A couple of days later the MacBook arrived. The unpacking, the packaging being premium to say the least, reminded me of boxing day as a child.

The first boot // iApps

I carefully — yes, carefully — pressed the power button. After watching the welcome video I entered my iTunes account information so the Wizard could import personal data like my name, my address and phone number. Pretty convenient.

The Desktop and the dock, filled with a lot of shiny icons asking to be clicked, showed up. I spent the next hour playing around with the Apps of the bundled iLife ‘09 and soon realised that I had absolutely no need for any of them.

• I don’t play and instrument, so I don’t need Garage Band,
• I don’t shoot films, so I don’t need iMovie
• I don’t need to author DVDs, so I don’t need iDVD
• iWeb, really?

Don’t get me wrong, they look decent and while I don’t need them right now you never know when they could come in handy and I’m not going to uninstall them, for now.

Dashboard // Exposé // Spaces

The Dashboard didn’t seem very useful to me and I didn’t even bother to try using it. This changed when I heard about and wanted to use iStat Menu. The 13″ screen isn’t that big and every inch of menu bar space is precious. The screen size limited the potential of this app and so I had to look for another way to display system information. The folks behind iStat Menu had made another app to display system information, iStat Pro, a Dashboard widget. is when I started using the Dashboard. To be honest I didn’t really use the Dashboard, I used iStat Pro. Then I had to track a package I ordered and read that you can add elements of a web page to the Dashboard via Safari. A quick and easy solution to track the package. I don’t see myself using the Dashboard all the time, but it’s cases like this that make it a really useful addition to the OS.

As a Windows and Linux user I was using alt-tab This constantly, it is part of my workflow and my favorite way to switch between applications, or should I say windows and that’s the catch. The OSX equivalent to alt-tab, cmd-tab, doesn’t work in the same way it does in Windows or in Gnome/KDE on Linux. It switches focus between applications, not windows. So if I had either to get a third party software or to use the mysterious art of Exposé-fu. If you don’t know have any idea what Exposé does, it basically shows thumbnails of all currently opened windows on a single space. It is easily accessible by a dedicated key (F3 without fn.) or by a three-finger gesture on the multitouch trackpad. Once you opened Exposé you can choose between windows either by clicking on them or by navigating with the arrow keys and hitting return. It’s a different way of moving between windows but I got used to it. One of the coolest things about Expose is that it’s not only accessible on your desktop but you can also use it while using cmd+tab which results in it displaying all windows of the particular application. Or you can use it will viewing the Spaces overview.

Spaces are different workspaces on which you can place windows on, it’s just like the multiple desktops on Linux. Although I use spaces, I’m not really happy with it. It’s great tool to organise your work and applications but it doesn’t offer any customisability. For instance you can’t assign a hotkey to move the active windows to another space like I’m used to from Linux. You have to drag a windows and use a hockey or you have to drag it to the border of the screen. It’s a little annoying but I can live with that.

There’s one thing though that’s really disappointing…

F/LOSS on the Mac // Software I bought

I’ve been using a lot of F/LOSS software on Windows, and of course I’ve used mostly F/LOSS software on Linux and still use on my server. The free software scene on the Mac is kind of dead, I don’t know if it was ever alive in the first place. You really don’t find that much OpenSource software on the Mac. Widely used examples of OpenSource software on the Mac are Adium, and libpurple-based IM-client, and VLC, the latter with an unknown future because of the lack of Mac developers.

So what do you do if you’re looking for some handy, small apps and there is no F/LOSS? You buy it. There are lots of independent developers on the Mac and they sell tens of thousands apps, ranging from note taking applications to bitmap graphic editors. It really doesn’t bother me to pay for software, if I think it’s worth it, but some of them are just overpriced in my opinion. Luckily most, if not all, developers offer demo and trial version of their software for you to evaluate.

Two examples of Software I bought, Socialite, a social network client, that I’m using for Twitter, Digg and Google Reader. And CoverSutra, kind of a remote app for itunes that sits on you desktop and/or your dock. It’s currently on sale with 75% off the regular price.

Conclusion

I don’t regret getting a Mac, but I’ve realised that the grass isn’t as green as it looks from the other side of the fence. It’s been only two and half months and maybe it’s only because it takes more time to getting used to how things work on the Mac. It’s a different OS, it’s a different world and becoming familiar with any aspect of it will take a while and I’m confident that I can manage not to through it out of the windows any time soon and you can expect a couple of reviews and things about the mac that are on my mind soon. So stay tuned.

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As you might imagine I have got lots of stories to tell, if I can be bothered to actually write posts. But I’ll try.

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I was hitting the big lower case g (google) and found this. Thanks to Tsukasa I finally found a ‘sudo’ for powershell.

I just had to figure out a why to get it to work. Probably there are others looking for the same I thought I might just summarise the steps it took to make it work.

Since I don’t know what editor is available on your system we’re going to use notepad.exe. Personally I’m using ‘e’, there is a free trial but it’s pretty much worth the money. So you might think about buying it.

let’s start with…

step 0.5 , creating a script: mount.

It’s no really necessary but might save you some time, so if you don’t care just skip to step 1.

