May 18th, 2010
Most operating systems make this rather trivial to expose, Apple seems to have made it just a tiny bit more difficult… as such, I provide the simple steps here for my own memory as well as your benefit.
Open Terminal…
WARNING: Be particularly careful about the files you modify or delete, you could impact your system in very critical ways… there is a reason they are ‘hidden’, most often it is to keep less-technical users from breaking things 
Return hidden files to their usual state.
Open Terminal…
Cheers
![]()
Tags: apple, files, folders, hidden, ipod, os/x, system
Posted in Life, Work | No Comments »
May 6th, 2010
As many people and businesses have come to depend on Google for their services ‘in the cloud’, it becomes difficult to know what is really going on when something is ‘down’ or unavailable. The following link may prove useful in such cases.
http://www.google.com/appsstatus
![]()
Tags: apps, calendar, cloud, dashboard, google, groups, mail, services, talk, web
Posted in Life, Work | No Comments »
April 5th, 2010
As we enter storm season in the US, and storms ’seem’ to get more intense each year… particularly for those of us that live in tornado territory, it’s often advised to get a “Weather Radio”.
I’d heard about these for years, but never really looked into them… with my communications background, they prove quite interesting. There are over 1000 stations in the US and coverage is pretty good (excellent in my area). Obviously you need a special receiver to receive the broadcasts, VHF requencies are below…
162.400
162.425
162.450
162.475
162.500
162.525
162.550
REFERENCE:
![]()
Tags: hurricane, noaa, radio, storm, tornado, vhf, weather
Posted in Life | No Comments »
March 31st, 2010
Okay, so this one’s a little old, and I just found it while looking at some of Microsoft Update’s HTML source, it appears to be relevant for MSIE6 and newer and may be responsible for some interesting styling and behaviour of form components.
A quick search for it turns up lots of discussions about other browers such as Firefox being effected if the value is not defined… as such it’s likely a good idea to define it in your pages to be sure.
An old MSDN entry reads…
When running on Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6 and the content displayed in it sports a look and feel that matches the Windows XP platform. You can opt to have your HTML content not take on the same look as the operating system for elements such as buttons and scroll bars, by adding the following META tag:
<meta http-equiv=”MSThemeCompatible” content=”no” />
Cheers
![]()
Tags: button, checkbox, css, form, html, meta, msie, msthemecompatible, radio
Posted in MSIE bugs, WebStandards, Work | No Comments »
March 18th, 2010
Testing web applications with various versions of MSIE (Internet Explorer) often proves problematic as it’s generally not possible to have more than one version installed on a single Windows installation. There are various approaches, such as:
- Having an entire test lab with different browser configurations.
- More often, it’s also possible to run a set of virtual machines on a single desktop.
- Another option is to find a package that ‘hacks’ around some of the Windows limitations and installs (at least partially) the browser rendering capabilities.
NOTE: the final method above has some quirks, but you can generally use it for preliminary testing by developers as it’s obviously easier to maintain.
Here are a few common packages that I’m aware of:
Happy testing!
![]()
Tags: browser, collection, msie, testing
Posted in MSIE bugs, WebStandards, Work | No Comments »
January 25th, 2010
If you have ever looked at the console or logs while starting a Tomcat instance on Windows you have probably seen the following line about APR.
INFO: The Apache Tomcat Native library which allows optimal performance in production environments was not found on the java.library.path
As long as the “tcnative-1.dll” is in the Windows PATH, generally you can place it in c:\windows\system32, but any other location in the PATH will work should you need it to be portable, or have different versions in use.
NOTE: Other Operating Systems use a similar approach as Windows to add an environmental variable, optionally you can also add the appropriate location to the “java.library.path” attribute used when calling the VM, if you are more technically inclined.
Cheers
![]()
Tags: apache, apr, dll, java, jni, native. library, performance, tomcat, win32, windows
Posted in Work | No Comments »
December 25th, 2009
ReplayTV, as a predecessor to the commonly known Tivo had two features that ultimately lead to the companies undoing:
- Commercial Advance (automatic)
- Internet Video Sharing
Obviously, advertisers did not like the first feature, and movie studios did not like the second. As these boxes could easily share ‘anything’ that they could receive it was/is relatively easy to send video that was captured from cable networks or DVDs over an internet connection.
Mind you that sharing is not as easy as it is over the file sharing networks, user interaction is required to both send and recieve files, and that process is far slower than most people would be willing to wait if they just wanted to ‘pirate’ something.
Several years ago, when I first purchased my unit, it was easy to go to http://www.myreplaytv.com/ to remotely manage my hardware, that service is now gone but in it’s absence there have been some creative solutions.
My ReplayTV (5xxx) ISN: 00004-54831-42373
Test your connection (or mine):
http://www.lhaven.net/ivstest/
Merry Christmas!
![]()
Tags: dvr, isn, ivs, mpg, replaytv, rtv, sharing, tivo, video
Posted in Life | No Comments »
December 22nd, 2009
For a very long time I was perplexed as to why my old 900Mhz Pentium-3 server outperformed many of my newer and faster machines, even when they all were running with essentially the same amount of memory and had the same 7200rpm hard-drives.
I recently realized that over the years, I had optimized the WindowsXP NTFS registry settings with a variety of software and manual edits, and thus had essentially changed the way that windows works with the drive itself.
Here are the current settings that these machines utilize, perhaps you can try them for yourselves:
WARNING: You need to be confortable making edits to your registry to do these changes, as such I will not document ‘how’ to open the registry itself, you can easily find that info anyways. These are all DWORD settings.
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
- DisableNTFSLastAccessUpdate = 1
- NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation = 1
- NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate = 1
- NtfsMftZoneReservation = 2
Cheers
![]()
Tags: disk, ntfs, performance, registry, windows
Posted in Work | No Comments »
December 16th, 2009
Here’s another great reason to use Linux over Windows. Ksplice Uptrack provides for runtime patching of the Linux kernel without rebooting of the machine. This has great advantages where you need to maintain the security of a server but have limited opportunites to reboot due to SLA’s (Service Level Agreements). Ubuntu Linux was the first supported operating system, other variants are now available too, though often for a fee.
![]()
Tags: free, kernel, ksplice, linux, patch, reboot, security, ubuntu, update
Posted in Life, WebStandards, Work | No Comments »
December 11th, 2009
This is a concept I had forgotten about until recently, it can often serve as a simple means of code obfuscation and is also sometimes referred to as “Decimal Address”.
Some background:
- DNS is used to convert a URL/domain name into an IP address that is used to contact the remote machine.
EXAMPLES:
localhost = 127.0.0.7
giantgeek.com = 99.138.127.198
- IP addresses (as IPv4) are represented as groups of 4 hexadecimal or decimal octets.
- Those numbers can be plugged into a simple formula to be represented as a single large integer.
As such, you can use the following as equivalents:
- http://localhost
- http://127.0.0.1
- http://2130706433
REFERENCES:
![]()
Tags: dns, domain, http, ip, url
Posted in WebStandards, Work | 1 Comment »