11
Feb
Just checking to see if this works from iPhone. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Lots of complaints about how iPad doesn't multitask any more than iPhone 3GS.
Okay, so, well. My machine is jailbroken, and has a multitasker in it. It's about 5% more convenient than it used to be. If I uninistalled the multitasker, frankly, I'd barely notice. I use Orbit almost every time I trigger my phone. Multitasker? Hardly ever.
What things, precisely, do you detractors want to multitask on iPhone, or on iPad, that you think you'll be missing? Endgadget was whining about how they want to play videos while IMing. That is not multitasking; that is attention-switching.
What multitasking things do you do now, with a desktop system, that you think you need to have on iPhone, with its little screen (video and IM on the same 320x240? Come on), or that you believe you'll be missing on iPad?
Play your cards. Show your faces. Put up, or shut up.
A developer known as "Briask" created a Joomla! module called ImageSlideShow, which works nicely, except that it insists on inserting an alpha fade effect between images, even if you've set the transition delay to 0.
This means that if (for instance) you're using one of those Cisco flat panel-Web enabled displays, the image transitions can really start to chug, because the CPU can't handle the transitions.
I managed to mod the JavaScript on it, so now it won't do that any more.
The developer indicated he would put that on his to-do list for the next revision — but he said so back in November of 2008. So I'm not holding my breath.
Here's the modded version. It's probably an inelegant hack, but WTF. It works.
I have both — FFox 3.5.6 and OSX.6.2 — and just now, when I tried to open a tab in FFox, my system logged me out and forced a re-login.
Never, ever happened before, with any browser, on any OSX release.
Is this part of the rumor I've heard that FFox 3.5.6 is more or less lethally unstable?
Methinks I'll switch back to Safari, or go to Opera, for a while. Just in case.
And, heh heh, no I don't think I'll be putting Fennec on my iPhone any time soon either, thanks.
14
Nov
They've had it with MS. Their Dell PC, six years old, can't be upgraded to Win7. Even if it could, they'd have to back up, format and reinstall. Which, for the record, is a shitty stupid thing on Microsoft's part. My upgrade curve from OS9 to OSX did not involve a single format of the HD. At all. And that was nearly ten years ago, when Apple was trailblazing. MS has no excuse for this. None.
I was arguing for Ubuntu, but Mac won out in the end. The superb pricing on the Mini is part of what did it, but I've been hacking code longer than my nieces have even been alive, and that may have been a factor as well. It was Linux or Mac, ultimately; they're more or less totally disgusted with Redmond.
I did agitate for Ubuntu, but in the end, Apple won out.
Because, you know, it works. It just fucking works.
Thanks, Bill, for proving with Windows 7 what I've been saying for years. Now focus your company on XBox, Windows Mobile, and Microsoft Foundry. You're excellent there. Keep it up. Cede the desktop to your betters.
You could spend umpteen skillion hours dealing with Adobe, or you could give this a shot.
I have all the system requirements in place. Mac OSX.4.11 or later. Plenty of RAM. Dual core fast box, even if it's not Intel, but the Motorola chipset.
So when I try to run the Flash CS4 installer, it just hangs. I get a blank window saying "Installer Alert", but no controls, no message, nothing.
What to do?
Well, after 30 minutes listening to on-hold music from Adobe's tech support, and another fifteen minutes telling the rep I will not create a new user account just for CS4, and will absolutely not format my hard drive for their damn asinine vector animation engine, I found out what it was, sort of.
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In case you ever need to do it yourself. It's stupidly easy.
Basically it involves changing the word "approved" in the location bar to "spam", selecting the comment you want to unspam, and clicking approve. You don't need Akismet, and you don't need to hack your database. Nice.
Just a quickie. While you can change general system settings for your default browser systemwide in Linux (Ubuntu) by going to System -> Preferences -> Preferred Applications, this does not affect how TweetDeck behaves when loading URLs.
I've been using Epiphany because of my somewhat-laggy netbook, so having Firefox load whenever I used TweetDeck was getting old.
Searching the Ubuntu forums brought up the issue of modifying some settings files for Adobe AIR, but I discovered something interesting while investigating the /opt directory, which is where AIR and TweetDeck get installed. I did that because solutions I'd seen described altering a .so file to point to a different browser, but it was tetchy and could be destroyed with something as simple as a Flash or AIR upgrade.
I found an easier way to do this, I think, one that works for me anyway. NOTE that you need to do this with root privs (sudo).
When I looked into the /opt directory, I saw that there were three folders there — one for Adobe AIR, one for TweetDeck, and one for firefox. (The firefox directory was not a symlink. This is marginally troubling and might explain why upgrading your system to Ffox3.5 isn't recognized by TweetDeck, and it still loads Ffox3.)
