Ed's Blog

Hi there,

I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard and was shocked to see that Apple have not kept up support for DVI to S-Video output. The output on screen appears in greyscale and poor quality. Even with restarting I had the same problem. The latest patch for Snow Leopard doesn’t seem to have anything to fix this problem so I was left with no alternative but to revert back to Leopard or lose my TV in my room, no thanks. Also upon upgrading I lost some widgets I used such as MenuMeters and my replacement for the time stopped working also.
Luckily I had a backup with Time Machine from a few days ago which could be restored!

Beware of Snow Leopard!

EDIT: I’ve just upgraded again and these issues appear to be fixed, damn right!

Hi,

I recently had a UIF image that I didn’t really know how to mount. After some digging I found that it seems to mount only with MagicISO, a Windows only application.

However there is a nifty little converter that converts from UIF to ISO which can then be mounted, burned etc.

Check it out at http://vafer.org/projects/uif2iso4mac/.

Hi,

I’ve recently picked up a nice big TV and doing quite a bit of streaming from my laptop through the TV. However one this that has annoyed me is that the display on my Macbook Pro stays on all the time even when the primary display is the TV. After searching around for a little bit I found this work-around. It only really works well however if you have a remote.

Basically you hook up the TV using a DVI adapter and go into display preferences. Go into the ‘Arrangement’ tab and you’ll see two blue boxes. One of those boxes will have a narrow white rectangle on the top of it. Drag this rectangle over to the TV(i.e. the opposite to the one it is on already) and close the preferences pane. Start up FrontRow and it will automatically turn off the secondary display (now the MBP screen) and you can watch TV without having the secondary display annoying you.

Link to detailed explanation.

Hi,

I’ve recently upgraded to Google Apps for my site. It allows me to use Google Mail for my own personal site and I can use all the Google Documents, Spreadsheets and the rest of their free applications. I just had to modify my MX records for my site to point at Googles MX server(which takes a while to go through). Check it out if you’re a webmaster, I was previously using SquirrelMail so using Gmail is a massive improvement!

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions.html

Recently when I booted up into the Windows XP partition using bootcamp of the Intel Mac I’m using I needed to access the files on the Leopard OSX partition of the hard-drive. After looking around for a bit I found HFSExplorer which can read from a HFS partition(i.e. Mac OS filesystem) and copy from it if needed. It is read-only though which is a bit of a bummer but is open-source and worked pretty well when I used it.

I see that bots have cracked both Gmail and Hotmail Live’s captcha methods. Not only that but did it in 60 seconds, very impressive. Read about it here and more in depth here.

I’ve also been playing around with some Ajax stuff recently. I had to make a modal window that contains a form, the form set a session variable that is set just once for a user’s session. I looked around for a bit, tried a few samples and found Control Modal which is a pretty lightweight, easy to use Modal window Ajax API built on top of Prototype. Check out the demos and grab a version at the Control Modal site. Below is some code I wrote to place the form in the Modal window.

Select an option

Note: Took us ages to figure that onclick was the right Prototype JS event to fire the click event, we were previously using click() but it wasn’t working. So now when the page loads a dom loaded event is triggered which then goes and creates a click event on the modal_link_one id which creates the Ajax modal window.

I had a strange problem with Aptana Studio for the last week. I have Subclipse installed as a plugin and previously all my icons appeared fine, all the repository information showed up. I was able to perform Update and all the other typical SVN commands. However in the last week all the icons disappeared and were replaced by question marks. Nothing had appeared to have changed so I was confused with it! Aptana had previously performed an update so I decided to uninstall it and re-installed Aptana, same problem. I uninstalled it again and put in Eclipse but same problem. Finally after fishing around a bit I saw that my workspace directory i.e. ~/Sites/ had an .svn directory in it. I had no idea why it was there so I deleted it and the subdirectories, restarted Aptana and all the icons showed up agan! I’ve no idea how it got in to begin with but I’ve seen it again since on a Ubuntu machine so its not just me!

I needed a command to see what packages were installed in Ubuntu, found this after a little searching:

    dpkg –get-selections

Does the job nicely.

Hi all,

Have been back on the php trail again recently. On problem I’ve had is to do with executing a certain piece of code every 20 seconds. One way in which I was doing it was:

[code lang="php"]
startTime = time();

while(true)

{ endTime = time();

if(endTime - startTime > 20)

{ startTime = time();

//Code

}

}
[/code]

This however is quite harsh on the CPU. If came up with a better and more obvious way to do time-based looping

[code lang="php"]
while(true)

{ sleep(20);

//Code

}
[/code]

This loops around every 20 seconds and runs the piece of code and is much nicer on the CPU

I’ve been using PHP AGI which hooks into the Asterisk Extensions.conf dialplan.

One of the other problems I’ve been having is that the php scripts weren’t being killed by asterisk when a user hangs up in the middle of the call.

The solution is to register a handler to react to the hangup event

[code lang="php"]
if(function_exists('pcntl_signal'))

{ pcntl_signal(SIGHUP,'sig_handler');

}
[/code]

This registers the function sig_handler to be run when a hangup is detected within the php script execution

[code lang="php"]
function sig_handler($signo)

{ //Other code, CDR and closing MYSQL conns

exit(0);

}
[/code]

The exit closes the php script thus freeing up the CPU.

