A Day Late

Here’s a handy firefox tip that enables handling urls with line breaks in them. This is particularly useful for those of us still using Outlook, which seems to improperly wrap URL’s quite often.

Here’s another Mozilla/Firefox tip: if you copy a URL wrapped over multiple lines from somewhere and try to paste it into the address bar, you will end up only with the first line of it. To fix it, go to about:config and change editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines setting to 3 or add:

user_pref(”editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines”, 3);

to your user.js file. Now all the line breaks will be removed upon pasting.

I came across a good, free utility to securely (for my purposes) erase a hard drive. It’s called “Darik’s Boot and Nuke” and is available at http://dban.sourceforge.net/.

UPDATE: Perhaps a better solution is to use something I already have. A bootable linux CD with the “shred” utility. The knoppix live CD has this program. For instructions on how to do this, click HERE.

Was there ever doubt that I would get one of these? Really it was only a matter of time. This was actually a business purchase, not a personal one. A few weeks ago I was developing a web site which was mainly going to be used by Safari users. Every time I made a change I felt compelled to walk over to our graphic designers G5 and make sure everything still looked ok in Safari. That’s when it hit me, if I had a nice Mac Mini on my desk I could just switch over to it, test the page on Safari and keep on working. Fortunately the low cost made it an easy sell. So far I’m very impressed. As expected, it’s well designed. It’s a shame I have to ruin the sleek and sexy design by attaching cables to it, but there’s not much I can do about that.

UPDATE: FreeMiniMacs.com

I received an email the other day at work notifying me that our home page didn’t look very good on Internet Explorer for Macintosh. I pulled it up and sure enough it was just a jumble of garbage. This confused me because I use a Mac and I was sure I’d looked at it on IE, although I knew it was quite a while ago (I usually only use Mozilla or Safari).

Anyway…I noticed when I commented out a few javascript functions that dynamically manipulated a table the page looked fine (from what I’ve read, javascript support is awful on IE for Mac). That would seem to indicate the problem was with the javascript, however the exact same javascript was being used on other pages and worked just fine. I decided to rebuild our homepage starting from scratch, adding things in piece by piece. I discovered a few tables and other tags that weren’t properly closed. When I was finished the page was working on IE for Mac. However…I decided to reload the page a few times just to be sure and was disgusted by what happened. On average if I loaded the page 10 times, 9 times it looked just fine and 1 time it was a jumble of garbage. So, it seems to work 90% of the time. From a computing perspective I’m confused. IE is receiving the exact same code each time but it seems to randomly interpret it differently. Odd.

When I purchased my new Powerbook last month I had to figure out how to migrate the settings and files from my old one. I’ve been backing up my home directory and applications directory regularly to DVD using tar but I had the suspicion this wouldn’t migrate the settings properly. I was right, so I started looking for a proper way to backup and restore a user in OS X. I found a backup program created by Apple. It allows you to do complete or partial backups of a system and allows spanning of DVD’s to create the backups. Very nice, but I was disappointed to discover you have to have a .MAC subscription, which run about $99/year I think, to use the backup program. Am I the only one this doesn’t make sense to? I have a DVD burner on the system, so why do I need a subscription to some online service/community to create backups on my DVD drive? In the end I ended up tar’ing my data files and then tried to recreate all my settings.

During the process I discovered tar really doesn’t work with “package files”. Specifically my Quicken data files. On my old machine the data files appeared as a single file, but when I untared them on my new machine they appeared as a folder with multiple files within and were completely unusable. This was really frustrating and took me a few hours to figure out a way to transfer the file successfully. I searched Quicken’s web site about backing up OS X files, thinking surely someone else has come across this. Apparently no one has. It seems like a rather large security risk to me. Quicken for OS X automatically backups up the data file (I think it keeps the last 10 copies). However, all of these 10 backups are stored on the hard drive, so should it fail you’re basically screwed. Even if you copy the data files to a dvd directly, with or without archiving, they’ll be unusable. So for some reason, cp and tar don’t work with special OS X files known as “packages” or at least they don’t work with the Quicken data file packages. In the end I discovered an OS X command line archive utility called ditto that would properly archive the Quicken data files so I could transfer them to the new system.

Looking back, I’m wondering if I could’ve created an image file of my home directory. Oh well, too late now. Anyway, I have yet to find a good way to backup my system, if anyone knows of one, I’d be interested.

Well, I couldn’t resist. I decided to splurge and upgrade to the new Powerbook G4. I have hard time walking away from a good deal, esspecially when it’s for something I’ve been thinking about getting.

