Archive for the 'Technology' Category

  • 01.19.10 Disk Utility: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972) posted in Technology, Uncategorized

    Hello, Disk Utility. You’re usually a great tool. Not today. All I wanted to do was Verify Disk Permissions and you would immediately spit back at me:

    Error detected while verifying/repairing permissions on disk4s2 Server HD: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)

    There were no physical disk errors reported and I just had a gut feeling that there was something else going on.

    Turns out, there was. /Library/Receipts. This directory is incredibly hard to find documentation on, which is why I’m writing about it here.

    The problem:
    Permissions for the entire Disk Utility receipts directory structure was wrong causing it to error immediately upon check.

    ls -l /Library/Receipts
    drwxr-xr-x 31 axl admin 1054 Nov 23 13:41 boms
    drwxr-xr-x 3 axl admin 102 Jan 12 16:50 db

    The fix:
    Recursively give the boms & db folders the right permissions.

    chown -R _installer:wheel /Library/Receipts/boms
    chown -R _installer:admin /Library/Receipts/db

    ls -l /Library/Receipts
    drwxr-xr-x 31 _installer wheel 1054 Nov 23 13:41 boms
    drwxr-xr-x 3 _installer admin 102 Jan 13 10:46 db

  • 01.04.10 My top ten jailbroken iPhone applications posted in Technology

    I jumped on the iPhone jailbreaking bandwagon very early when it was actually hard to do. Nowadays, it’s so easy you’d be silly not to. But for those of you that still haven’t (or have but aren’t sure what to install), these ten applications extend the iPhone beyond what Apple allows and upgrade the experience of owning an iPhone ten-fold.

    1. Music Controls – Play Pandora and many other music applications in the background. Popup controls work when you double tap the home button. I use this every single day and it’s the only jailbroken application I’ve ever purchased.
    2. Categories – Eliminates clutter on your screen by creating a new application and moving apps you choose (like games) into it.
    3. Five Icon Dock – Believe it or not, 5 icons fit perfectly into your dock. If you’re like me and text message all the time this is indispensable.
    4. Flashlight – The brightest possible flashlight you can get. Apps from the app store don’t even begin to compare to this sucker!
    5. Lock Calendar – Put a calendar on your lock screen. If you’re like me and forget things, like birthdays, this will help!
    6. PrivaCy – Eliminate anonymous usage stats from being sent.
    7. SBSettings – Quick settings screen that allows you to swap services on/off, kill processes, free up memory, etc.
    8. SpotBright – Show recently launched applications under the spotlight search menu.
    9. xGPS – A free GPS tool that, while not as accurate as TomTom, is light years ahead when it comes to usability.
    10. iHulu – Watch certain Hulu episodes right on your iphone. Streams over 3g. Totally cool when you’re stuck somewhere you don’t want to be and need something to occupy your time.
  • 06.11.09 Updating Wordpress via SVN when the repository URL changes posted in Technology

    Wordpress has a great and constantly up-to-date wiki for administrators to manage Wordpress installations via SVN. Every time a release is made, I just search google for “wordpress svn sw” and copy the svn sw link over to my terminal.

    But recently they changed the repository URL — which means anyone using the old URL will get the following error when they try to update (assuming they are using the svn sw command):

    svn: 'http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8'
    is not the same repository as
    'http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress'

    The fix for today’s (2.8) release is easy (replace 2.7.1 with whatever you were previously using):

    svn switch --relocate http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.7.1 http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.7.1/ .

    Then just do your normal:

    svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8/ .

    It’s not hard to fix, but I’m not an avid user of SVN. So every time I do an update (assuming the repo URL has changed), I have to look at svn help and remember the syntax for changing repositories. Now, since I wrote this, I won’t need to. Perhaps this helped you too!

  • 09.10.08 A better text input for touch-screen devices posted in Technology

    I would be very excited to see something like this supported on my iPhone:

    In fact, I’ve thought multiple times how instead of an “unlock code” on my iPhone (to prevent people spying on my mail, etc. if I were to lose it) I could just have some type of swipe or gesture that would unlock it for me. Swiping: Wave of the finger future. Pun intended.

