Konfabulator -- free for OS X

Update: It's funny how catastrophe strikes. You're driving down the road one day, and wham -- someone caves in the side of your car. Or you're playing with a neat widget, like Konfabulator, and the system locks up. You hear odd recurrent drive noises. You can't shut down. You realize you have Classic running, and Konfabulator's just installed, and Fast User Switching is enabled and somehow a network share has been loaded and a remote DMG mounted, and you wonder how much free space there is on the iBook drive and you sweat. You try to kill the apps that are running, but finally you power off. And that's it. The drive is toast. Beyond repair by Disk Utility.

Was it Konfabulator? The app of which I'd just written:

My new iMac runs Tiger and Dashboard, but my old Panther iBook can't. So I've downloaded Konfabulator, which is now free courtesy of Yahoo's acquisition. Depending on how it works on my iBook, the Panther/Tiger/Windows features of Konfabulatory may have me installing it on Panther too.

PS. My last Retrospect backup was at 3 am this morning and it appears to have run properly -- for once! I've restored my data to another machine it it seems intact. So now I'll see if Retrospect will manage a 'full disaster restore' to the iBook.

Update: Apple's Hardware test is reporting an error code of the form: ata 1/6/13 HD 2,0.
I take this to mean the drive is toast. So Konfabulator might have been an innocent bystander.

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.)