First we’re going to create a directory to put all your scripts in

New-Item -ItemType directory $HOME\Documents\Scripts

After that we need to mount that directory so it’s easily accessible from everywhere within PS using the New-PSDrive cmdlet. The one draw back of that cmdlet is that all mounted directories only last as long as you current PS session. We need it to stay mounted, or at least get mounted at the beginning of every new session and there is a simple way to solve the problem. Put the mount command in your ps-profile. if you never bothered with it there probably isn’t a profile file yet, but Microsoft thought ahead and created a variable for it.

notepad.exe $PROFILE

and put this in it:

New-PSDrive -name script -PSProvider FileSystem -Root $HOME\Documents\Scripts

save, exit.

restart your powershell session by typing powershell into powershell. You should see the directory getting mounted, we’re good to go now.

cd script:

will take you to the script directory.

step 1, getting the script

Go to your script directory or any other directory where you want to put your script and type

notepad.exe sudo.ps1

Notepad will appear and you’ll need to put the following into it

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

$file, [string]$arguments = $args;
if([System.IO.File]::Exists("$(get-location)\$file"))
{
$file = "$(Get-Location)\$file";
}
$psi = new-object System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo $file;
$psi.Arguments = $arguments;
$psi.Verb = "runas";
[System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start($psi);

save, exit

The script is already working, and you can run it from everywhere by typing the whole path and since that’s a major PITA we’re going to assign an alias.

step 2, assigning an alias

Open your PS profile

notepad.exe $PROFILE

adding the following line

New-Alias -Name sudo 'script:\sudo.ps1'

(or the respective directory)

save, exit

restart the session.

Now you’re able to start any application with elevated rights. e.g.

sudo notepad.exe

or

sudo powershell

to get a elevated shell but I’ve yet to find a way to make the elevated shell being opened in the working dir where the command was executed.

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What I really liked is the fact that they took a lot of familiar u/*nix shell commands, using them as aliases to their own commands. So, there are different commands you can use to achieve the same task. Pretty simple example everyone should be familiar with is listing files in a directory.Doing a ‘Get-ChildItem’ will get you to your list just as ‘ls’ or ‘dir’ does.

‘Get-Process’ and ‘ps’ is just another example and the only strange thing about it, is that the aliases always seem to be be the better choice, since they’re much shorter and therefore quicker to type.

Why would you type ‘Get-Help New-PSDrive’ if you can do the same typing ‘man mount’ ?

That’s it for now. Next time I’ll tell you how to get a little sudo-like command for Powershell.

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• ‘sudo’ for Powershell, sorta

Sometimes you don’t feel like blogging at all, because you’re not sure if there is anything to write about.

Sometimes however you do feel like writing a blog post because it could be the revelation you’re looking for.

I haven’t been actively doing anything with my blogs or websites for quite some time now and I think it’s the right time to change that. While I was being bored I managed to do some things that I’m going to write about in the days and weeks to come.

Among those things are a guide on how to set up your own Ubuntu server in Virtual Box on Windows to use to get some ssh and web action going. Another thing I plan writing about is setting up IIS7 on Vista and getting some applications and modules up and running.

So, that’s it for now. Hope to see you next time.

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First of all if you don’t know what Microblogging is, and you’re lazy to type Wikipedia into you’re location bar here’s the link to the the entry about it. Long story short, it’s basically some sort of online community where you can post public and private messages usually of 140 characters, the size of an SMS. It depends on your encoding, and responses on services like jaiku can be much longer, but that’s just to get you sort of an idea what it’s about.

This cap of characters your able to use is already the first problem you’ll probably face using Pidgin as you have absolutely no idea how many characters you already typed into the input field while the web sites of the services themselves usually show some sort of counter next to the input area or field. This brings us to our first plugin:

ConvCharCount

It’s kind of a no brainer to guess what it does. It counts the characters contained within the input area of Pidgin and shows the count on the right side of the bar where the emoticons, formatting and the like are located. Get it here

Pidgin identi.ca/Twitter Status

These two plugins set your status message to whatever your last dent on identi.ca or tweet on twitter was, only use one at the same time. Installation is quite easy, on Linux and you should already have everything you need to run them, on Windows however you’ll probably need to install ActivePerl. Which isn’t uncommon and you need for a lot of Pidgin plugins. Anyway here’s the like for the identi.ca plugin and here’s the one for the Twitter one.

Twitter in your profile

It puts your last tweet inside your protocol’s profile at a position you defined. You can put all your usual stuff in there and tell the plugin where it has to put the text of your last tweet. Personally, I don’t see a use for this. Is there anyone who even pays attention let alone looks at profiles on instant message services? Well, if your part of such a group this is probably for you. It works and it does what it promises. Link

Microblog-Purple

This is the one plugin you should probably keep an eye on or maybe even start using it today. I currently only supports Twitter, but other services like Jaiku and identi.ca are planned for the future. When Twitter dropped it’s xmpp support a lot of people were sort of pissed as they couldn’t use pidgin anymore to post tweets. Ping.fm already existed at this point which some did not want to use following their Stallmanian ways. Microblog-Purple, when activated adds another protocol to your account management: TwitterIM. After you gave it your password and account name you can start writing and reading tweets. Link

I know that there are a lot of desktop application like Twitux, Twhirl and Gwibber out there which do an amazing job and which I used for a while and appreciate all the work that was put into them but I prefer to not run one gazillion applications at the same time, and if Pidgin does the job. Why not?

