November 18, 2005
In which punk rock is whatever we made it to be
After reading the ugly presentation on Why I hate apache, I felt compelled to clean up my various httpd.conf files, in the process fixing punkrock.virji.net, which rips off the famous d boon sticker and plays The Minutemen's sentimental "History Lesson Part II" from "Double Nickels on the Dime". As much as the song brings tears to my eyes, the album title (and the awesome diy cover photograph) makes me chuckle. The same image figures into The Shins' video for "New Slang", which sweetly pays tribute to this album (and others). Yes, the punkrock url has been broken for about three years. I finally fixed it. And I really cannot stand apache config syntax, but give me an httpd.conf over a sendmail.cf any day.... Read more
November 07, 2005
In which we have a photofilesystem
tuxmann has released 1.0 of flickrfs, a FUSE-based representation of flickr, the (social) photo-storage service.... Read more
November 02, 2005
In which multicast is our king
Stuart Cheshire, designer of Zero-Configuration Networking (that's RFC 3927 to you IETF fans out there) quoted Antoine de Saint-Exupéry today with respect to protocol design: "You know that you have finished not when there is nothing left to add to the protocol, but when there is nothing left to take away from the protocol." Saint-Exupéry was an aviator, and I suspect that he was referring specifically to aircraft design when he said that "La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à enlever." I think the same applies to bicycles!... Read more
October 19, 2005
In which I love it when a plan(imeter) comes together.
The ACME Laboratories BART map is cool; the Metro map is cooler. As is the planimeter, which gives rise to a miserable play on words. These do not work in Safari.... Read more
October 12, 2005
In which vector graphics appear
Eyebeam research (great name, that!) have added vector-graphics support for Google Maps. Their proof-of-concept application is a New York City Subway map. I like this better than the transit-maps-on-ipod widgets of a few months ago: different medium, yes, but easier to design programmatically, and more functional ( alpha portability, I suppose).... Read more
September 17, 2005
In which it is to larf, nay to hoot an' holler
Thanks to the OSX Password Generator (also available as a Dashboard widget): classicist516696945*woolgrowing The mostly-undocumented OSX builtin is actually FIPS-181-compliant. You can find it via System Preferences -> Accounts -> Change Password -> (click on the key to the right of New Password).... Read more
August 15, 2005
In praise of screenshots
change the default screenshot dump type by using a command-line: defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_format \ && killall SystemUIServer where image_format is any of png pdf jpg tiff. Pre-Tiger (10.4.x), the default was pdf; Tiger defaults to png. You must restart the SystemUIServer to see the changes. Screenshots are cool.... Read more
August 02, 2005
In which changes are at hand
Apple introduces its first multi-button mouse in the era of OSX, and Greg points out that Tiger supports remapping the capslock key to control (!!): System Preferences -> Keyboard and Mouse -> Modifier Keys (irritatingly, a non-navigable button: one needs a mouse to activate it!).... Read more
July 22, 2005
In which life is delicious
After using Delicious Monster for the past year or so, I find the lack of feature development somewhat frustrating. Why can't I export to formats other than text (and even that export does'n't allow me to choose delimiters, CSV format, etc. ...) The delicious guys have posted some cool new third-party stuff on their blog, such as the DeliciTunes, but really this should be integrated into the app. I'm dumping some of my DVD to hard drives, and they are now in brown paper bags awaiting transit to Amoeba or something. I'd post the list online, but ca'n't get DeliciousExporter to work with DeliciousMonster 1.5 and Tiger [ insert sad 'smiley' face here ].... Read more
July 18, 2005
In which I hack
Over the past few days, I have been hacking a lot, mostly for work, but also a little for non-work. I have discovered or re-discovered many power-user bits of zsh, my interactive shell of choice. In between long stretches of late-night firefighting (routers melting, electrical systems failing, infrastructure subsystems behaving oddly), I am moving some of my little webapps from their miserable perl or python existences into a world of ruby. Part of this is sped along by nice interfaces such as the flickr API and instiki (wow, what a great name for a wiki!). Another really nice thing is that, barring configuration parameters, the code works seamlessly on either the powerbook (for development) or the linux or g4 servers. Rich Kilmer blogs about some hacks to get ruby working more smoothly under tiger.... Read more
