ExMH dependencies in fink : a few bits and bobs required to get this excellent (though ugly) UNIX mail reader app working on MacOS
(tags: exmh mail macos porting fink)metamail for OSX patch : fixes this ExMH dependency to build on OSX
(tags: metamail macos exmh)Salon.com Life | Old people Facebook disasters : “The funny thing about Facebook is that you’re there with your colleagues and your friends […] and the next thing you know, you’ve forgotten that your status update is all about how hung over you are.”
(tags: salon funny facebook privacy generation-gap age 30s online-life life social-networking)Stanislav Petrov Day : last Friday, but worth celebrating. on 26 September 1983, a little-known Russian military officer averted global nuclear war, by disobeying procedures and correctly identifying a missile-launch report as a false positive. phew!
(tags: stanislav-petrov war nuclear russia cold-war 80s anniversaries history)
Month: September 2008
Vim (Vi IMproved) for Mac OSÂ X : tick another item off my switch to-do list
(tags: vim gvim macos editors)
Well, some bits of this are easy: here’s a MacOS X version of GVim and Vim, which works nicely, is easy to install, and is simply vim/gvim. Great stuff!
But some bits are harder. Remember I was complaining about that silly ± / § key in the top corner of UK/Irish MacBook Pro keyboards? Some investigation reveals that I’m far from alone in this:
‘it fucks up application switching’
There are a number of apps that offer key remapping, but for no apparent reason they limit themselves to “popular” remappings only, such as swapping the Control and Caps-Lock keys etc. I presume this is because that was easy to code ;)
The one that does work fully is Ukelele. Watch out though — it comes with a raft of caveats. It’s buggy, at least dealing with my MBP keyboard under OSX 10.5.5; the “Copy Key” functionality doesn’t work, and you need to start using a key mapping file from the Ukelele package, not a system one or one you’ve downloaded, otherwise it’ll silently produce an output file that doesn’t recognise any keys at all. On top of this, each time you make changes, you need to log out and log back in again for them to try them out. (Small mercies: at least you don’t need to do a full reboot, I suppose.)
I’m not impressed by this whole keyboard issue. If you look at photos of the US MacBook Pro keyboard, it’s clear that it doesn’t have the stunted tetris-style Enter and Left-Shift keys that the UK/Irish one does. It also has the tilde key in the normal place, the top left, instead of some bizarre symbol that isn’t even used in this keyboard’s locale, and as Ash Searle noted, when you’re a developer, the # is a hell of a lot more useful than the £ symbol. They’ve basically screwed with a good US keyboard design to bodge in a few extra keys they needed to deal with the tricky European corner cases.
All that would be relatively minor, however, if I could remap the keys to suit my tastes — but it was pretty damn tricky to do that. Key remapping needs to be an easy feature!
I’m still working on the fixed key layout file, but I may post it here once it’s finished to save other Googlers the bother…
Update:: here’s the fixed key layout file:
Irish Fixed.keylayout
Save that to ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/ , then open System Preferences -> International, select Input Menu, and choose Irish Fixed from the list, and ensure “Show input menu in the menu bar” is on. Close that window, then select “Irish Fixed” from the input menu left of the clock on the menu bar. Log out, and log back in again, and the keys should be sane…
(thanks to Sonic Julez for the MBP key image)
9li : Bruno 9Li — cool Brazilian psychedelic, high-contrast art
(tags: bruno-9li art graphics psychedelia)
Neuros set-top box lets you crowd-subtitle TV : ‘Neuros has a new technology to superimpose text from a dedicated chat room in real time on a TV set, allowing a sort of ‘crowd narration’ for events or shows.’ ‘crowd heckling’ more like; this is a great idea that Danny O’Brien talked about a few years back
(tags: for:malaclyps tv set-top-box video chat irc discussion heckling backchannels)Is That Your Final Answer? : ‘As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. Some people out there in our nation don’t have maps.’ it’s like Frances McDormand in Fargo, channeling Dan Quayle
(tags: funny omgwtfbbq sarah-palin foreign-policy incomprehensible babbling gibberish via:mat)
Addictions, Think Amazon, not Google : Brian “Krow” Aker: ‘Google’s AppEngine is much closer to […] “Digitial Sharecropping” […] S3 and EC2 have little tie in to them. You can end up with a physical addiction to the services but the mental addiction to a framework does not exist. S3 is just storage and EC2 for most is just a hosted Linux image.’ +1!
