Apple’s introduction video for the new iPad has undergone some changes, quietly.

When Steve Jobs demoed Safari on the iPad on stage, it was obvious that Flash wasn’t on there. Several sites he visited had the now-traditional blue block in place of the Flash player.

In the introductory video that was previewed and later put online, around 2:11 you see the New York Times homepage. A section of the page that uses Flash is clearly visible in the video. This has led to speculation that the iPad will indeed support Flash. No such luck for those that want it.

In an un-announced update to the video, that section has been re-edited to show the blue block.

View the videos yourself and compare. Right around 2:11.

Original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-aVbSmfTFs

Updated: http://www.apple.com/ipad/

(On a side note, I am on the side of *not* wanting Flash on the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad). Its slow, buggy, and just a bad experience overall.)

One of the uses of VirtualBox is to run a web server or other application from a virtual operating system on your computer, whether it be Windows, Linux, or Mac.

So, the point of this short post is to describe how to access your web server from your host machine. For whatever odd reason, I simply could not find this documented *anywhere* that was simple. This requires no installation of extra software or configuration of anything on your computer or on your virtual server.

Ok, I’m assuming that you already have your server installed.

1. Shut it down if its running.
2. Open up Virtual Box. In the left panel, select your VM and then click the yellow Settings button above it.
3. In the new view, click on the Network button off to the right along the top.
4. By default, Adapter 1 should already be selected. If not select it, or if you are configuring a different adapter, select that one.
5. You should see menus called Adapter Type, Attached To, and Name. Name is probably greyed out.
6. Under Attached To, select Bridged Adapter. The Name menu should now be clickable.
7. Under the Name menu, select the network adapter that your computer is using for its internet connection. I am on a Mac on wireless, so my network adapter is en1: Airport. Yours might be one of the others if you are connected via ethernet.
8. Hit OK, and this window will go away.
9. Now start your VM image and log in.
10. Once it is started up, you have to find the IP address that the VM is now using.
11. If you are running a Linux server like Ubuntu, type “ifconfig” on the command line. Look for “eth0″ and the “ifnet addr” near it. In my case, it is 192.160.0.7.
12. If you are running Windows, open your command prompt and type “ipconfig”. Look for a similar type of IP address.
13. The IP address you found will be the one that you use to contact your virtual web server.
14. Open a browser and type that number in as the address. If your server is up and running, you should now see a web page from it.

As an added bonus, its easy to configure a local name that points to this IP address and makes it easy to access your web page in the future. The steps are nearly identical for Mac, Linux, and Windows users. Since I am on a Mac, I will describe the process for us. For Windows users, do a quick search on where to find your Hosts file. The information I describe here applies, but your hosts file is in a different location.

1. Mac users: Open a terminal.
2. Type ’sudo pico /etc/hosts’ and enter.
3. Somewhere at the end of the file, add something like “localubuntu 192.168.0.7″. Of course, “localubuntu” is the address I want to use. Feel free to name it whatever you like. Also, the IP address has to match the one that you found in the earlier steps with “ifconfig” or “ipconfig”.
4. Hit control-o and enter to save the changes. Closing the terminal window will save the changes system wide. No reboot should be necessary.
5. Now go back to a browser and try going to “localubuntu” or whatever you named yours and you should now be hitting your web server.

Feel free to leave comments, suggestions, or questions about any of this.

I have a different relationship with my Windows 7 machine. I chose to go with Windows for my video editing for a few reasons. First, all of my video experience has been within the Premiere/After Effects suite. The latest versions of CS4 are really quite good. It was a relatively inexpensive upgrade to the latest versions that have better support for multicores and GPU acceleration.

Cost was the biggest decision maker for me. I absolutely love the desktop Mac Pro I have at work, but I couldn’t justify the cost of spending close to $3k on an equivalent machine for my hobby. I was able to build a high end desktop for about $1500, with 8gb of RAM, terabyte HDD, dual video cards, etc. To top it off, when I built the machine Windows 7 was available for free.

After many years of working with XP, Win7 was a breath of fresh air. So much of the OS was revamped. It got rid of many of the annoyances of XP, it runs so much faster. Installation was a breeze. It had automatic support for some of my specialized hardware. To sum it up, Win7 seemed like an automatic win, and indeed in many ways it was. For any average user, its a must-have upgrade if you’re going to stick to the Windows world.

But then, there’s no point in writing this if I don’t illustrate my frustration with Windows 7 compared to my Macs. Its not a single thing that bothers me so much that I can just point at it say, “THAT’S THE REASON!” Rather, its a collection of many small things.

