Mac OS X "Open With" Context Menu Shows Duplicate Entries

Tue, 05/11/2010 - 08:09 — charles

Like many of its underlying features & functionality, Mac OS X inherited context menus from the NEXTSTEP operating system. Also known as "contextual menus" (which I find clumsier to say), they pop-up upon user interaction such as a right-click of the mouse. For all you die-hard, one-button mouse users, they are available by holding the control key when clicking the mouse button. But you probably knew all that already or you wouldn't be here.

Infrequently Asked Questions of FAQs

Wed, 04/07/2010 - 22:53 — charles

Infrequently Asked Questions of FAQs - We take FAQs for granted as part of our site's content, but do they really work, or are they a band-aid for poor content? FAQ-hater R. Stephen Gracey explores the history and usability of FAQs. Learn how to collect, track, and analyze real user questions, sales inquiries, and support requests and use the insights gained thereby to improve your site's content, not just to write a FAQ.

BOINC and SETI at Home

Tue, 04/06/2010 - 02:00 — charles

SETI@Home

Carl Sagan made a compelling argument for the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. And, as Douglas Adams said, "Space is Big. Really Big." For years, the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) folks at UC Berkeley have been scanning the skies and collecting radio telescope data from locations such as the Arecibo Observatory. Unfortunately, they collect more data than they can process wither their available computer resources.

Quicktime Movie from JPEG Images

Thu, 12/17/2009 - 14:58 — charles

My latest idea for an art project that I can complete in a fairly short period of time involves the animation of still images. My first thought was to go for a walk and take pictures every so often, holding the camera at approximately the same level each time, pointed forward. When spliced together into a movie at, say, 10fps, you'd get a really choppy video where each image was visible for just long enough to register but not long enough to absorb much detail.

Web Site Pre-Flight

Fri, 04/03/2009 - 12:27 — charles

When taking a site live onto a production server, it's always tempting to rush the last few steps, especially if you're under a launch deadline, or if you've been working on the same site so long that you're sick of it. At this point it's important to sit back, take a breath, and be sure to go through the following pre-flight checklist:

  1. Check for broken links
  2. Disable any debugging lines in your code
  3. For PHP-based sites, set error_reporting to NONE. Errors should be redirected to a log file.

Ruby on Rails

Wed, 12/10/2008 - 22:55 — charles

A Web Development Toolkit

Although I don't have it yet, apparently Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" comes with ROR. I'm still on "Tiger", so I had to install it manually. Fortunately, I found a great Tutorial at Dave Benjamin's Site.

MySQL Character Encoding

Wed, 12/10/2008 - 22:26 — charles

I encountered a funky problem on this very site where certain characters in my news feeds were getting garbled in the database. I suspected it was a Unicode/UTF-8/etc problem, and upon exploration I discovered this suggestion. First backup the table(s) with the offending data:

$ mysqldump -uusername -ppassword --add-drop-table --default-character-set=latin1 database table > backup.sql

Then restore the table(s) with the following command:

mysql -uusername -ppassword --default-character-set=utf8 database < backup.sql

MD5 "Message Digest" Utility

Mon, 05/05/2008 - 14:43 — charles

MD5 is an algorithm for generating a digital signature from a message of indeterminate length. It can be used as a form of encryption but is also useful for ensuring data has not been corrupted during transmission.

Under Mac OS X, the "md5sum" terminal command allows the generation and verification of md5 checksums. An md5 checksum file will typically have a ".md5" extension. To verify data integrity from an existing md5 file, issue the following terminal command:

$ md5sum -c

Installing Apache 2 on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

Sat, 02/09/2008 - 19:02 — charles

Apache 2 offers many improvements over Version 1.3 that comes with Mac OS X 10.4. That's probably why it comes with Mac OS X 10.5! For those of you who are just hankering for Apache 2 but not quite ready for the move to Leopard, here's how it's done. Roll up your sleeves, boys & girls...

Disable Apache 1.3

The first thing you have to to is disable the Apache 1.3 web server. In the "System Preferences" app, go to "Sharing", and turn off "Personal Web Sharing".

Download & Install

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