May 2007 Archives

Here's a meme of 40 assorted questions, found via Troy. They cover a few things that I probably haven't answered in previous memes so hopefully it'll prove interesting.

I'm back from Wales. I'll post something more meaningful soon but I'm going to be busy for the next few days - though at least this time I will have internet access.

Had a great time though and have lots of photographs to catalogue and sort.

Well, I'm going away for a few days, as I mentioned earlier in the week. I'm heading off to North Wales with the university hiking club tomorrow, and coming back on Thursday evening. During that time I will be only reachable by mobile phone (and even then only when I'm in signal range) - I'm not taking anything computer-related so no email or instant message contact until I get back. This will probably be the longest time I've been without internet access in almost 4 years.

We're staying in a self-catering camping barn in Snowdonia, and will be going up Mount Snowdon at some point, amongst other things. Should be good fun and hopefully the weather will be nice too.

So, I'll be back on Thursday. Until then, I've turned off automatic approval of comments unless you use TypeKey or OpenID and I've marked you as trusted - I don't want to come back to find I've been spammed to high heaven in my absence.

And, incidentally, next Friday (25th) is my birthday.

If you have a Mac and have Boot Camp installed, you'll notice that you can access the NTFS partition used by Windows while booted to Mac OS X. However, access is read-only - you can open files and copy files from it, but you can't save to it. This makes sharing files between OS X and Windows difficult as there isn't a common place that both operating systems can read and write to (unless you have an extra FAT partition or an external drive).

The purpose of this good is to get around this technical limitation by using some extra software in Mac OS X to make your NTFS partition writeable as well as readable - that way any files on your NTFS volume can be read and written by both Windows and OS X.

We're going to use 3 packages - Google's MacFUSE (which I mentioned yesterday), and MacFUSE Tools and NTFS-3G.

I have a new favourite FTP/SCP client for Mac, in the form of MacFusion. It's a GUI frontend for MacFUSE, which itself is a Mac port of FUSE, which allows non-native files systems to be mounted in user space, apparently.

What this basically means is that you can use MacFusion to mount FTP and SSH servers as if they were removable disks in Mac OS X, so you can browse them using Finder (or indeed any program) and drag and drop files on and off the server as if it were any other folder. You can even make it run at startup and have it mount the connections then, so they're always available while your computer is turned on.

It's not the easiest program to install - you have to install MacFUSE from Google first, which requires a restart, and then MacFusion - but once you've set some servers as your favourites the whole thing is very transparent. In future it should also support WebDAV and other file systems too.

Apple has updated the MacBook range again, this being the third revision since they were launched last year. Mine is a first revision, and while there's nothing wrong with it, had I waited 9 months I could have got (for the same price that I paid):

• A 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, instead of a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor
• 80 GB hard drive, instead of 60 GB
• 802.11n Wi-fi, instead of 802.11g (108 Mbps instead of 54 Mbps)
• Faster writing of CD-RW discs (16x instead of 10x)

But never mind. It's had 9 months of very heavy use and yet doesn't seem to be suffering - the battery is still at well over 90% of its original capacity and everyone else seems to work fine. I guess I'm just envious.

Equinux's TubeStick is a great budget DVB-T tuner for Macs - but out of the box, it will only work on a Mac. Put it into a Windows PC and the Find Hardware Wizard will simply mull over it for a few minutes before coming up blank.

The good news is that there is a signed Windows driver for it, or at least the model I have. The TubeStick is based around the Afatech AF9015 chipset, and the driver can be downloaded from this page on Afatech's web site. It apparently works with Windows XP and Vista - I only tried it on XP SP2 but it seemed to work okay.

To actually watch TV, you'll also need some software to interact with the TubeStick, and it's here that I've come up blank, however, getting the driver should be a good starting point.

I'm working on a full review of the TubeStick on a Mac but I've pushed it back a bit since a new version of The Tube (the Mac software you use with it) has been released with some new features. I'm liking it so far though.

Back in July, I installed Comment Challenge, a plugin for Movable Type which adds an extra question to the comment form for those not using OpenID. Until the past few days, this has blocked around 99.9% of the comment spam I've been getting - I'm up to around 1 spam comment every 3 minutes now, but thanks to this plugin all I see is an event in MT's activity log which just needs purging from time to time.

Recently, more spam has been getting though, though we're still only talking maybe 0.2% here. It seems that spammers are now taking the time to manually enter spam comments on high-ranking pages, and doing so in a way that makes them look like legitimate comments - they usually refer to the subject of the entry but will have some spammy link as the provided URL. One dude in Pakistan entered around 8 comments over several hours here under various false names - his one mistake was to use the same IP address each time.

I'm still deciding what to do. I may remove the URL field altogether for those who haven't authenticated through OpenID, using Brad Choate's URLess plugin. I'm not going down the route of blocking all unauthenticated comments, nor do I have the time to manually approve all authenticated comments (especially as I am going on holiday next week). However, I'd appreciate some feedback.

If you have an Intel Mac and like living on the edge, give this build of Firefox a try. It's the first of the builds that will become Firefox 3.0 which includes native form widgets on Mac OS X - which means that web forms will no longer have ugly buttons and scrollbars and instead look more like they do in Safari. It's a nice improvement as it makes the program match in with the operating system more tightly.

You can also discover some of the other improvements in the release - speed being one major thing. The interface is much more responsive and pages render noticeably quicker, and smooth scrolling is smoother. There's also native support for Growl notifications for when your downloads complete - no need for any extensions. The Page Info screen has also been updated and is now not only more attractive but more useful too.

It is, however, not even an alpha-quality build, so tread carefully. I ran it on a new profile just to be sure - if you don't know how to create them then this isn't for you. Though it seemed quite stable to me, it may not be for you and there are some rendering quirks in it still. It's also Intel only at this stage so it won't run on PowerPC Macs.