MacOS | Lazycoder

31Oct/050

Windows vs OS X for wireless networking

I brought my “take-home” Dell laptop in to work because we are hosting some meetings this week and I needed a Wintel box to run some demos. This laptop came pre-configured by our IT dept. to connect to our campus wide wireless network. I can’t get it to connect to my home wireless network UNLESS I turn off ALL security. Right now I’m only performing MAC address authentication at home and the Dell laptop can’t even handle that. I’m at work now and I can’t connect to our network even if I plug into the hard-wired network.

I knew I should have brought my iBook in today and just used RDC to connect to my workstation. I’ve never had any problem connecting to any wireless network using my iBook. No matter what kind of security was in place.

Update: I removed the MAC Authentication from my WAP at home and set up WPA. Now both my Dell and my iBook are able to connect to the WAP with no problems. I have no idea why MAC authentication screwed with the Dell so much.

Filed under: MacOS, Technology No Comments

13Sep/053

Office 12 looks like iTunes

Check out the screenshot of the “ribbon” in Office 12.

Those of you that like the “flip feature” in Vista, may want to check out Expose in OS X or one of the many Windows clones.

But I’m not going to point out each and every item that Vista copied from OS X. The marketing folks at MS are expecting people to make those comparisons. They’ve pre-trained their minions to ignore those comparisons. I’m just excited that Windows is FINALLY getting a lot of the features that I love about OS X in the actual OS instead of as third-party tools.

update: Here’s a screenshot that shows the similarities between the new look of Office 12 and iTunes new look.

Brent Simmons (of NetNewsWire) had some great comments when the new look of iTunes made it’s debut. My favorite was the comparison to NeXT. He also notes some trends that he’s seen in the latest OS X apps. From the looks of Office 12, maybe those design trends aren’t specific to OS X? Notice the margins bounding the Word window? According to John Gruber, this new look is so bad-ass that it doesn’t even have a name. The only thing that O12 is missing is the combined title-toobar. Well, that and getting rid of the Aqua buttons. But I kind of like them.

Filed under: .NET, Apple, General, MacOS 3 Comments

6Jul/056

Ruby on rails error

Well my Ruby on Rails experiment has come to a screeching stop. I’m going through the “ToDo” example, from their website and i’ve inserted the line “scaffold :todo” into my controller, but every time I try to run that page it throws up an error page that just says “bad handshake”. Now I know that someone it’s related to Ruby talking to MySql, but I can’t find anything on Google about it and there’s nothing in the log except a “500 error” listing. hmmmmmmmmm

update It would appear that MySQL changed it’s password hashing algorithm between version 4.0 and 4.1. Most of the Google hits said something to that effect, but they were talking about having just upgraded MySQL to 4.1 and the solution was to upgrade Rails. In my case I had the newest version of Rails, but I was running MySQL version 4.0. Since I’ve upgraded to 4.1 now, I’m getting a new error “no database selected”. The solution for that is to update your Ruby mysql api, but I can’t seem to get the gem updater to install the latest MySQL api for Ruby. hmmmm, back to the drawing board.

Building native extensions. This could take a while…
ERROR: While executing gem … (RuntimeError)
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
Gem files will remain installed in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.6 for inspection.
ruby extconf.rb install mysql\nchecking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no
checking for main() in -lm… yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no
checking for main() in -lz… yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no
checking for main() in -lsocket… no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no
checking for main() in -lnsl… no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no

Filed under: General, MacOS, Technology 6 Comments

1Jul/050

Safari and RSS support

It’s interesting to note that if a web page presents two different types of feeds, RSS and ATOM, that when you click on the “RSS” badge in the address bar in safari it defaults to the ATOM feed. Even if the RSS feed is listed first in the HEAD section. At least on the few sites I’ve tried this on.

Filed under: General, MacOS No Comments

24Jun/050

IE7 looks and acts like Safari

Wow, I just watched the Channel 9 video of RSS in Longhorn and IE 7. One thing that struck me was how much IE 7 looks and behaves, at least in terms of RSS content, like Safari 2.0. Whenever I see similar applications from two different companies that behave in a similar manner, I wonder two things:

1) Who copied who?

2) Is there any real innovation happening or is that the best way to do things?

As far as the RSS related functionality goes, making the browser light up a little badge when there is a feed present makes sense. IE does it a little differently than Safari. I like the way that Safari does it mainly because the RSS icon isn’t always there. It only shows up in the address bar if a feed is present. IE 7′s RSS icon is omnipresent, just disabled or “greyed” (“Oranged”?) out when a feed isn’t present. IMO, it gets lost in all of the other Yahoo, ICQ, Office, and other icons that are stuck in the toolbar. I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on any of those icons.

The way the two browsers handle subscriptions is very similar, again there aren’t a whole lot of ways to skin that particular cat. It shows the “river of news” view of your subscriptions. Allows you to search your subscription, much like Spotlight and Safari do. Where the two browsers differ, and this is pretty significant to me. is how they handle external aggregators.

Safari allows you to designate an external aggregator. When you click on the RSS badge, it opens up the aggregator you have specified (in my case it’s NetNewsWire on my iBook) and lets the aggregator handle subscribing to the feed rather than the browser. IE 7, it appears from the video, allows aggregators access to the “common list”.

So my questions are:
1) Will I be able to designate a default aggregator. If I can, this will prevent the “extension grabbing” that happens a lot with documents.
2) Will the feeds be included in the Longhorn version of Spotlight? Being able to import the Feed details into the metadata store would be cool.

The other big difference between the two is that I’m watching a video of the IE 7/Longhorn RSS technology. If I want to see the Safari/Tiger RSS technology I just open up my iBook.

Filed under: .NET, MacOS, Technology No Comments

16Jun/050

Apple – Mac OS X – Inkwell

Apple – Mac OS X – Inkwell: “”

Wow, I had forgotten all about this feature until Scoble linked to a “OS X installed on a Tablet PC” story. I’ve got a tablet, I’ll have to try this tonight.