(tags: google gae aws ec2 amazon hosting s3)The Porterhouse to get a shiny new bottling line : hooray, great news for Irish beer drinkers sick of Guinness
(tags: porterhouse beer ireland brewing)
As previously noted, I’ve just bought myself a nice shiny MacBook Pro, to replace an old reliable 5-year-old Thinkpad T40, which ran Linux.
Initially, I was contemplating installing Linux on this one too, and dual-booting. But right now, I’ve decided to give MacOS X a go — why not? I find it’s worthwhile updating aspects of my quotidian computing environment every now and again, and it seems everyone’s doing it. ;) I’ll log my experience on this blog as I go along.
(Worth noting that this isn’t my first Mac; back in 1990, I was the proud owner of a free Macintosh Plus for a year, courtesy of TCD’s “Project Mac” collaboration with Apple Ireland. I wrote a great Mandelbrot Set explorer app.)
First off, the good news: the hardware is very nice indeed. It’s light in weight, esp. compared to my T61p work laptop, the screen clarity is fantastic, and the CPU fairly zooms along — unsurprisingly, given that the T40 was 5 years old.
In addition, the multi-touch touchpad is wonderful; I’m looking forward to lots more multi-touch features.
Unfortunately, some of the other hardware design decisions were pretty wonky. By default it’s quite tricky to keep the laptop running with the lid closed — it seems a decision was made to use passive cooling via the keyboard, so once the lid is closed, that heat cannot escape, causing overheating. There’s a third-party extension I can install to allow it anyway, but it’s festooned with warnings to overclock the fan speed to make up for it… ugh. Since I need the ability to be able to remotely login to my laptop from work if I should happen to forget something, or to kick off a long transfer before I come home, this means I have to leave the laptop open permanently, which I didn’t want to do.
In addition, I initially thought my brightness control was broken, since the laptop screen fluctuates in brightness continually. Turns out this is a feature, responding to ambient light — a poorly-documented one, but at least it’s easy to turn off in System Preferences once you know it’s there.
(Unfortunately, a lot of MacOS seems to consist of poorly-documented features that are hidden “for my own good”. The concept of switching seems to involve me abdicating a good deal of what I’d consider adult control of the machine, to the cult of Steve Who Knows Better. This is taking some getting used to.)
On to the software… what’s getting my goat right now are as follows:
Inability to remap keys (CapsLock key, the useless “+-” key, a lack of “spare” keys for scripted actions)
Up in the top left corner of “international” MacBook keyboards, there’s a useless key with a “+-” and double-S symbol on it. I don’t think I’ve ever typed those symbols in my entire life. I want a ~ there, since that’s where the ~ key lives, but for some reason, MacOS doesn’t include keyboard-remapping functionality to the same level as X11’s wonderful “xmodmap”. It seems this third-party app might allow me to do that, or maybe something called ‘KeyRemap4Macbook’?
This Tao Of Mac HOWTO seems helpful on how to support the “Home”/”End” keys, for external keyboard use.
Focus Follows Mouse
This is a frequent complaint among UNIX-to-Mac switchers. It seems that some apps do a hacky version of it, but then you’ve got this inconsistent thing where you lose track of which apps will automatically pick up focus (Terminal, iTerm) and which ones need a click first (Firefox, indeed everything else). Unfortunately, it seems an app called CodeTek VirtualDesktop would have fixed it, but seems to have been abandoned. :(
Programmable Hotkeys
I use a few hotkeys to do quick window-control actions without involving the mouse; in particular, F1 brings a window to the front, F2 pushes it to the back, F12 minimizes a window, Ctrl-Alt-LeftArrow moves a window half a screen left, and Ctrl-Alt-RightArrow moves a window half a screen to the right. Those are pretty simple, but effective.
This collection of Applescript files, in conjunction with Quicksilver, look like I may be able to do something similar on the Mac. Here’s hoping. LifeHacker suggests that the default for minimize is Cmd-M, so that’s what I need to remap from, at least…
This is a big issue — Dan Kulp had a lot of hot-key-related woes, and wound up going back to Linux as a result. Evan reported the same. I like the idea of MacOS, but my tendonitis-afflicted wrists need their little shortcuts; I’m not willing to compromise on avoiding mouse usage in this way.
