The Author – Bart Busschots
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Jun
17
Bwana – Easier to Read Man Pages on OS X
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on June 17, 2007 | 1 Comment
Bwana is a very simple app that allows Safari to render Unix Manual Pages (man pages). The man pages are rendered as HTML making them easier to read with the addition of some simple text formating and allowing easy linking to other related man pages. Installation is also trivial, just download, expand, and drag and drop into the Applications->Utilities folder. Then, by some OS X black magic URLs of the form man:[command] (e.g. the man page for the ls command will be found at the URL man:ls) will start working in Safari. It really is that simple! To make things even sweeter this app is free and open source (released under the MIT License). There really isn’t anything more to say about this app, it’s yet another example of a small, simple, OS X app that does one thing perfectly.
[tags]man pages, OS X, Open Source, Freeware, Safari[/tags]
Jun
15
Hosting365 – I Think I’ve Finally Had Enough
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 15, 2007 | 32 Comments
Another day and another Hosting365 disaster. You can read the ongoing saga on their outages blog. No one can deny that Hosting365 are expensive. You pay above the odds for them but previously my rational for doing so was:
- They are local – so fast from within Ireland
- They are local – so tech support during MY business hours not American business hours
- Good customer care
- It’s nice to support Irish companies
However, there is only so long that you can put up with ever poorer customer support and a sub-standard service before you start loosing customers and your hair! I am now actively looking for a new hosting provider.
[tags]Web Hosting, Hosting365[/tags]
Jun
13
WWDC 2007 – Bit of Damp Squib Really
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 13, 2007 | 2 Comments
Some of the Leopard stuff was cool, but much of it was old news, and the iPhone bit was down-right insulting. Not really a WWDC that will stand out as one of the greats. In fact, things even went backwards on one front, ZFS does not appear to be in Leopard at all, not even as an option, despite having been in some of the earlier betas! However, at least one of my predictions came true, Leopard has a new look. Just not sure that’s all good news, that transparent menu bar looks terrible!
[tags]Apple, Steve Jobs, WWDC, Leopard, iPhone[/tags]
Jun
8
Yahoo Messagenger – JUST DON’T!
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 8, 2007 | 2 Comments
Unless you are sure you want your system infested with useless bloat for ever more don’t install Yahoo Messenger! I did yesterday and now I’m really regretting it. For a start it wedges itself in everywhere. It runs a process to harass you into setting yahoo as your home page and as your default search. It wedges it’s tool bars into all your browsers and generally just puts itself everywhere it can. As a Mac user I’m not used to this kind of carry-on so it annoys me. However, my annoyance has only just begun. I had to install it to test something in work. My tests being over I went to un-install it today. I went to control panel->add remove programs and found it. Clicked uninstall. It warned me it would need a reboot to complete the uninstall and asked me if I was OK with that. I gave my consent and on it went. It took disturbingly little time and then my machine rebooted. Three guesses what started up on reboot all by itself without my ever asking it to. You got it, Yahoo Messenger! To make things worse, it is now gone from the control panel, and there is no uninstaller for it in it’s start menu folder. The uninstaller un-installed itself but not the program. Windows users need to stand up to this kind of rubbish software and stop using it. TBH I think this behavior would be classed as spy-ware and is probably illegal in the US. I hope someone takes these muppets to court. Enough is enough!
[tags]Yahoo Messenger, Spy-ware[/tags]
Update: It gets even worse! Fresh off the presses of US-CERT we have news of a publicly available exploit for the buggering thing. Just what I need, some randomers executing arbitrary code on my machine via an app I can’t un-install!
Jun
8
WWDC 2007 – My Hopes & Dreams
Filed Under Computers & Tech on | 3 Comments
I’d normally do a prediction post coming up to a major Mac event but TBH I have very few predictions to make this time. Lets face it, this WWDC is all about Leopard and the iPhone, there’s not going to be time for much else. So, instead I want to just outline my wish-list for Leopard and just mention the iPhone briefly.
[tags]Apple, Steve Jobs, WWDC[/tags]
May
31
Two Titans Meet – Gates & Jobs On The Same Stage At The Same Time
Filed Under Computers & Tech on May 31, 2007 | Leave a Comment
The All Things Digital conference has always been able to draw the big names. However, this year they have out-done themselves. Bill Gates with Steve Jobs in one interview. I’m very jealous of Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast who was there live! (she took the picture opposite). I was talking to her over ICQ/AIM/.Mac earlier today and she was very impressed by the interview. She felt she was present at a historic event. I think she’s right. However, the great news is that the good people at the the D conference have put the videos on the web so we can all share in this great event!
