One improvement coming to the iPad 2 is the addition of tablet-optimized versions of iMovie and GarageBand. iMovie is limited to the iPad 2 because the second generation tablet includes cameras to record video footage and a faster processor to handle the…
There are many angles you can look at the system to predict in performance, the model baron has published for example is good for measuring scalability of the system as concurrency growths. In many cases however we’re facing a need to answer a question…
Former TUAW-writer (but forever in our hearts) David Chartier tried using OS X's built-in Address Book sync to Google Contacts and had a very bad experience which ended with him turning it off almost immediately. I had a similar-but-different bad…
This hint is something that may increase the chance of getting your MacBook back if you ever lose it or it is stolen. You will need to install an open source application called Prey that runs in the background and uses zero memory until it is activated…
I keep running across people and companies I didn’t know about, and thinking, “Wow, they’re good.” I like it even more when I also get to think, “...and they’re generous too.” I just ran across Bjango a few minutes ago. They have some cool-looking apps for…
I love how Mike Rundle brings design and code together. Check out Design Then Code. There’s a free tutorial on Building iOS Apps From Scratch. Further down the page is two linked tutorials taking you through a single project. I’m going to get the Design…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, There are a number of techniques for finding memory leaks in iOS applications including using the Build and Analyze option in Xcode and the Allocations instrument. However neither of these…
Is there a way to access a MySQL database over the network from PHP and be confident that * the connection is actually using SSL, and As far as i can tell, when using the stock MySQL bindings, setting MYSQL_CLIENT_SSL is purely advisory (i.e. it won't…
Imagine if you rebooted your computer, and it automatically logged you in, launched all of your login apps, updated your Dropbox folder, MobileMe, email, RSS, Twitter and everything else without you even having to enter your password. That auto-login…
Check out pttrns and Mobile UI Patterns. Very cool. (Via Josh Clark.)
Mac OS X's Mail program is a solid e-mail client, but it's also got lots of unfilled potential. Check out these add-ons, plug-ins, and enhancements that help you get more out of Mail.
Following up on the ideas of this previous hint, there is also a possibility to make an application which starts with the sandbox already activated, so there is no need to run a shell script every time you need the sandbox. This is how to do that: * Make a…
The Finder's Search windows default to searching by content rather than file name. A few hints for searching by name.
Superstash is an iPad app for collecting and annotating pages on the Web that inspire you. I see it as an app for designers, but it has many applications. The basic idea: snap screenshots of the viewable area of a web page using the in-app browser, add…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, a quick follow-up on the recent post on Xcode breakpoint actions with some more detailed examples on how to set conditional breakpoints. As before these examples are all based on Xcode 3…
I’ve been out here for 6 months now. At the point in time I was coming out I was pointed at Andrew Pollock’s On bootstrapping oneself in the US. I figure some extra data may be useful for anyone considering the same. I moved from the UK rather than…
THIS IS AN EXPERIMENT.Alex Faaborg recently published some mockups for "Site Specific Browsers": I thought it would be a good idea to extend this concept. So here is an idea: * A webpage should be able to expose native controls to the UA * A webpage,…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, It seems a long time ago that Apple released IOS 4.0 but I am still coming across things I missed in that release. One new class that was introduced is UINib which brings to iOS some…
One of our customers mailed us to say that they had some database corruption in one of their main tables, and obviously our friend Murphy had forgotten to take backups, and could we take a look at it ? Obviously it’s always way more fun to poke at someone…
In the last week or two, I have been trying out search engines other than Google (yes, Google is not the only search engine). The two I am most impressed with are DuckDuckGo and Blekko, DuckDuckGo is so good that it has knocked Google off it’s place as my…
My previous solution to auto answering FaceTime calls involved AppleScript, which required 'Access to assistive devices' to be enabled. I thought this method , while it worked, was too cumbersome, so I began to dig into FaceTime to find a way around the…
Dear Aunt TUAW, I'm in the Mac Developer program and I'd really like to be able to install Lion on my MacBook Air as a second OS. What are the best strategies to do this? Is it worth going out and buying a second SSD drive and swapping that out with my…
Alfred is a utility for Mac OS X that's part app launcher, part navigation tool and part web service. In short, it's a productivity tool that sits quietly in the background until you need something -- fast. Imagine a fully fueled 1987 Buick GNX 223 idling…
Seagate has played down technical problems experienced in recent weeks by users of the company's Momentus XT hybrid hard drive.
Cocoa Samurai: “With grand central dispatch and blocks many problems that have been traditionally associated with multithreading go away.” Nice work by Colin Wheeler.
Want an easy way to read your PDFs on your iPhone or iPad? Here's how to use Automator to add PDF files to iBooks from within Preview.
Having trouble automatically reconnecting your unattended Mac to a wireless network because of unreliable signal quality? If you would like to have it keep reattempting reconnection until it manages to connect it's fairly simple to setup. You need to use…
At Mozilla we have around 400 million Firefox users by now, that means that offering traditional support to them is completely impossible, especially since the support team has only 5 employees. But we still want happy users, and the only way that works is…
The folks over at FireCore LLC announced today that their Seas0nPass had been updated to include an untethered jailbreak for the AppleTV 4.1.1 (iOS 4.2.1). Currently it is only for Mac, but a Windows version "will be available soon." The FireCore folks…
My server, which is among other things hosting this weblog, is a dedicated server originally hosted by the German webhoster webperoni. It was a bargain at that time, and still a good price, and I was satisfied with webperoni’s performance and reliability.…
Have you ever wanted to wirelessly stream all audio from your Mac to the Unix/Windows/Mac box in your cupboard connected to your beefy stereo? Here is an alternative to buying an Airport Express for the purpose. This tip is similar to this hint but after…
So, last week we released Bugzilla 4.0, which was pretty exciting. It had some awesome major new features, like the redesigned search page, automatic duplicate detection, autocomplete for user and keyword fields, and an enormously-enhanced WebServices…
I once owned a ThinkPad T60 series and when the battery in it became critically low it would beep wildly and make its low battery status very well known (impossible to ignore) and forced me to do something about it. I am distracted easily, and when…
* Woooot! * Boom Boom!