The best way to say it is that Windows doesn’t get out of my way. No matter what I’m doing, whether browsing the web, doing an application update, or playing a game, its always there in some niggling little way. It ranges from every time I install an update in Firefox or Chrome and the UAC pops up and blanks out my screen to how the start menu works. The big thing that got me today was after manually initiating the Windows Updates, it politely downloaded them and asked me if I wanted to restart. I said, “No, but thank you. I’ll do that later.” So it goes away and I continue writing a rather lengthy forum post I had been working on. As part of that post, I had several tabs open where I had been researching parts of the answer I was working on. About 15 minutes after I said “No” to the restart, the OS decides to install the updates anyway. Without warning, it shuts down all of my open apps, logs out, and then reboots. It quickly reboots and does the updates, and is back on my desktop within a minute. The actual update experience is nice. The fact that is did so against my wishes is not. So yeah, I lost everything I had been working on. Anger ensued.

So the point of all this is that for a product that has been tested, debugged, and gone through all levels of Dante’s circles and back before being released, Windows is just not good enough. It seems like its so close. You just start to like it, and then it does something weird again. Its like an old friend of mine. She drinks and can be really raucous. But she’s a great person but has off moments. Its like hanging out with her on a good day and everything seems awesome, and then she randomly punches a cop. You kind of expect it, but you let your guard down for a minute and then wham, you get reminded again.

I’ve basically come to the personal conclusion that an artifact really reflects the culture that makes it. Clovis arrowheads tell us about the people in ancient North America. Neanderthal burials tell us a lot about how they loved their families and friends. Apple’s culture is expressed in every product they make. They’re sleek, well-made, and durable. They don’t try to do more than they need. Microsoft has their own culture, and unfortunately it gets expressed in even their best product offerings. The Zune is a great mp3 player, but its 3 or more years behind the curve. The Xbox is a GREAT gaming machine, but the UI is both pretty and weird. IE8 made some big improvements, but their best effort just wasn’t good enough. Windows 7 is gorgeous, but the team behind it can’t make it what it needs to be because its still a product of that culture.

So in the end, I just fell for Mac because she’s really my type of girl. We fit well together. Windows is really pretty, and we have some good times, but she’s just not the one. We’ll still be friends, but that’s all we can ever be. ]]> http://trending.us/2009/11/08/why-i-use-a-mac-and-not-windows/feed/ 2 http://trending.us/2009/11/02/quick-tips-on-utf-8-encoding-on-a-mac-running-java-tomcat6/ http://trending.us/2009/11/02/quick-tips-on-utf-8-encoding-on-a-mac-running-java-tomcat6/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:41:40 +0000 Geuis http://trending.us/?p=40 I ran into a problem today with UTF-8 encoding on my Mac(10.5.8), running a Java/Tomcat6 environment. It took a while to figure out, so I’m posting here in the hopes it helps others in the future.

Mac OS uses its own variant of the Java SDK. The default character encoding is MacRoman. (Read this page, scroll to “Character Encoding”). This can cause problems, such as my situation, where we are consuming a service that encodes its data as UTF-8, operates or transforms the data within our application, then outputs it again as UTF-8. The original UTF-8 data was being converted to MacRoman and then back out to UTF-8. Corruption ensued.

Depending on exactly what your problem is, I identified 2 general fixes. I only needed the first one, but I want to document the 2nd as well.

1. Add URIEncoding to both the Java HTTP and AJP Connectors
2. Add “-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8″ to your JAVA_OPTS environment variable.

Fix #1:

1. Edit your server.xml file. This is typically in /apache-tomcat/conf/server.xml.
2. Look for the HTTP Connector, mine looks like this: <Connector port=”8080″ protocol=”HTTP/1.1″ connectionTimeout=”20000″ redirectPort=”8443″ useBodyEncodingForURI=”true”/>
3. Add the uriencoding to it: <Connector port=”8080″ protocol=”HTTP/1.1″ connectionTimeout=”20000″ redirectPort=”8443″ useBodyEncodingForURI=”true” uriencoding=”UTF-8″/>
4. Look for the AJP Connector: <Connector port=”8009″ protocol=”AJP/1.3″ redirectPort=”8443″/>
5. Add the uriencoding to it: <Connector port=”8009″ protocol=”AJP/1.3″ redirectPort=”8443″ uriencoding=”UTF-8″/>

Fix #2:

1. In my setup, I have added my JAVA_OPTS and other environment variables to my ~/.bash_profile. I am assuming that you already have your dev environment setup and know where your JAVA_OPTS are. This is my setup.
2. From the terminal: sudo pico ~/.bash_profile and find the line with your JAVA_OPTS. Again, this is my config line and yours may be different.
3. Add “-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8″ to it: export JAVA_OPTS=”-Xmx768m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Djava.awt.headless=true -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8″

It took me a few hours of searching around and it seems like these are the general settings that most people recommend. For me, it was the combination of both Connectors that made it work. It will probably be different for other people depending on your setup.

