The last time I was here in the States, two years ago, I found free wireless networking everywhere – all the hotels and coffee shops had it, or maybe just all the ones that I went near to, which may be some sort of demographic indicator. This time, the hotel access is both flakey (poor […]
Tagged wifiI’ve just returned from my first visit to Las Vegas, and I think I have finally got a handle on the place; I have watched too many films, TV shows, and listened to too many Americans recount the lore and mystique of the place. First thing: I enjoyed myself. The reason for my trip was […]
Once upon a time, many years ago, I wrote a column for PC Pro (UK PC magazine) on “Mobile Computing”. The editor wanted me to write about Windows CE PDAs, which were then and are now extreme crap – and I submitted columns on what worked – which, back then, meant mainly Palm, and I […]
Tagged pdaThis book is one of the (very few) classics of software development. It is written in a simple style that is easy to understand, but offers great truths. Many people with limited experience won’t be able to fully appreciate what it has to offer; this is the collation of two lifetimes of experience in the […]
Tagged book reviewIf you bake bread, then you will be in sympathy with what Andrew Whitley has to say. The author rants extensively about the state of the industry, and the depredations to our palate caused by the Chorleywood process with no signs of abatement. He informs this with an eye to the biochemistry of baking that […]
Tagged baking, book review, breadProbably the simplest Ajax effect that I can think of that is desirable to add to web applications is to cause login boxes to “shake”, just like real computer login panels do, on a failed login. This is one of the few situations where a simple animation effect (too simple to qualify for Ajax, really) […]
Tagged html, java, javascript, prototype, scriptaculous, webobjectsO’Reilly seems to be suffering from more typos and code errors than they used to (in the distant past, before perfect bindings). This book suffers from a few that jarred on me. If pressed, I’d describe this book as a reasonable taster for Rails. The authors assume that you are already familiar with the basic […]
Tagged book review, rails, rubyWhen I first set up the junkmail accounts on MacOS X Server, I came across some web pages describing problems that people had been having with it. Details are also given here: http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/SpamAssassin_on_Mac_OS_X_Server Probably the most visible problem was that the spamassassin configuration file supplied used obsolete keywords, from a previous version. This is /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf. […]
Tagged mac mini, mail, unix adminI need to make a note of this, as I keep on looking it up on the web. Here’s the situation: you want to automate access to a server from your private machine, and are prepared to give up the security of the password prompt to get this extra benefit. If so, use this: ssh-keygen […]
Tagged unix adminFor a long time I have used crontab for almost all scheduled tasks, with a few diversions into /etc/rc and other such Unix techniques. With Tiger, Apple created launchd, which is intended to unify these, as well as inetd and Apple’s previous (and largely ignored) attempt at the problem, StartupItems. Here are a few pointers […]
Tagged mac mini, unix admin