Mobile green screen

In case there was any doubt why the iPhone gets all the attention, compare and contrast these screenshots from Twitter clients for iPhone and Windows Mobile Live Personal Client 2007 (or whatever it’s called these days):

First, PocketTweets (for iPhone)

Then iTweet (also for iPhone)

And finally, Twmobile. Guess which platform?

After six months of fighting with my t-Mobile MDA Vario II, I dumped it in favour of an iPhone, flogged the Vario on ebay and haven’t looked back.

Getting passworded RSS feeds in Mail.app working

Password-protected RSS feeds in Mail are a royal PITA to set up - basically Mail.app doesn’t support password authentication natively (or at least it doesn’t support entering the uid/passwords natively.) Here’s a sneaky work-around:

* Add the feed into Mail.app as normal, and let it whinge about not having a password
* Go to Safari, and set it to be the default RSS reader if it isn’t already
* Drop the feed URL into the address field, and respond to the authentication challenge - and allow the details to be saved into your Keychain
* Go back to Mail, where the feed will have automagically updated using the Keychain settings.

Apparently the “make Safari the default reader” step is optional, but your 1.609344 kilometerage may vary.

Technorati Tags: mac, osx

More cat changes

Ack. Another Leopard change that’s cost me half-an-hour of messing around: lookupd is gone, replaced instead by dscacheutil.

So now flushing the DNS cache is done by dscacheutil -flushcache.

Technorati Tags: mac, osx, unix

Blocking out your surroundings

The advantage of working in an open-plan office is that it’s easy to interact with your colleagues; the downside to working in an open-plan office is that it’s easy to be distracted by your colleagues interacting. Short of locking yourself away in an empty closet or meeting room, the next best anti-distraction technique is to plug your ears with sound to block out the distractions, and with an iPod or iTunes running it’s really easy to do.

But sometimes music is just as much of a distraction - a pounding beat or obtrusive vocals can be almost as bad as chattering colleagues if you’re trying to maintain a train of thought. So plain old noise can be better in these situations - but then the question is what kind of noise?

I’ve tried using noise generation software to mask out background sounds - pink or white noise is very effective at blocking out extraneous noise. But it’s not particularly pleasant - there’s a good reason why blasting victims with white noise is a favourite CIA interrogation technique.

An alternative I’ve come across is ChatterBlocker - it’s a small app that has a number of built-in soundtracks of things like running water, birdsong, random chillout-y music and indistinct voices. The clever part is that you can mix these sounds together at various volumes to create a custom soundscape that works for you - so currently I’ve got a babbling brook and birdsong with a smattering of airy chords blocking out the sound of colleagues talking and the street beyond. It helps that I’m using a pair of Sennheiser CX300 in-ear headphones, which help to cut down the outside noise with rubbery bungs.

It’s very effective, and I’m surprised by how quickly you manage to forget the fact that you’re wearing ear buds and that the noise is artificially generated. It’s not quite working by the banks of a stream in a forest glade, but it’s certainly an improvement on a busy office in the centre of London.

Setting default routes with a VPN and OS X

Setting up a VPN connection in OS X is incredibly simple - just use the Internet Connect wizard, and away you go. But if you use the wizard to set up a VPN connection, it assumes that you want all traffic to go down the VPN tunnel. That’s fine in some circumstances, but it can be a pain if the upstream connection to the Internet at the VPN end is slow - and in any case, it’s most likely to be adding additional hops to your destination if that destination isn’t at the VPN end. A much better scenario would be for normal traffic to go via the default Internet route, and only VPN-specific traffic to go via the VPN.

It’s quite easy to fix, but it does involve a certain amount of command line wrangling. The process goes like this:

• Fire up a terminal session and go to the /etc/ppp directory with cd /etc/ppp Then create a subdirectory in here called peers if it doesn’t already exist. You’ll probably need to invoke sudo to do this so that you get root privileges - so the command will be sudo mkdir peers
• Create a file in here with the same name as your VPN connection - so for example, my VPN connection is called ‘Headshift’, so I create a file called Headshift by using sudo touch Headshift (this is case-sensitive, so make sure that the case of your VPN connection name and the file agree)
• Open up this file and edit it to include the line ‘nodefaultroute‘ - sudo nano Headshift, entering the line then saving the file will do the trick here.
• Restart the VPN connection, and check that the default routes have changed. You can do this by using the netstat -rn command in a terminal window. This will throw back a whole chunk of data, but the part we’re interested in is right at the start. The top line is the default route which shows the gateway which all traffic will go through - this should show the IP address for your default network connection. In my case, it’s the Airport interface which is listed as en1, with a default gateway of 192.168.1.1, but this will change depending on the setup.
• Further down the list will be the entry for the network at the other end of the VPN connection, and this will show it’s gateway as ppp0, which is the VPN link. So for example, if the network at the other end is 172.168.1.0, then you’ll see an entry for 172.168.0 in the list with a gateway of ppp0
• You can also check this by doing a traceroute to a host on the VPN-connected network, which should show that the packets are passing across the VPN link; then tracerouting to an Internet host, which will go via the default LAN connection.

