Internet Explorer & Mozilla / Firefox: what's different

Migrate apps from Internet Explorer to Mozilla

This article covered common issues web application developers face when they try to get their applications to work in Mozilla-based browsers. When you develop web applications, always consider possible browser differences and be informed about them. In Resources, you'll find two good references that provide in-depth coverage on cross-browser development. Following those guidelines not only allow your web applications to work in other browsers, but also on other platforms.

I haven't dealt with this sort of detail in years, but I can still follow it. This is the most succinct and useful discussion of the 2005 state of the browesr I've seen. IE is darned ugly.

Motherboard for MacTel machines

Intel Desktop Board D915GUX

Rumor has it this is the board Apple uses in their MacTel develoeper machines.

Pixel to print ratio: 100 pixel/inch - 72% of print size.

Apple 30-Inch Cinema HD Display

In an article on Apple's cinema display, an obscure factoid. 100 pixels/inch is the standard for Apple displays. I think 72 pixels/inch gives fonts that are the same size as printed fonts, so 100 pixels per inch means ...

: ... One final note about resolution. All monitors are, of course, different in terms of the ratio between resolution and screen real estate. The Apple 30-inch Cinema HD Display, at its optimal resolution, displays images at a pixel density of 100 pixels per inch, which means that the things on your screen will be about 72 percent the size they would be if you were to print them out at 100 percent. Personally, I'm used to this, as my 22-inch widescreen CRT does the same thing. But it can make small text a bit difficult to read, particularly serif text below about 9.5 points. But you can always crank the resolution down for a larger image, or up the magnification of your documents for easier viewing.

It's interesting that most discussions of displays omit the pixels/inch number -- but it's the most interesting number for me.

Of course a scalable interface would allow this sizing ratio to be adjusted. I believe that a long forgotten Commodore/DOS OS did this in the 1980s (I can't even recall the name myself any more!).

OS X Backup: cloning the the startup disk

Mac OS X 10.4.2 (Part 27)

I've wondered if there was a good reason to partition my OS/X startup disk. This is a good reason -- cloning the boot partition to a boot partiion of an external drive using Disk Utility:

After reading on MacInTouch of problems with Disk Utility's restore in 10.4.2 I was concerned about my weekly backup. I clone my startup disk weekly using Disk Utility's Restore, and this week was my first time using 10.4.2. The backup worked fine for me. I can start up from the newly cloned partition of my FireWire hard drive with no problem. I named the partition before cloning and the name was retained after the clone.

Another OS mail format converter: emlx (Mail.app) to mbox (Thunderbird), mail recovery

emlx to mbox Converter

I love this class of utility -- keeping data mobile.

In Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger', the default message format for Mail messages changed from the Apple custom mbox-package format to the new emlx format (where messages are stored in individual files for Spotlight indexing). However, if you need to recover from a hard drive crash, it's almost impossible to recover your mail messages easily since Mail won't import emlx files and you can't add them to your mailboxes any other way.

This tool will convert your individual emlx mail files (found in ~/Library/Mail/) to the old mbox format, used by almost every UNIX/Linux mail client and recognized by many more.

With this tool, you could convert some individual emlx files to mbox and then import the mbox file using Mail for Mac OS X or almost any other mail client.

To use the tool, drag your emlx files into the main window. Click the 'Save mbox...' button and a prompt will appear, allowing you to save an mbox file.

Creating a reference (inetloc) to an network share (smb, afp) that works with keychain (OS X 10.3 - macOS 10.14)

I don't know where I read this, but I recently searched for this tip and had a bit of trouble finding it -- even though I had an example of what I wanted on my desktop! 

Most of our household files live for now an XP box (they may move to a G5 iMac). Mac clients often need to access this workgroup (non-Domain) share. I want the clients to mount the share seamlessly, without having to enter the share password. Unfortunately, creating an alias to the share, and saving the password and username to keychain, doesn't work reliably. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

It's been a bug since 10.0 and it's never been consistently fixed. I can create an entry in the Ctrl-K list (smb://workgroupName;userName@serverName/shareName) and OS X will store the password, but that's not very user friendly. I need something similar that's clickable, aliasable, etc. The answer is to create an 'inetloc' that points to the share and includes a username. Keychain will correctly associate the password with an intetloc, perhaps because it's a physical file. You can create an alias to the inetloc and place it on the Finder left panel. 

 Intetloc creation is peculiar. They are created using the OS X "scrap" behavior. I use TextEdit for this purpose. Enter the inteloc string (same as Ctrl-K string) in text edit. Highlight it, click on the highlighted text, and drag it to to the desktop. On first use it will ask if you want keychain to store the password. As with the Go To Server method the text string is:

smb://domain;username@servername/sharename

or 

smb://domain;username:password@address/sharename

For example:

smb://mcgill;mgordon@boston/espresso

I wonder if the aliases work in Tiger ... 

 Update 7/24: Inetloc files have a rather dull default icon. I've never changed OS X icons, but it turns out that it's not too hard (see www.iconfactory.com for directions). The only catch is permissions -- you need to have write permissions for the file who's icon is being changed. Select source file, Cmd-I, select the icon at top, Cmd-C. Then select destination target file, select icon at top, Cmd-I then Cmd-V. What icon did I use? Since it was a family server the ideal would be to turn a picture of the kids into an icon. I might do that later, but I found a great free-for-personal-use server icon in the World of Aqua 5 Collection. I had some odd glitches with getting the reference in the left Finder bar to display this icon -- may have been permissions. Anyway it now displays and is quite a lovely way to show the server.

 

Update 8/2: I discovered that I can add this Inetloc file to my account's login item list. When I do that my network share loads on startup, and takes the password from my Keychain. I keep our family slideshow on the smb share, so I need this for my screensaver. Lovely!

