While setting up a new PowerBook for a friend, I found that there was no application to handle .sitx files…or .bin, .sit, etc…

Turns out that Mac OS 10.4 can not handle these common files without installing additional software by hand. This is new to me, as 10.3 did not have this problem….it came with Stuffit Expander installed by default.

You’ll need .

Downloading the free Real Player application used to be easier…

Now they require you to create an account to get the URI for downloading the free player. Here is the URI I was given after creating an account, which should lead you directly to the download area for Real Player, bypassing the registration:

Bypass the Real Player registration, and go straight to the download area for Real Player 10 for Mac OS X

With the introduction of google’s new jabber service, I’m trying out Adium, a jabber compatible OSS (Open Source Software) chat client for Mac OS X. Google has instructions on setting up Adium for talk.google.com, which makes it easy to get going.

I like that Adium, unlike iChat AV 3, puts my AIM and Jabber contacts in the same window pane. iChat AV 3 requires them to be in separate windows!

Also, after installing Adium, I became aware of OTR, or Off-the-Record, messaging. OTR provides encryption to instant messaging chat text. From their website:

Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging allows you to have private conversations over instant messaging by providing:

Encryption
No one else can read your instant messages.
Authentication
You are assured the correspondent is who you think it is.
Deniability
The messages you send do not have digital signatures that are checkable by a third party. Anyone can forge messages after a conversation to make them look like they came from you. However, during a conversation, your correspondent is assured the messages he sees are authentic and unmodified.
Perfect forward secrecy
If you lose control of your private keys, no previous conversation is compromised.

It doesn’t seem that Google Talk has this functionality….yet. I’ll keep everyone posted as I learn more about this stuff!

DuFF commented the other day on joehungry.com with a possible solution to the 5 users per day restriction on iTunes music library sharing:

# DuFF Says:
August 21st, 2005 at 4:24 pm e

I’m assuming they don’t have this restriction if you add a password. The easiest solution to me would be to add a password and then just put it in your share name so everyone knows it. I haven’t tested this though.

So, here are the steps you can take to test this:

1. Open the iTunes preferences. (In MS Windows, Edit->Preferences)
2. Click on the Sharing tab.
3. Check “Share my music”.
4. Check “Share entire library”.
5. In the “Shared Name” field, type: password: no5userlimit
6. Check “Require password”.
7. In the “Require password” field, type: no5userlimit

Now, the password no5userlimit is just a suggestion. Feel free to use your own creative password. Make sure to tell all your friends to do the same, if this solution actually works. I will get around to testing it next week and report back.

Anyone else up for testing this and reporting back?

I was curious the other day to find out which webpages pointed (or linked) to joehungry. A quick search on google produced the answer. Here’s what you would search for:

link:www.joehungry.com

Just replace joehungry.com with your domain name (or IP) of choice. Enjoy!

I was using this a few weeks ago when troubleshooting my LDAP email address lookup function in Mulberry. I was wanting to see the fields that the UNC-CH LDAP server was serving out for me to use. Here is the command that worked for me:

ldapsearch -h ldap.unc.edu -x -b “dc=unc, dc=edu” uid=<username>

The uid is the same as the user’s ONYEN (Only Name You’ll Ever Need). If you don’t know the user’s ONYEN, you can use their last name (surname):

ldapsearch -h ldap.unc.edu -x -b “dc=unc, dc=edu” sn=<lastname>

Skebrown thinks this is all pretty crazy. So much information publicly available could be dangerous! Right? I’m not taking any chances. I just found a location on http://studentcentral.unc.edu where I can set my privacy flags. I just configured the LDAP server to just show my name and initials (no phone and address). But a quick check seems to show that the LDAP server is still handing out the address and phone. I’ll have to check into this.

I have recently been evaluating my website traffic in order to better serve visitors.

One line in the log evoked my curiosity. It was a URI from which someone visited my site:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22sean ervin%22 %2B greensboro&btnG=Search

What this means is that someone searched Google for: “sean ervin” greensboro and it led them to joehungry.com because of the Just Juan content on my site.

I IM’ed Sean and told him how interesting I thought this was. Who in the world is looking for him? We both were curious to know who is trying to find more about Sean on the web. But all we had was an IP address of the machine that apparently was used to do this (152.2.39.222). I was determined to find out who Sean’s secret admirer was! Let’s go!