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In the evening my shared host provider sent me an email in which he explained that they though there was an DoS attack directed at my page and that they had to move me on an isolated server, after a quick email discussion and me telling them that it was in fact the digg front page what caused DoS like traffic they put me back on line.

There are few things I could have done to prevent the site from going down, the best probably being getting a root or managed server instead of an shared host but that’s not a quick solution and as I think this is probably an isolated case not really necessary. Now the support team of my hosting provider gave me this great tip on how to get rid of all that incoming digg traffic which was taking down my site with some short two lined addition to my .htaccess-file.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?digg\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

These to lines will drop incoming traffic from digg and show them a forbidden instead of forwarding them to my index.php where a lot of load is produced executing or accessing php files. Some people will assume the site remained done, some will be just confused why they’re forbidden to access the site, as I know digg some will shout censorship, and those who know what happened will just enter the URL in their address bar and access it this way as only traffic from digg is blocked. Anyway, I thought there is maybe a more elegant way, which I didn’t use because I did not know what Wikipedia’s policy would say about this and to be honest I’m just too lazy to dig it up. It is possible to to redirect incoming traffic from a specific source, in this case digg to a completely different URL and one that would suit quite well is the Wikipedia entry about the digg/slashdott/etc. effect.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?digg\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg_effect$1 [r=301,nc]

Well those two are what I could have done, but when I noticed what was happening most of the traffic has already had happened and at this point there was nothing I could do.

I think I was quite lucky that I installed the wp super cache add-on for Wordpress which cached pages, making static URL files being served instead of executing the PHP files every single time which reduced the load at least to some extend but it clearly wasn’t enough and the server struggled every time a new page has to be cached.

Is there anything else more I could have done? I love the idea of a Wordpress plug-in that puts those lines in my .htaccess every time a set number of visitors from digg or other social media sites tried to access the page, I don’t even know if this kind of automation is even possible though.

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Wikipedia e.v. was forced to stop the forward because Lutz Heilmann brought this to court and explained that the Wikipedia entry about him contained untruthful accusations of him dropping out of university and engaging in dubious affairs within the porn industry, which apparently wasn’t the case.

When it became public that a member of the Party “Die Linke” (lit. the left) which inherited a lot of Members of the PDS successor to former GDR ruling Party SED the press and the general public was crying out loud, wrote about the lack of understanding of democratic principles by former East German politicians and the their Party. For one, the Party, while controversial had nothing to do with this, and her Member made use of his right as a citizen to protect himself from false accusations.

notice on wikipedia.de (German)

Being able to question wrong accusations is of course in favour of every German citizen, but what I want to criticise is how the law handles such cases, the domain wikipedia.de isn’t hosting any content, and shouldn’t be target of such rulings. Wikipedia is part of Wikimedia a non-profit organisation in the United States and therefore not liable under German law which the judge acknowledged and within his right ruled that the forward should be suspenend.

German Internet related laws are increasingly outdated and incredibly web2.0 hostile and while classic journalists, the printed media and most of television is being protected by the freedom of the press, and freedom of speech laws by some extend, Internet forums, social networks and blogs are not. There is a large number of lawyers basically living on suing their way through the blogoshpere.

Lutz Heinemann luckily abandoned his lawsuit, but he was in his right to sue the German Wikipedia e.v. and the authors of the entry about him but not every case is resolved this quickly without any notable damage to the German Internet crowd. But I doubt anything will change, as everyone seems to be focused on bashing the “Die Linke” instead of finally proposing laws that will help to deal with the reality of the Internet of the 21st Century.

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His idea is as brilliant as it is simple, he just quartered a video of Rick Astley which is not “Never gonna give you up” (kudos to you Mr.doob), and uploaded each of them. He now wrote some little JavaScript for his page so he could start, restart and pause the videos together and removed their Youtube chrome. The result is amazing, four videos become one, four times the resolution, four times the size.

Now I doubt that we will see a lot of such, or similar videos following this idea, and I doubt google is really fond of it but I’ve to admit I’d love to see a 32×32 vid on a large screen, just for the sake of it, ha!

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• Google launches Lively

Access to them is pretty easy but not very intuitive since everywhere inside GMail you only get forwarded to your inbox’ atom feed. It would be more convenient if could subscribe to tags right on the page of the specific tag. But well, It works so yeah, no need to complain I guess.

https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom

https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/<label>

Are the feed urls, just add them to your reader of choice.

Wait, no, there’s a catch. Your feed reader has to support access of authenticated feeds and now guess which popular feed reader does not support this feature. If you guessed Google Reader, than your right. Google’s own feed reader can’t handle the GMail feeds. Firefox’ dynamic bookmarks do however support it, not sure about the Sage add-on though.

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