  • 08.18.08 Free the airwaves posted in Technology

    I learned about an interesting petition from Google’s blog today. www.freetheairwaves.com is attempting to get people involved to free whitespace between broadcast television channels. What’s wonderful is how they make it so easy to get involved. So if you read my site, go take a second and sign the petition. It’s a good thing.

  • 08.08.08 Wordabble is live! posted in Dancing, Technology

    Wordabble is live! I’ve submitted requests for reviews in few places. I’ve talked about it a lot in the past few posts, so I’ll keep this short and sweet to simply say: If you have an iPhone, buy Wordabble!

  • 08.05.08 Wordabble in review posted in Technology

    As Adam wrote on his blog, Wordabble is now in review on Apple’s App Store.

    Once the application is available, I’ll be contacting lots of people in attempts to get reviews and (hopefully) positive talk about the application going around. If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, I hope you’re excited to play!

  • 08.01.08 Wordabble iPhone application icon, part 2 posted in Technology

    Wordabble iconAdam and Lindsey came up with a cool concept that Adam executed really well. It has everything an icon needs (in my opinion). It’s unique, it indicates what the application is about, and is quite aesthetically pleasing.

    There are some cool things in the works like submitting scores to the servers, which means soon this thing will actually be playable in puzzle of the day mode. Since I have early access to it, I have a leg up on everyone else by having a week or so extra time!

  • 07.29.08 Wordabble iPhone application icon posted in Technology

    Wordabble IconiPhone application icons are insanely hard to make look good on a black background. Seriously. All I want is the game’s tiles on a black background and all the iPhone wants to do is layer the little transparent highlight on top of it making my tiles look like crap!

    I know why I wasn’t a graphic artist in another life. I know what I want but I can’t make what I want. I just want something representative of the actual gameplay. Argh, the pain!

  • 07.24.08 More on Twitter and its clones posted in Technology

    I found an interesting article on Twitter as a business today, which explains a bit of how they became successful and their problems with success. It wasn’t what got me into Twitter but it might be enough to convince a reader or two that it’s something worthwhile to investigate and/or try. Adam, I’m looking at you.

    Quite a few people I know use applications like Adium, Meebo, or Pidgin to connect to various IM services, including AIM, MSN, Google Talk, and Facebook. While this is great for 1-on-1 messaging, it isn’t effective for viewing the public, “what are you doing” social concept that Twitter, identi.ca, and Facebook status all have in common. Eventually, those clients I named will come up with a solution. But until then, there is some room for a can-do-all social status application that groups Twitter and its clones together. There are lots of service-specific applications out there that post to Twitter or identi.ca but there is no superb knock-out application that groups everything together the way I want it to be done. I’ve been pondering creating something like this for either the iPhone or Mac OS X (or both). There’s lots to be learned from what already exists but there’s also a lot to be desired.

  • 07.21.08 My twittering begins posted in Technology

    I struggled for a while on the concept of Twitter. It’s a company I’ve known about for a long time but I’ve always asked myself why it would ever be useful. I figured it would just be a waste of time.

    Then I realized people are already doing this sort of update all the time on places, for example Facebook. I just logged into my account and within the past 8 hours I have had 21 updates from friends. That’s 6% of my friends! Pretty good, considering the 8 hour timeframe and the fact that most of these people aren’t bloggers or hip with that kind of stuff. If you expand my timeframe, I have 71 updates within the past week. That’s more than half my friends. Impressive, powerful, and not to be underestimated.

    It took some “using” to convince me of Twitter’s value but I’m beginning to get it, understand it, and even become a fan of it. My twitter updates are posted directly onto my website as well as Facebook. If you’re a fan of updating your status on Facebook, or have simply wanted a way to shout to the world something interesting but don’t want to take the time to write a blog post about it, Twitter might be for you.

    Here’s a great video expressing the value of Twitter and how you can use it:

  • 07.18.08 mod_rewrite RewriteRule flag ordering and Wordpress posted in Technology

    I spent about an hour yesterday looking up URL’s on my site that have been archived or moved over the years and redirecting them via .htaccess to the appropriate sections. The problem was, I could only get proxy rules to work within Wordpress.

