the foremind

Posted by Administrator in : Palm OS , add a comment

After purchasing a new, open box Palm Tungsten T5 at the Apple Store in Tampa, Flordia, last weekend, I decided that I need to learn how to develop on a new platform.

After researching my options for development tools, I ran across a forum post mentioning an article on how to develop Palm OS apps on Mac OS X. Unfortunately, this article was no longer available at the link posted in the forum.

After contacting the author of the article, David Garcea, the president of Trinfinity Software, I received a copy of the article as well as a disk image file containing the sample XCode project files.

Developing Palm OS Application Using Mac OS X

Sample XCode Project Files
• MacOS X Disk Image
• ZIP archive

Posted by Administrator in : Uncategorized, Linguistics , add a comment

I know that the correct pronuciation of some words like nuclear is not up to much debate, no matter how our oh so cultured president mangles it.  For a different take on this particular linguistic faux pas, see the essay given on Fresh Air by Geoffrey Nunberg.
While some words, like pecan, is pronounced differently depending on where in the U.S. you were raised.

Even so, I would think that if you were producing and/or starring in a major television series, that you could at least manage to pronounce a given word the same way each time you say it.  Especially, when it is featured three times in the same sentence.

Maybe the producers of $40 a Day on Food Network need to coach Rachael Ray on that.

And while I am at it, maybe the wait staff at Middletown Place in Charleston, SC, could manage to pronounce huguenot properly when listing their desserts.

The times they are a-changin’ April 26, 2006

Posted by Administrator in : WordPress, Web Development, Internet , add a comment

As Bob Dylan said…

Well, if any of you come here often you will have noticed that the look of the site has changed.  I am now using the Regulus theme by Ben Gillbanks.

The reason for this is that I am now running the Widget plugin and needed a new theme that supported widgets.

For more on WordPress Widgets, browse on by the Automattic WordPress Widget page.

In the next couple of weeks I am going to be working on a widget or two.  I’ll post more on that soon.

But when will I ever need to know that?

Posted by Administrator in : Uncategorized , add a comment

For all of those who thought (and still fervently believe) that all of those hours of math we took will never be used, now you too can turn that hard work into works of art.

Take a look at the math-inspired Lego(r) structures featured at MAA Online, the Mathematical Association of America.

iTunes and WordPress April 6, 2006

Posted by Administrator in : Mac OS X, WordPress , add a comment

Looking for a way to display my recently played songs in the sidebar of my WordPress site.

I ran across a small program called Recent Tunes, by Freshly Squeezed Software in conjuction with a WordPress plugin called WP iTunes.

When the plugin is activated, after following the configuration notes on the homepage, it should create the appropriate table in the WP database. In my case it did not and I had to manually create it myself. If you refresh your homepage after activiating the plugin and receive a parse error, then most likely you will need to create this table yourself. The query for doing so is:

CREATE TABLE $wpit_table ( itunes_id mediumint(8) NOT NULL auto_increment, album varchar(255) NULL default '', track varchar(255) NULL default '', artist varchar(255) NULL default '', genre varchar(255) NULL default '', image text NULL default '', added_date varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', PRIMARY KEY (itunes_id))

After creating this table you will need to configure Recent Tunes to use HTTP GET to update the wp-itunes data.  Make sure that you don’t add http:// to the url section of Recent Tunes’ preferences, or it won’t work.

For more on configuring this setup checkout the following references:

Note: The original version of wp-itunes is written to display either an image from Amazon or a link to the iTMS for the album.  Since I wanted neither of these, I commented that line out in the plugin file.

Are your pixels stucK? Call for a tow! April 3, 2006

Posted by Administrator in : Technology, Consumer , add a comment

So, you just got this really awesome LCD monitor.  You gingerly take it out of the box and lovingly connect it to your machine.

You turn it on and a horrific screams escapes you mouth “Noooooooooooo! A Stuck Pixel!”.

Then you get that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you remember the manufacturer will only replace the monitor for 5 or more bad pixels.

So what do you do? You fix it yourself.  That’s right fix it!

Check out some techniques on repairing your stuck pixels.

I have one on my monitor at home and I am going to test this out.  Check back tomorrow for a report on whether it works or not.

Posted by Administrator in : WordPress, Web Development, Internet , trackback

As Bob Dylan said…

Well, if any of you come here often you will have noticed that the look of the site has changed.  I am now using the Regulus theme by Ben Gillbanks.

