Paul's Time Sink

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Firefox 1.5

Paul Westbrook | 30 November, 2005 20:34

Firefox has just been updated to 1.5. It is working fine for me, but I haven't really noticed any of the new features.

The one problem that I had was getting some old extensions to work. This post has some instructions on getting this to work.

[via MAKE: Blog]

Technorati Tags: Firefox

Script to remove old files

Paul Westbrook | 30 November, 2005 19:07

I finally got around to writing a script to remove old files from dcc that were filling up my disk. The script was pretty simple.

#!/bin/sh
TIMELIMIT="+14"
LOGDIR=/var/dcc/log
DATE=`date +"%y%m%d"`
if [ -d $LOGDIR ]; then
    find $LOGDIR -type f -name 'msg.*' -mtime $TIMELIMIT -exec rm {} \;
fi

Technorati Tags: system admin

Cast Away

Paul Westbrook | 28 November, 2005 20:51

Castaway Today, I downloaded Cast Away, which is an applescript that allows you to specify settings for each podcast in iTunes. For example, you can specify how many episodes to keep for podcast.

It looks like it can do this cleanup on a daily basis. When you set this up, all that it does is an a entry in your user's crontab.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get this to work. I was getting some AppleScript error. Until I get this to work, I have reverted to manually deleting podcast episodes that I don't have time to listen to.

[via TUAW]

Technorati Tags: Cast Away, podcast

convert between text formats

Paul Westbrook | 28 November, 2005 20:41

I just saw this post that describes the textutil command line tool. This tool can convert between text, html, Rich Text, Microsoft Word formats, in addition to others.

It is pretty cool that this is built into to Mac OS X 10.4.

Technorati Tags: Mac OS X, textutil

Digital Life

Paul Westbrook | 28 November, 2005 20:35

I just saw the HDTV edition of Digital Life TV, and I actually liked this show. It is a lot like the old Screen Savers from TechTV.

Here is the link to subscribe to this in iTunes.

[via HD Beat]

Technorati Tags: IPTV

Apple Mail and dialup

Paul Westbrook | 28 November, 2005 20:20

Over Thanksgiving, we were staying in a condo that did not have high speed network access, so I was using dialup to access the network.

I have configured Mail to get my mail with IMAP. The main reason that I did this is because I want to leave my mail on the server, so I can check it with different clients. Another benefit of IMAP is that that clients can only download the headers instead of downloading the whole message.

It sees that Apple's implementation is pretty poor when it comes to IMAP. Here are the probelems that I have seen:

(More)

Hopefully last memory post

Paul Westbrook | 27 November, 2005 17:55

Hopefully, this will be the last post that I have to make on this topic. The problem that I was having was that I was running out of memory when there was a lot of access in apache. The swap partition was being filled up, and eventually the machine just bogged down swapping.

Part of the problem was that LifeType is using a lot of memory. This is being fixed in the 1.1 release. But, I don't want to upgrade to it until it is more stable.

In the mean time, I have just reduced the number of threads that apache can start. The worst thing that can happen is that when there is a lot of access, some requests may be denied. At least this is better than having the whole machine go down.

Technorati Tags: system admin

Forty Faces

Paul Westbrook | 26 November, 2005 20:46

Forty Faces is an interesting site. It will show a photo representing each of the most recently updated blogs that it is watching.

Currently, it is looking at the rss feed to determine when there are new posts. Maybe in the future it will use xmlrpc pings to determine when new posts are made.

[via Paint the Tiger • Carve the Swan]

The neighbors must love this

Paul Westbrook | 26 November, 2005 20:27

This video is pretty cool. At first I though that this person just hooked up X10 controlled lights to a midi player, but I think that some more thought went into this.

Technorati Tags: X10

Synergy Gui

Paul Westbrook | 23 November, 2005 12:54

Synergy I just saw this post about a UI for synergy on Mac OS X. I have been using synergy to share the keyboard and mouse on my Windows and Linux workstations at work. Previously, there has only been a command line version available on Mac OS X. Now SynergyKM provides a UI for configuration of Synergy.

I see that it includes a version of the synergy built in. I wonder if you want to use a different version, if it would be possible to put one in your search path.

Technorati Tags: Mac OS X, SynergyKM

spam and virus in .Mac mail

Paul Westbrook | 23 November, 2005 12:20

I have been getting a lot of spam and virus messages through my .Mac email account. Recently, I have been receiving a lot of email with the the Sober.U worm in it.

I would think that Apple would want to protecting their customers from these things.

Technorati Tags: .Mac, spam

Found memory leak

Paul Westbrook | 22 November, 2005 06:02

I think that I have found the problem that I was having where it appeared that apache was leaking.

I had some mod_rewrite rules that forward request from where this blog was hosted to the new domain name.


<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>


       RewriteEngine on


       RewriteRule ^/blog$  http://www.paulstimesink.com/ [L,R]


       RewriteRule ^/blog/(.*)  http://www.paulstimesink.com/$1 [L,R]


</Ifmodule>

I changed this to:


Alias /blog /<path_to_LifeType>

When people browse the old url, the url that they will see in their browser will be the old one, but I think that is reasonable.

(More)

Video over IP

Paul Westbrook | 17 November, 2005 19:58

Ever since I had to change one of the the RG6 cables coming into our living room, from a satellite feed be used for the ATSC antenna, I have been trying to figure out how I can use the other TiVo, without bringing another drop to the room. I have been thinking about getting a device that would send the audio and video signal over TCP/IP. I want to put the DIRECTV receiver near the multiswitch, and then send the video signal over a ethernet cable.

I saw these products that are Cat-5 based video distribution systems. Unfortunately, these don't say that they use TCP/IP. I assume that they send analog signals over the 8 wires of the Cat-5 cable.

(More)

Google Analytics

Paul Westbrook | 16 November, 2005 19:53

Google just came out with their Google Analytics. This is a service to allow statistics about web traffic maintained. It is using the Urchin software that Google bought earlier this year. Urchin created software products that allowed companies to track their web site usage.

I signed up to have my stats tracked through Google Analytics. I had been using Site Meter. I Both of these services require javascript to be put into pages, and then the services track these impressions. One problem about these are that the tracking depends on the browser downloading the scripts to do the tracking. I also am using awstats which parses the log files, so this should be more accurate.
(More)

Power failure and Linksys PSUS4

Paul Westbrook | 16 November, 2005 05:50

Last night a transformer exploded in our neighborhood, so the power went out at our house. After about an hour our UPS ran out of power so the remainder of the network equipment turned off.

This morning I tried to print something, and I noticed that the Linksys PSUS4 was not accepting print jobs. It looks like it wasn't using the ip address that I had previously allocated to it, and it wasn't getting an ip address from the dhcp server.
(More)

Paul's Time Sink

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Firefox 1.5

Script to remove old files

Cast Away

convert between text formats

Digital Life

Apple Mail and dialup

Hopefully last memory post

Forty Faces

The neighbors must love this

Synergy Gui

spam and virus in .Mac mail

Found memory leak

Video over IP

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