    I kept trying the following, which I assumed would work after reading the apache mod_rewrite documentation:

    RewriteRule ^gallery/$ /photos/ [R=301,L]

    I finally gave up and went with a proxy rule that worked fine, but wasn’t exactly what I wanted (because the url didn’t get changed — ie, proxy).

    RewriteRule ^gallery/$ /photos/ [P]

    Just a second ago though, I thought to myself, “I wonder if the order of the flags plays a role.” And of course, it does… though I can’t find any documentation to support this.

    So if you’re driven nuts trying to create a custom rewrite rule which won’t work for you, remember that order matters. Give the rule the last flag first, then the redirect flag.

    RewriteRule ^gallery/$ /photos/ [L,R=301]

    I suppose that might make a lot of sense to mod_rewrite veterans but not for me. I’m very glad I figured this out and hope this post can help someone (or me again) in the future.

  • 07.10.08 Why I won’t iPhone 3G posted in Technology

    I won’t be buying a new iPhone tomorrow for a variety of reasons. I thought it might be important to note them now and perhaps see how my viewpoint changes over time.

    While I’m quite excited about the iTunes App Store and real software for the iPhone, it’ll all run just fine on mine. The only piece of software that will convince me to go iPhone 3G will be a working GPS application. Read: An actual real-life GPS application like you’d have in your car.

    I figure that one is quite a ways off, if at all even possible. I’ll leave that little piece of wizardry to Garmin or another big player but I bet it would be one of the most, if not THE most popular application for the iPhone.

    Beyond that, it doesn’t do anything new. Edge speeds hardly ever bother me. Most of the time I have a wifi signal. What’s the point in upgrading if you don’t get an upgrade?

  • 06.20.08 Mac vulnerabilities do exist posted in Technology

    The net has been abuzz with talk about the ARDAgent ’setuid root’ problem on Mac OS X. While I think I’m a pretty good judge of character when it comes to an application I’m installing, I think I’ll opt for the safe solution for now and disable the remote application. I’ve never used it, so being safe is an easy win for me. If you use a Mac and are worried, simply execute the following in terminal:

    sudo chmod -R u-s /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app

  • 02.18.08 OS X bash script to download entire picasaweb albums posted in Programming

    I found this great tool to download an entire picasaweb album except it didn’t work in OS X. After a quick search on a couple of man pages I found the difference when using OS X’s mktemp and fixed things. Now I can easily grab my favorite albums from friends and family and load them into iPhoto. What a huge time-saver!


    #!/bin/bash
    # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3 or later
    # AUTHOR: Lo?c Cerf
    # e-mail: magicbanana@gmail.com
    WGET_OPT="-q -T 180 -t 3 -c"
    EX_USAGE=64
    EX_NOHOST=68
    if [ -z "$1" -o "$1" = "--help" -o "$1" = "-h" ]
    then
    echo "Usage: $0 url [destination]"
    exit
    fi
    page=${1#*picasaweb.google.*/}
    if [ "$page" = "$1" ]
    then
    echo "\"$1\" is not the URL of a PicasaWeb album or gallery" 1>&2
    exit $EX_USAGE
    fi
    tempfoo=`basename $0`
    temp=`mktemp ${tempfoo}.XXXXXX` || exit 1
    if wget $WGET_OPT -O $temp "$1"
    then
    finalPage=${page#*/}
    if [ -z "$finalPage" -o "$finalPage" = "$page" ]
    then
    # $temp is a gallery
    if [ -z "$2" ]
    then
    destination=`grep -m 1 "^var _user" $temp`
    destination=${destination##*nickname:\"}
    set "$1" "${destination%%\"*}"
    fi
    mkdir -p "$2"
    cd "$2"
    grep -E -o "$1"[/]?[[:alnum:]:.%~_-]+ $temp | sort | uniq |
    while read album
    do
    "$0" $album &
    done
    else
    # $temp is an album
    if [ -z "$2" ]
    then
    destination=`grep -m 1 "^var _album" $temp`
    destination=${destination##*title:\"}
    set "$1" "${destination%%\"*}"
    fi
    grep -E -o {id:\"[0-9]+\",s:\"[[:alnum:]:\\.%~_-]+ $temp |
    while read picture
    do
    picture=${picture##*\"}
    picture=${picture/\x2Fs144/}
    wget $WGET_OPT -P "$2" ${picture//\x2F//} &
    done
    fi
    else
    exit $EX_NOHOST
    fi
    rm $temp