The reason for this is that I am now running the Widget plugin and needed a new theme that supported widgets.

For more on WordPress Widgets, browse on by the Automattic WordPress Widget page.

In the next couple of weeks I am going to be working on a widget or two.  I’ll post more on that soon.

Posted by Administrator in : Uncategorized, Linguistics , add a comment

I know that the correct pronuciation of some words like nuclear is not up to much debate, no matter how our oh so cultured president mangles it.  For a different take on this particular linguistic faux pas, see the essay given on Fresh Air by Geoffrey Nunberg.
While some words, like pecan, is pronounced differently depending on where in the U.S. you were raised.

Even so, I would think that if you were producing and/or starring in a major television series, that you could at least manage to pronounce a given word the same way each time you say it.  Especially, when it is featured three times in the same sentence.

Maybe the producers of $40 a Day on Food Network need to coach Rachael Ray on that.

And while I am at it, maybe the wait staff at Middletown Place in Charleston, SC, could manage to pronounce huguenot properly when listing their desserts.

Posted by Administrator in : Uncategorized , add a comment

After spending a day working with my father to setup a pair of motion sensor lights on my brother’s house, I come back inside and sit down to work on my 15″ Aluminum Powerbook. To my horror I find some large drops of black ink on the smooth silver cover.

So I had picked up a bottle of Goo Gone earlier in the day so that my brother could remove the tree sap from his hands after trimming the base of his Christmas tree. Knowing that the citrus based formula of Goo Gone was unlikely to damage the finish of my laptop, I quickly sprayed some on to remove the ink.

To my extreme disappointment, the ink was not completely removed. Most of it was gone, but the was a noticeable stain left. After several additional treatments removed more of the ink, I sighed and resigned myself to the existence of the stain. My brother recommended an extended treatment, so he put more on the stain and left a white napkin on the solution to soak.

Even more of the ink was removed, yet a noticeable stain still remained. After a decision of diminishing returns, my brother placed a small amount of Method-brand dishsoap on the area that was cleaned as per the recommendations on the Goo Gone bottle. To our surprise (and joy) the rest of the stain was removed after cleaning the soap of with a damp cloth.

I am now considering using the Method dishsoap on my entire case (minus the speaker grilles, keyboard, and touchpad/button).

Airport refuses to reconnect November 24, 2005

Posted by Administrator in : Mac OS X , add a comment

So, here I am at my brother’s house in Atlanta, GA for Thanksgiving. He has an “snow” Apple Airport base station setup using WEP encyrption and with no SSID broadcasting.

The sad thing was that every time I woke my laptop up from sleep it refused to automatically re-connect to the network.

Now I knew that if the network was broadcasting an SSID that I would have been given a checkbox to mark to “Save the password,” but I doubted that my brother was going to lower his security levels just for me. Knowing that there had to be a solution to this problem that did not involve an major security risks, I set out to find it.

In a thread on the forums at macosxhints.com I found a reference to the property list for the Airport configurations.

This file is named com.apple.airport.preferences.plist and it is kept at the following location /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration.

What I found was that in this file under the branch List of known networks there is a child for each of the Airport networks that has been “saved.” After investigating this, what I found was the listing for my brother’s network was missing the key for SecurityType.

Seemed easy enough to add the new child to the network key at set the name of the property and the value. Only problem was that even after opening the file using sudo /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist I was informed that I did not have the requisite permissions to save the changes. Undaunted, I changed the permissions on the file, made my changes, then put the permissions back.

Now after waking from sleep, my latop recognizes the network as it should. And all is well in laptop land.

Posted by Administrator in : Personal , trackback

At 1:01pm EST my niece, Teagan Grace entered the world!

She weighed in at 10 pounds, 2 ounces.

As soon as my brother has pictures up (apparently the hospital they chose doesn’t have wifi) I will post one.

For any of you wondering about the name, it is pronounced TEE-gun, and it derives from the Irish Gaelic word tadhg which means poet. So her first name, after adding the diminutive suffix, means “little poet”.

UPDATE: Photos of Teagan Grace are now up on my brother’s Flickr account.

