Mac Tales

This is so 1990’s – it reminds me of the days when software rarely worked, and crashed a lot.

I run my mac with the filesystem set to case sensitive mode.

I do this because I’m a programmer, the languages I use are cases sensitive, and I tend to write software that is deployed on linux, which is case sensitive.

So imagine my surprise when I went to install photoshop, and it wouldn’t install because it only supports case insensitive file systems!!!

I’d like to add that this is the only piece of software I have found that hasn’t worked on case sensitive HPFS+.

FFS! Adobe, it isn’t 1999. How lame.

Well, updating to snow leopard was actually a fairly smooth process.

The first thing I did was make a backup using Carbon Copy Cloner, then rather than doing an upgrade I formatted the disk, and did a clean install onto the freshly formatted disk.

Once the install was complete, I chose to ‘import my settings from another mac’, but pointed it at the backup drive.

Afterwards I had a fresh, faster, snappy upgraded mac with all my previous configuration settings, documents and applications.

Nice.

A friend sent me this brilliant tip via twitter the other day.

OSX mail.app is a really sweet desktop mail application with built in gmail support.

After using mine for about a year, it had become kinda slow – I didn’t really notice how slow until I tried this tip:

1. Close mail.app

2. Open terminal

3. Type the following in to terminal:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

4. You should now have a sqlite prompt (sqlite>).

5. At the sqlite> prompt, type:
vacuum subjects;

6. After the prompt returns (may take a few seconds), you can Control-D to exit.

7. Restart mail – it should be noticeably faster!

You’ve all read the news today about Net Sol, well, here’s the biscuit…

kudos to Jey Westerdal who spotted the icing on the cake…

If a customer chooses not to register the domain name with Network Solution they are forced to wait 4 days for Network Solutions to delete the domain name in the Free Add Grace period.

After the four day hostage period the consumer is free from the hostage situation and can register the domain somewhere else.

However Network Solutions has now exposed those domains to Domain Tasters that will snipe those domain up milliseconds after Network Solutions deletes them.

Check out: http://www.domainfrontrunningisacrime.com/ And lets not forget it….

One of my early encounters with an OS X Mac when the ibook came out, and a colleague bought one.

He only had it a few months before it became plagued with problems and woeful after sales support.

He ended up taking the reseller (there were no Apple stores in australia at the time) to the small clams court, and got his money back.

Howard’s experiences probably put me off buying a mac for many years afterwards. While, so far, I’m still very happy with mine – Howard is not!

PC2-5300? PC2-5400? Corsair? Crucial? Apple own brand? WTF?

I recently decided to upgrade the memory in my Macbook; I learned a few valuable lessons along the way, which today I’m going to share…

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not uncommon to find attacks used by web-savvy criminals which exploit the ability to traverse the users history / cache using JavaScript. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is blog action day where bloggers blog on the environment. As I blew dust of the feed reader this morning, many of the posts I read repeated a subset of the same handful of ‘tips’ (turn your computer off at night, get compact fluorescent light bulbs, buy a new monitor…) Read the rest of this entry »

Truecrypt is an excellent open source security program providing cross platform virtual encrypted disks for Windows and Linux; but what about Mac OS X?
Read the rest of this entry »

Apache htaccess files have many uses to the webmaster, but by default this file is not visible in the OS X finder. This is because OS X treats files that begin with a dot (like htaccess) as system files.

There is a simple way to change this behavior so that you can see, and edit htaccess files on mac OS X.
Read the rest of this entry »