Author: rolfje

Choose: AFP or SMB

2009-01-11 rolfje No Comments

I recently upgraded the operating system on my trusty Mac Mini G4 home fileserver from Tiger to Leopard. In addition to the out-of-the-box backup, I no longer have to use SharePoints to manage my network shares. In Leopard, I can just right-click them and arrange the sharing.

In doing so, I decided to switch on both SMB and AFP sharing for all shares. The idea was that my Macs all would use AFP automatically, and all Windows machines would see the SMB mounts. After a few hours, iTunes began acting up on me, because it decided to switch between the SMB and AFP protocol (or so it seemed). Finder also seems to have some trouble listing network shares if the exact same name on the same server is shared with two different protocols.

Because there are people on my network with Windows machines, I decided to switch off the AFP protocol and only go with SMB. I haven’t had problems since.

If you’re sharing drives like I’m doing, go for SMB. It may not be the technically superior solution, but it will “just work”. You can easily switch to AFP when the world is freed of Windows machines. 😉

Uncategorized

We are Free! Free, I tell you!

2009-01-07 rolfje 2 Comments

Regular readers know that I’ve been ranting about the way the music and movie industry are selling us crippled content, which actually feels like punishing you for honestly buying your digital content. Coincidentally, a month after that rant, Steve wrote a mail to the music industry in which he stated that DRM clearly was not working, and we needed to approach things differently.

A few months later, Apple and EMI actually started a new service in iTunes called iTunes plus, selling 256kbps DRM-free AAC files. If you’ve seen the latest Macworld 2009 Keynote Address by Philip (Phil) Schiller, you will have noticed that Apple hasn’t been sitting still. At the end of this quarter, all songs in the iTunes store will be available as DRM-free iTunes plus version. And there’s an easy button in iTunes which let’s you upgrade all your DRM-ed music automatically (payed, ofcourse). The link is in the iTunes Quick Links box, top right. I tried it, works fine.

Finally, your music will travel with you and play anywhere, just like those trusty CD’s did. Even better: with your iPhone you’re now able to buy music anywhere you are, because Apple has added 3G to the iTunes store on the iPhone.

Uncategorized

Free OSX Wallpaper

2009-01-02 rolfje No Comments

Apple

“Instruments” – Application monitor

2009-01-02 rolfje No Comments

Did you know that your installation of Leopard comes with a built-in performance monitor? It’s called “Instruments” and you can attach it to any process currently running. In the screenshot you see here I attached it to an instance of Eclipse while running some unittests.

Instruments has some nice templates for you to choose from, and you can monitor CPU activity per thread, disk I/O, User Interface activity, Object allocations, and leaks. Just so you know, it might come in handy.

Apple, Software

How to add drivers to SQuirreLSQL.app

2008-12-30 rolfje 11 Comments

SQuireL SQL on OSX with Oracle drivers If you’re a SQuirreL SQL fan like me, and you use a Mac, you probably also want to know how to add a driver to the OSX version of the application. Most people just point to an external jar file, but you can also add drivers to the application bundle. There’s not much to it, but it took me some time to discover that I actually had to edit the plist file in the bundle after adding the driver.

As you can see on the left, my SQuireLSQL.app now comes with the Oracle OCI and Thin driver built in, and because they are part of the application bundle, I can’t wreck my installation by misplacing jarfiles or reconfiguring classpaths. Nice.

If you want to drivers to your SQuireLSQL.app yourself, here’s what you need to do:

Apple, Software

Eclipse 3.4.1, OSX and Java 1.6

2008-12-28 rolfje 2 Comments

Eclipse application icon

I recently downloaded Eclipse 3.4.1 for Mac OSX, and tried starting it using the eclipse.app icon. It did not work, and I noticed a message in /var/log/system.log telling me that the JVM could not be loaded.

Apple, Software

Hex color picker for OSX

2008-12-24 rolfje No Comments

If you’re working on some source code and you quickly need to insert a hexadecimal color code for a color you currently have on your screen, then here is a neat little trick I found:

First, install Hex Color Picker by Waffle software. It will add an extra option to the built-in OSX color picker to show you the selected color in Hex.

To reach the color picker, you usually start up any application which uses the standard OSX color picker and just choose “choose color”. What you can also do, is have the OSX color picker behave as a standalone application in 3 simple steps:

Read More “Hex color picker for OSX” »

Apple, Software

Programmer Quotes

2008-12-19 rolfje No Comments

On StackOverflow, there is a question asking for the greatest programmer quotes you know. In the top 3 quotes are the following two quotes which I think hold much truth:

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Rick Osborne

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” – Brian Kernighan

These two quotes are briliantly summing up the usual rant I always use. “if my phone rings at 3 a.m. for a prio 1 production issue, I want to be able to easily read the code. And I’m not going to be awake or cheerful at that time of night.” I guess at that time of night, it’s easy to awaken the violent psychopath in me, and so it better not be “smart” code. CVS blame support anybody?

Software

Wiimote Whiteboard

2008-12-12 rolfje 7 Comments

For people wanting to have an interactive whiteboard but don’t have the money, Johnny Chung Lee has found the solution. Using a Wiimote, he can track an infrared lightsource (like an LED) and use that to control the mousecursor. I tried some software on the Mac and the PC, and I actually got both to work without too much trouble.

Micro Victories

2008-12-11 rolfje 1 Comment

Trophy The last few weeks I was frustrated about not being able to write any code for the project I am on at work. My days are filled with email, spreadsheets, documents, discussions and distractions. All important stuff, I’m sure, but none of it has got to do with actual coding.

I tried to write code during the evenings for that project, just to get my kicks. Two things happened:

Frustration grew, because I feel that this is the kind of work I should be doing during the day.
As I worked the late night hours, I realized I could never get it all done because the blocks of work were simply to large and required too much research to be done during a few evenings.