04.20.03

Type Geek Humor

Posted in General at 4 pm

I came across a list of April Fool’s Jokes through out the last couple of centuries. This is my favorite one:

“The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement describing the tenth anniversary of the small island of San Serriffe. […] its two islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its leader was General Pica, and its capital was Bodoni…”
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04.18.03

Dream Time

Posted in Dreams, Life at 8 am

Very strange dream this morning. The main crux of it was that my cat Simone had been ‘possesed’ by a demon and was all red, and racing around a house (and then my parents’ kitchen) and I had to corner her.

That’s what I get for watching Buffy *and* a Satan episode of South Park in the same night I suppose…

04.17.03

Blogs Back in Town

Posted in General at 1 pm

Two blogs have started back up recently:

Peter Meholtz and Ken Bereskin’s Radio Weblog

Peter is a UX/UI/IA guy at Adaptive Path, and very smart. Ken Bereskin is the product lead for Mac OS X at Apple and posts lots of cool nook-and-cranie notes about updates and stuff.

Blogs were the topic of conversation at the Dev Group meeting last night. We showed the new website and Nick Finck was the speaker.

04.15.03

You are FreeBSD

Posted in General at 10 pm

Amy sent me a quiz, which told me:

You Are FreeBSD
You’re a speed demon and a great networker. You have a tendency to give it away for free. Well-respected, but virtually unknown.

That’s okay, but Amy is Amiga. How cool is that!?!?

04.11.03

Rowdyruff Boys

Posted in General at 9 pm

I’m so a Rowdyruff boy!

WarTooth

Posted in General at 10 am

Okay that’s a new term for me:

“It may sound obvious but I too have War-toothed in the occasional coffee shop, train station and computer lab only to be stunned at how many people had wide open PowerBooks and phones. To be safe ensure that all sharing is turned off (System Preferences > Sharing > Services), Bluetooth is turned off (System Preferences > Bluetooth > Settings) and that OS X’s built-in Firewall is turned on (System Preferences > Sharing > Firewall) at all times.”

The Firewall and settings stuff is old hat, but the term ‘WarTooth’… That’s pretty cool. 🙂

(From PowerPage)

04.05.03

Words do not equal actions

Posted in General at 1 pm

Damn… And this is at the House.gov web site:

http://www.house.gov/appropriations_democrats/caughtonfilm.htm

No, I’m not for spending tons of money on stuff, and I think that it’s bad for most activities to require government funding.

But I am for doing what you say you’re going to do.

Example from the page:

Program: No Child Left Behind

Image with caption: Bush talks up the need for education funding at the one-year anniversary of the No Child Left Behnid Act [1/8/03]

Quote from Bush: “This administration is committed to your effort. And with the support of Congress, we will continue to work to provide the resources school need to fund the era of reform.” — Bush, 1/8/03

The Actual Budget: The President’s 2003 budget – the first education budget after he signed and touted the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) – proposed to cut NCLB programs by $90 million overall, leaving these programs more than $7 billion short of what was authorized under the bill. Bush’s 2004 budget for NCLB is just 1.9% above what he proposed in 2003 – $619 less than needed to offset inflation.

04.01.03

Final Drivers for 3CXTV589DT

Posted in General at 12 pm

I sent to the NewtonTalk Mailing List:

Has anyone been able to tune the UHF channels using the 3COM NTSC TV Receiver? The 3CXTV589DT seems to pick up channels 2 through 12 no problem. (The local PBS station comes in great, and looks pretty good in 16 grays.) But our local WB channel, FOX channel and UPN are all in the UHF range.

Do I need to get a different antenna? Right now I’ve just rigged up a small FM antenna, using a pigtail, similar to the N-type connector that I used on my Lucent WaveLan silver card.

I’m hoping that PCBMan’s work on the wireless coax adapter will let me forgo the entire broadcast realm and hook into my cable line. I’m sure Comcast will be surprised when they see my MP2000’s converter box emulator show up on their network! 🙂

The final cool piece will be when Hiroshi gets his Bluetooth driver finished and I’ll be able to change channels and volume using my Sony/Ericsson phone, just like I’ve got it controlling my iTunes.

Anyway, if anyone has any tips for getting those UHF channels to come in, let me know.

03.20.03

Talk about Iraq, Not Newtons

Posted in General at 11 pm

I sent this to the NewtonTalk list, hoping to fork off the political discussions from the Newton-oriented subject matter:

I hope everyone is sending out Private notes to anyone who is posting about off-topic threads asking them not to post *OR RESPOND* to off topic threads.

If you wish to discuss this, please follow this link to a message board which requires no sign-up to post:

http://www.quicktopic.com/20/H/NPZKqDGRuvkv

This seemed like a great way of diffusing the thread, and I think it’s worked, so far.

03.19.03

AppleShare Error 5002

Posted in General at 12 pm

Last week I kept getting an AppleShare Error -5002 whenever I would try to connect to our Windows 2000 file server from my Mac OS X iBook.

I wasn’t able to diagnose it for a while, but eventually, I switched to using SMB to connect rather than AFP. After I did that I was able to connect but the bug kept bugging me.

I noted that if I logged on as my Backup User, I could connect using AppleShare just fine, so I figured I messed something up in the preferences of just my user account, rather than some system-wide setting.

Eventually, I rebooted my iBook into OS 9 and poked around my “/Users/~[user]/Library/” and found the file “.GlobalPreferences.plist” which seems to be a total dumping ground for Apple’s own sub-systems. (Note the “.” at the start of the file name which hides it from the OS X Finder, but not from the OS 9 Finder.)

I compared the .GP.plist for a new user to that of my regular account, and lo and behold, the new user .GP.plist was virtually empty. So I guessed that I could remove almost anything I wanted to out of the .GP.plist for my regular user and the worst I’d have to worry about was reseting some System Preferences.

This is what I did (while running OS 9):

1) I made a backup of the “.GlobalPreferences.plist” just in case.

2) Inside of the .GlobalPreferences.plist I found the block of Key & Dict that was for AppleShareClientCore. (I’ve included it in the Read More section.)

3) I deleted the <key> </key> and everything inside the <dict></dict> from the .GlobalPreferences.plist

4) I saved the .GlobalPreferences.plist file and rebooted back into X.

5) I tried connecting (via AppleShare/AFP) and it worked.

Now, I’m virtually certain that you could do this while running OS X as well, so if you can’t run 9, don’t worry.

I would recommend at least Logging out, if not rebooting after you save the changes. I don’t know if these preferences get cached in memory or not, so it just seems like the safe thing to do.
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