(by the way, in order to get F1/F2/F12 back, check the “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features” box in the Keyboard control panel. Thanks to this page for that tip; it has a few other good tips for UNIX switchers, too.)
Upgrades and Software
So, there’s two main contenders for the “apt-get for Mac” throne — Fink vs MacPorts. Fink takes the Debian approach of downloading binary packages, while MacPorts compiles them from source, BSD/Gentoo-style, on your machine. Since I’m not looking at the source, or picking build parameters, or auditing the code for security issues there and then, I don’t see the need to build it — Fink wins.
One thing though — the installer for Fink informed me that I needed to run “Repair Permissions”, which took a while, and found some things that had somehow already been modified from their system defaults, I’m not sure why. This left me slightly mystified. I then was later told that this is now considered ‘voodoo’. wtf.
Mind you, Daring Fireball suggests that the Mac software update are so poorly implemented that they require essentially rebooting in single-user mode, which sounds frankly terrifying. I hope that’s not the case.
BTW, it’s worth noting that IMO, AWN is as nice as — possibly nicer than — the Dock. ;)
Anyway, that’s post #1 in a series. Let’s see how I get on from here. (thanks to Aman, Craig and Paddy for various tips so far!)
Linux x86_64 frozen by heavy I/O on Dell PowerEdge 2950 : starting to think we may be running into this on our build machine; annoying. bookmarking for future reference
(tags: poweredge dell hardware linux drivers performance sysadmin)Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Deletionpedia : hahaha. WP deletion gnomes argued that Deletionpedia should not have an entry due to non-notability, just 24 minutes after that entry was created
(tags: wp wikipedia funny deletion processes bureaucracy deletionpedia)Atrivo/InterCage depeered : the ISP’s AS (AS27595) is now offline, due apparently to coordinated lobbying of its upstreams
(tags: atrivo isps abuse intercage spam malware hosting)
baltic-avenue: An open source clone of S3 : built on top of Google App Engine. interesting hack!
(tags: gae s3 aws amazon baltic-avenue google)
THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS By Nassim Nicholas Taleb : ‘Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let’s face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).’ (via Gary Stock)
(tags: banking probabilistic-methods probability statistics investment black-swans nassim-nicholas-taleb via:gstock essays the-edge)International Expert Group – Report – The Innovation Partnership : ‘the findings and recommendations of the International Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property’. Very anti-Bayh-Dole and the “old IP” patent-everything regime as it pertains to biotech. great stuff (via Techdirt)
(tags: via:techdirt bayh-dole ip patents biotech canada reports)Greg Kroah-Hartman rips Canonical a new one : over allegations that they do not contribute enough development effort to the Linux ecosystem; in all major components, they push a truly miniscule amount of patch code upstream
(tags: canonical linux greg-kroah-hartman code open-source free-software distros packaging upstream debian)
A unique place for creating and preserving knowledge : swan song for Iona Technologies. as an ex-Ionian, all I can say is +1; great place to work in the ’90s
(tags: iona dublin ireland software business 1990s)Deletionpedia : ‘an archive of about 63,556 pages which have been deleted from the English-language Wikipedia.’
(tags: wp:vfd deletion wikipedia archives web)Michelle Malkin » The story behind the Palin e-mail hacking : Yahoo!’s password recovery feature is pretty trivial to defeat: ‘seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)’
(tags: yahoo passwords security web sarah-palin 4chan)
valhenson: Focus follows mouse on Mac OS X: Only $14.95! : more on the OS X FFM mess
(tags: focus-follows-mouse focus x11 macos mouse ui)Stevey’s Blog Rants: Settling the OS X focus-follows-mouse debate : if I’m to consider using OS X, this needs to work; I’m a FFM zealot
(tags: zealotry focus-follows-mouse focus ui osx mac x11 window-management)
now to install Ubuntu ;)
Update: here’s the first bug, spotted in Apple’s “thank you for registering your Mac” mail:
Hi. Welcome to Apple. We're just as excited as you are. ........................................................................... Thanks for registering your new Mac. We have the following on record in your name: [[IREG_PRODUCT_HTML]]
Templates are hard!