  • 10.26.07 New phone: iPhone 1.1.1 firmware causes buzzing posted in Technology

    After upgrading to my iPhone 1.1.1 firmware, my phones speaker went totally bezerk on me. Every time I tried making a call the speaker would just buzz and buzz. Not only would I hear it but the person on the other end would too! It was one of those radio interference buzzes you get when your cell phone is near a radio.

    Odd enough, when you put the phone on speakerphone or used a bluetooth headset everything worked fine. It was only when you used the built in speaker that things went nuts. I tried a firmware restore suggested by my friend Daryl but soon after the restore it started freaking out again.

    So after driving me crazy for half a week, I took my phone into the Apple store where they promptly replaced it. It was really great to have such an awesome customer service experience. Nowhere else could I have done that! I’m absolutely an apple fanboy. Thanks for not only making such a great device but also supporting it so well.

  • 09.05.07 The price of early adoption posted in Technology

    iPhone prices were just cut from $600 to a cool $400 for the 8gb iPhone. That’s $100 less than the original 4gb iPhone sold for. Not sure what that means for the 4gb iPhone but regardless you can get yourself one now for a lot less that I purchased iPhones for Fusion Bay. Shoot, that’s a third iPhone right there. We could have bought our girlfriends each one! That combined with the fact that hardware unlocking methods and easy to use application installers like installer.app are popping up everywhere means adoption of this device is only going to continue upwards.

    Update 9/19/07: I’ve received my $100 Apple store credit. Not sure what I’ll buy but I sure won’t complain!

  • 07.25.07 Soundstream screensaver for OS X posted in Technology

    I recently cleaned out my laptop by doing a complete reinstall of OS X, which means that I have to go back and reload all of the goodies I’ve spent years finding.

    Soundstream screensaverOne of those goodies I had forgotten about until today was my screensaver. Soundstream is just one of those things that makes my mac so much fun.

    Rather than your typical screensaver with a blob moving around on a black background, this screensaver takes input from your microphone and reacts to the sounds. Go ahead and boop or bop or beep. It responds to everything and makes idle time just that much more fun. It’s like an iTunes visualizer for everything. I love it!

  • 07.03.07 Thoughts and experiences with my iPhone posted in Technology

    First and foremost, the iPhone is a really great phone. The interface is intuitive; the syncing process seamless. Integration between my address book, pictures, and even music is top notch. I’m glad I held out for the iPhone and I’m glad I waited until now to try web and mail on a mobile device. Until the iPhone, I simply dismissed web and mail as something that was cool but would entirely frustrate me.

    Now that I have the web, maps, and email, I’m in love.

    I’m sure I have not found all of the goodies on this phone, however I’ll outline some that I have found I particularly enjoy:

    • Contact list: The “Favorites” contact list function allows you to take anyone in your address book and add them to a special “favorites-only” address book. This is stupid easy and insanely useful. Sort favorites however you’d like — I have Emily at the top, then Adam, then my family. It’s the most used feature on the phone so far!
    • Earbuds: They double as the microphone/headset. No more bluetooth for me (I’ll outline this in the negatives below).
    • Text messaging with a QWERTY keyboard: Textile or not, it is a snap. Never having it before, WOW! What a difference.
    • The by-letter scrolling feature of the contact list: I originally thought lack of a keypad would make dialing someone a pain (before hitting 5 would go straight to J and hitting 5 three times would go to L — easy), however this is really intuitive and I can usually go to the right letter just by touching the right side of the screen so in the end it ends up being even less keystrokes
    • Google maps: How did I ever live without maps on my phone?!
    • The “locked” screen: Whoever had the idea to show you what has happened without unlocking is a genius. I just press the button and it tells me I have 2 missed calls and a text message from various people. Wonderful!

