charles's blog

Just because a product is abandonware doesn't mean your completely SOL. There are some great grass-roots resources online helping support users of older Macintosh systems and software.

I recently had a client who needed to import all of their Outlook Express contacts from an OS 9 machine into Address Book on their new Mac OS X machine. I found several methods and procedures, but the following sounded the most straightforward, so I tried it. It worked like a charm for me, so I'm posting it here.

The Sonos Digital Music System

Now, I'm not sure what the greatest thing was before sliced bread, but I know this: Today, Sonos is the greatest thing ever. As soon as I heard about the Sonos Digital Music System, I realized three things:

1. This is what I have been trying to do for two years on my Mac.
2. I have to have one.
3. Everyone should have one!

The Sonos CR200 Controller

The Geeky Side of Mac OS X

Here is my personal collection of Mac OS X technical odds & ends. For more specific tech tips under Mac OS X, refer to the following pages.

• Apache
• Audio
• Perl
• NetJuke

Make Hidden Apps Look Hidden

The LAN in my house is connected to the internet via broadband. Like most home users, I don't want (or need) to pay for a static IP address. I was looking for a roll-your-own alternative to dyndns.com, and I found this perl script... somewhere. This script allows me to keep a server on my LAN and make it accessible from the internet by opening up the appropriate ports on my router. I retained the original author's comments so you can track him down if you want.

Charles gets bitten by the travel bug

Late in 2003, a good friend of mine suggested that I might be interested in a new outdoor activity that he and his family had recently been enjoying. It combines hi-tech resources with elements of a traditional treasure hunt, and it's known as "Geocaching". I later learned that this was basically Letterboxing with gadgets, but it was the gadgetry that piqued my interest.

If you've never heard about it, there's an entire web site devoted to geocaching. I guaranty there's a geocache near you!

NetJuke is an open-source php/MySQL-based jukebox for your digital music. Basically, it provides a web-browser access to your digital music from any computer on your network. It uses the ID3 metadata to create and maintain a database of artists, albums, genres, and so on which you can search using any standard browser.

An acronym for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, CPAN maintains a huge library of perl modules and provides semi-automated access to them.

A couple of months ago as I was checking my web server access logs, I came across something odd. A single image file was being requested repeatedly and often from the same host IP. Although I wasn't aware of the term at the time, I had become a victim of Hot Linking. Since I wasn't aware of a technical means of blocking this heinous practice, I simply performed a reverse lookup on the IP, then emailed the owner of the domain with a "cease and desist" warning. Turns out it was a college dude, and he promptly removed the link.

So, we all know that a 'kilobyte' is not 1,000 bytes but 1,024 bytes (2^10), right? Wrong. A kilobyte is actually defined as 1,000 bytes, and therefore is a rather useless word to everyone except hard drive manufacturers. What we really mean to refer to is a kibibyte. Seriously. And scaling up there are mebibytes and gibibytes. Or so the International Electrotechnical Commission decreed in December 1998. The topic was discussed in the March 1999 Tech Beat, the online publication of the National Institute of Standards and Technology

A common complaint I hear when one of my clients upgrades to a new system is how Apple abandons their old users. It's frustrating. Trust me, I understand. This was never more evident than in the transition from OS 9 to OS X. Without trying to justify Apple's reasoning, I'll offer a little support here.