Everything that comes out of Dossy, from the strange to the banal.
Gotta love those quirky little ads in the right rail on Facebook. I was just quickly scanning the page and my eyes (mis-)read the ad title. What I thought I had just read was “Lingerie & Inmates” and my first reaction was “mmm, prison rape never looked so sexy before.”
I know, I know … I’m going to hell, yadda yadda. Merry Christmas!
I’ve been using nightly development builds of Google Chrome for Mac, Google’s shiny new web browser, for a while now. A few days ago, it was officially labeled beta for Mac. Until now, I wasn’t using it regularly, but I decided I should try using it full-time for a few days to see how it wears.
I’ve got 12+ tabs open and it’s still fast, smooth and stable. Granted, on the Mac there’s no extensions/add-on feature … it’ll be interesting to see how stable things remain once those are introduced. The browser’s rendering of most pages seems identical to Firefox, except for a few that I’ve stumbled across. Overall, it’s a very usable browser and should have a great future ahead of it.
Of course, there’s still a few bumps and warts that I hope they’ll address soon:
Have you tried out Google Chrome, yet? I’d like to know what you think … let me know in the comments below.
I normally don’t do these meme things, but I was very curious to find out what kind of questions ![[info]](https://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
jesus_jeff would ask me.
Leave me a comment saying “Resistance is Futile.”
* I’ll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity.
* Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
* Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.
Here are his questions for me and my answers:
1) Excluding family, who have you known the longest that you are still in fairly regular contact with?
I’m notoriously bad about not keeping in regular contact with people. Given this fact, I suppose my answer has to be my friend Ian, from high school. There are a few people who I talk to now and then that I’ve known longer, like Jeff Mach, but I don’t really maintain regular contact with him.
I wonder if this answer will cause people I’ve actually known longer to come out of the woodwork. Interesting …
2) Iphone, Droid, Blackberry, or good old-fashioned “my phone just makes phone calls, thankyouverymuch”?
I own a BlackBerry, now. The Droid has tempted me, and I refuse to take the iPhone as long as it lacks a real physical keyboard. I’ve got high hopes for the Nokia N900, but apparently it’s fallen short. I gave up on Palm after replacing my aging Treo 650 with my first BlackBerry.
3) If your kids (once of appropriate age) expressed an interest in joining the peace corps or the military (i.e., doing dangerous work in dangerous far-away places) would you encourage them or try to convince them to pick a safer path?
I’d like to believe that I encourage them to pursue things that they love. Life is dangerous and learning to handle it is an important skill, not something to be avoided for the sake of avoiding.
That being said, I’d rather they not enlist in the military. While I’m thankful that there are people who do so on behalf of the rest of us, I would rather my kids pursue careers with an organization that has more accountability.
4) What do you think the next big thing technology-wise will be?
Realistically? Probably something truly boring like “wireless electricity“.
My personal imagineering? I call it “personal interactive television”. It changes the way we watch television: the shared screen (the traditional TV set) acts as an interface hub, while individuals use their handheld devices (phones, remotes) to interact with the content programming without disturbing the shared experience of the other participants.
I suppose I should describe this vision more clearly in a separate blog entry, but maybe this hints at the potential of such a paradigm shift.
5) If you were a craftsman in the middle ages, what craft would you practice?
If I had to pick an established craft, I would probably be a butcher or apothecarist. Butcher, because I enjoy dealing with food and especially meat. Apothecarist, because I enjoy the diagnostic process of medicine but would prefer to deal with the common folk rather than solely royalty.
However, I suspect if I actually lived in the middle ages, I would probably be a agricultural scientist: experimenting with growing plants to increase their yield, be more resistant, come up with ways of dealing with pests, etc.
…
That was fun answering Jeff’s questions. If you’d like to participate, just leave a comment for me and I’ll try my best to come up with interesting questions for you!
After getting totally fed up with the poor Wi-Fi range on my MacBook Pro, I picked up an external Cisco/Linksys WUSB600N. Of course, Linksys doesn’t provide Mac drivers for this product, but it’s a Ralink 2870 and Ralink provides drivers for MacOS X in their support section. I downloaded the RTUSB D2870-2.0.0.0 UI-2.0.0.0_2009_10_02.dmg driver (5.2 MB).
