• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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  Unless otherwise stated, the content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works 3.0 License

  

iGTD is a donation-ware program which implements the ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) philosophy or methodology or what ever it is. However, I didn’t start experimenting with iGTD because it does the whole GTD thing, I started experimenting with it because I wanted a better way of keeping myself organised than a combination of iCal and Stickies! As it turns out though, I quite like the GTD way of doing things. It makes sense to give each task two classifcations, a project to which it belongs, and the context in which the task has to be done. For example, I put an entry into iGTD to remind me to write this post. It is filed under the project “Blog/NosillaCast” and the context “Home”. It’s this ability to see your tasks by both Context and Project that appeals to me.

[tags]iGTD, GTD, Getting Things Done, Apple, OS X.[/tags]

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Tagged with: OS X • review • software • GTD

There was a time when I was one of those freedom of speech nuts who felt I had a right to stick my ore in everywhere, including the comments on other people’s blogs. You know, confusing the non-existent right not to be edited on other people’s websites with the right to free speech. Thankfully I’ve grown up a bit in recent years. Freedom of speech is very important, absolutely vital, but it does not include a right to effectively deface other people’s expressions of their right to free speech with your own rantings. As long as people are free to set up their own blogs you will have true freedom of speech. Don’t just take my word for that. Far wiser people than I have come to the same conclusions. The following articles make interesting reading:

• Dave Winer – The Unedited Voice of a Person
• Joel Spolsky – Learning from Dave Winer (this article sums it up perfectly IMO)

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Tagged with: web site • blogging

I recently watched a documentary about the events of 9-11 which looked at a group of people you never hear talked about any more. I remember them because these people did get mentioned in some early live broadcasts as that terrible day’s events were begining to un-fold. However, in the hours and days that followed they were mentioned less and less. And now, over five years on, they are almost never mentioned at all. They seem to have been wiped from our collective memories of that day and to mention them has almost become a taboo, particularly within America. I am talking about ‘the jumpers’, those people who were trapped above the impact zone of both towers with no hope what-so-ever of escape who appear to have taken their destiny into their own hands, and jumped. The documentary was called “The Falling Man” or something like that, and it was all about a picture of one of these people snapped by a photographer which was given that caption. That one picture came to represent all those who appear to have jumped. The falling man became their icon.

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I was searching for a tutorial on setting up custom global exception handlers in Struts 1 when I came across this fantastic article. If you develop with Struts 1 or are thinking of starting development with Struts 1 you really should read this – Jakarta Struts: Seven Lessons from the Trenches

[tags]Java, Apache, Struts[/tags]

Tagged with: open source • Java • Apache Struts

If you access CVS over SSH you will know that you have to do two things to get it working. Firstly, you have to set the CVS_RSH environment variable to the location of your SSH binary. Secondly you have to use the :ext: scheme for the CVSROOT environment variable (or -d flag). The thing is, there is no place in the :ext: scheme to set a port number! This means that CVS will try to open the SSH connection to the specified server on the standard SSH port. I don’t like running SSHD on the standard port, I much prefer to stick it on a non-standard port, but does that mean I can’t use CVS over SSH? Well, if you leave things to CVS then yes, but luckily OpenSSH is not as retarded as CVS and provides you with a simple mechanism for over-ridding the default port on a per-host basis. The key is to add an entry for the host in question to your ~/.ssh/config file. The sample below tells SSH to use port 123 as the default port when connecting to the server my.machine.ie:

Host my.machine.ie
  Port 123

This will work on Unix, Linux and OS X as well as through Cygwin on Windows.

[tags]SSH, CVS, OpenSSH[/tags]

Tagged with: OpenSSH • source control • CVS • tutorial • open source

A long time ago I discussed an easy way to run Synergy on OS X. This is a good solution if you want to use a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple machines with multiple OSes. However, if all the machines you want to share are Macs there is a better solution, Teleport. Teleport does everything Synergy does and some more besides. To be honest, I’m pretty sure Teleport is just Synergy with some Mac-specific features added in. However, they are good extra features and Teleport had the kind of fantastic user interface Mac users have come to demand. The entire program is contained within a System Preferences preference pane. You just install this pane (by double clicking it) and open up two ports on your firewall and you’re ready to go (you have to do this on all machines that will use Teleport).

The big improvements for me over the Synergy option described in my original post are:

• Simple Drag-and-Drop arrangement of displays
• An actual security model and support for encryption
• The ability to sync clip boards between machines
• The ability to transfer files by dragging them from one machine to another (only works well with small files)
• An overlay is displayed the main display when the mouse and keyboard are ‘teleported’ to another display. This overlay shows the teleporter logo, the name of the computer that the keyboard and mouse have been ‘teleported’ to and an arrow showing where that display is in relation to the master. (This feature alone was enough to convince me to switch.)

