Archive for the 'Tech' Category

Blaise Agüera y Arcas on Photosynth (and Seadragon)

Published by Yuletide on May 3, 2008 in Cool, Innovation, Tech and Trends. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Seadragon (the underlying technology): “It’s an environment in which you can, either locally or remotely, interact with immense amounts of visual data.”

Photosynth (the product): “So what this is really doing is, discovering, it’s creating hyperlinks, if you will, between images. And it’s doing that based on the content of the images. And that’s really exciting when you think about the richness of the semantic images that a lot of those images have” [like the text appearing alongside an image on a webpage, content which then becomes linked to any images found to be related visually]

See the full talk by Baise Agüera y Arcas (at TED2007). (video is 9:27 long and worth every second!)

EDIT: OH, wtF!? I went to try out the web demo and I get THIS:

Windows XP SP2 and Vista Only

The Photosynth technology preview runs only on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista.

Are you kidding me?

Firefox ProQuest PDF Bug?

Published by Yuletide on March 17, 2008 in Software and Troubleshooting. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Site: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=12033281&SrchMode=1&sid=3&Fmt=6&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1205792003&clientId=28381

Problem Type: Plugin not shown

Description:
Not sure exactly what’s going on here… but when I try to view a “formatted document” from ProQuest in Firefox, it shows a page with two frames. A small frame at the top with a header, and a blank white frame below, which seems to be linked directly to a pdf or something (since I can’t even right click on it). The page views fine in IE, and I can open PDF’s in Firefox w/out incident (except for in this case). Now it says in the status bar “The document has been closed by Acrobat - press the Refresh button to reload”. Also, I installed the “pdf download” plugin that intercepts pdf’s before they are handled by the adobe viewer (hoping this might somehow solve my problem) and the plugin doesn’t even intercept the pdf.

Platform: Win32

Product: Firefox/2.0.0.12

OS: Windows NT 5.1

Gecko: 2008020121

Build Config:
–enable-application=browser –enable-update-channel=release –enable-official-branding –enable-optimize –disable-debug –disable-tests –enable-static –disable-shared –enable-svg –enable-canvas –enable-update-packaging

Useragent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12

Language:
en-US

Advancing Synergy “Classic” and the Stagnancy of Synergy Advance

Published by Yuletide on February 18, 2008 in Software. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Synergy Advance is still in the early stages of its roll out so it does not yet feature all the features of Synergy (although it does feature some things that Synergy does not and never will have because of its architecture). By the time the roll out is complete Synergy Advance will do everything that Synergy can do and much more (see the road map).

[From Synergy Advance]

and yet it hasn’t been updated since MARCH 2007?! (And that was a beta!!!!)

and yet Synergy “Classic” is constantly updated…

3.5a (27 November 2007)

Rewrite in Objective-C 2.0.
This release is the first Leopard-only release of Synergy; for users of older versions of Mac OS X the 3.2 series is still available for download here.

[From Synergy: history]

It’s updated every few weeks, and was completely rewritten… for Leopard only!? How is this a “successor” app?

I guess they say that Synergy Advance is a “preview”, and maybe that’s why it doesn’t have the urgency of keeping the ‘mature’ Synergy Classic polished and running… but I was hoping to be getting in on a cutting-edge product that would grow over time, yet it has remained pretty stagnant since I bought my license months ago…

Lightwindow Mod: Enabling OnMouseOver Activation

Published by Yuletide on January 13, 2008 in Hacks. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

So I wanted to be able to have a lightwidow open up on mouseover, but couldn’t find an easy way to do this, especially not without having to embed scripts in the page, which is a huge pain within a wordpress post (though I do have TextControl installed now, but still). Anyways, this implementation is as follows:
For a normal lightwindow link, you simply add class = "lightwindow" to the link tag. For a link to become mouseover friendly, add class = "lightwindow_over" instead.

There are a few changes that then must be made to the lightwindow.js file: Continue reading ‘Lightwindow Mod: Enabling OnMouseOver Activation’

Jeffrey Friedl’s Blog » Lightroom Export Plugin for Flickr

Published by Yuletide on January 6, 2008 in Photography and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Jeffrey Friedl’s Blog » Lightroom Export Plugin for Flickr]
And of course I find this 2 hours after dropping $15 for a PictureSync license :-\

Update: Well, after only giving it about 2 seconds worth of effort, the flickr plugin didn’t seem to show up where I expect it to (export menu, etc…) so I’ll just use picturesync for now. And it uploads to both flickr and facebook simultaneously… :-)

Migrating an iTunes Library

Published by Yuletide on December 15, 2007 in Hacks and Software. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Note: I’m pretty sure some of the steps below are either redundant, or at least unnecessary (such as moving to the desktop, but I kept that since it helps keep things organized). So do comment on improvements to the process. This is just what I’ve been using.
SUMMARY/ALTERNATE PROCESS:
Just select the songs you want to move in the finder, and double click (or drag into iTunes). They’ll be copied, but not “re-added” as they once were (in previous versions).
Continue reading ‘Migrating an iTunes Library’

Hallelujah!