(This article was updated 1/25/2021 because, well, it still works and I'm trying to fix a very annoying share problem in Mojave.)

Create an OS X screen-locking keyboard shortcut

macosxhints - Create a screen-locking keyboard shortcut

I need to lock my machine when I leave so the kids won't play with it. Astoundingly, there's no quick and easy way to do this in OS X, no equivalent to Windows-L in XP. This hint has some workarounds.

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner - Importer

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner

This free OS X utility will transform Eudora files to either Thunderbird or Mail files. There's no precise equivalent for Windows; the thunderbird FAQ references a lesser windows app.

Update 7/2005: The latest version will do the import for Eudora PC as well.

iVideo in September?

PBS | I, Cringely . July 21, 2005 - When Elephants Dance

Cringely is obsessed with Apple lately. It's easy to see why. If you're a computer geek, Apple has all the excitement. Here he predicts iVideo:

... like Intel's partnering in the new Apple movie download service, which someone told me this week will be called iVideo.

If iVideo is the correct name, it implies that the new application will become part of Apple's iLife suite along with iMove, iTunes and other applications. This makes good sense even for Intel. Why? Because at this point it is more important to Intel for iVideo to be a success than it is for iVideo to use lots of Intel chips. The population of broadband-equipped OS X computers in the U.S. is around 10 million, and that's a good number for launching a new service and avoiding problems should it be literally TOO popular. The point is to make iVideo a hit, first with Mac users and with impatent Windows users who'll go out and buy a Mac Mini just to be able to run the app (that's the old model for upgrading, right?). Mac Minis quietly appeared last weekend at Best Buy and Target, for sale alongside the iPods. This is in preparation for the iVideo launch, which will presumably come in September or October, certainly before the xBox November launch.

Just as there was with iTunes, there will eventually be an iVideo for Windows, probably in February.

Sounds good to me, I just bought a G5 iMac that would work well with this. Last week he predicted new video iPods with retinal displays -- that I find harder to credit. I do note though that the current iPod lineup is weird -- 20BG is too small, and 60GB is too big.

dealram: 1GBx2 Apple iMac G5 PC3200 Computer Memory (PC3200 DDR SDRAM (400MHz))

dealram: 1GBx2 Apple iMac G5 PC3200 Computer Memory (PC3200 DDR SDRAM (400MHz))

How to shop for memory for a new G5 iMac. Paired RAM costs about $240 for 2GB. I might buy a single 512MB set for $40 and wait for the paired prices to fall to about $140 or so.

XP Concurrent users -- this was promised for XP SP2?

I don't know why this kind of thing doesn't get more attention. Concurrent user support is huge. I wish we had it in OS X!! Apparently it was almost in XP SP2. That would have made SP2 a huge upgrade for our family.

Techlog: Microsoft related news and issues: "What happened to the concurrent sessions feature in XP SP2?

14 October '04 - 16:08, kenneth
Coming from Paul Thurrot's Supersite for Windows:

It's gone. In February 2003, internal Microsoft documentation described a feature planned for XP SP2 called 'concurrent sessions.' This would have enabled XP Professional Edition systems with Fast User Switching (FUS) enabled (i.e., non-domain systems) to support two concurrent interactive users. The current XP version is limited to one interactive user at a time; this user can be sitting at the XP machine locally or connecting to it remotely through Remote Desktop Connection (RDC), Microsoft's desktop version of Windows Terminal Services.

Under the original plan for XP SP2, XP Pro would have supported two users, one local and one remote. This capability would have accomplished two goals. First, it would further differentiate XP Pro from XP Home Edition (an ongoing concern in Redmond) and make the more expensive XP Pro more enticing to users. Second, this feature would make Smart Displays more functional; under the current scheme, when a user accesses his or her XP Pro desktop from a Smart Display, the local system is logged out. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, responding to complaints about Smart Displays, had promised that the company would add concurrent sessions functionality to the product in the future; XP SP2 was one way to accomplish this goal. But things change. Microsoft removed the concurrent sessions feature from XP SP2.

However, concurrent sessions will soon pop-up in an unexpected place. The next XP Media Center update, named Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, will include concurrent sessions in order to support up to 5 Media Center Extender devices. To my knowledge, this is the only XP version that will get this feature.

So we will have to wait for someone finding out what is different in Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 making this possible (maybe another Termsrv.dll)and see if it can be installed under Windows XP SP2 to enable concurrent sessions.

Keyhole Community: Dynamic Data Layers - Google Earth

Keyhole Community: Dynamic Data Layers

macosxhints - 10.4: Remove SSH connection delay

macosxhints - 10.4: Remove SSH connection delay

I think 10.4 has a way to turn off IP v6 support. I will try to do that.

OS X Tiger Preview is a very handy image editing tool

MacDevCenter.com: What Is Preview? (and Why You Should Use It)

Ahh, the beauty of standard framework.

This bit caught my attention:

But there's also a bookmarks feature that's new in Preview 3.0.1 (shipping with Tiger) that allows you to add a bookmark to any PDF, or intriguingly any image, or your computer and reopen it from Preview.

You could think of it almost like a browser bookmarks menu. If you're halfway through a huge text document and need a break, you can hit Command+D to add a bookmark. The same applies for images you might want to use often.

Command-D? Weird.

Preview's keywords are not viewable in iPhoto. Maybe an AppleScript will fix that?

Building OS X Dashboard widgets

O'Reilly Network: Let's Build Another Dashboard Widget

OS X Dashboard widgets don't seem that complex. The development requirements remind me of HyperCard -- a bit more than DOS Batch file programming but nothing like writing Cocoa or Java apps. The sort of thing that will attract a lot of end-user creativity.