I ssh’ed onto my iTouch yesterday. I followed the instructions here http://hacktheiphoneitouch.blogspot.com/2007/12/installing-ssh-client-on-112-iphone.html for the MAC, works nicely. Put on Apache and PHP, not tested them as of yet but I’m sure they’ll work nicely as a simple webserver. Haven’t upgraded from 1.1.2 as of yet couldn’t be bothered jailbreaking again but when 1.1.3 is jailbroken out I’ll consider upgrading. Want to get the mail, stocks etc new apps at some stage……free preferably. Thinking of looking for a ColdFusion server for the iTouch, major long shot but would be hilarious if I got it working!

Hi again,

I’ve been fishing around for new iTouch apps and have found some excellent new ones out there. Check out Simplify Media, its brilliant allows you to connect to your iTunes library as long as you have a Wifi connection. Just install the app on your Mac or PC, create an account and download the Simplify Media app from the iTouch Installer and log in there too. Takes a little while to get the libraries the first time but after that its very fast. The songs then buffer as if you were streaming them, I’m very impressed with the speed of it – a must have for any iTouch/iPhone owner.

Another site that has lots of recommendations but isn’t quite working for me yet is Seeqpod which is basically a search engine that searches for music in Safari and apparently can stream the audio over the net. The audio doesn’t start for me yet, not sure why. There does seem to be a HUGE amount of music there though.

iPhysics is very very cool ‘game’, you can draw lines, objects and then the physics engine takes over and the new objects bounce around under gravity and as you would expect under Newtonian phyiscs. The really impressive thing is that it is dynamic, you can create objects on the fly and they’ll interact with one another and bounce around the place, fun. The game part involves moving a ball across a level to a small red box, there’s tons of user-created levels so its quite fun from what I’ve played of it. Here’s a video of something similar I found a few weeks ago, thought it was only a college experiment though

Similar to the SimplifyMedia is the telekinesis project. It looks really cool and I’ve not had a chance to test this yet but will give it a goo this evening and see how it works.

Also ScummVM is available for the iTouch now which means that……….yes Monkey Island my all-time favourite game can be played on it. Also can play all the ScummVM developed games, Sam & Max, Indy series and all the other classic adventure games. Hurray!

MobileCast is an other app that can be installed via the Installer. It allows you to fetch podcasts from RSS feeds without having to sync up with iTunes, this wil be handy when I’m travelling and can just pick up random Wifi hotspots.

I’ve recently upgraded the firmware on my PSP to version 3.90 M33-3, mainly because I want to play Pro Evo 2008. Check out Dark Alex’s site with all the releases there, I upgraded from version 3.51. Always pretty nervous when doing it but he hasn’t let me down yet.

Linky to his site

Finally here’s how to quickly create a tar gz archive. Here it is

  tar -pczf nameOfArchive.tar.gz /directoryToZip

Hi again,

Front Row is setup by default to point at your ‘Movies’ folder on the Mac. However I have lots of movies located in other locations on both my Mac and on extra hard-drives that I want to be able to use through Front Row(i.e. use the remote control in bed). Front Row doesn’t support the addition of new folders by default but a very easy hack gets around this. In your movies folder just create a new alias to point another folder(very easy to do just select file and create new alias) and follow this alias in Front Row and it will bring you to the required folder. Easy!

Edit: In looking this up again I’ve found this new hint which will allow volumes(and hence anything on your own Mac and external drives be available) to be added to the movies folder. I haven’t tried it yet but might do soon, sounds like a bit too much navigating to me. http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060815123339582

Oh yes… its about time someone did this. After a bit of searching I found this site: http://www.blackdog.ie/tv/

Follow the instructions on the site, its fairly straight forward. I got it working (watched some Home and Away or RTE1) following the instructions on the site. Took a few re-tries though, think the server being used is a little dodgy or doesn’t respond all the time so it is still a little flakey. It eventually responded to me looking for a username and password, I just hit return and it started the stream. Hopefully it will work when it matters watching Ireland or Munster rugby games.

One of my friends has asked to load up his iPod with movies. So with a burgeoning collection of avi’s I began searching for a good free application to convert avi’s to mp4 on a Mac. I found a nice piece of kit called iSquint which is now unfortunately stopped active development but the last version released works a treat for me. It even gives you the option to add encoded movies to iTunes after it has finished with them. Batch processing is handy although you can’t set the output folder for each individual file, only the output for the entire batch which is a bit annoying. Get iSquint here

Finally I’ve been busy downloading a lot of stuff recently and was eager to keep an eye on the status of my downloads during the day. There are plenty of remote desktop tools but I’ve recently started using LogMeIn and I’m very happy with it. Its free and you can have multiple clients that you can access from anywhere remotely from a website. The interface is nice and simple and it seems reasonably fast so thumbs up from me on that.

Hi all,

Scrolling on my Mac was annoying me so I had a look into how you can scroll properly and of course I found out the very easy way to scroll using just two fingers. In the process I’ve also found out you can do a whole bunch more using the multi-touch.
Check it out here.

Also I’ve had a lot of missing songs in my iTunes and haven’t found a very easy way to remove them. Some quick Googl’ing found that a guy called Doug has made a handy Applescript to remove dead songs. You can get it at Doug’s site here.
Very easy to install just put it in the iTunes script folder in /Users/username/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder and it will appear in iTunes as a weird scroll shaped menu. I tried it, it works a treat. Removed over 270 missing files from my library, hurray!