Mac OS X Leopard & Tiger Dual Boot

Cuil.com, a Google search competitor, launched today, July 28, 2008 and I’m happy for it.  But, they’ve got a long way to go to unseat Google as the search king.

They claim to rank content rather than popularity (number of incoming links to a web site). Unfortunately, that type of understanding programmed into software is a long way off.

A simple search for “carte orange”, the Paris public transportation pass, returns a lot of weak results on Cuil:

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=carte%20orange&sl=long

Whereas on Google, the majority on spot on for finding good in-depth information on the correct subject:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=carte+orange&btnG=Google+Search

Cuil has some nice features though: pictures in search results, category refinement (search within search results by clicking on a category), and instant search suggestions which are already quite good.

Google has gotten lonely up at the top.  It’s nice that Cuil may give them some competition.

On web pages with accented characters, such as on French language websites, Firefox 3 may show a diamond question mark symbol instead of the accented character.

To fix this character set display problem in Firefox 3, change the Character Encoding under the Menu -> View -> Character Encoding from Unicode to Western ISO-8859-1 if you’re reading Western European language based web pages.

When connecting to a remote mysql server, the login/user must have rights to connect to the mysql server from outside of the local server, i.e. localhost. You need to edit the user record within the mysql.user table or add a new record for this user, giving it access to connect to the mysql server from a host other than localhost.

Login to the mysql server add run the following command:
grant all privileges on *.* to 'user'@'192.168.25.1' identified by 'password' with GRANT OPTION;
Replace “user” and “password” and “192.168.25.1″ with your mysql username, password, and the IP address of your computer that you’re connecting (to the mysql server) from.

Remember that your mysql server must also allow connections from remote hosts.

By default mysql does not allow connects to itself from any host besides localhost, for security reasons.

When you get an error “Can’t connect to mysql server on [remote server]” when trying to connect to the remote SQL server via the mysql command line tool, log into the server running the mysql server and edit the /etc/mysql/my.cnf config file.

In particular, comment out the following line:
bind-address           = 127.0.0.1
This allows for connections from any host.

Next, update the mysql user to allow it access from a host other than ‘localhost’.

Using keyword tag searching in Firefox 3 is broken and not working with OpenDNS.  Keyword tag searching, i.e. typing the letter G for Google in the address bar, then typing the search words or terms, then hitting enter, should do a google search.  If you’re using OpenDNS, Firefox 3’s keyword tag searching in the address bar gets hijacked by OpenDNS, returning OpenDNS results instead of Google search results.

To fix this, go into Firefox’s hidden configuration page by typing into the address bar “about:config”.

A warning will come up.  Just click “I’ll be careful, I promise”.

Then filter the items you’re shown by typing “keyword”.

Double click on the Value for Keyword.URL and replace the value with the following (without quotes) “http://www.google.com/search?q=”

Click OK.

Try doing a keyword tag address bar search in Firefox: “g peanut butter”. Hopefully you’ll get something like this:

You may have to quit and restart Firefox to have this change take effect.

With FireFox 3 some users have noticed that setting up custom keyboard shortcuts with Keyboard preferences pan no longer works.  Most noticeably, you can’t create a keyboard shortcut for going to your Home page in Firefox 3.

A remedy, although not a solution, is to use the built-in Home page keyboard shortcut for Firefox: alt + home or Option + home for Mac users.

Macbook users need to use the function key (fn) + option (alt) + left arrow key to get the “home” key normally found on full size keyboards, to apply the homepage keyboard shortcut.

It’s early in the honeymoon phase with Firefox 3 or more accurately infatuation “I just met you” phase, but FF3 appears as fast (or faster) than both Safari and Camino.  That’s fast.  Ridiculously fast when you consider that it has the power of the largest Add-Ons base, plus the best overall standards support of any web browser.

I performed a quick pseudo-scientific speed test among Camino 1.6.1, Firefox 3, and Safari 3.04, emptying caches and restarting each browser before loading the test site for each run and here are the results:

TripAdvisor.com

• Firefox 3 - 4.09 seconds
• Camino - 4.29 seconds
• Safari - 4.33 seconds

Cnn.com

• Firefox 3 - 4.98 seconds
• Safari - 5.15 seconds
• Camino - 5.3 seconds

Gmail.com

• Safari - 3.82 seconds
• Camino - 4.67 seconds
• Firefox 3 - 4.60 seconds

These are load times of the following home pages for my location (France), and my account, where applicable (i.e. Gmail).  The timer was stopped when the loading bar disappeared from the browsers.

Interestingly, Safari is still consistently fastest for Gmail.