Posted by Administrator in : Palm OS , trackback

After purchasing a new, open box Palm Tungsten T5 at the Apple Store in Tampa, Flordia, last weekend, I decided that I need to learn how to develop on a new platform.

After researching my options for development tools, I ran across a forum post mentioning an article on how to develop Palm OS apps on Mac OS X. Unfortunately, this article was no longer available at the link posted in the forum.

After contacting the author of the article, David Garcea, the president of Trinfinity Software, I received a copy of the article as well as a disk image file containing the sample XCode project files.

Developing Palm OS Application Using Mac OS X

Sample XCode Project Files
• MacOS X Disk Image
• ZIP archive

After spending a day working with my father to setup a pair of motion sensor lights on my brother’s house, I come back inside and sit down to work on my 15″ Aluminum Powerbook. To my horror I find some large drops of black ink on the smooth silver cover.

So I had picked up a bottle of Goo Gone earlier in the day so that my brother could remove the tree sap from his hands after trimming the base of his Christmas tree. Knowing that the citrus based formula of Goo Gone was unlikely to damage the finish of my laptop, I quickly sprayed some on to remove the ink.

To my extreme disappointment, the ink was not completely removed. Most of it was gone, but the was a noticeable stain left. After several additional treatments removed more of the ink, I sighed and resigned myself to the existence of the stain. My brother recommended an extended treatment, so he put more on the stain and left a white napkin on the solution to soak.

Even more of the ink was removed, yet a noticeable stain still remained. After a decision of diminishing returns, my brother placed a small amount of Method-brand dishsoap on the area that was cleaned as per the recommendations on the Goo Gone bottle. To our surprise (and joy) the rest of the stain was removed after cleaning the soap of with a damp cloth.

I am now considering using the Method dishsoap on my entire case (minus the speaker grilles, keyboard, and touchpad/button).

As the former Macintosh guru in Valdosta State University’s Department of Information Technology, I was called upon on several occasions to rescue hapless Mac-users who had managed to screw up their font installations, whether by monkeying with the fonts without knowing what they were doing, or by honest mistake.

One of the questions often asked was “Where are my fonts anyway?” Other questions included the every popular “Which fonts do I have to leave alone for my Mac to work?” or “Why isn’t font management in Mac OS X as easy as it was in Mac OS 9?”

Well, I can’t answer the question on ease of use, but the others are answerable.

Where are my fonts anyway?

In the old days of Classic Mac OS, the fonts were all stored in the Fonts folder inside the System Folder or inside the System suticase itself. This led to huge System files and massive Fonts folders, but it did allow everyone to easily find their installed fonts.

So for those who want to know where the fonts are in OS X, here’s a list:

Location	Path
Program specific font folders	/Library/Application Support/application/Fonts
	/Applications/application/Fonts
User Fonts	/Users/username/Library/Fonts
Local Fonts	/Library/Fonts
Network Fonts	/Network/Library/Fonts
System Fonts	/System/Library/Fonts
Classic Fonts	/System Folder/Fonts

Which fonts do I have to leave alone for my Mac to work?

Another popular quandry is what fonts are required to left intact for proper functionality of Mac OS X itself. The following fonts reside in /System/Library/Fonts and should remain unmolested:

• AquaKanaBold.otf
• AquaKanaRegular.otf
• Geneva.dfont
• Keyboard.dfont
• LastResort.dfont
• LucidaGrande.dfont
• Monaco.dfont

Other Mac OS X applications, such as Mail, iCal and TextEdit, require that other fonts also be installed.

For a more exhaustive article on this topic, as well as more detailed information on the required fonts and a comparison of various third-party tools that can be used to manage them, please check out the October 2005 issue of MacAddict magazine.

So everybody wants there website to be useable by the handicapped. Which of course means that sooner or later, your boss is gonna walk into your office and say

“Johnson, I want my disabled nephew to be able to navigate our site by the end of business on Friday.”

Now if you have an atypical boss, this demand will be levied on Monday morning, first thing, but as we all know, most bosses don’t work that way.

So what is a poor web-slinger to do? Well, one thing you could try is a little-used HTML attribute called access keys. Access keys allow you to associate a hyperlink in a webpage with a particular keystroke on the keyboard.

Sounds cool, right? So why is it used so sparingly? The reason is because only a small handful of the available browsers support this attribute.

For more on access keys, visit the article Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation, over at the excellent site A List Apart.