Forget Me Notes

Fix VNC Screen Sharing after upgrade to OS X Lion

2011-07-30T06:01:00.000-07:00

After upgrading my MacBookPro to OS X Lion I noticed that none of my Windows, and other non-Apple VNC clients such as TigerVNC, RealVNC or TightVNC could connect to it. Following some instructions in the Apple Support Discussions web site I installed the Onyx utility, used it to delete all the caches under the Cleaning section. After cleanup and reboot, VNC sharing works again, with TigerVNC, with iPad client etc.

Here is the download link to Onyx, I used version 2.4.0b3 which is the 10.3 MB (beta) download. You can skip the S.M.A.R.T. and system volume tests on startup.

http://www.macupdate.com/download/11582/OnyX-Beta.dmg

Good luck, please comment on whether this works for you.

Mac Outlook 2011: Keyboard shortcut to quickly file messages

2011-01-22T02:54:00.000-08:00

Trying a switch to Outlook 2011 for Mac I needed a keyboard shortcut to quickly move selected email messages to specific folders. I edited some of the default AppleScripts which appear in Outlook's script menu, ended up with a script per folder I want to move messages to. Next step was to assign a keyboard shortcut to each script e.g. Option-A for File Message to Archive, Option-F for File Message to Follow-Up and so on.

A sample script is below, this is the one I use to move messages to a folder named "Archive", I simply created copies of this script for each folder I want to move messages to from the keyboard. The script is saved under ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Outlook Script Menu Items/File Message to Archive.scptd

The keyboard shortcut mapping is done from the OSX > System Preferences > Keyboard panel, just create a new Application shortcut, pick Outlook 2011 as the application and enter the exact name of your script as it appears in the script menu.

(*

 File message to Archive folder

*)

on run {}
 
 tell application "Microsoft Outlook"
  
  -- listSelectedItems : a list of all items selected in Entourage
  set listMessages to current messages
  
  -- Check to make sure items are selected, if not then quit
  if ((count of listMessages) < 1) then return
  
  -- Iterate through selected items
  repeat with objInSelection in listMessages
   
   set listFolders to mail folders
   
   repeat with objFolder in listFolders
    
    if (name of objFolder is "Archive") then
     set gtdFolder to objFolder
    end if
    
   end repeat
   
   if (class of account of objInSelection is not imap account) then
    -- IMAP currently not supported
    move objInSelection to gtdFolder
   end if
   
  end repeat
  
 end tell
 
end run

Caveats of Snow Leopard's Exchange 2007 Integration

2010-08-17T23:07:00.000-07:00

My Company recently switched to Microsoft BPOS which allowed me to use the native Exchange 2007 support in Snow Leopard. I'm documenting below the various caveats I've encountered while using Mail.app and iCal on BPOS. Overall Mail is very workable and easily became my default email client. Still struggling with iCal, pretty much using it as a calendar viewer but all editing is done via OWA or Outlook in a VM.

Mail.app (v4.3)

Cannot configure server-side Exchange email rules, only client side-rules (workaround: configure via OWA)
Doesn't support sending or requesting read-receipts
No HTML composing
No easy way to set font type or size when composing (see workaround from jasonjackson)

iCal (v4.0.3)

Doesn't allow editing message when declining invitation
Cannot delete event without sending a Decline message
Pending invitations remain in iCal even when deleted on Exchange server
Events forwarded to Outlook users appear to them as calendars

Address Book (v5.0.2)

Caused 30% CPU usage of Mail.app (see workaround from Sylvain G)

Fix Juniper Network Connect on Snow Leopard

2009-08-30T12:29:00.000-07:00

If you are unable to connect your corporate Juniper SSL VPN with Network Connect after an upgrade to Snow Leopard, enter the commands below in a Terminal window:


sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/juniper/nc/6*
sudo mkdir "/Applications/Network Connect.app/Contents/Frameworks"

Try to connect as usual and this should do it.

Sort installed RPMs by size

2009-08-18T05:21:00.001-07:00

Keep forgetting this one, to list all RPM packages installed on a Linux (Red Hat / CentOS) machine sorted from the largest to the smallest in size:

rpm -qa --queryformat '%{size} %{name}\n' | sort -rn | more

This outputs something like this:


[root@healthy ~]# rpm -qa --queryformat '%{size} %{name}\n' | sort -rn | more
87389896 kernel
66720559 glibc-common
35274936 perl
30873913 valgrind
28767659 selinux-policy-targeted
27805586 redhat-logos
27022854 valgrind
26982540 mesa-libGL
24517704 mesa-libGL
22091978 python
20474820 specspo

Cydia size mismatch error

2009-07-05T05:59:00.001-07:00

While installing SBSettings or other packages in Cydia it kept aborting the installation with the error "Size mismatch error" and an "Okay" button was the only option.

