Category: Software

Easy Image Resizing in OSX

2007-12-31 rolfje 1 Comment

A little heads-up for Apple OSX users who have lots of images to resize. There’s a free tool available to do this at http://www.eagle-of-liberty.com/resizeemall/. It’s donationware, if you like it you can send the author money by paypal.

I’ve used it, and it works as advertised. Drag a bunch of images on the application, and batch-resize them without touching your originals. You can save the images with a postfix, and even in a different format if you like. Very easy for mailing a bunch of photo’s.

Apple, Software

If Not HTTPS Then Exit

2007-12-19 rolfje 4 Comments

Hello kids. Yes, if you are writing applications for consumer companies, there’s a good chance I’m talking to you. We need to have a talk, urgently. It’s about a whole new way of doing things, and it’s a new word in your dictionary. The word is “secure” (linked to Webster’s for your convenience.

Read More “If Not HTTPS Then Exit” »

Software

Backup Guru? Give me a break

2007-12-11 rolfje 2 Comments

Today I listened to a podcast called “For Mac Eyes Only”, in which people were complaining about how Time Machine does not work “the way they want it to”. I think this is utter crap, and I will explain why.

Apple, Software

OSX 10.5.1 Update, still SMB problems

2007-11-16 rolfje 21 Comments

Last week, I hapily installed OSX 10.5 (Leopard) on my trusty Mac Mini. The upgrade from Tiger went without a hitch, and the system even got a bit “snappier”. For a week, I had no major issues with Leopard. The Dock dissapeared once, and I had a non-reacting keyboard once when waking from sleep mode. Other than that I am a happy Leopard user.

Up until a few das ago, when I tried to access my newly acquired 500GB Iomega Network Storage. The Iomega drive is a network connected drive, formatted as FAT32, and accessible through the samba (SMB://) protocol. With Leopard, I could see the drive in the network, and I could double click on it’s shares, but when (if) the share connected, I could not drag files onto it, or see what is on the disk. Unmounting takes ages, and sometimes requires me to “killall -9 Finder”.

Apple, Software

Block Luntbuild 1.5.1 Anonymous Access

2007-11-13 rolfje 4 Comments

If you are using luntbuild for your continuous integration builds at work, you probably want to remove anonymous user access. In stead of adding that feature to the administrator “Properties” page where I’d expect it, you have to hack the Spring configuration in the webapps directory of luntbuild. Sigh. Here we go:

Software

Clonezilla: m4d Sk!lZ

2007-11-06 rolfje 23 Comments

A few weeks ago, my Dad and my Brother both bought identical Windows Vista machines, at the same shop, at the same time. Although the hardware specs of these computers were terrific, the performance of Windows Vista was “moderate” to say the least. An even bigger problem was that some of the older XP programs my dad had been using did no longer work on the shiny new Vista machine. The shiny 3D effects had to go in favour of something that “just worked”.

Read More “Clonezilla: m4d Sk!lZ” »

Microsoft, Software

Essential Color Design Tool

2007-10-15 rolfje 1 Comment

For those people out there designing user interfaces, web frontends or anything else displayed on a screen: About 8% of all males are color blind. This could mean that because of a simple color choice, 8% of your target audience (customers) could have serious difficulty in using your design. 5% of all males can’t distinguish green from red, although they are regarded as high contrast to eachother.

Do you want to test how your design looks to colorblind people? Now you can, with Color Oracle, a tool for Mac OSX and Windows which transposes the colors of your screen to reflect what it would look like if you were color blind. In fact, it can simulate 3 different kinds of color blindness.

From the site: “Color Oracle takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see. Color Oracle applies a full screen color filter to art you are designing – independently of the software that you are using. Eight percent of all males are affected by color vision impairement – make sure that your graphical work is readable by the widest possible audience.”

Software

AFP breaks when messing with your Public folder!

2007-10-04 rolfje No Comments

Hi, just a quick reminder to myself and users of the AFP protocol (Apple File Protocol) who are wondering why it is not working. For some strange reason, if you start messing (deleting) the “Public” folder of any user which is on the system providing the AFP share, you will break the AFP protocol.

Apple, Software

Phrack still in ASCII

2007-08-04 rolfje No Comments

It is a long time since I read this stuff, but I stumbled upon a paper discussing the non-executable stack on OSX (a trick to prevent buffer/stack overflow exploits). Ah, the good old days. And with all this markup, it’s good to see that Phrack magazine stuck to their format. It’s still the same as over 20 years ago… Well written articles, focussed on correctness and content, for the coders out there who are not afraid experimenting with some assembly. The amount of (nightly) hours that go into the research and proof of these articles are unbelievable, and it shows.

Read More “Phrack still in ASCII” »

Fun, Software

Programmer Personality Test

2007-06-06 rolfje No Comments

Just found this funny page where you can take a Programmer Personality Check.

My programmer personality type is DHTB, which is explained as follows:

You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it’s parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.

You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

Software