The whole interview is well worth watching but it is long (7 parts averaging about 15 mins plus a prologue running at about 8 mins). What impressed me most is how well Bill Gates came across. At the time of the Vista launch I saw him do quite a few media interviews and he never really came across very well. Today he was relaxed, witty and interesting …. though his voice still reminds me of Kermit the frog 🙂
One other point to note is that I think Steve gave us a hint as to at least one thing we’ll see at the WWDC, the next generation of .Mac. I sure hope I picked up that hint right because .Mac is well over-due a major over-haul (see .Mac – The Devil is in the Implementation).
[tags]Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, All Things Digital, .Mac[/tags]
May
31
What Happened to Journalistic Standards on the Web?
Filed Under Security, Computers & Tech on | 3 Comments
It’s hot news in the mac world today that Apple have not yet patched Windows File Sharing (Samba) on the very latest OS X. This is unforgivable since they released a security update this week and a fixed version of Samba has been available for weeks now. That was the blog post I wanted to write this evening but before I did I wanted to read the actual Symantec advisory that I see quoted all over the place. Surely, if there was any proper journalism on the web all online articles referencing the advisory should contain a link to it so people can read it themselves? None that I have found do. So, I went to the Symantec site to see if I could find it there. Not a hope. I used Google to try to find the original everyone is quoting. No joy. I don’t feel comfortable reporting on what Symantec supposedly said in an advisory based on second-hand information. Others on the web don’t seem to be as picky as me. Shame really.
[tags]journalism, standards, symantec, usability, Mac World[/tags]
May
22
A Non-Scientific Contrast of PHP & Perl
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on May 22, 2007 | 11 Comments
It’s no secret that I don’t like PHP. In fact, I dedicated an entire article to explaining just why I don’t like PHP last year. Recently I’ve found another reason to dislike PHP. The GD image manipulation libraries SUCK! They are so insanely and needlessly complex. All I wanted to do was write a simple command-line script to read in a folder and edit each JPEG image in the folder to resize it, insert a Creative Commons logo, and the URL to my website. I’m currently working on uploading some of my photography to my website and doing this manually for all my photos is just not an option, it would take forever! So, I started writing a PHP script because I know PHP can do these things thanks to the DB libs. That turned out to be a bad idea so I ran home to Perl 🙂
[tags]Perl, PHP, GD Libs, Image Magick[/tags]
May
21
Would Somebody Think of the Color Blind People!
Filed Under Software Development, Computers & Tech on May 21, 2007 | 3 Comments
If you design stuff please bear in mind that not all of us are blessed with perfect color vision. When you’re developing your color schemes please make sure they are still readable to the color bind. Don’t worry, it’s trivially easy to test this with a great free tool called Color Oracle. BTW, even if you don’t have an actual need for this tool it’s still fun to play with 🙂
What’s really nice about this tool is that it’s available for Mac, Linux and Windows so everyone can play! I’ve only tested the Mac version and it works like a charm. It adds a simple menu bar icon to select which kind of color blindness to simulate. When you select a scheme your screen colors change so simulate what a color blind person would see. I really like that the change is very temporary, just click the mouse of press a key and everything goes back to normal. You can also set up hot-keys so you can very quickly check your interface works for color blind people with just the press of a single button. There is no excuse now for developing an interface that color blind people can’t use!
[tags]color blindness, software, freeware, OS X, Windows, Linux[/tags]
May
17
Microsoft Start to Crack
Filed Under Computers & Tech on May 17, 2007 | 4 Comments
It’s no secret that I’m no Microsoft fan. Their business practices annoy me and the way they treat their customers like criminals makes my blood boil. I mean really, what exactly is the genuine advantage consumers like you and I get from ‘Genuine Advantage’? I’m a big fan of open source. I like the openness and the community and I think that approach leads to better software in general. Having said that I’m no Linux zealot. I do use it both at work and at home and do run it regularly as both a desktop and a server OS. However, I’m also a dedicated Mac user. One thing I do not own is a Windows machine. Linux and OS X all the way for me!
This week Microsoft provided me with yet another reason to hate them. They are now threatening to sue open source users for supposedly using their patents. Leaving aside the fact that I find software idea patents objectionable and a bad idea and that I think the American patent system is a disaster, this all strikes me as a great big load of FUD. MS are not naming the patents. They are just making threats. They are trying to use fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) to scare people back to MS software.
[tags]Micorsoft, Litigation, Patents, Linux[/tags]