BrT

Musings about technology and other neat stuff

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Edmodo - Microblogging For Education - Possibly useful Twitter-like platform with features specifically geared toward education, like groups, assignments and events. Longer review here: http://www.boxoftricks.net/?p=403 (tags: networking education microblogging tools collaboration )
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Nostradamus - Entertaining demonstration of creating MD5 collisions among meaningful documents. (tags: md5 cryptography cool hash )
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Build Your Own URL Shortening and Redirection Service in WordPress | WebDevLounge | design, development, SEO and wordpress | articles, discussion and community - Interesting description of how to build your own URL-redirection service using Wordpress custom fields. (tags: howto wordpress tips tutorial )
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Fixing Mail.app’s recent mail addresses problem

September 2nd, 2008 · Comments   

I had noticed for a while that somehow my Mail.app’s “recent mail addresses” list was not updating (I never seemed to get any of my recently used addresses in Quicksilver). Today I noticed the following error message in /var/log/system.log:

Mail[365]: AddressBook failed to save: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=259 UserInfo=0×10c9a810 “The file MailRecents-v4.abcdmr€ could not be opened because it is not in the right format.” ({\n NSFilePath = “/Users/dza/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/MailRecents-v4.abcdmr”;\n NSUnderlyingException = Fatal error. The database at /Users/dza/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/MailRecents-v4.abcdmr is corrupted. SQLite error code:1;\n})

While trying to figure out what was wrong, I discovered that the file for some reason had an ACL that prevented everyone (including me!) from modifying it:

~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook $ /bin/ls -lea MailRecents-v4.abcdmr
-rw——-@ 1 dza staff 102400 Feb 4 2008 MailRecents-v4.abcdmr
0: group:everyone deny write,delete,append,writeattr,writeextattr,chown

So I removed the ACL:

$ /bin/chmod -a# 0 MailRecents-v4.abcdmr

And the error is gone! The file was not corrupted, but Mail could simply not write to it. The puzzling part is how did that ACL end up there…

Posted by email from zzamboni’s posterous

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My GTD system

September 1st, 2008 · Comments   

Here’s my mapping from David Allen’s GTD workflow to the parts in my system that implement each component. My main electronic tools are Things (http://culturedcode.com/things/), Journler (http://journler.com/), Mail.app and iCal. My main physical tools are my HPDA, my physical tickler file, my A-Z filing cabinets and my “inbox” and “pending” boxes.

(the workflow image is © David Allen & Co.)

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Testing posterous

August 28th, 2008 · Comments   

Posterous looks quite nice, with the ability to “do the right thing” for different media types, and to autopost to other places. I have just set it up to autopost to my blog (http://zzamboni.org/brt/), we’ll see if it does the right thing.

It should also auto-post to Flickr, so here goes a test photo.

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Moving to FeedBurner

August 19th, 2008 · Comments   

I have just configured things so that my RSS feed is served through FeedBurner. I am using a Wordpress plugin so that the redirection should be transparent (here’s the FB url: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BrT), but if you notice anything broken, please let me know.

Of course, I haven’t posted anything in so long that I wonder if anyone will even notice. That’s what having a second baby will do to you :-)

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5 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do | Cracked.com - Nice list of movie computer-related offenses (tags: computers fun humor movies )
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macosxhints.com - 10.5: Repair Time Machine after logic board changes - Great tip on how to reassociate a Time Machine backup with a new machine, so that it continues backing up on the same time line, without creating a new backup set. TM backups are keyed by the machine's Ethernet MAC address, so it needs to be changed for i (tags: backup hack howto leopard macosx timemachine tips )
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Password Assistant | codepoetry - For some time I've thought it would be nice to be able to invoke the Password Assistant from the OSX Accounts preference pane on its own, since it is very nice to generate pronounceable passwords. Alas, it seems I was not the only one, someone did it alre (tags: cocoa cool hack macosx password security tools )
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