TweetDeck seems to be hardwired to load /opt/firefox/firefox when opening a URL. But it doesn't actually seem to care if it's really Firefox it loads or not.
Here's the shortened version of what I did. About half of it was guesswork and trial-and-error, but it worked.
1. In /opt, rename the firefox directory to something like ffox.
2. Create a new directory in /opt called firefox.
3. Copy the script or symlink to the browser of your choice into the firefox folder you just created.
4. Rename that script or symlink firefox.
After that, TweetDeck should use the browser you want.
UPDATE: I did have to alter the epiphany ("firefox") script so it would load new content in tabbed sessions in the browser, assuming it was already running. I commented out the original line (exec epiphany-browser "$@") and added the new-tab command. The revised script looks like this:
#! /bin/sh
#exec epiphany-browser "$@"
exec epiphany-browser --new-tab "$@"
Of course if you're using a different browser, your scripting (and mileage) may vary.
This also bodes well for those who want to use Firefox, but the current version, not the one that ships (for some bizarre reason) with AIR. Just make a symlink to your firefox install in /opt, and you should have the correct, current version load.
UPDATE 2: Apparently not all users have an install of firefox in /opt. So this might not do the trick for you after all, though I guess you could still give it a try and see what happens.
To borrow from a lamentable final chapter in a movie trilogy,1 every time I get out, they pull me right back in again.
They being, in this case, general nerdish tendencies.
Followers of this blog will know by now that I've restarted my usage of Linux, in Ubuntu form. I can't begin to describe what a vast improvement Linux has enjoyed since the last time I used it, back in the Red Hat days. Prior to that, as I've mentioned, was Slackware — and for those of you familiar with JR "Bob" Dobbs, you'll know what I mean when I say that ’ware gave everything except slack.
But this is about Mac, not Linux, and specifically making the Mac Mini work with non-Apple wireless networks. I'm posting it because I've seen, firsthand, the kinds of questions that come up in a lot of user forums, and I'm hoping it might help others who are Googling around for answers about getting their Minis — or their Macs in general — working with certain Belkin wireless networking products, especially their USB wireless transceivers. Typical questions are "Why won't my Mac Mini work with wireless?" and "Mac and Belkin USB wireless — how?" and "Belkin wireless USB drivers for Mac?"
Okay. Many years ago, I bought an AirPort wireless modem/base station — the Graphite model, immediately prior to Apple's release of Extreme.2 It's actually still working just fine, but it's 802.11B, which in non-nerd terms means pretty damn slow, all other things being equal, about 2 MB/second maximum transfer rate. Since my net connection is capable of up to 5 MB/sec download, well, it was choking.
My Intel dual-core 2 GHz Mini can handle G series, which is much faster, and between that and the periodic connect problems I was having with the AirPort — plus the fact that AirPort Graphite hasn't been supported by Apple (surprise!) since about 2005 — I thought maybe I'd be better off with a new wireless router.
I skipped over the AirPort idea, though. I'm sure it's just a matter of time — probably 3 to 6 months, knowing my general luck in these matters — before Apple releases something even better than an N-compliant unit; and besides, third parties make N-speed routers that cost much less than an AirPort Extreme, to the tune of $100 less. Faster and cheaper.
So I scooped up a Belkin, which has a Mac OS installation CD, and while the setup appeared to work fine — I got my Linux netbook and WinMo 6.1 smartphone talking to it without a hitch, though I had to use the Web interface rather than their install wizard for arcane reasons that few others will probably ever encounter — I had no connectivity at all from my Mini.
Well, that's not totally accurate; I did get some connection, sometimes, but it was extremely sporadic and tended to fail a lot more often than not.3 Those of you who have Minis and have experienced this probably already know what's coming, so you can skip ahead a little if you want.
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Came upon a page via another Twitterer today (@blogofinnocence) that made me go a little cross-eyed. Here's the site quoted in full:
0.999… is the same as 1. Not just very close, but precisely identical:
a = 0.999…
10a = 9.999…
10a – a = 9.999… – 0.999…
9a = 9
a = 1There's no trick here. It's just a mathematical fact that most people find deeply counterintuitive.
No, there's no trick, but there is a failure to parse.
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The rest of you will merely find it baffling.
Yes, that is Ubuntu Jaunty running in emulation via VirtualBox on my Mac Mini.
Why?
Because I could, that's why.
Welp, that was an interesting exercise in holy crap. After installing Ubuntu 9.04 (netbook remix) on my Acer Aspire One netbook, things looked great; I switched the system over to the full Gnome desktop UI — the remix has a simple launcher as its default — and everything just ran slick and stable … until I rebooted, and the system menu bars were gone.
That's a bit of a problem, since pretty much everything you need to load and run the Gnome GUI resides in those panels.
