Casper's Life

Some time ago, I read an article about why an "IKEA" would never happen in Denmark. Not that Swedes are anything special, or that Danes are't smart enough. But the argument is that to be able to create an IKEA, one would have to decide that things are only made to be "almost good enough", meaning that one know that the product is not perfect, it will not last longer than it was designed to last, and so fort. And any one in Denmark who would start a company would would do so to produce products which where the best of the best (I am not fully in agrement with that one). But lately that made me think about the stage of software quality, we know that it is impossible to remove all issues in software, the 90/10 rule still plays a role in our daily life. But we have gotten used to software which, we actually pay for, doesn't work, or it crashes, or causes data loss. The vendors, in many cases does not care, or tell us that it's caused by us using the software...

As some might have noticed, I have a "Recent Books" in my sidebar, and some might have wonders how it got there, well some time ago I decided to get a bit more handle on my books, as I started buying duplicates. Due to getting a license to DeliciousLibrary fairly cheap via MacHeist I choose to use that as library software, now what does on do when one have +800 books; there is the option of using a camera with ones Mac, but then again after a few books one figures out that this is not an option, so via ebay I found a cheap USB Barcode reader, and presto 3 days later all my books where in DeliciousLibrary. One thing I feel I have to mention; DeliciousLibrary is not perfect, far from, but it kind of works with all it quirks. And if your books isn't in any Amazon shop, then you'll have to manually add them. Now that was cool, I had all my books in a database, well sort of, in a massive sqlite database, which kind of made things a bit difficult, I wanted to be able to 1...

There is a problem with the protocol Adium used to implement the Facebook Chat, which means that some people have problems seeing their contact (they are not there...). As of Adium 1.4.2 this will be fixed as Adium is moving to the new protocol - or they say they are. As per this wiki page do: in preferences, remove the facebook "account". add a "Jabber" account (as opposed to a Facebook account). type in your Facebook username, followed by @chat.facebook.com, for examples "JoeBob@chat.facebook.com". You'll need to activate your username in the account preferences (Account ? Account Settings ? Username) of your Facebook account, using the website. (I did not have to do this) set the connection server to "chat.facebook.com", on the options pane. And you should see all your Facebook contacts in Adium again.

Firefox has become a memory hog, it will do it best to use all the memory available, or so it seams. I sometimes see that Firefox uses more than 1GB Ram, which will grind my computer to halt, or make everything else very slow. According to this , there is a simple way to make sure that Firefox doesn't use too much memory. Use the configuration editor (url: about:config) Find 'browser.cache.memory.enable' and change it to 'false' Add 'browser.cache.memory.capacity' as an integer, and set it to 4096 Restart Firefox, it should not behave itself.

One of the nice things about MacHeist is that you pay a small amount of money and you get a fair select of Software. The last bundle (as they call it) included ‘MacJournal’ which I’m using to write this - I always like offline tools to online tools (not depending on an internet connection). In general a MacHeist bundle is every from $19.95 to somewhat more, mostly you’ll end up with a selection of software which cost many times more than what you paid.

I've been learning something new this week (which happens on a regular basic), but this time it was very official, I actually went to a training. It was decided, that I had to learn Python , which is a [stag]programming language[/stag], and yet another of the scripting ones - we already have Perl , PHP , Ruby , and so forth, which meant that I actually was in some sort of pathetic way was looking forward to see what all this was about. There is one thing which is annoying about Python, and it's even worse that they have decided not to do something about it. They have not implemented a 'switch' statement, they have some obscure reason why; It is too early to decide. I'd like to see at least one completed proposal for pre-computed values before deciding. In the mean time, Python is fine without a switch statement, and perhaps those who claim it would be a mistake to add one are right. The whole thing is discussed here . A switch statement is used to in a very simple...

I'm using [stag]Google Reader[/stag] for my rss feeds (that way I can read them everywhere), and now they (well been able to for a while), allow you to share things on a public page. When you see items you would like other people to see (actually people can also subscribe to it) you can share the item (at the bottom of the reader item window), and it becomes available on your public page. Also you can put a link to it on you page: Kind of cool.... My shared page is here .

I wrote “The end of the Mac road”??? , as a response to [stag]Ian Betteridge[/stag], now it seams that things have happened in "choose your OS" world.... Adrian Kingsley-Hughes from ZDnet have written a comment to "why does people still use Windows" discussion. First installment: Five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user , second installment and follow up: Three more things that the Linux community doesn’t get . The sad thing is that he is mostly right, how do you convince anyone to change to something they do not know anything, and btw. cannot promise that it will work. Over the years I've have many and quite intense discussions with both sides of the fence so to say (I can be quite good at playing the devil advocate). And what I have found is that, for the common user it is most of the time it's ease of use which is the main thing, and there after applications, most people do not mind OpenOffice ...

I was reading this entry on Ian Betteridge blog, where he talks about his switch from [stag]OSX[/stag] to Gnu/[stag]Linux[/stag] ( [stag]Ubunto[/stag] ), not that I have any specfic issues with that. But one thing which stands out was this sentence: "First up, let’s look at what this move is not: It’s not a protest against Apple, or a of criticism of Mac OS X or Apple hardware. Mac OS X is great: if you’re a non-technical user, and want everything to just work out of the box, it is almost certainly the the right choice for you." Wohhhh, most of the people I know who are using OSX are anything but non-technical, and yes he's right it works, and it works out of the box, well isn't that the reason why you would want something?? - I'm a geek (yes I finally did get around to admit to it), and I probably know more about Linux than any sane person should do, but that does not mean that I don't want something which works (day in, day out). I'm also a great...

