Although a bit slow this might be useful for printing

[code lang="shell-unix-generic"] man -t bash | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app [/code]

Don't you just hate it?

Although you have turned off the "Lower display birghtness…" setting for the power adapter in the Energy Savings panel it just gets ignored. Some searching on the Apple Knowledge Base turns up this Article wich basically states: "We know it is a problem, but we did not care to fix it."

Here is a simple script you can run to stop you display from misbehaving:

[code lang="shell-unix-generic"] sudo pmset -c halfdim 1 sudo pmset -c halfdim 0 [/code]

It turns out, that turning the setting off and on again fixes the issue (at least till the next time you disconnect the power supply or put your mac to sleep.

Locking a workstation when you go away should be quick and easy. And most times it is.

On Unix workstations running X11 you lock your screen by typing xlock into a shell.

On Windows you can press Windowskey-L to do the same (one of the very few uses the windows key at all).

On MacOS X you can add a menubar item wich lets you lock the screen. The preference for this is hidden away in Keychain.app. But you have to use the mouse to do this. This is not very convenient if you work a lot inside the shell. So here is what I did to speed it up:

Write a shell script that looks like this

[code lang="shell-unix-generic"]

!/bin/sh

open '/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app' [/code]

name it something like lock make it executable and put it somewhere in you $PATH.

Now you can just enter lock into your shell when you leave your workstation.

Like almost everybody these days I own a scanner, printer, copier, coffe-maker combo device, in my case a Epson CX6600 (would have b´put a link to the product page in, but it *is* hard to find).

I'm quite happy with it, although I paid Epson a fortune for printer-ink already (which is exactly why I got myself an old HP LaserJet 6P recently, way cheaper and faster for printing pure text).

The CX6600 is connected to my Cube which runs OS X 10.4 as a headless server in my apartment, serving a bunch of Firewire HDDs via AFP/SMB and shares the printer. But for scanning I always had to connect to to the Cube via VNC, which sucks. Also the Epson Scanning software is,…well acceptable at best, but you can always use OS Xs Digital Pictures.app to replace it.

Today I discoverd, that OS X has a network service for sharing scanners, nice and easy via Bonjour! Did you know that? I did not and was very suprised to find out.

It is hidden away deep inside the preferences of Digital Pictures.app. Just open Digital Pictures.app form Applications, then open Preferences in the applications menu and look for sharing.

If you have the firewall enabled you have to open TCP-Port 5100 to be accessed, according to this document in the Apple Knowledge Base, which conveniently lists all ports commonly used by Apple software.

There it is. Nice, isn't it?

I think this preference pane needs to be in the System Preferences.app, right next to Printer sharing. BTW. why can't I password protect printer sharing? Do they have to much ink at Apple?

Update: The updated CSS (see below) also blocks images from wired, because they were relaing the ads.

One of the things I like most about RSS feeds is that they come in plain simple text. No Buttons no colors, no ads and no strange text sizes that some web developer thinks is cool because his OS has no decent anti-alising – just text.

An frankly text is all I need for news items.

Just tet is great, until FeedBurner came along and tried making RSS the web all over again. Ads and ugly, very ugly graphical-text-buttons.

So how do you get rid of them?

Well CSS to the rescue. Just add this little snippet to the CSS you feed-reader is using.

[code lang="css"] img[src*="feeds.feedburner.com"] { display: none !important; } img[src*="feeds.wired.com"] { display: none !important; } .feedflare { display: none !important; } [/code]

This works for all platforms where you can customize the CSS of the feed view. In NetNewsWire, which became my feed reader again after experimenting with NewsFire a while back), this is quite easy:

1. Open ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/StyleSheets in the Finder
2. ctrl-click onto the style you are using and choose "Show Package Contents"
3. Open stylesheet.css in a text editor of your choice
4. Add the above lines to this file and save the changed file
5. Restart NetNewsWire

I'm using the latest beta of Adium and there is a huge bug there. It spawns Threads like there is no tomorrow.

But see for yourself:

1.1 Gigabytes of memory in over 1.169 (Java-)threads. Something is very wrong!

Update: If you are experiencing this Problem. Delete your preferences and start over with entering your account details.

