Raible Designs

.Mac Address Book Synchronization

Cool! Apple is sure making it easy for me to keep my Contacts' information all over the place. On my phone, on the web - I love it.

On the PIM front, I've been using a trial version of Inbox Buddy for a few months now. This software rocks, and it makes my e-mail addiction soooo much easier to cope with! Do you have a cluttered Inbox? If so, you should really try this out, it's amazing how it works so well - and only $30 when you finally decide to buy it. I bought it yesterday.

iSync 1.0 Released!

Apple has finally released iSync 1.0. I use iSync and I have a T68i phone, but to be honest with you, I've only used iSync once. I synched my Contacts from Outlook XP and have looked back since - and that was a couple of months ago. Sure I've updated contacts in both places, but I've just never felt the need to synch all the time. Maybe if I was a traveling saleman, I'd feel differently. None of this will stop me from upgrading though - I'm an upgrade addict after all.

VNC on OSX

I was fortunate enough to be subscribed to Forwarding Address: OS X in NetNewsWire and stumbled upon this easier-than-all-get-out HowTo about setting up VNC on OS X. In my environment, it only tool one step:

• Install this on the Mac you want to control: Share My Desktop

I tried to install a VNC Server on OS X a while back and never had any success. Share My Desktop made it real easy. Now if I could only find a similar HowTo for setting up VNC to "share my desktop" on Red Hat 8. I've had a similar "I can't get it to work" experience on that platform.

Connecting to your home folder on OS X

I know I had it working at one time, but I can't seem to get it working now. In Jaguar, I have "Windows File Sharing" on, and I can map a drive to it from my Windows machine, but no username nor password I type in will work. I've tried minime\matt and everything for the username, but no joy. I also have the User (me) setup so they can login from Windows. What gives?!

Connecting a Mac to M$ Exchange

I have both Entourage and Mail on my machine. Has anyone connected successfully to an Exchange server with either of these products? I can connect successfully using Entourage and treating it as an IMAP server, but it wants an SMTP server to send mail, and they don't have one of these at work. Any ideas?

Chimera 0.6 - Nighly Build download Recommended

Not recommended by me (as I haven't done it yet), but by the project itself. It doesn't look like they've fixed the most needed feature for me. The "view selected text" feature that Mozilla has. My default browser has changed from Chimera to Mozilla on the Mac because of this feature. Of course, this feature is only needed when I'm blogging a lot and since that has been sporadic lately, I might switch back to Chimera.

I found out at work yesterday that there's a fat chance of getting a better desktop. So my Powerbook has now become my in-the-office development environment. I don't mind, I just wish BBEdit had a Homesite-like Explorer window. Of course, since there is no Explorer and Finder sucks, this might be wishful thinking. Also, I'd love for a CVS app like TortoiseCVS for the Mac - sure makes things easier. I'm a GUI-guy, can you tell ;)

In an effort to satisfy my Windows-app-cravings, I just downloaded the Virtual PC 6 upgrade [screenshot]. Version 5 sucked as it was soooo slow. And I really had no need for it, as I could use Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection client to connect to my Windows machine. Now that I'm in the office, this is no longer an option. I hope this is faster than the 700Mhz/128MB machine at work!

OS X and Writing/Coding

I've been using my G4 Powerbook all week to write this security chapter. Today I started coding and writing at the same time. This post is meant to vent that this laptop/OS is a DOG! It's so fricken slow! I have Eclipse, Word, Mail, Terminal and Internet Explorer running and I feel like I've lost hours for these apps to respond. The machine is 667Mhz and has a gig of RAM! What the hell?! I'll be coding working on my Windows box for the rest of this project, I'm tired of waiting.

gunzip and tar

You *nix gurus probably have know this for a while, but I didn't. To gunzip and untar a *.tar.gz or *.tgz file with one command, try this:

gunzip -c ips6.0.tar.gz* | tar xvf -

It works on Solaris (9) and OS X (10.2.2 with gnutar), and therefore I assume it'll work on Linux. I learned that at the portal class I taught last week. Good stuff, committing to memory...

Apple Store in Cherry Creek

A new Apple Store is opening in Cherry Creek (Denver) this weekend! It's actually further away from us than the Aspen Grove store, but it's in a cool part of town. Cherry Creek is both an area of town and a mall - and the store will be in the mall. The good part, now we can go "shopping" and I can attend all their cool iPhoto and iMovie sessions while Julie and Abbie pal around. Other than the iApps sessions, the Apple stores don't do much for me - while it's cool to look at the new Apples, it gets old after 2 or 3 drool-sessions.

Chimera Gets Faster

If you use Chimera as your web browser on OSX (and there is every reason to) you might be interested in a little speed boost reported recently by MacOSXHints.

It's called HTTP/1.1 Pipelining and you can enable it by adding the following lines to the preferences file ( ~/Library -> Application Support -> Chimera -> Profiles -> default -> [random].slt -> prefs.js ):

user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true); 
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);

There should be a noticeable speed increase, especially news heavy sites such as Slashdot or Metafilter.

{ via xlab via pixelised }

Very cool - my fastest and favorite browser gets even faster! What more could you ask for on a Monday morning?