Build a Web Page Monitor with Google Docs : incredible. the GDocs spreadsheet supports getting a remote URL, extraction using XPath, and RSS output, making it a pretty credible scraping platform
(tags: google-docs google xpath rss feeds scraping)PayPal phishes their own customers : ‘Your monthly account statement is available anytime; just log in to your account at https://SECURE.UNINITIALIZED.REAL.ERROR.COM/au/HISTORY.’ doh
(tags: paypal phish phoul funny errors anti-spam via:risks)laptopsdirect.ie crappy reviews : wow. I dodged a bullet when I bought my work Thinkpad T61p last year; since then they’ve accumulated a truly atrocious customer service reputation. avoid
(tags: laptopsdirect.ie laptops shopping ireland boards.ie reviews customer-service cluetrain)
Groklaw – Anonymous Speech in Email Upheld in Spammer Case : Groklaw goes into the detail of how and why the Virginia anti-spam law could be overturned. Ugh. I strongly believe that spam = UBE, not UCE, and political spam is still spam, so this is particularly disappointing for me
(tags: ube uce spam law legal virginia jeremy-jaynes groklaw anti-spam)VMware server tweaks : ugh. quite a lot of voodoo here, need to investigate to see if any of these improve performance on our little build farm vmware server
(tags: vmware performance linux tweaks kernel)consumer tips in response to the XL Airlines collapse : tour operator/airline went bust, leaving its customers well in the lurch. Those who booked flights directly on their website, using a debit card, have lost their money. Most travel insurance doesn’t cover airline collapse. Moral: use a credit card
(tags: credit-cards safety consumer xl-airlines travel-agents atol flights travel)
Commtouch Plug-in for SpamAssassin : SA plugin to add the proprietary Commtouch filter to an existing SpamAssassin system; nifty
(tags: commtouch spamassassin anti-spam filtering plugins)
Va. Supreme Court Strikes Down State’s Anti-Spam Law : argh! IMO the judge has confused misleading forged headers with anonymous speech
(tags: anonymity legal law jeremy-jaynes spam anti-spam virginia)Watch out for that Dropbox Public Folder : Joe has a good point: ‘you hereby grant all other Dropbox users a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use and exploit Your Files in your public folder.’ wtf
(tags: dropbox ip backup legal terms-and-conditions legalese)Microsoft Open Source inside Google Chrome : namely the Windows Template Library, now distributed under the (OSI-approved) Microsoft Public License. strange days (via reddit)
(tags: microsoft open-source osi google chrome wtl windows)Irishmen buy up island of England : ‘an Irish consortium has emerged as the buyer of the island of England in The World development, a man-made scheme off the coast of Dubai.’ hahaha!
(tags: funny ireland england dubai unintended-consequences property the-world)
Techdirt: How Patents Have Harmed University Research : the majority of university technology transfer offices have never made money, according to this. mind-boggling
(tags: bayh-dole patents ip universities academia tech-transfer techdirt)VTun – Virtual Tunnels over TCP/IP networks : ‘The easiest way to create Virtual Tunnels over TCP/IP networks with traffic shaping, compression and encryption’. looks like it. UDP-based, no Windows support, but in Ubuntu’s “universe” apt repository
(tags: vtun tunneling linux unix networking ip tcp udp security)Perl Best Admin Practices : good advice to those of us running systems built on perl. Every interpreted language needs a document like this
(tags: perl wiki advice sysadmin best-practices guidelines fhs unix)
Four Tweaks for Using Linux with Solid State Drives : good tips (via Jeremy)
(tags: for:hughescr linux ssd disks optimization performance tmpfs kernel)VW Should Bring Back The Microbus And Make It Electric : and a pony! (via fergusb)
(tags: want electric-vehicles cars volkswagen techcrunch over-ambitious and-a-pony)
Twitter API Rate Limiting : ‘Clients are allowed 70 requests per 60 sixty minute time period, starting from their first request. This is enough to make just over one request per minute, per hour, which should meet the needs of most applications.’ Fingers crossed this can be lifted for twit.ie
(tags: aggregation rate-limiting api http twitter twit.ie)Pipes: BBC AOD filter : select a BBC radio show, get an RSS feed of “Audio on Demand” RealAMRadio files as they are posted. (“radio4” works as the station ID for that station)
(tags: bbc radio4 radio realaudio via:hublog)Work at Home . . . for a Criminal? : good round-up of how those “work at home” scam spams work
(tags: work spam scams fraud teleworking telecommuting)
EC2 hack: make metadata visible in ‘ec2-describe-instances’ output : by creating one-off security groups to hold the metadata. hack, will be deprecated by AWS in a future release, but hey it works right now
(tags: ec2 via:elasticgrid hacks patterns aws)
Brian Scanlan mailed me with this blurb, worth blogging for any AWS users in the Dublin area:
Are you a software developer or IT professional working in the Dublin area?