1. I needed a fully qualified domain name. Perhaps that would give me some useful information. From a shell, I ran nslookup 152.2.39.222 and got back rm524c.sowo.unc.edu. Wow! A UNC-CH computer. I guessed this from the IP address (152.2) but this pretty much confirmed it. So where is this computer? What is SOWO? I figured that was my next step. It is probably a department at UNC-CH.
2. Onward to Google! A quick search at http://www.google.com/unc/ for “sowo” returned some useful hits. Looks like sowo is the abbreviation for School of Social Work. Yay! We’re getting somewhere.
3. Oh! And look at this part of the fully qualified domain name: rm524c. Might that be Room 524C? If I was naming computers, that seems like a logical naming convention. Cool. So who is in room 524C? Was it that easy?
4. I went to the School of Social Work homepage: http://ssw.unc.edu/, which I was in the Google hits from a previous step. Oh, hey, a site search at the bottom! How convenient. Let’s search for 524. Many times, they’ll list faculty, staff, and students with their office room numbers. Oh Boy!
5. Hey, it worked! Sortof… Here was the result: http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-q=524&submit=Search&sp-a=00050d5c-sp00000000 and of interest was this snippet of text in the results: “Chair of Doctoral Program Rick Barth in Room 524”. I IM’ed the name to Sean. He didn’t know him. Well it said Rick Barth is in room 524, and not 524C. Hmmm… Perhaps one of the doctoral students near his office? I clicked on the search result. Wait a minute! What’s this? A building map in pdf form at the top of the page? This is too easy.
6. The building map: http://ssw.unc.edu/currentStudent/orientation/Florplan.pdf was pretty useful. I noticed that on the 5th floor, there was a computer lab. Could be any number of people. But likely someone in the department. Even more likely to be a student of staff. A faculty member would have just used the PC on their desk.
7. Well, let’s find their students and staff lists then. Another visit to the School of Social Work homepage gave the option of seeing “Faculty and Staff”. There I found webpages listing Faculty, Staff, and Doctoral Students. Excellent!
8. I sent Sean the link to the Students, but he didn’t recognize any names. Second list I sent was of staff: http://ssw.unc.edu/people/prosupp.htm and he recognized a name. A likely candidate!
9. Krystie Grubb. He thinks this could be a person he used to manage in Greensboro, but not sure. No problem. Let’s find out more about Krystie. Her email address is kgrubb@email.unc.edu. That information is available from the list we were just looking at. Now here is where my knowledge of the computing environment at UNC-CH helped. I know that folks at UNC-CH are given webspace on the campus servers. You can access a person’s webspace by going to: http://www.unc.edu/~. My space is empty, but it is at, http://www.unc.edu/~jwaddell/, for example. So, I visited http://www.unc.edu/~kgrubb/ and, OH!….perfect!
10. On Krystie Grubb’s UNC-CH homepage the first link was to her Resume. Would we find that this was the Krystie Grubb who worked with Sean in Greensboro? Reeee Rawwwww! 404 errors all over the place. Not a single URI worked on Krystie’s webpage.

So that’s as far as we got. I did a few Google searches for “Krystie Grubb” and found some interesting stuff, but nothing like a resume. That would have been the ultimate find on this expedition. Absolute proof! Until then, we may never know. Oh, and if that mysterious person out there is still looking for Sean, you can find him at skebrown.com. Adios!

This afternoon I upgraded Norton Anti-Virus (NAV) on my Mac, running OS 10.3. I upgraded to the latest version of NAV (version 10). Went through the list of viruses that NAV protected me against and the vast majority were viruses that only infected the Microsoft Windows operating system. It listed a few viruses that could infect Mac OS 7, back in the mid 1990’s.

I started looking around to find a list of current Mac OS X viruses. Symantec only listed two, and one was a “concept” virus that didn’t even exist:

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/sh.renepo.b.html
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/mp3concept.html

thanks to non-standard MS file formats I spent 2 hours trying to import a txt file into mysql on a linux box. I had the LINES TERMINATED BY ‘\n’ set, but it was still giving me carriage returns in my table. rar!

I dug into the documentation and found a little bit that said something like:

“Some MS text file formats require you to terminate the lines with ‘\r\n’. This is because MS, for some reason, wants to put a carriage return AND a line break at the end of each line.”

yay.

this keyboard looks to be really cool…..oh, and maybe useful too:

http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/

i’ll keep my eyes on this one and see what it retails for when it arrives on shelves.