Teleport can be easily controlled via a menu bar icon and to really sweeten the deal it’s freeware 🙂

[tags]Teleport, Synergy, OS X[/tags]

Tagged with: OS X • review • software • utility

People didn’t seen averse to my posting links to interesting articles I’d recently read so here’s another batch to tickle your fancy. These range from serious and thought-provoking to playful and humorous.

• We’ll start with a thought-provoking article about Linux. This is one that some of you are bound to disagree with but I think Walt Mossberg is right, Linux is getting better but it’s not yet ready for novice users – Linux’s Free System Is Now Easier to Use, But Not for Everyone
• While we’re on the topic of technology I came across a fantastic essay by one of my hero’s Stephen Fry on smart phones. I had no idea Stephen was such a technophile! This is a very long but a very well written, thoughtful, and humorous look at why none of the supposed iPhone killers actually are iPhone killers – Device and Desires
• Before we more on to other matters here’s one more technology article. One I find rather humorous. According to Steven Frank from Panic Software Macs make better Windows machines than regular PCs! – Macs Really Do Run Windows Better
• Now on to a totally different subject, light pollution. I came across a fantastic article about it in the New Yourker this week. That article is long, but very well written and touches off all the issues including energy savings, the ways in which much modern ‘security’ lighting actually helps the criminals and of course the wonders of the night sky which we are depriving our selves of needlessly – The Dark Side
• Finally, some light entertainment in the form of a fantastic parody of the last Harry Potter book – Potterdammerung

I have been an iLife user for years but hadn’t previously bought iWork because it was lacking a spreadsheet program. When iWork ’08 came out with Numbers I decided the time was right to give it a go. Just to put things into perspective, at work I use Microsoft Office (the Mac version), and at home I’ve been using OpenOffice and NeoOffice. OpenOffice and NeoOffice always strike me a striving to emulate MS Office, iWork doesn’t do this. It sets out to do Presentations, Documents and Spreadsheets in a simple and accessible way. It’s refreshing to use an office package with a simple interface instead of the usual glut of buttons everywhere. I’ll be writing about Pages and Numbers in the future but today I want to talk about the oldest of the iWork applications, the presentation app Keynote. This review is based on my experiences creating and then presenting a talk about science to students at my old secondary school the week before last. You can read about how I got on here see a PDF of my slides here.

[tags]Apple, iWork, KeyNote[/tags]

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Tagged with: tutorial • OS X • software • office suite

Note: This article was written for, and first published in, The Big Bang, the news letter of Astro2, the Astronomy & Physics Society of NUI Maynooth.

This is a very nice time of the year to get into some practical astronomy. The nights are getting longer and it’s getting dark earlier and earlier so you don’t have to stay up late to enjoy the wonders of the night sky. A few months from now the treasure’s of the winter sky will make their appearance but until then we have a last chance to admire the stars of our summer skies before they are gone for the year.

In particular this is a great time to enjoy the constellations that straddle the Milky-Way galaxy. Even with the most basic of binoculars scanning the band of the Milky-Way is a fascinating experience. So many stars all heaped on top of each other. I can’t help but wonder how many intelligent aliens are staring back at our little sun from those tiny pin-pricks of light.

While you’re scanning the Milky-Way with your binoculars you may as well have a go at tracking down some of the nice open clusters in the area. Probably the best of these is the double cluster in Perseus closely followed in my opinion by the V-shaped M39 at the top of Cygnus. Also worth tracking down is M34 also in Perseus and M52 in near-by Cepheus.

After you’ve tracked down those clusters you could also track down a must larger group of stars, the Andromeda galaxy just a little lower down in the sky at the top of the constellation of Andromeda. If you’re in a particularly dark location you can also try for the pinwheel galaxy, M33, in Triangulum. This is a huge galaxy that is so large on the sky it’s almost impossible to see in a telescope but can be quite easily seen with a pair of binoculars if the sky is dark enough.

Finally, over these months Mars will start to rise earlier and earlier in the sky as it charges towards us for it’s closest approach around Christmas time.

It’s not long ago that I posted about Apple not patching their SAMBA implementation for months after a patch became available. Now there is a Quick Time vulnerability in the wild that was apparently reported to Apple about a year ago. I constantly give off to Microsoft for this kind of carry-on, so, each time I catch Apple at it I’m going to highlight it too. The Mac user experience is currently fantastic but Apple’s continued complacency about security is putting that experience at serious risk. How bad will things have to get before Apple cop on to themselves?

For more details on this vulnerability (which affects Windows too) check out this Mac World article

[tags]Apple, Security, QuickTime[/tags]

Tagged with: OS X • vulnerability • QuickTime

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