Tag: usability

Mattermost Delete Channel “fixed”

2017-10-26 rolfje 41 Comments

Users of Mattermost have probably noticed the less-than-optimal interface design where de Delete option is right above the Leave option in the Channel menu. On a busy server, you can imagine having quite a few incidents where people accidentally completely delete a channel.

In the Open Source version of Mattermost, everybody van do anything, because there is no sensible security model with roles. Mattermost Inc. seems to think that the Open Source community is not entitled to roles, which I (and others with me) strongly disagree with.

Forking Mattermost, learning Golang and enabeling security, improving a few other issues for the open source community along the way is a plan. But there is a simpler workaround for people running Mattermost inside Nginx.

Software

Open a port in OSX Mavericks’ Firewall

2014-05-10 rolfje 10 Comments

The new firewall in Mavericks is great. For the common user. For a developer, not so much. If you are a Java developer like me, and you just need to open one port (say, 8080) so that the web application you’re working on is accessable from another computer, you can’t. I disabled the Firewall altogether for a few days, but it didn’t feel right.

I googled around and to make a long story short, here’s how to open port 8080 on any interface to any application on your OSX Mavericks installation in 3 steps:

sudo vim /etc/pf.conf

Then add the following lines at the end of the file:

# Open port 8080 for TCP on all interfaces pass in proto tcp from any to any port 8080

Test (and, according to the documentation, load) your edits with:

sudo pfctl -vnf /etc/pf.conf

Reboot.

(I have found at least 5 pieces of voodoo to make the Firewall restart and reload, but none of them seemed to work reliably, so pardon the reboot)

You can close it by commenting out the lines in pf.conf and reboot again. If anybody knows of an easier way to do this, preferably in one terminal command, and without rebooting, let me know.

Hope this helps.

Software

There’s life without Google. Or iCloud. Or Facebook.

2014-03-08 rolfje 5 Comments

Regular readers of this blog already know that I am not using dropbox, and I was an Evernote user, but recently decided it became to dangerous and replaced it with my own scripts. I had an interesting discussion on Twitter which made me decide to show you how I run my digital life without the help of Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Whatsapp or iCloud, and still be able to have all the functionality these services offer.

The search was hard and sometimes I need to reconsider some of the choices, but the last few years the selection of products was very stable and the setup has worked flawlessly. Searching for a secure replacement for Whatsapp or Google? It’s in here.

Software

iOS7 hidden features

2013-09-28 rolfje 2 Comments

If you’ve just installed iOS7 and like it as much as I do, you are probably interested in all the new features of it, and where to find them. On behalf of Apple, I’ll be happy to point out where all those neat new features are, and share my happiness about this wonderful new magical market-leading mobile OS.

How big is 5 Zettabyte?

2013-06-23 rolfje 3 Comments

Since the interview of Edward Snowden with the Guardian, the discussion about privacy and companies storing and sharing unencrypted private data is picking up. Particularly Americans are worried about what it does for their National security and their private data. But that’s actually a naive thought, given the NSA stores worldwide data.

In a recent coverage on theblaze.com (a rather tabloid-looking news station in the U.S.), the interviewers are shocked to see that the NSA spies on “every American”.

This is a limited view of the world and failing to see the importance of spying on people outside the U.S., but lets start with technical side of things first. What data are they storing and how big is their hard-disk?

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Uncategorized

Open letter to Keith Lang about Skitch

2013-01-03 rolfje No Comments

Dear Keith,

I read your letter about Skitch and would like to respond to all that has happened from my end-user perspective.

I am a long-time Evernote user and fan. Evernote changed note taking by being truly searchable. I can confidently drop all the websites, receipts, todos and ideas in there, and clear my mind of the “I must remember that” burden. The OCR of Evernote works beautifully on photos of whiteboards, making even my whiteboard notes searchable.

In 2010, I discovered Skitch. The simplicity and razor sharp focus on anotating a screencapture and share the anotated image by dragging it anywhere was sheer brilliance. My daily work includes making annotated screenhots and mailing them to team members to discuss improvements. Skitch changed this ugly capture-save-edit-save-attach-send cycle to pure poetry in motion. Dragging images into Evernote even made my screenshots searchable. It instantly became second nature and my go-to image tool.

Apple

Make your buildserver talk

2012-12-16 rolfje No Comments

Jenkins talking Have you ever started a shell script which takes a while and you keep monitoring that window because you really need those results? If you are working on a Mac, you can use the Mac’s power of speech to tell you a command is finished. Here’s how:

./yourreallyslowbuild.sh; say &quot;really long build is finished&quot;

With a little curl and shell scripting magic, I told my Mac to constantly monitor our Jenkins buildserver, and bug everybody in the office when the hourly build is failing:

Apple, Fun, Software

Why developers are never on time

2012-06-28 rolfje No Comments

If you have worked in IT as long as I do, you probably have noticed that developers have a tendency to not be on time. They are late for meetings, late for lunch, and on other days they are in at 6am or (and) they work until 3am the next morning. If you ever wondered why this is, I might have some answers for you.

You might also find this post interesting if you are trying to figure out why you can’t get your time zones working in MySQL.

Software

Review: Lamy Pico pen

2011-12-23 rolfje 6 Comments

A few weeks ago I saw this amazing pen design by Lamy, the Pico. I’m a heavy computer user so I don’t do much handwriting, but I do like nice tools so I thought I’d get this. Particularly the small form factor when retracted and the sleek design attracted me.

There are some things about the Pico that nobody is telling you, so I thought I’d write a little review.

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Hardware

Linked-In not really Opt-in?

2011-09-07 rolfje 1 Comment

Recently there was some kerfuffle about LinkedIn silently changing privacy settings. In fact, they didn’t do that “silently”, nor was it “recent”. Remember that large chunk of text nobody reads with the “Agree” button you clicked on? Those were the new terms, and deeply buried in them was this privacy settings stuff. LinkedIn’s Eric Heath blogged about that, bringing it as “more control over your LinkedIn information”. Sadly, the default setting for this new “control” is “rather open”. But you can change that.

Uncategorized