Versions, the Mac Subversion Client, is finally out. I really don’t have much more to say about it other than it’s great for lazy people like myself who just don’t like messing with subversion from the command line.
Check it out at http://www.versionsapp.com
This took a while for me to figure out, hope it helps someone. (I’m using Leopard on an iMac, with Flash CS 3). If you follow the Adobe instructions for connecting your Flash app to your built-in iSight camera, things will start great at first, and you should be prompted to connect to your camera when you run the code:
Click allow, and you’ll likely only see a blank screen. And that’s where I became stuck. After some searching, I found you have to actually change the type of camera inside Flash from the default setting, which is “DVCPRO HD”, to a USB based one. To do this, run your SWF, right-click on the movie, then click on “Settings…”
From the Settings menu, click on the small camera icon, and switch to a “USB Video Class Video” camera.
That should work for you. You should see your iSight light activate and see video in your Flash app. Let me know if you have troubles.
I pull for the little guy, I really do. But in this case, Firefox gives me more trouble than it does a sense of the downtrodden and oppressed sticking it to the man. So, I’m with Safari.
In its defense, Firefox may not be entirely to blame. I’m running Leopard on an iMac, and I have two plugins installed, Firebug and Adblock Plus. Your mileage may vary. But, I can count on at least 2 hangs/force-quits a day. I especially notice problems when exiting Gmail, but I don’t think it’s related to Firebug.
I haven’t used Firefox in two-weeks, and having used it since the first beta it feels very weird not to use it now. I’ll still use it to test my web designs across the board, but no more than I’ll use IE6/7 for the same purpose. And I do miss a few features too, like the way it restores my tabs and browsing session if there is a crash, or let’s me undo a tab close (Safari doesn’t do this for me), and I do find Firebug to be a very handy tool when debugging some of my Javascript.
I should be fair and let you know that while I was writing this post, Safari crashed. It happened while I frantically did a cut-copy-paste into a popup window, but I’m guessing it was a clever twist of Firefox irony, letting me know I can’t just depend on one browser–and for the little guy, that’s a good thing.
I’ve been pretty happy with PHP for a long time now. Every once in a while I’ll find a good reason to explore another language, and just as I was getting the hang of Ruby on Rails, Google had to go and do this.
The Google App Engine (GAE) has very exciting potential, especially for developers like me who don’t have a big supply of extra cash they can throw at scaling hardware or bandwidth costs. Free 500MB of storage and 5 million pageviews a month? I’d be happy to pay for exceeding those pageviews.
Conspiracists will find some Big Brother-ly problems with GAE, but really, it’s a neat idea, and I’ll definitely be taking advantage of Google’s services. Unfortunately, it only supports the Python programming language, of which I have no experience. So, for the next few days, I’ll be dipping my foot in the Python pool, and waiting for my invite to the GAE.
“I don’t like the way it looks now.”
“It feels too bulky.”
These were the phrases I uttered when trying out different cases for my iPhone. Maybe it would’ve protected it from this:
On St. Patrick’s Day, my iPhone took a 4 foot tumble from a counter top to a concrete floor. To its credit–it still works perfectly. The touch screen itself has not been damaged, only the outer glass. It pinches, it slides, it texts, and otherwise works as new, but it has a deathly pall hiding its ingenious beauty. I’ve watched a YouTube disassembly video, ordered the requisite case-removal tool, and am waiting for a replacement glass from Hong Kong, hoping with everything that it fits.
I’ve dropped the iPhone a few times, I guess this was the last straw. I will definitely protect my next one (or repaired one) much better. Surgery video to come soon.
… or “Using Google and Yahoo to Light-Force An (Almost) Infinite Dictionary”
I read an article recently about using Google to search for plaintext equivalents of MD5 hashes. Basically, you search for the hash (something like, “5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99″) and look through the results for the plaintext equivalent (in this case, “5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99″ is equal to “password”).
It got me thinking about when I wore the Grey Hat in the old days, and I would download dozens of wordlists to use for my brute-force attempts at cracking Windows NT passwords (for educational purposes only :). If you consider the *illions of pages in the internet, you can essentially utilize them as a massive wordlist, or “webtionary”, for cracking.
Using PHP, I whipped up a script that searches both Google and Yahoo for the MD5 hash, then takes the results, sorts them by frequency of word, and hashes each word to try to match to the original query.
There are sites that let you search their huge databases of MD5 hashes and their plaintext-equivalents, but that’s not the point here. The point is using search results and sifting through a few hundred words of search results–which is more efficient that searching a few million rows, though not as successful. But, I was surprised at how many times the script quickly deciphered a hash. Try it yourself, and send me any improvements that could be made to the code to make it even more efficient.
This is pretty cool. In a patent filed today, Apple lays out an iMac-esque docking station for the upcoming (rumored) ultra-portable notebook. Not travelling much, I didn’t see myself getting one of these “featherbooks” anytime soon, but this might make a difference. Interestingly, Fig 1D shows a slot load optical disk drive in the featherbook–and that’s been rumored to be ommited in effort to conserve space and weight. We’ll see what shows up in these next 2 weeks leading up to the MacWorld Expo…
I was about an hour outside of Dallas today on a relatively remote highway, when I passed this car. My apologies for the picture quality, it was taken with my iPhone while I was doing about 50 MPH. It’s a car fitted with a large antenna (possibly a camera, GPS, and more?) and a Google Maps logo. Inside, the driver was keeping one eye on the road, and one eye on a rather large and bulky laptop. I’m guessing Google is working on giving us even better map data (and going away from NAVTEQ?), and maybe even street level views. I’m not joking when I say that sounds like a fun job to me…
Update: Here’s an article from the Dallas Morning News talking about the appearance of these vehicles. This guy must’ve gotten lost 
Disclaimer: REALLLLLLY boring topic (but this took me a while to figure out so I hope it helps someone):
Leopard uses a directory in the root called "home." This is different than a user’s home directory, and it has something to do with NFS shares and/or a new “autofs” feature. I’m not going to pretend I know what this does Update: autofs makes using network shares a lot more stable, but it doesn’t really affect me–I’m really just a designer/developer, and don’t get into the inner-works of the OS much.
What I do know is that I don’t want it using that "/home" directory because in one of my development projects I had used that directory to store a website. Now that Leopard has been installed, I can’t write to that directory, and I need to to avoid changing up my development project.
Long story short: To fix this “problem,” you can edit the "auto_master" file in your /etc directory.
Change the line
/home auto_home -nobrowse
to
/your/directory/here auto_home -nobrowse
Reboot and you will have reclaimed your /home directory.
I try to stay away from just posting someone else’s work, but Coding Horror has a good article on the art of hyperlinking we could all benefit from. I posted it because it’s a good reminder to keep links simple and intuitive, and because I really really really (really) hate SnapShots-styled links like this:
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