Published by Yuletide on May 13, 2007 in OSX and Troubleshooting. 0 Comments

I have worked a miracle!!! From the threads I posted on the help BBS’s…

Blue Screen of Death & Can’t Reinstall OSX?! Help!!
Hey everyone,
Critical Info:
Machine: MacBook Pro 2.33Ghz 2GB RAM
OSX 10.4.9 with all latest updates, then 10.4.8 combo installer over that

So, I managed to really screw up my whole system, and then in the process of trying to fix it, made it much worse. The last thing I did was use Pacifist to install the 10.4.8 combo update over my 10.4.9 system. (Initially my problems stemmed from stupidly running Monolingual). It went fine, but when I went to reboot, it froze at a light blue screen (before showing the “MacOS” loading bar…) I tried booting in safe mode… no dice

I started up off the OSX Install discs that came with the machine, and was hoping to do an archive and install… But then the installer loaded, thought for a while, and gave me an error message: “Alert: This software cannot be installed on this computer.” with two buttons, “Startup Disk” and “Restart”. I tried setting the startup disk to the install cd, but it just repeated the whole process again. And I ran disk utility just for giggles (no problems to repair).

SO, I guess the only thing I can imagine working short of a complete erase-volume-and-reinstall (which would be not-good since I don’t have a recent backup… If I had to I guess I’d mount this HD via FW on another machine and back stuff up that way, but thats a last resort) would be somehow to mess around in Terminal to either a) Force the install, or b) Fix things enough that the Apple installer will behave itself.

I tried briefly to get Pacifist to open via the command line, but it complained that the commandline tools it needed were missing. Next step would be to reconfigure the PATH variable to include my HD (right now its using the CD) so Pacifist can find the tools?

SO, as of right now my machine is Kaput!!! Any advice?!

And my final triumph:

Hallelujah! I have worked a miracle!!!
I decided to try one last thing… I had already downloaded the 10.4.9 combo update (tried installing that one first, when that didn’t fix things I went to 10.4.8… etc..)

Anyways, booting from the CD,
I used Disk Utility to mount the combo update DMG, then quit Disk Utility and opened terminal to run installer.app (included on the dvd) >>/Applications/Utilities/Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/Installer
Then I navigated to the install package on the mounted 10.4.9 image and… it installed!!! And then booted normally!
I have no idea why the update would install and not a fresh install of OSX, but at least the machine works now!

ANyways, I’ll prolly still do an archive and install just-in-case.

I love when stuff like this works!

[tags]troubleshooting, OSX[/tags]

Fixing the Damage from Monolingual: SMB error -50…

Published by Yuletide on May 12, 2007 in OSX and Troubleshooting. 0 Comments

So I found a few threads on the net that described similar problems and how to fix them… Basically, due to either the latest Apple security update, or my running Monolingual, there was a conflict between the mount_smbfs and smbfs.kext versions. The solution? Use your OSX disc to extract and reinstall the previous version of the smbfs Kernal extension (1.6 rather than 1.7).
The problem? I don’t have my disc with me here at school.
The solution? Use the 10.4.8 combo updater. (It worked!)

I wasn’t sure which to update, so I went ahead and reinstalled smbfs.kext and AppleSMBios.kext, and I reinstalled mount_smbfs just for good measure.

Then, after a restart, I get an Error -36 blah blah could not be read or written…
Wtf?
After checking the Console, I saw this error message:
mount_smbfs: /sbin/kextload command failed, exit status 1: Operation not permitted
mount_smbfs: SMB filesystem is not available
Now, the ingenious bit that made me feel like a l337 h4rdc0r3 h4xx0r…
>>sudo /sbin/kextload -t /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext
kextload: extension /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext appears to be valid
kextload: /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext loaded successfully
The -t is just to print diagnostics…
So now it works!!! Yay!
Now, why couldn’t it load the kext on its own? That, I don’t understand. Maybe the SMBios thing shouldn’t have been reverted? I’ll try putting back the old (newer) version and see what happens…

But at least I can mount my shares again!

Update: I replaced the SMBios thing, but I think what ended up fixing it was that I went into /System/Library/Filesystems/SMB.fs/ and edited the plist files to match the version I had rolled Samba back to (1.3.6). Or something. I know I messed around with SMB.fs, since the error above says “filesystem unavailable” which meant there was something funky goin on with SMB.fs…. (what help I am… ! But hey, its late and I have two finals due tomorrow…. AHHHHHH)

Update: So everything turned out fine, and I didn’t even have to do an archive and install! What did I do? I borrowed a friend’s MacBook Pro install discs and forced it to “update” my installatin of osx. The initial installer app runs a test to see if it can install Tiger, which my computer failed. So, I had to dig into the installer and select the package manually, and install from there (this is after having started up from the cd). I believe I had to use the command line to actually open Installer.app so I could install it manually, but I forget. And pacifist doesn’t work in that context because a bunch of stuff it needs aren’t loaded. So after installing over things, and then perhaps also using Pacifist to do some more forced installing for selected directories that were suspected of giving errors earlier, just to be safe, everything was back to normal. Yayyyy!
[tags]troubleshooting, OSX[/tags]

FireStats icon Powered by FireStats