New view enabled, adds eye candy

Now you can see blogs in a new manner by adding /view to their URL: http://diyfrank.blogspot.com/view

This will enable a "sidebar" view by default and you can switch between the views from a dropdown on top. Quite nice, but requires a relatively new browser like Firefox 3.5+, Internet Explorer 8+, Safari or Chrome

Source

HD trailers in Front Row, revisited

As an owner of a TV bigger than my laptop screen, I need HD quality when watching trailers in Front Row. After upgrading (or reinstalling, I don't remember) to Snow Leopard 10.6.6, the Front Row Trailers preference pane did not work anymore. Then I checked the link for an updated version (from my previous post). The link however was dead, and so I needed to find another alternative.

Thanks to Michel Merx, I could find the answer in the comments of the site!

So for future reference, to allow HD trailers in Front Row on SL 10.6.6;

Open Terminal.app and enter (copy paste should work)

defaults write com.apple.frontrow EnableHDMovieTrailers TRUE && killall FrontRow


The && killall FrontRow will stop Front Row if it is already running.



Thank you Michel and the internett

Installing OCCAS 5 on a Mac

Oracle has released a new version of Oracle Converged Communications Application Server, or OCCAS. This time it is version 5 and it contains mostly bugfixes from version 4. One thing they forgot (again) is the Mac users, and we still have to go through a tedious process of tricking the installer to work. Anyway here's the solution (freely taken from other sources on the Internet, most notably here).

First problem is still that the installer does not recognize the installed JDK from Apple. This is because the installer is looking for a rt.jar in the JDK, but Apple does not have one. We can trick the installer by simply creating an empty file called rt.jar at the appropriate location (/Library/Java/Home/jre/lib), but the JDK does not have the jre/lib so that must be created as well).


The second problem is that the installer will complain about too little free disk space. To avoid this, you must add -Dos.name=unix to the parameter list of the java command.


Third problem is that the installer will crash in the final step where it is actually installing the software. This is due to memory usage and can be avoided by adding -Xmx512m and -XX:MaxPermSize=512m to the parameter list.


So in order to install OCCAS 5 on a Mac you must execute the following commands:

$ sudo mkdir -p /Library/Java/Home/jre/lib

$ sudo touch /Library/Java/Home/jre/lib/rt.jar

$ java -jar -Dos.name=unix -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m occas500_ja_generic.jar


That should do the trick! You may delete the jre/lib/rt.jar now if you like.

Now all we need is a Mac version of the JRockit VM, Oracle, please...

Getting the checksum of a file on a Mac

This is just another post for my future reference. Perhaps someone else will find this useful as well.

Verifying the checksum of a download is a way to check that the integrity of the file has not been violated. If the checksum of the download matches the specified value from the source, you can be pretty sure the file is as it should be (not modified or tampered with).

I've been wanting to verify the checksum of downloaded files before, but never taken the time to find out how, or bother to download third-party software to do it for me.

Here are a few alternatives:

1. In Terminal.app you can find different checksums (source, thank you)
1. To find the md5 checksum for a file, type: $ md5 [pathToFile]
2. Another way to find the md5 checksum for a file, type: $ openssl md5 [pathToFile]
3. To find the sha1 checksum for a file, type:$ openssl sha1 [pathToFile]
2. You can create an Automator folder action to do the work for you (md5). Luckily Moebius Strip Software has already done that.
3. If you don't care to open Terminal.app, there is a third-party cocoa wrapper for openssl here that will allow you to simply drop the file into the window and the calculation of checksums (md5 and sha1) starts automatically.

keka - the free Mac OS X file archiver

I have been looking around to find a good alternative to Apple's Archive Utility.app, with no luck.. UnRarX.app is great for unpacking archives, but as the 7zip format is getting more popular, I have to look for alternatives. There are many free and licensed applications ready to do the work, but very few of them have that instant action feeling. There is always something that should be done different..

Anyway, some time ago I found this program, keko. It was after I had uninstalled all the different archiving applications and I needed to unzip a 7z-file. I went to http://www.7-zip.org, hoping to find a new and improved version of whatever OS X application I had used before, but there was a new addition in the list, that's right, keko.

First impressions are very good, key qualities are

• fast
• intuitive
• covers all the common formats

Give it a try!

http://www.kekaosx.com/en/