There is a driver inside USBWireless-10.6 for Snow Leopard, and it will complain during installation that the RT2870USBWirelessDriver.kext failed to install. This is expected, just ignore it, the installation will complete successfully.
At the time of this writing, the WUSB600N v2 isn’t included in the Info.plist for the kext, so I had to edit /System/Library/Extensions/RT2870USBWirelessDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist in a text editor and add the appropriate bits. Search for “Linksys – RT2870 – 2” and duplicate the <key> and <dict> elements, renaming the key to “Linksys – RT2870 – 3” and the idProduct integer from “113” to “121”. Here’s what it should look like after the changes:
<key>Linksys - RT2870 - 3</key>
<dict>
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.Ralink.driver.RT2870USBWirelessDriver</string>
<key>IOClass</key>
<string>RT2870USBWirelessDriver</string>
<key>IOProviderClass</key>
<string>IOUSBDevice</string>
<key>idProduct</key>
<integer>121</integer>
<key>idVendor</key>
<integer>5943</integer>
</dict>
After making this change, unload/reload the kext or reboot your machine, and then plug in your WUSB600N and you should get a window popping up telling you that a new network device has been detected.
I hope this helps someone, as I was totally disappointed when I learned that Linksys wasn’t supporting this device on Mac “out of the box.”
Over the last year, I’ve accumulated several “one-shot” Visa credit cards in the form of “gift cards” and manufacturer rebates. I decided today would be the day I’d try to spend some of these. I went to one of my favorite online shopping destinations, Amazon.com, picked out some items, and went to go pay with these cards. This should be no big deal, right? Right???
So, I picked out an item that I couldn’t pay for with a single gift card. No problem, I’ll just tell Amazon to charge two of these cards and that would be that, right? Only, I discover that I can only choose one credit card to pay for the transaction. Ha, ha, this must be a joke, right? It’s 2009, you can’t expect me to believe that the company that basically pioneered e-commerce hasn’t figured out how to implement split billing?
Out of disappointment, I decided to locate the same item on Buy.com, where I discovered that they also only allow you to choose one credit card as payment. I did notice that both Amazon and Buy.com allow you to use multiple site-specific gift certificates to pay for an order, so I decided to work around the problem by ordering a Buy.com gift certificate for $50, the value of one of my Visa gift cards. I chose email fulfillment, figuring that I’d soon receive the necessary information by email to redeem my card and be done.
When I received my order confirmation email from Buy.com, this is what I saw. Try to appreciate the moment of WTF I experienced as I tried to believe what I was reading. An emailed gift certificate was on back-order??! Are you kidding me? What, did they run out of electrons or bytes in the warehouse?
I tried to attribute this to some bug in their order confirmation email process, so I waited for an hour for a second email, which would never arrive, containing the gift certificate. Finally, I gave up and went back to Buy.com and cancelled my order.
Does Amazon.com do any better? I’m not sure. I just noticed this fine print on their gift certificate order page:
* Note: For security purposes, e-mail gift cards and printable gift cards may go under a 24-hour review process while payment information is verified.
I don’t know what to do, at this point. Have any of you been in this situation, trying to make a purchase using multiple credit cards? Should I just bite the bullet and purchase these Amazon.com gift certificates and wait 24 hours? Are there any better solutions? Please, help me out, leave me a comment with your best suggestions.
This morning, my friend Marjolein Hoekstra (aka @CleverClogs) brings this blog entry by Terence Eden to my attention. In it, he suggests that Twitter’s OAuth is a “gaping security hole,” but what he really illuminates is that he totally does not understand the point of OAuth. Let me try and explain:
In the bad old days of Twitter only allowing HTTP Basic authentication, in order for third-party applications to access your Twitter account, you had to hand out your username and password. While this “worked” it wasn’t ideal. Why? Well, any time you changed your password — either to prevent an application from continuing to have access to your account, or out of good “security hygiene” practices of regularly changing your password — you had to go back to every application that you wanted to continue to work on your behalf. If you use more than a few applications, this quickly became a tedious process as you can imagine. Again, this was less than ideal.