For extra info, visit these links for more info:

Tomcat and UTF-8

Apple’s Java Docs

Also, I am not providing a download for my modified Page Speed extension because:

1. It will be out of date soon.
2. I don’t want to deal with hosting it.
3. And I don’t want to deal with comments from people who just install it and get any of the errors that result. This is just a how-to.

What’s Needed

You need Firefox 3.5 Beta. Go here.

You need Firebug 1.4 Beta. Go here.

You need Page Speed. Go here.

Install the Firefox 3.5 Beta. When you get that going, install the Firebug 1.4 Beta extension.

STOP HERE. READ ON FIRST.

The Problem – Page Speed Isn’t Designed For Firefox 3.5 Beta

After I got this going, Page Speed was giving some errors. Basically, it looks like the page performance tab works just fine, but the page speed activity tab doesn’t. And it produces some errors. Oh well, lets continue.

What we’re doing is increasing the “maxVersion” value in the page-speed.xpi extension to allow FF3.5 to install it.

Steps

1. Download the page-speed.xpi and save it locally on your machine. Direct Link
2. Rename the file from “page-speed.xpi” to “page-speed.zip”.
3. Un-archive the zip, aka unzip. This creates a directory called “page-speed”.
4. Navigate to “page-speed” directory.
5. Edit “install.rd” with your favorite text editor.
6. Search for “3.0.*”
7. Change to “3.5.*”
8. Save the “install.rdf” file.
9. On a Mac, select all of the contents of the page-speed directory, right-click and choose “Compress 6 items”. This creates “archive.zip” in the page-speed directory.
10. Are you on Windows? I’m sure the steps are similar. You really should just get a Mac, because “I’m a Megan”, not a piece of under-performing commodity hardware with an over-priced OS and no quality pre-installed software.
11. Rename “archive.zip” to “page-speed.xpi”.
12. Drag the new “page-speed.xpi” into any open Firefox 3.5 Beta window and you should get the extension install dialogs. A restart of the browser is required after installation.

If you get an error like: “Error: Firefox could not install the file at because: Install script not found -204″ its because you created the archive wrong. See notes from above.

After Installation

Assuming everything went well, you should now have Page Speed available in Firebug. In my testing, the Page Speed tab works great. However, the Page Speed Activity tab generates some errors and won’t run. I have no idea or ambition to fix this particular problem. Maybe someone more outgoing than I am can come up with a fix for this.

sudo ifconfig en1 lladdr  00:11:22:33:44:55:66

The address I show here is just made up. A MAC addresses uses hex notation and needs all 7 fields. If you’re not sure what hex notation is, Google.

Ok, so the gotchas:

1) Your wireless card has to be ON. Turned on, not turned off.
2) You CANNOT be connected to an existing network.

The biggest problem (and most confusing) that I ran into was simply how to disconnect from my current connection without turning off Airport. I first did a weird process of trying to connect to a neighbor’s secure network, typing in a crap password, and hitting connect. This disconnected me from my router but its not really an elegant way of doing it. Since we’re already using the terminal, lets keep everything in that vain.

It turns out there’s a command-line utility for working with the Airport, called “airport”. Only its buried pretty deep in the system. Visit this article to find out more. I’ll show you how to add this to your PATH to make sure its always available. We can use this utility to easily disconnect from your current wireless connection. That command looks like this:

airport -z

Finally, I will tell a short story about how my need to figure all of this out came about. Essentially, this is also partly a tutorial for how to knock someone on your local network offline.

Making “airport” available in Terminal

Open up a Terminal. By default, you will be in your user account’s home directory.

I use Pico. Other people use vi or emacs. Pico is much easier to use for the average person. In the terminal, type the following, then your password if asked:

sudo pico .bash_profile

Anywhere in the file, copy/paste/type the following:

export PATH="/system/library/privateframeworks/Apple80211.framework/versions/current/resources":$PATH

Hit “control-o” to save the changes. Close the terminal window and open a new one. To verify that this worked, type the following and you should get some information about your Airport card.

airport -I

Assuming that worked(if it didn’t, do it again), you can do “airport -h” for more options. I’m not covering that in the scope of this article.

What’s My MAC?

