Lately i’ve been tinkering around with the idea of recreating my blog in a more handcrafted way (ruby on rails) as opposed to the current implementation using WordPress. Don’t get me wrong WordPress is awesome. It has many years and millions of websites as a testament of it’s awesomeness behind it. But i guess my hacker’s vein popups up every now and then to whisper the reasons why i should have something custom made

The biggest problem with this, is that WP’s interface to create posts is, again, awesome. You can find plugins for pretty much anything, especially to do tasks that are otherwise plain boring, like uploading pictures to your flickr account and instantly have them available in your post for inclusion. I’ve been trying to find something like that for those nice HTML editors out there (like tinyMCE and CKEditor), but so far have had no luck.

Anyone out there knows if something like that exists yet and where can i find it?

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Don’t ask me how the sed magic works, but it does. Taken from here.

Running this:

mysql -u<USER> -p<PASSWORD> <DATABASE> -B -e "select * from videos_video;" | sed 's/\t/","/g;s/^/"/;s/$/"/;s/\n//g'

will produce something like this:

"id","title","url"
"1","video 1","http://youtube(...)"
"2","video 2","http://youtube(...)"
"3","video 3","http://youtube(...)"

Just pipe it to a .csv file and you’re done

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I think most of them work on both Snow Leopard and Lion. Not sure about previous versions. Just type the ones you want to activate/deactivate on the command line and have fun.

# Enable full keyboard access for all controls (e.g. enable Tab in modal dialogs)
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleKeyboardUIMode -int 3

# Enable the 2D Dock
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -bool true

# Disable menu bar transparency
defaults write -g AppleEnableMenuBarTransparency -bool false

# Expand save panel by default
defaults write -g NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode -bool true

# Expand print panel by default
defaults write -g PMPrintingExpandedStateForPrint -bool true

# Disable shadow in screenshots
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

# Enable highlight hover effect for the grid view of a stack (Dock)
defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -bool true

# Enable spring loading for all Dock items
defaults write enable-spring-load-actions-on-all-items -bool true

# Disable press-and-hold for keys in favor of key repeat
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

# Disable auto-correct
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled -bool false

# Disable window animations
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false

# Disable disk image verification
defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify -bool true
defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify-locked -bool true
defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify-remote -bool true

# Automatically open a new Finder window when a volume is mounted
defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages auto-open-ro-root -bool true
defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages auto-open-rw-root -bool true

# Avoid creating .DS_Store files on network volumes
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool true

# Disable Safari’s thumbnail cache for History and Top Sites
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2

# Enable Safari’s debug menu
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu -bool true

# Remove useless icons from Safari’s bookmarks bar
defaults write com.apple.Safari ProxiesInBookmarksBar "()"

# Disable send and reply animations in Mail.app
defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool true
defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableSendAnimations -bool true

# Disable Resume system-wide
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

# Enable Dashboard dev mode (allows keeping widgets on the desktop)
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode -bool true

# Reset Launchpad
rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db

# Show the ~/Library folder
chflags nohidden ~/Library

# Disable local Time Machine backups
sudo tmutil disablelocal

# Kill affected applications
for app in Safari Finder Dock Mail; do killall "$app"; done

# Fix for the ancient UTF-8 bug in QuickLook (http://mths.be/bbo)
echo "0x08000100:0" > ~/.CFUserTextEncoding

The original source can be found here.

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This is just a self reminder on how to disable and enable spotlight in Snow Leopard and Lion. Open a terminal and type:

To enable:

sudo mdutil -a -i on

To disable:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

In system preferences you can control which drives and/or folders are not to be indexed.

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If you are developing in Swing and using hibernate you might – at some point in time – run into this exception:

org.hibernate.NonUniqueObjectException: a different object with the same identifier value was already associated with the session

What happened, you might ask? Well, turns out that when you close the session that created a given hibernate-managed object, this object becomes “detached” (meaning hibernate no longer has any control over it). So, when you attempt to save or update it in another session, hibernate will complain with that exception, because it can no longer tell which is the “true” version of the object.

The solution(s)? Look inside your code for places where you might be closing the session and take that out. That’s the solution in the case where you are using a long session (one that spans the entirety of the application’s life). In case you really want to close the session, you might consider using the session’s merge() method, which basically merges the fields in both the attached and non-attached instances of the object, and performs an update.

Hope that saves someone half a day of debugging

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After buying my shiny new ipad2 I, like most other tablet enthusiasts, devoted a fair amount of time in search of the coolest and most useful apps to install.