The single biggest reason for my switching to Camino from Firefox was Firefox 2’s abysmal speed.  The other nice features of Camino included Flashblock/adblock, inline search+navigation (forward slash key, start typing, if inline search result is a link then hit enter to open the link), are now fully integrated into Firefox 3… plus FF3 is slightly faster.  I think this could spell the end of Camino for me… (for now).

Just finished an install and setup of SMF forum software and I have to complain: its file permission handling is horrible. SMF’s solution to make it easier (or more accurately: less impossible) to handle file permission changes and to install Mods (Packages) is to use a built in (php) FTP script to make file permission changes for you. I feel pretty uncomfortable with giving out administration credentials on software I just installed, maybe that’s just me.

I spent a good two hours trying to install reCaptcha for SMF and ended up failing. Why? File permissions for one. Without setting the entire SMF directory to full file permissions for everyone (777), I could not get an SMF Mod to install. Next, after getting the reCaptcha mod installed, I couldn’t enable it. The instructions on the Mod page at SMF is either far out of date or simply wrong (Admin => Registration => Settings doesn’t exist).

And to top it all off, the look and feel of SMF is not user friendly. It’s as if the only people to have contributed to the user interface design of SMF are programmers, rather than designers. For instance, finding the New Topic button requires effort and searching. Whomever created the style sheet for the default theme of SMF, spent all their time blending all page elements together rather than making important features stand out and capture attention. For forum software, used by all skill levels of computer users, user-friendly design should be the most important feature. If people cannot use the most basic functionality of the software, the rest of the features are completely wasted.

The golden rule of user-interface design: “Don’t make me think“. In order to use SMF Forum, you have to do some serious searching to perform even the most basic function: posting a new message.

In my estimation, SMF is going to be losing ground to phpBB steadily over the next few years and will slip into obscurity unless they fix their UI and setup/permissions issues.

Part of the reason why maintaining a solid AirPort wireless connection is so difficult is the different number of wireless encryption protocols available today.

WiFI Encryption Methods available on Leopard

• WEP - Wired Equivalent Privacy
• LEAP - Lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol
• WPA - WiFi Protected Access
• 802.1X WEB - Port based Network Access Control

To have Apple Front Row show and play videos inside of an iso file, first mount the iso file then make links to the video files inside of the iso, within your Movies folder. This can be useful for example when you have a season of television episodes of House MD in a single ISO disc image somewhere on your Mac.

step 1: mount iso file

First mount the iso file by double clicking on it (within Finder, on your desktop, wherever it may be). The ISO file will be mounted like a drive and will show up within Finder under Devices and look like this:

In my case the iso file disc image was named 20071107_170514 when it was created. Your mounted iso volume will be named differently.

step 2: link to video files in iso

Create symbolic links to the video files within your Movies folder using the Terminal. Afterwards the videos will show up in Front Row like any other video or movie and you don’t have to copy the files out, saving disk space.

Before that, I’m going to create a folder within ~/Movies with a descriptive name (since 20071107_170514 is meaningless to me). In the Terminal window I would enter:
mkdir ~/Movies/HouseSeason4

Now create symbolic links to the videos with the the “ln” program:
ln -s /Volumes/20071107_170514/*.avi ~/Movies/HouseSeason4

ln is the link program
-s tells the link program to make symbolic links (like detour signs to real files)
/Volumes/20071107_170514 is the mounted iso volume. Change 20071107_170514 to whatever your iso volume is named.
*.avi In my case the video files were AVI files and I wanted all of them (*) to be linked. Change this to whatever format the videos happen to be for you, for example: *.mpg *.mkv
~/Movies/HouseSeason4 is the directory where the videos will appear in Front Row. Since Apple Front Row automatically searches through your Movies folder for videos, making a subdirectory underneath Movies is an ideal spot. These symbolic links will appear like any other video file and Front Row will browse and play these files as if they were actually located in your Movies folder.

step 3: Watch iso videos in Front Row

Start Front Row by hitting ⌘+⎋ (Command Key and Escape) or hitting the Menu button on your Apple remote.

Go into the Movies folder and you should see the folder you created in Step 2. Go into that folder and you should see the video files that were inside the iso disc image file. From here you should be able to play the video files that are inside the iso, without having to copy the files out to your Movies folder and taking up twice the disk space.

Notes

Any volumes that you mount will be unmounted automatically when you reboot. Since the symbolic links within your Movies folder aren’t the actual video files themselves, they need the mounted iso volume to work. After rebooting, remember to remount your iso disc image by double clicking on it before looking for videos inside it within Front Row.