To find out what your current MAC address is for the Airport, type the following into terminal:

ifconfig en1 | grep ether

You should see something like “ether 00:01:02:03:04:05″. This is your MAC address for your wireless connection. To view it for other connections, just change “en1″ to “en0″ or “en2″, depending on what network devices your have available. Type “ifconfig en1″ if you want to see a lot of other info.

Changing Your MAC (and some other crap)

Ok, so by this point you should know:

1. That you want to change your MAC address for one or more of your network connectors.




2. You have another MAC address you want to use.




3. How to make the “airport” terminal command accessible.




4. Your Airport has to be on and NOT connected to a network.

On to the fun stuff.

Open up a new terminal window. Lets disconnect from any networks that might be active:

airport -z

If you were connected to a network, you should be disconnected now. Next, spoof your MAC with that first command mentioned above. Change the MAC in the command to match the one you want, or use this one just to see.

sudo ifconfig en1 lladdr  00:11:22:33:44:55:66

That’s It!

Assuming everything was done correctly, your you’ve just spoofed your MAC address. You should be able to reconnect to your wireless network and you’ll use the new MAC on the network.

Well, That’s Not Everything

Ok, so there’s a couple things to be aware of. When you use the command “ifconfig en1 | grep ether” to view your MAC address, it will show up properly. However, this is the only place on your MAC that you’ll see it. It appears that Mac OS X caches the physical MAC address during the startup process. So, if you use the Network Utility, Airport network, or System Profiler (among others) to view your MAC address, they will all show the physical one. However, rest assured that the rest of the world will see your spoofed address.

If you have access to the router you’re connected to, you should be able to login and view the spoofed MAC address that you just set. I’ll also explain a couple of other mechanisms I used to verify it was working, as well.

Bittorrent and Roommates

So I have a couple of roommates. Love these guys to death. Hmm… to death… Anyway, we have a kickass 50mb/s cable connection and it always rocks. Except today. One of the guys recently learned about bittorrent… but not about capping upload rates. See, even though we have a massive downstream rate our upload is still somewhat limited in comparison, around 5mb/s. So if you max out your upstream it increases the latency so much that your downstream is really fucked, no matter how big the pipe is.

So he had apparently started up about 15 pretty big downloads last night and didn’t wake up until pretty late in the afternoon. This guy was impossible to wake up and his door was locked. God bless the heavy sleeper.

His torrents were all finished but were still seeding. I was tracking our latency at being around 300ms, and multiple speed tests were showing our fat 50mb/s clocking in at around 1.5mb/s. Upload was so low its not even worth mentioning.

So I needed a way to solve the problem that was pretty easy to implement. I had no access to the router, so that option was out. MAC spoofing was the 3rd thing that came to mind after the 2nd being to turn the power in the house off for 6 hours to wait for his laptop battery to drain. Sure, it would have been a good excuse to clean the refrigerator but I didn’t think it would have been looked upon too kindly. And it wouldn’t have really solved the problem.

So, the problem was 2-fold.

1. Get my delinquent buddy’s LAN ip




2. Get DB’s MAC address

My choice of network scanners in this case is Zenmap. This is a GUI front-end for the rather well known nmap network security analyzer.

I grabbed a copy of Zenmap(slowly) and got the IP of our router, aka the default gateway, from my network settings. In this case, 192.168.1.1. This told me the range of IPs to search. In Zenmap, I set my target as 192.168.1.* and had it run an “Intensive scan”. This searched every machine connected to our network. It even found my iPhone!

After parsing through the logs, I found his machine at 192.168.1.104. I also found his MAC address, which at this point was like finding the last Blue M&M at the bottom of a bowl of brown ones.

So after a couple minutes of fiddling, I spoofed my MAC on my Mac using his MAC. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

It took a couple of minutes for our router to sort itself
out. I had started a ping to his .104 address previously. While it was running, once I disconnected the pings started failing as expected. Once I spoofed and reconnected, I started getting “No route to host” errors. Then after another minute or so, my pings started failing again. This was exactly what I was expecting. It basically meant that my machine had been assigned a new IP (.108 in this instance) and that .104 was no longer on the network.

As further evidence, the obvious speed of different web sites immediately improved. My new speed tests came in at full force, close to 50mb/s. I re-ran Zenmap and confirmed that the MAC address for .108 matched the one I had just spoofed from my roomie. Lastly, he apparently woke up and walks out asking, “Hey, is everyone else’s internet connection down?”

