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I have two keyboard shortcuts that I just found. Keyboard shortcuts are of course always shown in the menus of applications but I thought I’d mention these two.

Here’s the first one. If you have a folder as a stack item on your dock, command clicking it will immediately open the folder instead of doing the usual stack animations.

The second one is, if you select a file anywhere on the desktop or in a finder window and press command+shift+T you’ll add that item to the dock as a direct link to that file or as a stack if it is a folder. Command+T itself will the selected file as a sidebar item in Finder.

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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.

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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.

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Microsoft is already calling it quits with the Kin as reported by a number of places. I get this strange impression that Microsoft isn’t quite sure what its strategy is with anything these days.

It’s even being reported that the killing of the Kin could be the beginning of a number of shake ups at Microsoft. One can only hope they come out looking a lot more focused than they are right now. I can’t help but feel that Microsoft is doing as well as it is right now out of sheer momentum. Windows 7 is selling well, but it’s hard not to be when there is such a large user base to begin with. Then again, it really is a great OS. Windows Phone 7 sounds very promising but I don’t think anyone could say for sure where Microsoft is going from here.

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As Windows Phone 7 gets closer to release we keep hearing more and more about what Microsoft’s Phone operating system will and will not do. For the first time that I can remember, Microsoft appears to be incredibly focused on released a product that simply works and if that means not releasing features that everyone else has in 1.0 then so be it. And I applaud them for doing so.

Not everyone feels the same way however, pointing out some of the features Windows Phone 7 will initially lack such as copy and paste as well as multitasking. Although both are important features, neither are required for Microsoft to release a successful product.

It’s hard to argue that when the iPhone was introduced back in 2007 it destroyed everything else on the smart phone market, despite not having copy and paste or multitasking. It also didn’t have any way for developing native applications and developers were expected to build web applications to be run on the iPhone’s web browser. Speaking of the web browser, the iPhone still doesn’t have the ability to run flash which so many people claim is simply required for a proper web experience.

Apple’s iPhone of course has been a run away success, despite missing all of these “required” features. What the iPhone lacked in features it made up for with an as yet unseen level of polish, responsiveness and thoughtfulness in the smart phone market. With just two physical buttons it was incredibly easy to use and understand compared to other smart phones available at the time.

Unlike Google’s Android, which was already in development when the iPhone was released, Microsoft’s mobile phone OS was in no condition to compete with either and for Microsoft to compete properly in the smart phone market they really had to start from scratch. Windows Phone 7 is that from scratch effort and it makes sense that they’re going to have to cut some features in order to release a solid mobile OS in a timely fashion. Microsoft is always accused of simply buying or copy features from someone else and this time it is no different. Microsoft is clearly running the same plays from Apple’s play book and I don’t see anything wrong with that. When Microsoft releases Windows Phone 7 they’ll have a product that is neatly situated right between what iPhone OS, now known as iOS, offered initially and what it can do today. It should also be able to more quickly adapt and even out do its competitors in future releases. My only remaining concern for Microsoft is whether or not hardware makers can create new devices that can match or even rival that of Apple. That I think, will be the key to it’s success.

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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

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In case anyone missed it, Apple revealed iPhone 4 yesterday along with all its improvements. There is a lot of coverage out there on it so I’ll just concentrate on my reactions to the device.

The new iPhone is thinner and made with glass on both the top and bottom. In between the two pieces of glass is a stainless steel bezel which also doubles as the antenna so in effect the antenna has been moved to the outside of the phone. Unfortunately, it does nothing to improve reception on the Verizon network.

Apple has also (finally) decided that iPhone OS isn’t a fitting name for their devices and instead of renamed it to iOS. It really should have been called this from the beginning because the iPod touch came out immediately after the iPhone and the iPad was already in the works. In fact, in a recent interview (D8) Jobs revealed that the iPad was in development before the iPhone and that the iPhone was created based from the iPad idea. At any rate, this is the first time I think of where Apple has renamed such a major product at this stage in the game. I always figured Microsoft was the only company that couldn’t stick with a name.

iPhone 4 also finally gets the forward facing camera everyone has been clamoring for and frankly, I just don’t see this being as big a deal as everyone claims. Of course, a front facing camera is useless unless you have a reason to use it and Apple’s reason is the new FaceTime app. FaceTime is really nothing more than iChat for iPhone but if you are to believe what you hear in Apple’s promotional video on their site it’s the second coming of Christ. I’m an Apple guy but they talk up FaceTime as if we haven’t been doing video chatting for over ten years. Am I the only one who remembers the black and white quikcam?. I just don’t see it catching on today any more than it has prior to iPhone 4.

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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.

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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.