by ·5 Comments

For some reason I decided to give Railo a try tonight. Railo is dubbed as “the fastest CFML OSS engine” available. The little bit that I’ve messed with it so far, I really can’t confirm that. What I can say however is that setting it up is fairly easy, particularly if you choose to download the express package.

One thing that hung me up though, and seems to hang up some others, is the configuration of virtual hosts when using Jetty. The OS X package is only available with Jetty and the documentation does a fine job of explaining how to setup virtual hosts. The only problem is they fail to mention that you actually need to uncomment some of the included config file to make virtual hosts work properly. Some people might see that right away, I glossed over it.

Documentation for setting up virtual hosts is provided by the Railo team at http://www.getrailo.org/index.cfm/documentation/installation/railo-express/. Note that in the virtual host definition section the documentation shows the option virtual host information already commented out, in the files distributed in Railo Express, they are not uncommented.

You can learn more about doing virtual hosts using Jetty at http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Virtual+hosts.

by ·0 Comments

One of the things that makes the Mac great is how easily it can find network resources. Apple calls this technology Bonjour but in reality it’s a combination of a number of different protocols talked about at http://www.zeroconf.org/. Avahi is in basic terms an open source implementation of Bonjour and with it you can advertise services that a Linux server provides on your local network. I use Avahi to advertise the netatalk/afp service running on my home Linux system. By doing so, my Linux system shows up immediately in the Finder Window of all of my Macs in the house.

The only “problem” I had was that my Linux system would show up with an icon that looked like an Apple display. I wanted to appear in my Finder window as a little bit closer to reality. By default OS X is aware of all of Apple’s products and can display the appropriate icon for any product it finds. In my setup I’m happy with my Linux system appearing as an older style of PowerMac. With a bit of effort you can cause OS X to show any custom made icon you want.

This blog post explains the process and this comment describes the various device types you can specify.

by ·0 Comments

Since about 2005, Apple laptops have had a feature that allows the laptop to sleep and wake quickly, but also be able to deal with the situation where the battery runs out of power or is removed. Basically the laptop writes out a hibernation file before going to sleep but then doesn’t actually enter hibernation. If the laptop is able to it will simply wake quickly from ram and mark the hibernation file as old. If the battery runs out of power or is remove, then the laptop will boot from the hibernation file instead. This is a fantastic feature because it nearly guarantees you won’t lose work if you’ve put your laptop to sleep.

There are times however that you might not want to use this feature. For example, I was out of town this weekend and my Macbook was spending a lot of time in sleep. Even though sleep uses very little power, it still uses more than it would if the power was completely off. In this situation I prefer that the laptop simply hibernate when I close the lid.

You can tell an Apple portable what kind of sleep mode to use using the command line tool called pmset or, better yet, you can use the very simple preference pane called SmartSleep. SmartSleep is a simple frontend to the pmset command allowing you to choose between a number of different sleep options. Best of all the utility is free and is available at http://www.jinx.de/SmartSleep.html

by ·0 Comments

It’s possible to create a keyboard shortcut to nearly any menu item for any application. For example, lets say you’d like to create a keyboard shortcut to show extensions in Google Chrome.

To do so start System Preferences from the Apple menu in the upper left. Next, click the keyboard option and then click the Keyboard Shortcuts button.

Click the plus to add a new keyboard shortcut. Search for the application, enter in the name of the menu item, the keyboard shortcut you want to assign and click Add.

The shortcut will now have been added. You may need to close and reopen the application before it appears.

by ·0 Comments

In at least Snow Leopard, and possibly older versions, hot corners are nearly always hot. For example, if you setup a hot corner to show the desktop you can drag a file from a finder window to that hot corner and cause it to fire allowing you to place a file on the desktop or a folder on the desktop easily.

by ·0 Comments

Last week I helped someone rescue their computer. The striped disk set had gone wonky and would only occasionally boot properly. If it booted at all it would run fine, but getting it to boot was the tricky part. They wanted me to fix the issue and as long as I was doing so, upgrade the system to Windows 7.

After some effort, I got the computer to boot and promptly created an image of it using my favorite disk imaging software. I then broke the raid set and used the one drive that was still good to install Windows 7. Once installed I copied the appropriate data from the old Vista system on to the new Windows 7 system. All seemed well until I got an email claiming the computer wouldn’t download files or play flash videos.

While attempting to download a file they’d get the following error.

Internet Explorer cannot download from
Internet Explorer was not able to open the Internet site. The requested site
is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.

After much trial and error I found the solution. Rename the Temp directory located at %userprofile%\AppData\Local. Once this was done IE was able to download files and play flash videos once again. I’m not sure what the real issue was but this fixed it.