I commented on the [stag]QuickTime[/stag] 7.1.5 update , and how it broke [stag]VLC[/stag] (and maybe other things). Well it turned out that part of the problem was partly 40cm from the keyboard - deleting the VLC settings (program is provided in the DMG), solved the problem with VLC. And last week [stag]Apple[/stag] released an update for QuickTime . It now looks like everything is working again....

I am not really a South Park fan, but this one is actually funny....

Yes!!! it finally look like we are getting [stag]OpenOffice[/stag] on OSX without X11. Yes I know that there is [stag]NeoOffice[/stag] , I use it, and I like it, but I would like to be on the same code base as the reast of the OpenOffice users out there. That is why I'm very happy to read that [stag]Sun[/stag] is officially going to work on a Carbon version version. Ok, ok, Carbon might not be the lastest and brightest but it will still be a native [stag]OSX[/stag] application.

A free '[stag]Battlestar Galatica[/stag]' game (Beyond the Red Line) have been release for Mac... I'm watching this show, but not much of a gamer, but will have a look at it at some point.

As I wrote here [stag]Garmin[/stag] promised that they would release OSX versions of their software that is [stag]MapSource[/stag] and POI Loader, well finally a year after they initially said something about it they have released a beta of POI Loader for Mac . Lucky me, who does not have a GPS which support POI Loader..... So I will still be waiting for MapSource on OSX..... As for howto to do stuff with your GPS on OSX look here; Peter Hilton (yes the guy from Hilton Harbour ) have some neat tricks here .

There is a holy grail in working with directories, that is directories as in LDAP or meta directories, which have one thing in common - you mostly do not have the right tool at the right time. And one thing I've been missing for years is a decent LDAP browser. It looks like I finally have found what I've been looking for. The [stag]Apache Directory[/stag] project have released a tool called Apache Direcotry LDAP Studio which is based on [stag]Eclipse[/stag] , which means that it runs on Windows, Linux and OSX without having to anything strange. They have some screenshots which shows what it can do; This is the browser it self And it can work with the schema Or you if you have eclipse installed already then you can add http://directory.apache.org/ldapstudio/update to software updates, and install it that way - even better as you then only will have one eclipse installed. This is almost too good to be true.

Ever wonder about how to get information shown on your [stag]OSX[/stag] desktop? Well wonder no more, I stumbled over a blog entry which mentioned [stag]GeekTool[/stag] which looks to be pretty interesting. I especially like some of the screenshots , here is an example of what it can do. While I was running Linux on my desktop I looked into this, but never really got around to do anything. And now that it's possible on OSX I'm thinking about giving it a try.

It looks like the latest update to [stag]Quicktime[/stag] (7.1.5) is buggy. There is a discussion going on at [stag]Apple[/stag] about reverting back to the previous version - which is close to a no go. I ran in to the same problem with VLC ([stag]VideoLan Client[/stag]), which quits unexpectedly, and very random. There is a long discussion going on on VLC forums about that, and some people are not too happy about this. One of the suggestions is to downgrade VLC to version 0.8.4, or 0.8.2, or 0.8.0 , which is anoying as then it's no longer a universal binary, but if that is what will solve the problem until Apple get's around to release a bugfix for QuickTime, or release information to developers, then that's what we have to live with.

I really like [stag]OpenVPN[/stag] it allows me to have a very simple [stag]VPN[/stag] solution, and it runs on standard ports (80, 443), which means that it can penetrate proxy's and firewalls (don't tell security people please). Now installing it on [stag]OSX[/stag] can be a bit anoying, as there are not prebuild binaries (that I can find), but fear not, as there is help for that. [stag]DarwinPorts[/stag] is a project to provide opensource software for the Mac, and it works very very well. It requires Xcode (OSX development environment). To get OpenVPN installed you need to do following steps; 1) install [stag]xcode[/stag] (download, open dmg, and do the install) 2) install darwinports (download, open dmg, and do the install), you can download the sourcecode, and use that for install. 3) use darwinports to install openvpn: - open a terminal (I use iTerm , which is nicer) # sudo port install openvpn2 .... ---> Building openvpn2 with target all ---> Staging openvpn2...

One of the few things which really scares me with computers are things like [stag]backdoors[/stag], or [stag]trojans[/stag]. Not so much that they exist, but it actually is possible for someone to gain access to my computer with out me knowing, or for someone to just sit there and follow what I am doing without me knowing that it happens. I'm using a [stag]Microsoft[/stag] (tm) Wireless Laser Desktop for Mac, which is as it says wireless, and suddenly earlier today my mouse cursor started moving around with out me doing anything.... my brain took a few seconds to process that, and it could have something to do with the driver, shaked it a bit around, and still it was moving. Hummmmm, then suddenly a list of my mails where selected... computer off..... For some strange reason I now have an issue or two getting my [stag]MacBook Pro[/stag] (MBP) up and running again, but because I had installed a few updates the last couple of days, I thourgh it could have something to do with that, s...

It looks like someone have been doing something about this. Amit Singh from Google , have been working on FUSE (File-system in USErspace). It is supposed to make is possible to read/write NTFS (and other non-supported filesystems) on OSX. But as usual with these things it comes with a warning: " Before opening new issues, please look at the Wiki, especially the FAQ and the HOWTO articles, to see if your problem is already discussed there. It would also be helpful to look at the current and past problems reported in the 'Issues' section. "