After some googling I found out it was probably network related, disabled Wifi to force going over 3G and the installation worked. It could also be that the repository server is down, in this case be patient and try again later.

Default root password on iPhone 3.0

2009-07-05T05:56:00.000-07:00

Just installed SSH, was able to login with:

- root / alpine
- mobile / alpine

You can change the default passwords if logged in via SSH by using the 'passwd' command for both accounts.

How to mount an LVM partition

2009-06-15T06:03:00.000-07:00

This details the commands I had to run to mount a CentOS 5.1 main disk into another machine. Because of LVM using mount on standard scsi partitions is not enough.

Assuming main physical disk: /dev/sda
Second physical disk: /dev/sdb

Run pvscan to list the physical volumes found in any block device of the system. Among error lines this returned PV lines for /dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb2. On the same line was the name of the volume group, in my case 'sysvg'
Made the 'sysvg' volume group active by typing lvchange -ay sysvg. This created a new entry in the /dev/sysvg
Doing an ls /dev/sysvg showed the different volumes under that volume group, from there simply had to do: mount /dev/sysvg/root.vol /mnt
When done: umount /mnt && lvchange -an sysvg

GWT disable text selection in an HTMLTable

2009-05-22T03:55:00.000-07:00

While modifying FlexTable to handle cell selection It took me a while to figure out how to disable the native text selection behavior of the browsers on 'SHIFT+Click' events. Turns out this native javascript function does the job pretty well. I tried playing with event.preventDefault() and event.stopPropagation() but that didn't work.

private native static void disableTextSelectInternal(Element e, boolean disable)/*-{
    if (disable) {
        e.ondrag = function () { return false; };
        e.onselectstart = function () { return false; };
        e.style.MozUserSelect="none"
    } else {
        e.ondrag = null;
        e.onselectstart = null;
        e.style.MozUserSelect="text"
    }
}-*/;

@Override
public void onKeyDown(KeyDownEvent event) {
    if (event.isShiftKeyDown()) {
        disableTextSelectInternal(table.getElement(), true);
    }
    ...

How to disable GZIP compression in Firefox

2009-05-07T05:13:00.001-07:00

Not sure this is the only/best way but I used the following steps to disable gzip compression in Firefox 3.0:

Type about:config in the URL bar (Accept the disclaimer)
Type encoding in the filter field underneath the URL bar
Doubleclick the line network.http.accept-encoding
Enter the following value instead of the default: gzip;q=0,deflate;q=0

Note: See comment from Anonymous below for a possible better way of doing this. Thanks Anonymous!

Delete Flash9f.ocx - Access is denied

2009-05-07T01:21:00.001-07:00

After installing Windows 7 on an XP partition I couldn't completely get rid of the Windows.old folder. The culprits were a few ocx and dll files left with strange permissions by Adobe Flash and Acrobat. All attempts to take ownership and delete failed.

I was finally able to delete these files easily thanks to Unlocker.

GWT+Eclipse: NoSuchMethodError

2009-05-03T14:33:00.000-07:00

If you get this error message while compiling a GWT module in Eclipse, go to the project Build Path and change the Order/Export tab to have the GWT-SDK module at the top.

java.lang.NoSuchMethodError:
org.eclipse.jdt.internal.compiler.lookup.ParameterizedTypeBinding.genericType()
Lorg/eclipse/jdt/internal/compiler/lookup/ReferenceBinding;
    at com.google.gwt.dev.jdt.TypeRefVisitor.maybeDispatch(TypeRefVisitor.java:178)
    at com.google.gwt.dev.jdt.TypeRefVisitor.endVisit(TypeRefVisitor.java:101)

Software List May '09

2009-05-03T01:02:00.000-07:00

Here is the list of programs or utilities that I currently use to get things done. Many of them are open source and freewares, the ones that are not are marked with an asterisk.

The every day stuff:

OS: Windows 7 RC1 *
Office 2007 *
Firefox 3 / Chrome
Pidgin
gVim
SecureCRT *
7zip
FileZilla
Greenshot (screen capture)
VLC
TrueCrypt
AutoHotkey

More specialized:

Wireshark (network capture)
WebScarab (http capture)
SquirrelSQL (sql client)
Eclipse (java coding)
Tomcat / Hibernate / Spring / GWT
PostgreSQL
TightVNC
VMWare *
GIMP
TPFanControl (keeps lap cool)
ClipX

Check Point VPN on Mac OS X

2008-11-20T21:16:00.001-08:00

I've given up on SecureClient for Mac OS X, currently using Leopard and found that IPSecuritas is a much better replacement. CPU usage when idle is insignificant compared to the 90%+ used by the Check Point client software.

IPSecuritas from Lobotomo Software