OpenOffice goes Aqua alpha

The OpenOffice Aqua development preview is now available for download - there’s the usual hair-raising warnings about alpha test versions causing lost data and lowered sperm counts, but it’s worth a look.

I’ve been increasingly impressed with Open Office - it’s proved to be more stable than Office itself, particularly when working with files that originate from the Windows version.   I’ve been running NeoOffice, so I haven’t really noticed the lack of full Aqua integration, but it’s good to see this step forward.

iPod reboot

For some reason (probably a protest about my lousy taste in music) my Nano locked up - nothing short of running it under the wheels of a car seemed to be going to make any different.

After a bit of Googling, the following solution presented itself:

• Toggle the hold switch ON
• Toggle the hold switch OFF
• Press and hold the Menu and centre buttons together for about 5 seconds
• Err
• That’s it.

Nano is once more a happy iPod, and filled with dubious crap.

MarsEdit 1.0 - ok, but nothing special

Ranchero, they of NetNewsWire, have just made a version one beta of their offline blog client available - MarsEdit 1.0. Given that NetNewsWire is the most popular news aggregator for the Mac, it seems logical that MarsEdit is also going to be popular, so I downloaded it and gave it a whirl. Specifically I was whirling it against Ecto, which is the offline client that I currently use.

First impressions are reasonable - it’s a chrome-less Cocoa app which uses a pretty standard layout - if you’re familiar with any other offline client, you’ll be able to find your way around MarsEdit reasonably painlessly. It supports multiple blogs, which are displayed in a drawer on the right, together with a list of previous posting in the main window. Creating a new post, or editing an existing one, brings up a new window, with post options such as categories and comments status in a drawer.

Editing posts

The editing screen is basically an HTML editor - there’s a drop-down list of common tags, and a custom drop-down list where you can add your own. Selecting a tag drops the HTML into the editing window and places the cursor inbetween - so tags are automatically closed. Highlighting a selection of text and inserting a tag places them at each end of the selection. Adding a link pops up a dialog box where you can enter the URL, and if the clipboard contents are a valid URL this is automatically entered for you. Other properties - alt text or target for example - have to entered manually.

Within the main editing screen, there are buttons to select the extended entry, summary or keywords, so you can enter pretty much all the post contents that you’re likely to want. The HTML code is displayed in a contrasting font so it’s obvious what’s HTML and what’s not.

Inserting images is done through a separate option - files can be uploaded and inserted in a single action, although I didn’t test this as it’s not supported by Wordpress.

The preview window gives you an approximation of what the post will look like, although it doesn’t pick up the template from your blog itself. You can enter an approximation of your blog template within MarsEdit itself.

Managing weblogs

There’s a pretty straight-forward dialog to create or edit individual weblog accounts, and MarsEdit attempts to autodiscover the RPC url, although this didn’t work on my Wordpress blog. It supports pretty much all the known blogging engines, plus generic Blogger, Blosoxm and MetaWeblog standards.

Conclusions

It’s not bad for a first attempt, but it’s completely outstripped by the latest version of Ecto in a number of areas. Firstly, there’s no WYSIWYG interface - you edit the posts in HTML, and although you can preview the layout, you can’t edit in the preview screen. Ecto provides a rich text interface, and although it’s not 100% foolproof in the current beta, it’s useful to be able to edit in what-you-see-is-almost-what-you-get mode. I wasn’t able to figure out if MarsEdit will give you a live preview either - although there’s a checkbox on the Preview pane, it didn’t seem to do anything.

Ecto also gives you much greater control over tasks like inserting links - it allows you to edit alt text and target windows for each link, whereas MarsEdit requires this to set globally or manually edited.

Although it’s a perfectly solid application, offline blog clients have moved on - Ecto’s WYSIWYG editing is now setting the standard for functionality. No doubt it will sell well on the back of NetNewsWire’s reputation as a good news aggregator, but for my money the latest version of Ecto is the better package - I’ve not been tempted to change.