Category Archives: Software

The missing insert key on the macbook keyboard

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control_T

I have been working with iTerm 2 on a Macbook Pro a lot to connect to my server. While I am in the Midnight Commander interface, often I need to do multiple selections to move files, change their permissions or sometimes delete them. Since I originally used Putty for my SSH Client way back when I was running Windows, I grew accustomed to using the INSERT key on the PC keyboard to add files to a selection in Midnight Commander. On the Macbook Pro, there is no such key. However the good news is you can perform the same type of selection using the CONTROL and T keys, thanks Wesley R Elsberry of Austringer. Have fun!

Jellybean update for HTC One X is finally here

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A few days ago, my phone reported the availability of a software update for my HTC One X phone, on Virgin Mobile. It was a small update of 1.25MB. I applied the update, and yesterday, my phone reported another update which was the Android 4.1.1 update (Jellybean). Wonderful! If your phone reports the same update, I recommend doing it at home over wifi as the size of the download is quite large, at 360MB. Here’s a screenshot of the phone after the update.

2012-12-27 20.58.32

Happy Birthday Firefox!

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I remember when Firefox was called Phoenix. At that time, when doing web design, everyone was testing on Internet Explorer 5, which was the de facto standard in HTML and other web technologies. If the client wanted a website that was a little fancy, then you would recommend that it was built using Flash. We all knew then that Flash websites were bad for search engines and usability, but everyone was doing it.  Continue reading →

List of Free Apps That I Use

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The main attraction of the smartphone systems available in the market is the ability of users to install applications. The ability of users to install applications on their phones is essentially what makes smarphones “smart”. The range of applications available is quite wide and they number in the tens of thousands to the millions.  Continue reading →

Murky Licensing Issues Can Bite The Developer (And The Client)

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A recent article from Ars Technica points to a situation in which a developer contracted by an agency developed an IOS app for a commercial client using the Titanium tool. It seems that the sales team from Appcelerator contacted not only the agency concerned, but also the client, demanding a payment of &pound 5,000 or the app will be taken down for intelectual property infringement. Continue reading →

How to fix Snow Leopard “compress” issues

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I have just recently noticed that some folders in Snow Leopard just refuse to be compressed using the “compress [folder name]” command (available under the right-click menu). For the life of me, I could not get the folders to finish compressing, with the symptoms including the famous “5 seconds remaining” progress bar status and the progress bar quickly jumping to about 90% and then just hanging there forever. I once left my Macbook Pro to compress a folder overnight (around 8 hours) and it was just stuck on “5 seconds remaining” status.

Initially I managed to avoid this issue by using utilities based on the 7zip compression, although it is less than ideal, since most of them want you to pay before they let you create  archives other than the 7zip format or .7z. After a while I was getting fed up with having to skirt around the issue and decided to investigate and guess what, the culprit is the usual dot files. If you have taken the folder to a Windows machine, say from a USB stick, then brought the folder back to OS X, then you are likely to encounter this issue.

The fix is quite simple. Just bring up the terminal.app (applications > utilities > terminal.app) and type “dot_clean” then drag the errant folder into the terminal window and terminal should display “dot_clean” followed by the path to your folder. Press enter and voila! You should now be able to compress your folder from the option click menu and it will finish. I have not yet encountered this bug in Lion, but who knows, it might be lurking in there somewhere.

Mac OS X security has been breached? Not the first time

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Despite all the hype about the breaching of Mac OS X security in the media, it pays to remember that this is not the first time it has happened. There have been many Flash Player and Java bugs in the past.

What is new here is that the bugs in Java has been exploited to carry out a silent install of the malware. This exploit has been so successful that it is estimated that up to 500,000 Apple machines have been infected so far.

If you have been unlucky you may have been infected, but there are ways to find and fortunately, remove the malware from your system.

Get your terminal fix on OS X

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When I first tried Linux, it was back quite a few years ago and at that time, most people who were developing software was running Windows. I was testing a Red Hat distro on a spare box which was a Pentium II 400Mhz machine with 128MB of RAM, just to find out what the fuss with Linux was about.

Since the server was a headless box, I needed a terminal client on Windows and the best one at that time and I believe it still is now, is Putty by Simon Tatham. It is really a Swiss-army knife for managing a Linux/Unix server box since it supports quite a lot of very handy functionalities.

Continue reading →

WordPress header annoyances

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I have used WordPress for quite a long time (since version 1.5) and it has been an excellent blogging software. However, I have only now started to use it for a Content Management System for a website with a lot of pages and a dedicated page for blog posts (blog section). So far, this setup seems to work, though in terms of templating it is nothing like CMS Made Simple, where making templates is quite straightforward. It seems to be a little more complicated in WordPress.

One of the things that annoys me, though, is that when you upload a header image in the default TwentyEleven template (very elegant template, I might add), it gets uploaded to the media library, but there is no way to tell the header to use an image that is in the media library. I would love to have this feature implemented, whereby a site admin could go to the header section under ‘appearance’ and find a button called ‘use images from library’ or something to that effect.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Installing Maxwell Render for Google Sketchup on Mac OS X

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Yesterday, I was inspired to try to install an interesting plugin for Google Sketchup (partly because it is free) called Maxwell Render. The company that produces the plugin is also currently running a competition if you’re interested in entering. So I went to their website and downloaded the plugin, which is a Zip archive with a few files and folders in it. Continue reading →