July 14, 2005
In which we annotate Google search results via del.icio.us
The Ponderer has a nice Greasemonkey script to annotate and bookmark google search results; the script checks for feeds from the resulting pages, and also summons lists of related tags from del.icio.us.... Read more
July 07, 2005
In which an interface cheers me
The two-step login for a Bank of America ATM has long irked me: the first screen asked which language I wanted, and the second asked me to enter the PIN. I suggested that the two screens be combined. Several years later, voilà:... Read more
June 20, 2005
In which we are as different as chalk and cheese
The list of apps I added to my powerbook after a clean install of Tiger: Acquisition Adium Camino Conversation IRC client Delicious Library to catalogue my books and DVDs (the music is already managed through iTunes, natch). This cost money. DivX 5.2.1 DVDBackup, fair right usage and all that. I prefer having my movies on one disk, not four hundred, thankyouverymuch. flickrExporter plugin for iPhoto flickrUploader Growl Notifier iLife '05: this cost money. iPassConnect KisMac, a port of the excellent BSD wireless-security tool kismet. MacStumbler, a very handy tool for finding wireless access points, especially when iPass is not an option. NeoOfficeJ NetNewsWireLite, despite the RSS integration in Safari osx2x, the awesome little widget that forwards X connections between boxen Quicksilver ß42. If this cost money, I'd pay for it. SSHKeychain, painless key management TomatoTorrent, even though the official BitTorrent client supports retries and resumption of partial downloads, this has a better logo ;-) VideoLan Client (the beta: the head does not run on 10.4)... Read more
May 21, 2005
How we read today
An ugly chart, which shows that you, d. readers, are using hip browsers.... Read more
May 03, 2005
HOWTO: install a personal cert for Mail.app
After starting on a quest to sign my personal email messages, I found this three-step HOWTO at MacMerc. Thawte has a clear signup process, with well-presented information about security and why they ask the questions they do. They also allow you to customize the questions for password recovery, which I liked a lot. Thawte then send a special URL to the email address specified for the certificate. Once you follow the instructions within, another browser window opens. This leads you through the steps to requesting the actual certificate: you need to choose the type X.509 cert: select "Netscape Navigator / Communicator"; neither Apple OSX nor Mail.app are an option. You will receive a second email message when the cert is ready. Returning to thawte's web site, I clicked on the certificate name and then on "Fetch" caused Safari to download the cert (via a PC Application named "deliver.exe" -- the most curious part of this process, since the cert is all about security, and sending me a small, unexpected, and anonymously-named app to "deliver" something onto my computer is counter-intuitive. This finally stuck it into my Keychain. The coolest part comes now: I opened a new mail message in Mail.app, and voilà!, an icon appears at the bottom-right of the addressing pane, and I can send signed email messages.... Read more
December 28, 2004
Flash fun
Thanks to the Deadly Dragon Sound System, I discovered the dub flash games at Infinite Wheel. Whee! And while we're talking of Flash and accents, how 'bout the blaspheming Scots in Chunk Ideas' Snowball?... Read more
December 17, 2004
dust my lemon lies
Wow. Erik pointed out that fraser speirs wrote an iPhoto plugin for uploading to flickr. Hot damn. And something at flickr or something in Safari has changed, because I can now use their web-based Flash tools to organize my photos.... Read more
December 05, 2004
flickr rss feeds r00lz
Man, I love flickr's rss feeds. I subscribe to barcelona, graffiti ("Photos tagged with graffiti", hahaha), and myriad others. Delicious.... Read more
November 23, 2004
ESP Game
From the ESP Game FAQ: Q: Does the ESP game work in Mac OS and Linux? A: Not always. The ESP game is written as a Java applet, and the versions of Java included in some of the browsers for Mac OS or Linux are slightly incompatible with the current implementation of the game. We are working hard to make the game available everywhere.... Read more
November 16, 2004
November 15, 2004
Always too much to not read.
sage, a firefox plugin, vs. NetNewsWire, a beautiful cocoa app (free/shareware). Fortunately, each can read the other's OPML file.... Read more
