Author Archives: bweaver

Use your own Xmarks server

0
Filed under internet

Apparently this is unsupported but possible.

What happened to Apple’s awesome web movie trailer service?

0
Filed under Media, cry
Tagged as , , , ,

I used to go to Apple.com for movie trailers because they had really high quality trailers and the downloads were really fast…

However, today I went to watch the “Shark’s Tale” trailer and I found I was unable to full screen the trailer.. and I couldn’t figure out how to pull the cached file so I could view the trailer full screen.

This is what I saw:
quicktime_trailers_shark_tale

Admittedly, I am watching this on my TV, so I have a very large screen.. but without being able to full screen (or at least zoom) the video, this is practically unwatchable.

I am certain this is not what Apple is trying to accomplish with their trailer service.

SugarSync

0
Filed under Uncategorized

While reading about the limitations imposed by the Dropbox developers.. someone mentioned SugarSync which is apparently a competing product. It’s not clear that it will support Linux.. but they do support Windows and Mac. They offer a free 2g plan similar to Dropbox’s free plan, but they also have a 30g paid plan for $5/mo or $50/yr.. which is less expensive than Dropbox’s cheapest plan.

How to rename the ‘My Dropbox’ folder in Windows

0
Filed under cry, dev

The fact that I can’t change the name of the dropbox folder in Windows from “My Dropbox” has been driving me crazy. After more Google searching than should have been necessary, I found this page describing how the author managed to find the setting and change it.

I found out the dropbox.db file in my \AppData\Roaming\Dropbox folder on Windows 7 is a SQLite 3 database. Using a SQLite database GUI I opened it up and found a table called ‘config’, with a value called ‘dropbox_path’. The value appeared to base base64 encoded.

The value is base64 encoded. I see absolutely no reason for the developers to have done that except to make it difficult to change the setting.

Update: It appears this is a deliberate decision on the part of the developers. One of the developers has written up an explanation for the decision.

Wiki software comparison

0
Filed under dev
Tagged as , , ,

I was comparing wiki softwares over at wikimatrix.org and this is the list I came up with.

There were a number of things I required to make that list. It must be software I can install which is free. It must not require root access or anything super crazy to run. It must support MySQL. It must support revisions, page permissions, unicode, and file attachments. I docked points aggressively for software packages that had other things I felt were weak, such as no XML/HTML export, no tables support, no commenting system, no email notifications, no full-text search, or no recent updates to name a few. Some also lost points for only supporting features I consider critical through a plugin or a patch.

As it is there are still a couple on that list that I consider weaker than others, like Wicked for example.

EFF has a nice page layout

0
Filed under dev
Tagged as

I noticed on this page on the EFF’s site that, in Firefox, when you zoom (ctrl-+), the right column wraps to underneath the article. I really like that!

Site mirroring python script

0
Filed under dev

I’ve often thought that I’d like my blog to automatically grab a copy of any page that I link to, since the page may change or even go down.

The other day someone sent me a link to an article which was actually mirrored using a script to do just that.

Embedded content hijacks keyboard focus in Firefox: work-around

2
Filed under cry, dev
Tagged as ,

Ever noticed plugins stealing your keyboard focus in Firefox so you can’t use Firefox keys anymore? Very frustrating because I thought the only way to get focus out of the plugin is to use the mouse, which may be unavailable.

Funny, it turns out this has been a known bug for 8 years! Well, I’ve found a work-around that works for me in FF3 on Windows XP, and I included it in some comments on bugzilla:

When I’ve focused a flash object, windows shortcuts like ctrl-escape and alt-f4 still work. If you have more than one tab open and you enable the “warn me when closing multiple tabs” option.. you can press alt-f4 and the browser will pop up the warning/confirmation.. you can then hit escape to say “no I didn’t actually want to close” and focus has magically been shifted back to Firefox!

Speaking of shit posts

0
Filed under Uncategorized

We have our theme “done” now.  Woot.

Old (but funny) xkcd

0
Filed under Uncategorized

I found this (old) xkcd pretty funny:

Speaking of shit posts.. are we going to set any editorial guidelines?  Does my posted content have to be “good” or tech related? :)