That solved the problem for me.

"[…] Sei der schon von Crimeware Gangs ausgenutzten Lücke im DirectAnimation-Control schlagen die Redmonder in einem Fehlerbericht vor, das entsprechende Kill-Bit zu setzen, um es mangels verfügbarem Patch zu deaktivieren […]"
heise Security

Über einen neuen – mal wieder Katasrophalen – Browserbug im Internet Explorer. Man beachte die Phrase Crimeware Gangs. So weit sind wir schon bei der Internetsicherheit das es Crimeware gibt. Interessanter Terminus, mal sehen ob er sich durchsetzen wird...

Für einige Zeit wollte ich schon einmal eine Statistik darüber erstellen, wofür ich eigentlich mein Geld ausgebe. Das Ganze sollte besser sein, als das übliche Mindmaping, das man mit seinen Kontoauszügen betreibt.

Heute morgen habe ich in meinem RSS reader dann einen Artikel entdeckt, der meine Lust mich mit dem Problem zu beschäftigen, wieder entfacht hat.

Kris Köhntopp schreibt in Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp über den Import der CSV-Daten seiner Sparkasse in eine MySQL-Tabelle, um hinterher intelligente Anfragen stellen zu können. Coole sache. Auch bei meiner Bank, der Berliner Volksbank, kann ich im Online-Banking Interface CSV-Daten herrunterladen. Nur ist sich jeden Monat einloggen und die Daten runterladen, etwas nervig; vor allem fällt es schnell unter den Tisch, wenn man nicht viel Zeit hat.

Also automatiesieren. Leichter gesagt als getan. Das Web-Interface der Berliner Volksbank ist voll von JavaScript/Tomcat/JSP Fallen. Nach einigem Rumgefrickel und dem Lesen von curl-Howtos habe ich die Requests für das herrunterladen der CSV-Daten herrausgefunden:

curl -b cookie -L -c cookie -d "snrMServiceDirekt_Nummer=$NUMMER&pinMPIN=$PIN" "https://www.berliner-volksbank.de/eBVB/Login" > res

curl -b cookie -c cookie -L "https://www.berliner-volksbank.de/eBVB/servlet/bvb.servlet.kontoservice.UmsatzuebersichtServlet?action=export" > result.csv

curl -b cookie -c cookie -L "https://www.berliner-volksbank.de/eBVB/Logout" > res

rm cookie res


Damit bleibt result.csv übrig, wobei die Datei bei mehreren Anfragen überschrieben wird.

Ein paar worte zur Erklärung, denn das lässt sich sicherlich noch für andere Geldinstitute (und andere Websites) nachbauen:

Der erste Request setzt ein HTTP-POST ab um das cookie (-b -c) zur Weiterleitung zur erhalten und lässt sich weiterleiten (-L). Das ist der Login Prozess.

Der zweite setzt das HTTP-GET ab um die CSV-Daten zu bekommen. Die URL war gut in JavaScript-Sourcen verborgen.

Das rm cookie res und das vorhergehende curl -b cookie -c cookie -L "https://www.berliner-volksbank.de/eBVB/Logout" loggt uns aus und sorgt dafür das niemand die Session-Daten missbrauchen kann.

Zum Nachbauen für andere Banken könnte auch noch --referer nützlich sein, um Referrer-Checks zu überwinden (funktioniert beim Mixtape-Download gut)

Ich würde diese Abfrage nicht vollständig automatisieren. Stattdessen sollten Pin und Nummer jedesmal abgefragt werden, da solche Dinge auf einer Festplatte nichts verloren haben.

Sun Solaris 9 seems a bit ignorant today...

root@solaris:~# df -t df: unknown option: F Usage: df [-F FSType] [-abeghklntVv] [-o FSType-specific_options] [directory | block_device | resource]

It should work...

-abeghklntVv

Some time ago I tried to remove HarwareGrowler from the Dock. I faild, because it would not show Growl Notifications if you set

<key>LSUIElement</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</pre>

A friend showed me Dockless, wich is able to do exactly that -- I still have to find out how.