I’m going to try and sell my other Powerbook. I’ll probably end up putting on eBay if I can’t find anyone who’s interested. So, if anyone’s in the market for a Powerbook G4 1GHZ SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-R) 512mb RAM 60GB HD 802.11b (airport) 15″ LCD with 3 year AppleCare extended warranty and OS X 10.3 (Panther) send me an email to powerbook@jwholmes.com.

I love it, by the way.

Remember how I was complaining about what a pain it is to keep my address books synchronized? At work I have my Microsoft Exchange contact list that I use with my dell laptop and Compaq iPaq handheld. At home I have my Apple Powerbook which connects with my t68i cell phone via bluetooth. In other words, I’ve basically been trying to keep 2 address books synchronized, by hand. My method was to use my Exchange account as the master and occasionally export it to a file, wipe out all the contacts on my powerbook and phone, import the file I created from exchange into my “Address Book” on my Powerbook and then sync it to my phone. A few problems I’ve run into with this approach:

1. I can’t update anything in my phone or on my Powerbook because it’ll eventually get wiped out and replaced with what’s on the Exchange server.
2. My Powerbook and phone are often out of date because I only do an import every month or two. The out of date Powerbook I could live with, but the phones become a real deal breaker.

Those are basically the only two issues, but they’re big ones. Well, tonight I was thinking it was about time to do another import and I was looking around in “Address Book” on the Powerbook and noticed a setting in the preferences that says “Synchronize with Exchange”. WHY WHY WHY did I not find this sooner? I punched in my Exchange server connection settings, opened iSync, clicked “Sync” and voila. Everything synchronized, the Exchange server, Address Book, cell phone, EVERYTHING! Everything stored in one central location, ya can’t beat it. Well, actually you can, it only works with Address Book, not iCal. I can live with that, I’ve never been concerned about having my calendar on my Powerbook but it would be nice.

P.S. Is it sad that I get excited about things like this? Yeah, it probably is.

When I got my powerbook I switched from using Internet Explorer to Safari solely because Safari had tabs and IE didn’t. I was happy with Safari but then heard rumors it suffers from a memory leak. I decided to continue using Safari, once again, solely because of the tabs. At about this time I got my new x86 laptop at work with Windows XP which means I was back to IE (at work anyway). Honestly it drove me nuts opening a new window for every page I wanted to view. Not too mention when you open 3 or 4 windows of the same program in XP they scrunch together as one on the task bar, making it cumbersome to navigate between them.

A guy I work with recommended Mozilla and when I realized it had tabs I was sold. I installed it on both my Powerbook and Dell D600 and have never gone back or felt the need to try anything else. The only thing that’s been annoying me is when I click on mailto links, it tries to open the Mozilla mail program (composer). I’ve searched the “Preferences” window repeatedly for a setting to “Use the system default mail program”. Tonight I finally decided to search Mozilla’s site, figuring at least a few other people have found this annoying. Sure enough I found the solution. Now my web browsing world is perfect.

Mozilla also comes with a built-in Javascript Debugger, very nice for a web developer. Also, since I’ve started doing full time web development I’ve gained a greater loathing for IE. The behaviour amazes and disgust me at times.

For example, today I was tweaking a page for a new site I was working on. Basically I copied a template from another of our sites and proceeded to change the graphics, menus, etc. On the top of the page there was a logo graphic 90 pixels tall, to the right was another graphic that was 70 pixels tall and another below it 20 pixels tall (all with borders=”0″). It looked fine in Mozilla, but when I checked it in IE I was stunned when I loaded the page and noticed the logo graphic had a gap on the top and bottom. I checked the other two graphics closely and they appeared to stretch from top to bottom with no gaps. I double and triple checked the graphic dimensions and img tags with no luck. I loaded the site I took the code from and everything appeared fine. I switched the graphics with those from the site that was working and the gap was still there. The code was almost exactly the same except for one thing. The site that was working used javascript for the top right image (70 pixel one) to automatically select a random picture when the page was loaded. The code looked something like this:

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>

var random = Math.round(Math.random()*(4-1))+1;
document.write(’<img src=”/images/top_images/image’ + random + ‘.jpg” width=”469″ height=”70″ border=”0″/>’);

</script>

However on the new site I only had a single graphic so there was no need to use the javascript I just replaced it with:

<img src=”/images/top_image.jpg” width=”469″ height=”70″ border=”0″/>

No problem right? Not with IE. Since that was the only code difference I could see, I replaced the img tag with the following javascript:

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>

document.write(’<img src=”/images/top_image.jpg” width=”469″ height=”70″ border=”0″/>’);

</script>

Reloaded the page, and suddenly the gap disappears, all is well with IE again. Strange and utterly annoying. How much time did I waste trying to figure out what was going on? TOO MUCH!!