As you may know, Norton and Symantec were originally rivals in the anti-virus software market. Then, Norton bought Symantec and the two anti-virus products merged into Norton Anti Virus. Yes, I know, I’m talking PC here. Bare with me on this one.
Author: rolfje
BusySync vs Spanning Sync
Google calendar is the new “Cool” in the calendar world. Or at least, the guys at work seem to think so. For me, a 100% online calendar is not always a good solution, because I can’t take it with me. Getting Google calendar to sync with iCal would help, because that syncs to my phone and iPod. I tried BusySync and Spanning Sync to do this. One of them succeeded.
Sell a Name or an Image?
The new marketing “trick” seems to be to give a product a nice name, which sounds “expensive” and “design” like. So the marketing boys come up with a nice name. Compaq for instance has been using “pressario” for a while now. But when I say that I have a “pressario”, do you really know what kind of computer I have? Do you know which computer to buy when you hear my praise on my great new computer?
Get an Onscreen Keyboard in OSX
Always forgetting how to do accents on characters, or where the euro sign (€) is? Use the on-screen keyboard and see where the special characters are while holdin down the option key, or the shift-option combination. Read the small tutorial on HackAddict.net on How to Get an Onscreen Keyboard in OSX.
Orange highlighted characters are the combinations. So do an Option-E, let go, and then an “o” to get “ó”. Have fun finding all the combo’s. Using the keyboard viewer is faster than the character palette, and in addition learns you the key combinations for often used characters.
Seemless Bluetooth iSync
In my last post, I wrote about how I got HomeZone to detect my bluetooth phone, and automatically start iSync. While I was playing with it, I noticed how HomeZone opens the Address book application and iSync, and doesn’t close them. To make it more seemless, I used a script I found at The Technocrat to start and stop iSync without interfering with your work. Here’s how I did that.
HomeZone: Start iSync automatically
Recently, I installed “Do Something When” and use it to start rsync scripts when I plug in certain USB devices. By doing this, every time I plug in my USB memory stick containing my Password Gorilla password databases, it gets backed up (Apple style, with timestamps). Needless to say, it then gets backed up by TimeMachine.
I also needed this hands-off approach for synchronizing my iCal calendar with my new Nokia 6300 phone. Enter Homezone, a very cool app that can detect if a certain Bluetooth device is in range, and start iSync. It can also lock and unlock your screen when your phone is in or out of range, respectively. I did find some buttons looking funny when running it in Leopard, but it does work fine.
Next up: a review between Busy Sync and Spanning Sync for synchronizing iCal with Google Calendar.
Stretch pants…
… invented for people who order size 12 pants for their size 18 butts.
File does not exist?
For those people who have had problems accessing their files today, I remind you of the very old saying:
“A file does not exist until it exists in two places”
Naturaly, this means on two different physical places, preferably miles apart.
Layer Violations
Like buildings, software usually a deviation of a standard structure. The architect chooses the structure his design will be based upon. After making design adjustments to the structure to cater the requirements, the architect supervises the builders. Like a building architect, the software architect supervises while walking around in the structure during the build.
Software projects can get so large and complex that the architect can not posibly monitor all the code all the time. This is where te tooling comes in. In this post, I will explain how to use Checkstyle to automatically monitor the basic architectural integrety of the software.
The vi religion
Every age has it’s tools. Many, many years ago, in 1976 to be exact, squinty-eyed nerds with a social deficiency ruled the computer world. They talked to eachother in a secret code, wore geeky clothes and made sure that everybody thought that computers were magic. To make sure that nobody could ever use a computer to edit a file, they all swore to never ever use another editor than… <scary music> vi </scary music>.