    Being a first generation device, there are things that aren’t perfect. I’ll go over a few things that are bugging me so far:

    • Battery life: Charging every night is a huge pain. I understand I’m doing more with this phone than any phone I’ve had before, but I really should be able to go longer than 24 hours without a charge. This isn’t faulting Apple exactly, but why is battery technology so far behind?
    • Bluetooth: Maybe it’s my Jabra JX10, but it still doesn’t sound good. I don’t understand how people can use bluetooth headsets. The batteries never last and they sound like crap. Adam’s motorola headset is the same.
    • Ring Tones: How do I add a new one? Or select a song from iTunes to be my ring tone? Come on, Apple, seriously… ring tones are HUGE business. How can this NOT be an option!
    • Missing plugins and readers: I need to listen to .WAV and .PPT files via my email. And where is Flash?
    • Fragility: This phone seems so fragile. I’ve watched an iPhone stress testing video where they dropped the phone on concrete and it held up without scratching the screen, but the first time I drop this thing I’m going to die!

    I’m sure as time goes on we’ll see more features, including ring tones and perhaps even hacks to enable disk access to the phone and edge internet via the usb cable connection to a laptop. I’m ok waiting for these features as I primarily want the iPhone as a phone but once they have them this will be a major contender for the “real” smart phones.

  • 06.30.07 My phone, the iPhone posted in Technology

    I’m writing this from my new iPhone. I’m with Emily and she is buying a bed. I love the phone but think the battery life sucks. I need to find a place to recharge!

  • 06.26.07 PicLens plugin: Full screen photos in your web browser posted in Technology

    If you like looking though photo galleries but sometimes find things clunky or cluttered, PicLens is a must have plugin for either Firefox or Safari. I’ve been using it since their first beta and have thoroughly enjoyed the ease it makes browsing photo galleries. I would absolutely recommend this to anyone who views photo galleries on popular websites like Flickr, Picasaweb, or even Google image search. Download this plugin now!

    How it works: PicLens takes all the available images on a page and goes full screen with a black background. Not only does it look great but it allows you to navigate using the arrow keys. Believe me when I say it can really speed up the browsing process. To read more on how PicLens works, read this users review.

  • 06.25.07 Wordpress posted in Technology

    I’ve got a secret. I installed and have been tweaking wordpress all weekend. The wonderful thing about wordpress is the copious amount of features it has.

    I have not had the time to setup a theme. What you see here is the default theme. So far, I spent my time migrating all of my old comments — including comments once thought to have been lost forever on older posts in my homegrown system. I also spent some time giving some newer posts categories so things are easier to browse.

    This will be good.

  • 01.26.07 Website demographics posted in Technology

    Sometimes I come across strange sites. Today, while doing whatever it is that I do in order to accomplish the feat of finding strange things, I came across this site that gives you demographics on your website. Wondering what kind of demographics jasonplancaster.com pulls, I thought I’d try it out. You can see the results to the left.

    Now, what do these say about you, the viewer?

    Well, unless you start speaking up I’m just going to have to go off some assumptions.

    For example, the average person viewing my site is an Asian female aged 18-24 who has a child aged 6-17 in the household. I’m not so sure, but that math doesn’t exactly hold up. Most of my friends are between 18-24, but as far as I know they are childless. Even if they weren’t childless, I’m pretty sure that most of them were too whiny, tiny, and pimply at 16 to actually get laid.

    Another example of how wrong these demographics are: The only person I know that reads this site and is Asian is Alan. But Alan is not a woman. So unless Alan has a secret identity on myspace and tends to frequent my site while keeping his webcam on (we all have those silly moments, Alan, don’t worry…) dressed in his polka dotted moo-moo and red leggings, (wow, there’s a sexy thought) I’m going to have to assume that quantcast is really full of crap.

    Where the hell did they pull this data from anyway? There’s no good technical process I can think of to make assumptions on the viewership of a site. That is really up to the site to decide. There is an idea though: accurate and a standard means of obtaining demographics. I like it.