The major problem in most results that google returns is that they all mention the same list: twitter, IMO.im, friendly, dropbox, etc. (for a list of the obvious, follow this link).

After some deeper searches I found the following apps to be extremely interesting to me. I’m hoping they will be to you as well:

Writing
	If you write anything, these are the most well spent 79 cents, believe me.
	Log your life, with notes, pictures, and music.
	Find the perfect word to convey your message
Games
	Snowboard fun
	Awesome card game, kinda like Magic the gathering. Warning: Massive time waster
	Cool top down RPG.
Reading
	Read all your google reader subscriptions in this clean RSS reader.
	There’s a few marvel comics for free in this app.
	The great classics are free in the Kindle store. And the iPad is the perfect e-reader.
News and Magazines
	A beautiful way of keeping track of current events worldwide.
	A new take on wikipedia articles; everyday a new selection of wonderfully formated articles.
	A kind of magazine with a gazillion tips on how to make the most of your shiny new iPad.
Notes and doodles
	Keep all your notes in sync across your computers, tablets, and phones. Much better than evernote, in my opinion.
	Everyone doodles from time to time
Remote desktop and media centre control
	Money well invested, if you have a mac mini in your living room and don’t want to spend $100+ on a wireless keyboard + mouse setup. This app allows you to use the iPad as both. And does one hell of a job at it.
	To control your XBMC from the iPad.
	A remote viewer for your computers (VNC).
Video streaming
	The best way i found to stream video and music from my server to the iPad and other computers. It compresses video on the fly, allowing you to stream even through a 3G connection. Priceless.
Graphics
	Just in case you need to retouch some pictures on the iPad.
Cooking
	If you’re lazy like me, this will come in handy to discover new recipes to cook.
Data
	View your Google analytics data from this cool app.
Alarms
	And finally, everyone needs an alarm. This one is simple and gets the job done

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1. Things i wanted in Apple’s iPad (tablet)
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So here’s the deal: I had planned to purchase a honeycomb-based tablet as my sabbatical leave of absence going away present to myself. I was carefully considering all the pros and cons of both the Motorola Xoom and the new 10″ Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Between the two of them discovered the latter has a better general body finish, as well as slightly better front camera. Besides, Samsung has had the first tab out there for some time now, which means they have some more experience in regards to what works and what doesn’t, as building tablets goes.

The problem is that I just tried an ipad2 for the first time. And, besides feeling super snappy and slick, it’s so shinny . I might have fallen for this thing already.

The price is more appealing as well: 549 euro for the 32GB wifi version. I can’t imagine either the galaxy or the xoom matching this anytime soon. Not before the ipad3 comes out anyway

UPDATE: Alright, i sold my soul to the devil: Ordered an iPad2, arriving at the end of the month

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While reading my morning web comics, i noticed this error in wulffmorgenthaler: Guru meditation error.

Apparently this is the default way the Varnish HTTP cache shows errors and – as it turns out – it comes from the old Commodore Amiga times.

It’s always refreshing to find more developers with a sense of humor

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The problem

For a while now, i have been searching for a way to stream videos from my living room’s Mac Mini to my other Macs across the house. Especially to my laptop (or in the future to my tablet) when i’m laying in bed. Yes, i know i’m lazy, but one has to take advantage of technology, right?

The problem is that i never found a nice enough way to do it. I tried streaming through VLC, but unfortunately the wireless network seems not to be enough to cope with the amount of data. Also, it’s a bit cumbersome to have to setup the stream every time i want to watch a movie in bed. I looked into whether XBMC or Plex would do the trick and, although there are some built in server capabilities, i was never able to make it work for my needs.

The solution

Enter StreamToMe and ServeToMe. Both applications are available in the Mac Appstore (they also have iPhone, iPod, and iPad apps) and allow seamless video streaming across Macs. Painless. You define the folders you want to share in the server and the client gets to browse them, complete with video thumbnails. Extremely cool and practical, especially because they convert the videos on the fly so it plays smoothly even across 3G networks

From their website:

“Files are live-transcoded into the native format for your device so you don’t need to pre-convert your media. Adaptive bitrates mean that you can stream over WiFi or 3G.”

Now if i could just get an android version

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If you’re trying the new developer preview version of OSX (10.7 – Lion) and find that the default sound output (headphones) is misbehaving, there is a quick fix for it.

According to OSX developers, if you go into the Audio MIDI Setup (under /Applications/Utilities) and change the output format from 2ch-16bit to 2ch-32bit (like in the image), that should take care of the problem.

Peace.

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