has started blocking 80 (and 25 aparently) but only on dynamic ip customers (ie consumer not business clients).

Posted by bforsyth at 09:11 AM | Comments (4)

August 16, 2004

Pretty Pictures

I really need to spend some time looking into this stuff when I have more time.

Posted by bforsyth at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2004

Mozilla Firefox Tips

I use Firefox as my primary browser and here are some useful links and infonuggets for firefox.

Synchronize Bookmarks with this extension using ftp or webdav.

Have an RSS news aggregator in your browser with Sage. Still undecided if this is better than a standalone aggregator.

Ctrl-L takes you to the location field and ctrl-k to the search bar.

If you are curious about what is in your cache enter about:cache in the location bar.

Posted by bforsyth at 09:26 PM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2004

Move Over Slashdot

I've found a new favourite geek website,
http://www.engadget.com/

Posted by bforsyth at 08:25 AM | Comments (2)

September 12, 2004

OS X Disk Usage Visualization

I keep running out of disk space and I like to get an idea of what is taking up space so I can prioritize burning/deleting. I had used some graphical tools before, such as omni's DiskSweeper , but it isn't free and I don't have the money to spend on this kind of tool when I can do the equivalent on the command line for free (du -kb | sort -n > diskusage.txt). This is fine for smallish directories but I find it doesn't work so well on a 60 GB volume. I did another search for graphical tools and found a sweet free one called Disk Inventory X. It works well and does everything I need it to do so I'm happy.

Posted by bforsyth at 01:29 AM | Comments (0)

Thunderbird and Procmail Filtering

I have been using procmail to filter my mail into folders depending on the sender etc. I also use Mozilla's Thunderbird as my email client. I was getting frustrated that procmail would filter messages to separate folders but Thunderbird wouldn't highlite the folders as containing new messages. Well I found a solution to this problem here.
Its as simple as creating one file and adding one line to this file.

Posted by bforsyth at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2004

Apple packaging


We just received our aiport express (sarah doesn't like wires around the apartment) and I'm pretty impressed with the packaging for it, which you can see here. Similar to the packaging of the iPod, and it even smells nice.

Posted by bforsyth at 12:23 PM | Comments (2)

September 17, 2004

Sage CSS hacking

I have been using Sage as an RSS agregator for a while now and I was getting a bit tired of the default presentation style. I found one that advertised itself as a Safari RSS look-alike. It was pretty close but they had copied the default Sage css file which has a bug in the link colouring in the text of news items. This made links white against an almost white background - not easy to read.

So I started poking around in the CSS file, and I'm no expert with CSS, but I managed to fix the link problem and clean up the spacing a bit. The results are here. This .tgz file has 3 files in it, two gifs for the title backgrounds and the css file. These guys have to be in the same directory, I have mine in the chrome directory of my firefox profile (no idea if this is a good place for them or not, but it works). Then you need to go to the options in Sage, tell it to use a custom CSS file and point it to my modified CSS file.

Posted by bforsyth at 12:35 AM | Comments (2)

Airport Express Weirdness

Having spent a day playing around with the settings of the Airport Express (AE) and how it fits into my home network I have noticed one possible bug. There seems to be a problem when using the default host option (to forward all requests to a machine behind the AE's NAT) and changing the settings of the AE. The host that is the 'default host' needs to have a static ip, the AE leaves the range from x.x.x.200-254 non-dhcp'd so you can assign static ips to machines in that range. I did that for my server and hit the 'update' button in the airport admin utility. As far as I know this button updates the settings of the AE and restarts it. After I did this I couldn't connect to anything from my server, but I could ping telus's dns server and the telus router infront of the AE. So i tried switching my server to use DHCP and everything worked again. Suspsicous, I turned off all firewall etc on my server and tried assigning it the 'deafult host' static ip again. Still no network. Tried a differet static ip thanthe 'default host' one. It worked. So I tried restarting the AE with the restart button in the airport admin program and set my ip back to the 'default host' one again. Now everything worked as expected. So I suspect that the update button isn't doing everything it should be doing.

Posted by bforsyth at 01:22 PM | Comments (1)

September 24, 2004

Satellite Image view

Keyhole

This is for windows only but it is interesting. See vancouver at 2 foot resolution. Sarah indirectly works for this company.