Eventually, Twitter rolls out OAuth, an open implementation of a cross-service authorization scheme. Each application now requests authorization to act on a user’s behalf, and such access is now manageable per application rather than an all-or-nothing as it were with HTTP Basic auth. This is a huge win as this decouples the user’s Twitter credentials from a third-party application’s privileges to act on behalf of that user. You can now change your Twitter password to maintain good security hygiene without the inconvenience of having to update every third-party application with your new password. You can now revoke access from a single application without having to, again, update every other third-party application with your new password.
Terence, sadly, mistakes this radical improvement as a defect and a security flaw. What’s truly sad is that Terence even knows about the Twitter OAuth Connections page where one can de-authorize individual applications, yet he still missed the whole point and benefit of OAuth in the first place. How?
He suggests that “Changing a password should
I know we all love this time of year with kids dressing up in cute costumes and the mounds of candy and parties, but with the current H1N1 swine flu pandemic, have we stopped to think about what we’re really doing?
Picture this: people who may be carrying the swine flu virus are handling candy that is being given out to children, who will then handle it and eat it, possibly putting their hands in their mouths in the process.
See the problem, yet?
Happy Halloween! :-)
Last night, Samantha and I went into NYC to see Daniel Bauer’s “Purity” show at The Duplex Theater with my friend Ian. It was a fun show and his magic is simple but effective. The Duplex is a very small venue and the intimate setting really lets you enjoy the experience nicely.
But, that’s not the point … what I really want to write about is some introspecting I did. I’ve known that I’m an extrovert, but oddly I don’t tend to enjoy myself amongst a large number of people. I usually end up spending time with the same few people once I identify who I want to spend time with.
A while ago, I stumbled upon the definition of dissocial personality disorder which fits me to a tee. I’m finding that the Paxil and Wellbutrin combo are helping a lot with this, but it hasn’t totally eliminated the feelings of “gee, I wish there weren’t so many people here.”
I realize that the definition of extrovert doesn’t necessarily speak to the number of people one interacts with but merely the fact that external interaction brings positive effect, and it’s clearly possible to be a dissocial extrovert because I am one, but it also means finding people that I enjoy spending time with is difficult.
I just wanted to get these thoughts down in writing before they escaped my head, so I can reflect on them later, and perhaps some of you have insights to share that I may not have thought of, yet. See, there I go again, that extroverted nature which thinks better by expressing than reflecting, looking for external inputs …
While waiting for my daughter at her hip-hop class, listening to folks answer their cellphones, it dawned on me that “telephone etiquette” has changed a lot. I remember the days when a person would answer their phone with a “Hello?” Now, most people seem to answer with a more casual “Yeah? Hey. What’s up?” I’m pretty sure this is a pretty common thing now, perhaps starting about 10 years ago. I think it all stems from the widespread adoption of Caller ID.
Years ago, before everyone had Caller ID, when you received a phone call, you didn’t know was on the other end. To err on the side of caution, we answered our phones more formally — the caller could be a parent, an employer, etc. But, now with everyone having Caller ID, we now know who the caller is before we answer and that familiarity results in the casual response when we answer.
Have you noticed this trend? Think there’s another explanation? Just curious …
ActiveState has created a Tcl Extension Archive tool called teacup which simplifies the installation of binary extensions to Tcl. It’s included with ActiveTcl, but if you’re using Tcl from MacPorts and want to use teacup, it’s fairly easy:
The teacup binary can be downloaded from this location:
Here is a direct link to the latest teacup binary. The file is named file.exe — simply rename that to teacup and put it in /usr/local/bin or another convenient place in your $PATH.
You will need an installation repository where teacup can store its data locally. The default location is /Library/Tcl/teapot and you can create it like this:
$ sudo teacup create Repository @ /Library/Tcl/teapot Created
$ sudo teacup setup /opt/local/bin/tclsh Looking at tcl shell /opt/local/bin/tclsh ... Already able to handle Tcl Modules. Already has the platform packages. Patching: Adding code to handle teapot repositories ... Done
$ sudo teacup link make /Library/Tcl/teapot /opt/local/bin/tclsh Ok
That’s it! You’re done. You should now be able to list available packages within TEA using teacup list and install them using sudo teacup install "packagename".
I’ve tested this on MacOS X 10.6.1 Snow Leopard with Tcl 8.5.7 from MacPorts.
Tags: HOWTO, Tcl, ActiveState, TEA, teacup
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