Ahh, success.

var tooltips = { //tooltip to show Alt text
	init:function(selector){
		x = 10;
		y = 10;

		jQuery(selector).hover(function(e){
			var tip = jQuery(this).attr('alt');
			jQuery("body").append("
"+ tip +"

");
			jQuery("#btooltip").css("top",(e.pageY - xOffset) + "px").css("left",(e.pageX + yOffset) + "px").fadeIn(250);

		}, function(e){ jQuery('#btooltip').remove(); });

		jQuery(selector).mousemove(function(e){

			jQuery(selector).css("top",(e.pageY - xOffset) + "px").css("left",(e.pageX + yOffset) + "px");

		});

	}
}

jQuery(document).ready(function(){
	//init tooltips
	tooltips.init(jquerySelectorHere); //use any kind of normal jQuery selector.
});

You also need some simple styling. The only thing required is for display to be none for the fade-in to work. Here’s a sample.

	#btooltip{
		display:none;
		background-color:#cc0000;
		border:2px solid #000;
		padding:5px;	
	}

1. 1) Make the label(s).




2. 2) Setup the filter(s).

Make the Label

Go to your inbox and at the top look for the Labels drop down button. Click on “Manage Labels” at the bottom of the menu.

On the Settings screen that appears, at the very bottom create a new label. For me, I’m adding “jsconferences”. Click the Create button to make it so.

Setup the Filter

Click the Filters tab, then click “Create a New Filter”. In the To: field, put your email address with the “+uniquetext” you used to register your Twitter account. For me, this is geuis.teses+jsconferences@gmail.com.

Click the “Next Step” button.

Check the box “Apply the label” and the label you created a minute ago from the list. When you’re ready, click the “Create Filter” button. You’re done!

Testing

Send an email to your email address with the “+uniquetext” text. When it is received back in your inbox, it should now have the label.

That’s it. Twitter on!

1. If the change has been slow, we might assume they have are advancing at a slower rate than we are.




2. Alternatively, we might deduce they are advancing more quickly than us.




3. If we detect a variable level of complexity in their signals over a long period of time it could indicate a civilization-wide war, natural disaster, or even economic collapse has occurred that set them back.




4. Finally, if their signals stop suddenly and never return it might indicate either a complete collapse or it could be an indicator that they have gone through their own Singularity.

Point 4 has some special meaning. If the complexity of another civilization’s signals have steadily increased over the years and then suddenly stopped or drastically altered in a short amount of time, this could be interpreted as a very good indicator of a Singularity event. Depending on the civilization’s distance from our own and how long the delay is between when it was broadcast and when it was received, this could be an early warning indicator that we could be on the receiving end of first contact in a short amount of time. It might be our only warning before we encounter whatever came out the other end of their Singularity. A short review of human history teaches good lessons for what happens to the less-developed in situations like that.

We should look at our own progress over the last 100 years and imagine what another species nearby might be seeing.

A while back I ran into an annoying problem. I was working on a couple of projects that were Java/JSF/JSP based. We were using Eclipse with Tomcat to run the project. The annoying bit was that whenever I made a change to a stylesheet, it would take several seconds to a minute before Eclipse updated the working deployment. Despite refreshing the browser repeatedly, a simple change just wouldn’t refresh immediately.

Also, if the remote dev servers for the database were running slow, each page refresh would take a while depending on what the application was trying to do.

My continuing interest in jQuery as a primary javascript development platform led me to a quick temporary solution. I wanted to make a JS bookmarklet that would dynamically reload all of the stylesheets on the page. I’ve since updated it a bit to make it more robust.

I’ve set this up as a code demo. You can add the bookmarklet to your browser by dragging the link to your toolbar in Firefox, or adding it as a favorite in IE. Safari is a little trickier, but basically just add it as a bookmark and it should work.

When you are on a page you are working on, hit the Reload CSS bookmarklet. This will insert a “Reload CSS” button floating in the top-right of the browser window. Every time you click this it will reload all stylesheets loaded via <link> tags. Sorry, it doesn’t load stylesheets with @import right now.

Each <link> tag href attribute gets a counter incremented as #num. This tricks the browser into updating the CSS.

The bookmarklet checks for jQuery in the DOM, then loads in v1.3.1. If you already have jQuery loaded, it isn’t loaded again. The script itself is then loaded from from my code stash here. When I make updates, they’ll automatically be updated. Also, feel free to copy the code itself if you want to use it or host it locally.

This has been tested and verified working in Firefox 3 and Safari on Mac OS and Windows. This is where I do my primary development and was my only concern when developing this.

Feedback is really appreciated, and hopefully this will help someone out.

ReloadCSS Bookmarklet: Reload CSS

The ReloadCSS source: Source