Posted by bforsyth at 05:11 PM | Comments (1)

October 05, 2004

Blog spam

I read the antiflux log comments rss feed (http://log.antiflux.org/comments.xml) and I have noticed that there is a lot of spam showing up on it. Hopefully some of you read my log once in a while and will read this email. The 'system' has MT-Blacklist installed on antiflux, which can block and remove existing spam, but it isn't turned on by default. Here's how to turn it on for your blog:

go to http://log.antiflux.org/mt-blacklist.cgi and log in with your blog id and password. Then click on the "Configure" button just below the title "MT-Blacklist" and between the "Publish" and "About" buttons. Once the configure page comes up check the "Blocking spam Comments" checkbox and save your configuration. Then presto! no more blog comment spam (or at least significantly reduced spam).

Posted by bforsyth at 08:42 AM | Comments (1)

October 27, 2004

Distributed compiling

It appears that the distributed compiling apple uses in xcode is based on a free tool, distcc. Now I wonder if I can use that nice gui distcc monitor with xcode...

Posted by bforsyth at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2004

Palm Desktop for OS X

Having just aquired a new palm zire 72 I installed the latest palm desktop. Most people know that palm desktop for the mac sucks in comparison to the windows version which plain sucks, so the mac version is a sucky version of something already sucky. Just how much does palm care about OS X palm desktop. I was adding a new field to the contact info template and one of the things you can do is add a button to open a url in cyber dog, apple's web browser for OpenDoc. Raise your hand if you have even heard of OpenDoc? I have but I'm a Mac geek. OpenDoc was a component object model that died a slow and ugly death like the Taligent/Pink project that it came from. It was ahead of its time. Anyways, the point is that it hasn't been around since '96/97, but Palm Desktop still refers to it, P.O.S!!

Posted by bforsyth at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)

February 07, 2005

Palm Wi-Fi

Palm and Wi-Fi don't mix very well right now. I recently bought a Palm Zire 72 and a Sandisk wi-fi card. The wi-fi card claims compatibility with the Zire 71, and since the Zire 72 is just a rev. up from the 71, and has a SDIO card as the 71 does, I expected the card to be compatible with the 72. WRONG. After having problems getting the card to work I sent a support request to Sandisk. They say that the card (model number SDWSDB-000-A10M) is only compatible with the Zire 71, there is an unspecified hardware incompatibility with the Zire 72.

I expected the SDIO port standard to be pretty well defined, but I suppose it isn't. My guess is that the Zire 72 uses a different SDIO controller than the 71 and either there is a hardware incompatibility between this controller and the Sandisk card or Sandisk is too lazy to write a new driver for the new controller (if that is infact Sandisk's responsibility and not Palm's). It does seem just a little suspicious that now the Palm has their own wi-fi card a previously compatible 3rd party wi-fi card is not compatible with a new Palm model.

I wonder which controller the many PocketPC devices that are compatible with the Sandisk wi-fi card use. I wonder if there is linux for Palm and if they have made any drivers for SDIO wi-fi cards.

No matter what, I'm not very happy with Palm and Sandisk and I think the next PDA type thing I purchase will most likely be a Symbian powered 'smart' phone.

Posted by bforsyth at 07:05 PM | Comments (1)

April 19, 2007

Apple Interface Consistency

I was using iTunes today and something bothered me so much that I had to write about it somewhere. Apple is well known for their human interface guidelines (HIG) and one of the key elements of these guidelines is consistency. Everyone knows that cmd-c is for copy, cmd-v for paste etc. Well recently Apple has been slowly starting to ignore its own guidlines, especially in iTunes. It looks different than everything else, has its own controls etc.

The thing that bothered me today was what cmd-f does in iTunes compared to pretty much every other application on OS X. To me cmd-f means "Find" and I'm pretty sure pre-cover flow iTunes it meant find in iTunes too. However, now that we have this shiny cover flow thing everyone obviously wants to see it in fullscreen mode so obviously cmd-f should put you into fullscreen mode. Now find has ben relegated to cmd-opt-f. Personally I think it should be the other way around. Oh well, Steve knows best. I had better go find some koolaid to drink.

Posted by bforsyth at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)