  • 12.12.06 Comment spam part two posted in Technology

    You would not believe the number of people who spam comments on my weblog. It averages between 20-100 comments a day. The amazing thing is how persistent they are, yet none of it ever comes through. There’s this whole new type of comment spam that actually takes news stories and prints a link to someone’s page with a snip of the news story. “Britney gives birth to two headed gorilla….” etc are just some of the intriguing headlines I see each day. And yes, I do see it because I need to weed through and figure out what is real.

    Current methods to fight comment spam utilize image recognition of some sort. I think that is silly. There are better methods out there, proven by the fact that NO spam gets through my filters. Ever.

    However, to make my life a little easier and give me a little insight into what is actually happening behind the scenes (instead of relishing in the fact that I don’t need to know), I’ve started logging a lot more data about comment spam. This site is now a honeypot of sorts. Do comment spammers give a valid user agent when they spam? What is the referring page? Their ip? How are they accessing my comments page? Are they just running through random id’s of my weblog entries or is there a pattern? I’d tell you more, but obviously someone wants through my system and I’m not about to lend them the key.

    Beware spammers, the world may know more about you soon because I have new data at my fingertips. Not that most of you really care. :)

  • 11.30.06 Photos 2.0 with picasaweb posted in Technology

    Adam mentioned I should say something about why there are two versions of photos at the top now. The reason is that I’m slowly migrating over to Picasaweb. It’s simple and I’m in love. Picasaweb is, at the core, fundamentally similar to a photo gallery Fusion Bay wanted to create a few years ago with one great enhancement: Pre-caching of photos. I can’t state how great of an idea the pre-caching is, but it’s seriously awesome. I’d recommend everyone using gallery on my server try it and see what you think. The cost is marginal once you want to put over 300mb and absolutely worth it. Jump on over to the photos 2.0 and try browsing each photo with a simple keypress of the left or right buttons. Talk about easy! Now if only Seldin’s could get on the bandwagon with his 1,000 photos of men in drag, we wouldn’t waste so much time clicking those next and previous buttons. How web 1.0 is that?

  • 09.27.06 Comment spam stinks posted in Technology

    Most of the time, I’m really glad I’ve written my own blogging engine. You would not believe the number of people who try to spam the comments section of this blog. It honestly amazes me. The thing that is most annoying is that while you don’t see the comment spam, I do, because I end up moderating everything. I coded up a few quick lines of code today that should block most of the comment spam coming through, but you’d think that the people sending comment spam my way would realize it is never being published. If you happen to post a comment and it is flagged as spam, let me know so I can adjust my filtering a little. I don’t think it will be a problem though. We’ll see!

  • 07.18.06 Another broken phone posted in Technology

    So along with the great service Cingular provides comes a letdown of sorts. On Friday night my phone’s keypad stopped working. Cingular to the rescue. They fedex’d me a phone next day when I called to complain yesterday. Got the phone this morning and I can answer calls and read my text messages. Sheesh. I hope this one lasts…

  • 06.30.06 Cingular’s phone insurance is awesome posted in Technology

    Not specifically Cingular, but the company they use to do the replacements for their 4 dollar a month phone insurance program. I’ve had phone insurance on my RAZR v3 ever since I bought it way long ago, and always wondered if it would be worth it. I can tell you that if you have a phone worth anything more than $100, it absolutely is.

    After seeing EEE get a new black RAZR, I was completely envious that her phone actually clicked open and stayed open and that her camera worked. I called up Cingular’s customer service, was transferred to the insurance replacement program, told them my story, and they sent me a phone that I received the next day.

    Unfortunately, I think that phone was a refurbished phone because it came in what looked more like a white box than an original V3 box. Not only was I a little disappointed about that and on top of that the phone wouldn’t sync to any bluetooth or usb devices. Obviously, there was something wrong with this phone. I called up the number for “questions or concerns” that came with this phone and told them about how it didn’t sync. They then told me they’d be sending me another phone asap. This was at 4pm on Wednesday.