Would you like to learn more about Amazon Web Services?
Amazon spent over ten years developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers Amazon web sites for millions of customers daily. Most people think “Amazon.com” when they hear the work; however developers are excited to learn that there is a separate arm of the company, known as Amazon Web Services or AWS.
Using AWS, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable and reliable technology that powers Amazon’s retail business.
Amazon Data Services Ireland are delighted to welcome Simone Brunozzi (simoneb at amazon.com), AWS Evangelist for Europe, to Dublin, where he will give an overview of Amazon Web Services, including S3, EC2 and EBS, SimpleDB and more.
Tuesday 16th September 2008 at 7pm, The Digital Exchange Auditorium, Crane Street, Dublin 8
Maps and directions to the venue are here. Refreshments will be served.
All welcome – but places are limited, so please sign-up by mailing aws-dublin-event at amazon.com before Thursday 11th September.
I have no connection to this; not even sure if I’ll be going, as I went to the last one anyway and it was a bit short on technical tips ;) . But worth blogging anyway.
eircom advertising on ThePirateBay.org?! : oh dear, someone really screwed up there
(tags: piracy pirate-bay eircom ads doubleclick google oops funny via:damien)Cheney Waits Until Last Minute Again To Buy Sept. 11 Gifts : pure Onion genius
(tags: cheney 9/11 theonion onion humor us-politics)We haven’t changed the name of the conference to ‘Over Quota’ : moral: don’t try hosting anything useful on Google App Engine until it’s ready — which it decidedly isn’t yet
(tags: app-engine google quota fail bandwidth hosting via:simonw)
Atari 800 “Donkey Kong” source code review : retrogaming fans find source for 1983 game cartridge, then original developer appears with commentary. hooray for internets!
(tags: atari history retrogaming retro donkey-kong assembler coding 8-bit programming)
prescription swim googles : for $28. woo
(tags: glassyeyes glasses prescription goggles swimming beach want)Design By Humans : great tees on this US site
(tags: shirts tee-shirts apparel shopping want t-shirts)
This is a little late, since I was off on holliers when it came to light — Galway News reports ‘hundreds hit by skimming scam’:
The account details of shoppers who used credit or laser cards to pay for their groceries and other items in a number of Galway shops and supermarkets were illegally skimmed by a gang who apparently managed to interfere with the Chip & PIN terminals at the stores’ check-out counters.
The Irish Times story:
However, it has emerged some cardholders had several thousand euro taken from their accounts overseas before they realised what was happening and alerted their card provider. And it is feared that thousands of other customers do not yet realise their cards have been cloned. Garda sources have confirmed the case involves thousands of cards.
The Galway investigation is centred on one large shop in the county. Gardaí believe several thousand cards have had all of their details skimmed, including pin numbers, over the past month. Some of the cards have already been cloned and used in Canada and other countries where, unlike Ireland, chip and pin protective technology is not in use.
In the Galway case […] Detectives are working on the theory that somebody in the Galway shop may have facilitated the card skimming for an Eastern European crime syndicate.
Gardaí do not believe the payment terminals were tampered with. Gardaí have recovered CCTV images of suspects from in-store cameras.
In the past, cards have been copied using very small hand held devices through which a card is quickly and discreetly skimmed at the point of payment. The information is then copied, or cloned, onto a blank card which is then used like a regular payment card.
Skimming devices around the size of a cigarette lighter can store details from thousands of cards.
The payment terminals from the Galway shop have been taken by gardaí for technical examination as a precaution. The Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation is leading the inquiry.
This Boards.IE thread is a real eye-opener, containing lots of reports from victims of this scam — many reports saying that they suspect it was in Joyces’ Supermarket in Knocknacarra, although one poster reckons ‘there are now over 20 suspect premises in Galway City and outskirts’. blimey.
On a related note — while shopping in my local supermarket at the weekend, I was pleased to note that when I paid with my credit card, I was asked to sign the slip, instead of using Chip-and-PIN. So it looks like at least one retailer is taking additional care.
On the other hand, the thread also notes many cases of skimming which took place from in-store ATMs in small convenience stores — those are very widespread now. eek. :(