As time passes, I am discovering more little features that either fill in the still existing gaps from my Windows toolchain or add new features. Today, at Apple presentation about Leopard Client and Leopard Server I have heard great tip.
The QuickView in Leopard is extensible with plugins. One very obvious and very useful plugin is ZIP View that gives you content of the ZIP file in preview without unzipping it. This is finally a workable replacement for Ctrl-PgDn of TotalCommander that allowed to "walk into" archive and treat ZIP file as part of the file system.
no, not because of the memory it takes or CPU cycles burned (does not really matter when you have 4 GB notebook with Core2Duo).
Few days ago, a good friend from old country (well, technically not anymore as he also moved within the EU) made me aware of this presentation "Silver Needle in the Skype" (link points to fairly large PDF file) by Philippe Biondi, & Fabrice Desclaux.
To fully digest and fully comprehend the content requires way more time than I am willing to invest - and to make meaningful arguments for or against conclusions does require much deeper special knowledge. It is interesting view into the deep internals of how Skype works and also provides very interesting references to tools available for this kind of exploration. I am not going to stop using Skype just because there is a chance that Skype could possibly be a backdoor or something not so innocent. There can be after all perfectly honest reason for all the obfuscation and anti-disassembling measures - to protect the IP against competition. Or it can be in order to hide something else ? We will probably never know.
Today I picked the printer I have mentioned yesterday - Xerox Phaser 6120N. It is somehow more bulky than the ML-4500, but boy, does it work !! From all available connection options (parallel port, USB, ethernet) I have of course chosen ethernet. Printer after switch on spent about 5 minutes doing strange and weird noises, initializing itself and then spit out a page with its DHCP-acquired network address.
To assign different IP address (so that it does not change) was very easy: go to http://192.168.x.x/ - whatever is printed on the status page and follow the Web instructions under 'Network'. Set new IP, disable the automatic IP settings, wait for printer reset (and new status page) and you can go on setting the clients.
I have been running the Unix only workstations for over a week now. During this week, I have managed to clean up and convert two Windows boxes to VMWARE virtual machines, but actually had to resort to use the VM's only in two cases. Everything else worked just fine.
The first case was requirement to review an non-trivial Excel file. Normally, Numbers does very decent job when it comes to loading Excel files and for the most the remaining cases, the OpenOffice (in it's more polished Cocoa version NeoOffice) works just fine. Well - as long as you do not open spreadsheet with pivot tables. In my case, the spreadsheet contained pivot tables and charts based on these tables. Numbers warned during import that this feature is not supported and the converted spreadsheet was very good looking - nicer that in Excel, but not quite so functional :-). Strangely enough, the charts were imported OK but lost the drill-down capabilities. After trying out the NeoOffice, the imported spreadsheet had retained some pivot capabilities of the original, but lost charts completely. The only resort was falling back to Office 2003 in virtual machine and using Excel. Fortunately one of the two VM's created from old hardware had Office 2003 installed, so that worked out OK.
Today is a special day for this blog as two bit boundaries were crossed. This is post number 256, which means that I have used all 8 bit numbers for numbering and jumped into nine bit space. The byte is not enough any more - vive la 0x100.
Another boundary crossed today is number of hits as tracked by Wordpress (which does not count my visits). In this case the number reached and crossed was 0x8000 or 32768 decimal, which brings us to upper half of the 16 bit address space. From today, full 16 bit counter must be used - and it must be even "unsigned short int" :-).
On previous weekend I had great opportunity to spend a lot of time listening to books and podcasts. The opportunity was long drive to Quebec City and back, plus the two days spent walking around with camera, taking pictures, enjoying the differences in style and architecture and listening to Seth Godin's book - Small is the new big.
There is nothing in this book that would actually require to drive almost 500 km one way - you can comfortably get the same benefit out of it without moving out from your favorite sofa, walking around your neighborhood or on a treadmill (hi Joel). The real reason being in the capitol of La Belle Province was Skate Canada - Grand Prix competion in figure skating. And while my wife was watching Jeff Buttle, Joannie Rochette and many others - which is her favorite leisure time activity, I was walking, taking pictures and listening - which is mine.
I have already worked through full week solely on Mac and Leopard platform with excellent results. The productivity in using Java is actually higher, thanks to faster machine and Spaces allowing to have opened few Firefox windows with Spring documentation, terminals for Ant builds, Tomcat, Eclipse and Spype/Adium to keep in touch. Spaces is about as good as having multiple monitors - the ability of switching between both with mouse and keyboard fits well in my working habits.
Last year, when I got my first Mac, it was a wild ride of discoveries and trying out new software. As result I have ended up with many programs installed that I do not really need or use. Fortunately, the uninstall process is as simple as install and there is no registry that could get corrupted, so it was not really a big deal. With the new one, I am going to be much more selective what I put on the harddrive and what not.
During the vacation, we stopped in small bookstore in Verona which was selling computer software as well. At the entrance, there was a poster showing smiling Finder's face, Apple logo and announcing reasons why you would want to make the big jump - il grande salto - to Mac platform. That is to explain the title :-)
Grande Salto is exactly what I did. Without too much preparation or notice. Since Tuesday evening I am happy owner of the beautiful piece of hardware (17 inch 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro with 250 GB HDD and 4 GB of RAM) that is greatly complemented by the amazing software collection (OS X 10.5, iLife 08, iWork 08 and many others) running on it. I spent Wednesday playing with it and between 'Wows' and 'Ahhs' managed to setup the core applications I need for work: several configurations of Eclipse (with and without MyEclipseIDE), Netbeans with Ruby, couple of gems and of course THE editor. Then transferred the sources, installed Ant, Spring, Tomcat and couple of opensource packages (e.g. Jakarta Commons). And on Thursday, I jumped right into the field, to the client continuing in development of my current Java project in the place where I left it on Monday with Fujitsu N5100 running XP-ProSP2. As a plan B, I had my old notebook also with me - but did not have to resort to using it.
Trying to install ATG on the Linux platform turned out to be not completely hickup-free. The default installer died with the following message:
$ ./ATG2007.1.bin> Preparing to install...> Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive...> Configuring the installer for this system's environment...> awk: error while loading shared libraries: libdl.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory> dirname: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory> /bin/ls: error while loading shared libraries: librt.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory> basename: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory> dirname: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory> basename: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory[/sourcecode]> Fortunately, the fix was easy after I found out what went wrong: incorrect assumption about kernel version. To make it work, this "hack" helped:> [sourcecode language='css']> $ mv ATG2007.1.bin ATG2007.1.bin.orig> $ cat ATG2007.1.bin.orig | sed "s/export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/" >ATG2007-1.bin None of this of course happens on Windows - oh, yes - the joys of not swimming with the crowd :-). You will encounter issues otherwise unknown - but also learn something in the process.