    When I came in on Thursday, I looked around just to make sure FedEx didn’t drop off the phone for me. I was a bit disappointed, but I mean come on, what can you expect? My high expectations continued and I was very happy to see the phone waiting for me when I got in the office this afternoon. I could be wrong, but this phone seems like a brand new phone to me, complete with all accessories and in a true Motorola box.

    I’ve synced up all of my contacts and I’m in the process of copying all the pictures back. I can’t tell you how happy I am that for once customer service has worked exactly as it should. This was definitely worth $50. Oh, and get this, they even send me prepaid shipping labels for both phones!

  • 04.06.06 Hotkeys: OS X quick screenshot posted in Technology

    I never new, but the combination of Apple + Shift + 4 gives you a cursor that will take a snapshot of whatever you lasso and automatically saves it to the desktop. Nice. No need for the grab utility anymore. Thanks, evhead!

    Update: On May 10, 2006 Apple posted information on this shortcut in the quick tip section of their website. Hooray!

  • 03.02.06 Mail.app “Sent Messages” corruption problems posted in Technology

    If it wasn’t for the fact that Thunderbird felt so sluggish in OS X, I’d ditch Mail.app (hereby known as Mail) right now. I just spent hours and I mean hours trying to figure out what was wrong with the “Sent Messages” mailbox I store on my imap server. Messages for the last 7 days were not appearing and to top it off, messages from 2002 were appearing either as duplicates or as something other than what the subject line said. Obviously it was having some serious issues reading the file and I thought things were bad, bad, bad I tell you. Then I realized how if I coped “Sent Messages” to a new file called “Sent2″ and read it in Mail, all my messages appeared properly. To top it all off, Thunderbird was reading everything just fine! Why must Mail be so finicky?

    The end problem was that my mailbox file (which I keep in mbox format) was a little too unorganized for Mail to properly read. Normal people probably will never have this issue but because I’ve migrated from multiple mail accounts over the years, messages from 2003 come before messages from 2001 and then 2006 is just clumped together here and there. It’s a mess but technically, it should not matter because a mail application just reads these items while sorting is done locally by the applicaiton — not on the server. Guess not in Mail’s case.

    Fix: I loaded Thunderbird, moved all “Sent Messages” to a new folder called “Temp” then moved them back to “Sent Messages” in hopes that it would slightly reorder the contents of the file. It did, and now Mail is happy and I can continue using Mail. Sheesh.

  • 02.15.06 Mute terminal.app in OS X posted in Technology

    And so my search begins. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to prevent Terminal.app from beeping at me whenever I make an error. It’s seriously annoying, and I don’t want to find an alternative application, I just want to mute Terminal.app.

  • 03.08.05 PHP random password generator, randomPassword.php posted in Programming

    I wanted to be able to control the strings a random password generator used and couldn’t find anything that let me use only the strings I specified. While it might not be completly random, I’m not a big fan of having []’s or / or ? or any other ugly characters. I just like having the abc/ABC/123/!@# combinations.

  • 12.23.04 Proper method for unlimited form inputs in a user interface posted in Programming

    You probably don’t notice how counterintuitive some forms are, but in one of my new projects I needed a method to properly maintain an unlimited amount of relational data in a html user interface. I couldn’t find any tutorials or examples that properly managed (at least in my mind!) an unlimited amount of data so I created my own.

    There’s very little involved to accomplish this. No funky php — just a little bit of javascript concatenation. I’d like to prevent the data from having to be hard-coded in the javascript function but I can’t come up with a method that prevents it for now.

    Working example and howto.

  • 01.23.04 Switch. posted in Technology

    So I’ve been using a Powerbook G4 for the past week. So far, I’m digging the whole Apple thing. My favorite part about it has to be Garage Band. There are a lot of other neat things but it’s so awesome to be able to make music when I’m bored without picking up a guitar or anything. I’ve made two songs so far but I’m not willing to share (unless you’re really nice).

    Jason and Stu are about to leave for the weekend. They are going up north to Connecticut. It’s gonna be so cold. I’ll be here, probably bored as hell if anyone wants to come keep me company!

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