Color Palette Site

Ran across this site Colourlovers while reading an article on Web development. While I didn't think much of the article, this site looks cool. It has a bunch of color palettes and designs any developer can use on a Web site.

iDisk on OS X Leopard

Just ran across something I though I should share. I have a .Mac account to store my address book and for the iDisk functionality. Since I switched to Leopard, it seems like my MacPro often takes a really long time to shutdown.

Well over the last couple of days, I have been adding some documents to my iDisk. I noticed when I had the iDisk window open, that the iDisk itself was syncing. What is this methinks? I like to have the syncing set to manual as one doesn't really need to sync the data all that often. Well by default, it looks like Leopard has everything set to auto sync. And from what I observed, the iDisk must try to sync like every 5 minutes. lol. Because every time I opened the folder, it was trying to sync.

So everything is now set to manual for syncs. We will see if this was causing the slow shutdowns.

Tip: Use Ctrl-Ctrl or Cmd-Cmd to start searching

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer

Whenever you want to search the web or your computer, you can bring up the Quick Search Box almost instantly. On Windows or Linux, just press the Ctrl key twice. On the Mac, press the Cmd () key twice. For more keyboard shortcuts, see the help center page for Windows, for Linux, or for the Mac.

Painless FreeBSD upgrade (6.2 to 6.3)

Just follow the steps below to upgrade to FreeBSD 6.3 (taken from the FreeBSD 6.3 release notes). Earlier in this blog I wrote about upgrading my Dell Inspiron 3500 laptop and my wiki server from FreeBSD 6.1 to 6.2. This was a painless process thanks to the fine folks at FreeBSD. Well, now that 6.3 is out, the upgrade to 6.3 was even easier.

FreeBSD Update

Starting with FreeBSD 6.3, the freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems systems running earlier FreeBSD releases, release candidates, and betas. Users upgrading to FreeBSD 6.3 from older releases (in particular, older than 6.3-RC1) will need to download an updated version of freebsd-update(8) that supports upgrading to a new release.

# fetch http://people.freebsd.org/~cperciva/freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz

Downloading and verifying the digital signature for the tarball (signed by the FreeBSD Security Officer's PGP key) is highly recommended.

# fetch http://people.freebsd.org/~cperciva/freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz.asc

# gpg --verify freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz.asc freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz

The new freebsd-update(8) can then be extracted and run as follows:

# tar -xf freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz

# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf -r 6.3-RELEASE upgrade

# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

# shutdown -r now

Finally, freebsd-update.sh needs to be run one more time to install the new userland components, and the system needs to be rebooted one last time:

# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf install

# shutdown -r now

For more information, see:

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-11-10-freebsd-minor-version-upgrade.html

Overheard

"If it weren't for the fact that I was AWOL from the Army I would have told the warden my name."

I ride the Metra to Chicago for work each day and I don't generally eavesdrop on conversations, but I admit, I had to stop reading my book and listen in on this conversation. How could you not eavesdrop? This has to be the best opening sentence to a personal story I've ever heard!

Who cares about Fermilab?

Who cares about Fermilab? Well, more accurately, "Why should I care?" I'm asked this quite frequently by my Wall Street colleagues, knowing that I had worked at Fermilab (for most of the 1990s). "Why should I care if some scientist loses his job?", they ask. "Can't they just go back and teach at a university?" or "What does it mean to me if the Higgs boson is discovered?" These questions may best be answered by going back about three generations.

In the late 1890s the British scientist Joseph John "J J" Thomson conducted a series of tests on the then mysterious cathode rays (e.g. electrons). His apparatus consisted of two charged plates inside an evacuated glass tube, a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). A generation after JJ Thomson, in the 1920s, the concepts of the CRT were applied to produce oscilloscopes. Twenty years later the Allied forces in World War II used CRTs, along w/ radar, to detect enemy airplanes. The television, medical imaging and computer industries, just a single generation later, would never have flourished without the ground breaking work of JJ Thomson. You would not be reading this article now without the efforts of the early pioneers in high energy physics (HEP).

Who cares about Fermilab? Perhaps the question should be "Why don't we care more?" Will the discovery of the Higgs boson have a direct and life changing effect on us now? Many doubt it will, but then again could anyone, in JJ Thomson's time, have predicted the life changing technologies that emerged just a few generations later?

Open Source Dreamweaver?

Here is an open source Dreamweaver type application I ran across this week: http://www.aptana.com/

Its designed to do HTML, Javascript, and AJAX development. Haven't tried this yet either, but it too looks quite promising.