PCWorld's Tony Bradley profiles VIPorbit, a mobile relationship manager from the co-inventor of ACT!
I hope this will be helpful to someone, someday: If you're using flup to serve fastCGI to nginx, don't enable multiplexing! Background: The Bugzilla Dashboard uses web.py as its back-end, for authentication, caching, and storage of divisions, teams, and…
I love the Faces part of iPhoto but I got tired of clicking 'Accept' on the hundreds of photos it found for each person in my family. Because the face recognition is pretty accurate, there are usually pages and pages of photos to 'Accept.' Instead of…
Fraser Hess, on Cocoa Is My Girlfriend, revisits his system for adding the git version to your app’s info.plist, so that the system works for the Build-and-Archive submission process.
If you're attending a professional conference or symposium, you can expect to do a lot of walking around, meeting and greeting, professional networking and intensive learning. Unfortunately, you can also expect to be saddled with a lot of paper: venue…
image credit: Matrix Rain by docmiller on deviant art, CC BY-SA 3.0 I recently had a problem. I was seeing intermittent issues with an iPhone app, Tapatalk, not working properly with a web forum hosted by a friend of mine. I knew there was a much better…
So, your boss just dropped a 25-page PDF document into your lap for a presentation he is doing today using Keynote for iPad. In typical fashion, he needed it done yesterday, but is handing it to you now for a presentation he is doing in a little over an…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, A quick tip on how to use of Xcode breakpoint actions as an alternative to debugging with print statements. The examples and screenshots in this post are from Xcode 3 but also apply to the…
Not content with effectively adding unlimited storage to your iPhone and iPad, AirStashdeveloper Wearable Inc. is introducing a public beta of the ability to read and write iWork files via WebDAV, making it easier to take your work with you wherever you…
Today I saw a hint on using AppleScript and Automator to enter special symbols into a document. That is fine if you need only a few special symbols, but I am a meteorology student, and almost every equation has almost every Greek symbol. Apple allows…
Create Digital Music has put together an interesting video detailing the various ways that you can connect MIDI gear (synthesizers / keyboards) to your iPad. MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) is the standard means by which musical information is…
Here's how to use Automator-based Snow Leopard Service along with an AppleScript to present a popup window from which you may choose from a list of special character symbols to input. The Service gives you quick access to OS-related (or other) characters…
iTunes never seems to backup all the data I need on my iPhone. So what I wanted was a way to access the root level of the device, and be able to copy everything, even all system and invisible files, to a backup on my computer's hard drive. The way to do…
Jeff LaMarche on how and when you can avoid matrix multiplication and gain a little performance boost in your Core Animation code.
Hey—we've moved. Visit The Keyword for all the latest news and stories from Google Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture Visualize your own data in the Google Public Data Explorer Over the past two years, we’ve…
Rather than waiting for a few months, as I typically do, I decided to be brave and upgrade my main virtual machine from Lenny to Squeeze. That host runs QPSMTPD, Apache, thttpd, and my blogspam server; nothing too complex or atypical. The upgrade was…
One of the common complains about Debian packaging is that it’s hard to learn because, while there is quite a lot of high-quality documentation, it is often written more as a reference manual than as a tutorial: it’s great if you already know everything…
It's beginning to look like the holy grail for any Mac user that also totes around an iPhone or iPod touch -- being able to open URLs remotely so that one can view them later from the comfort of their big, delicious Mac screen. Thanks to MacStories and…
The Debian Volatile archive is discontinued starting with squeeze. It has been replaced by the suite squeeze-updates on the official mirrors. Read the full announcement to know all the details.
I ran across this tidbit in the HyperSpaces FAQ and I know I haven't seen it here before (and I'm quite the avid OSX Hints follower). It has really sped up changing between Spaces workspaces for me (which I do probably over 100 times/day). Once you've…
Real data and musings on the performance of networks, servers, protocols, and their related folks.
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and student outreach programs.
This post is the fifth of a series that started here. From the previous posts of this series, we now have nearly everything setup, only a few pieces are missing. One of the missing pieces is the Pacemaker script that run on the MySQL instance. First,…
Technical blog on the Python programming language, in a pure Frenglish style. Main topics are Python and Mozilla – This blog does not engage my employer tldr: I have this idea that comes back and forth in my head since a few months now, working on the…
Do you want to share your calendar with others and sync your calendars across all your Macs and iOS devices—without paying for Apple's MobileMe? You can with Google Calendar. Lex Friedman shows you how to make the switch from iCal.
The other day I was working on trying to find a decent way to start parallelising our Selenium Tests within Mozilla. One thing to know is that the team I am in, WebQA, does the QA work for all of the Mozilla Web properties. The thing that people don't…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, In my last post about understanding the Objective-C self object I got into a discussion on the use of properties when accessing instance variables. I should have also mentioned that it is…
An upstart company that helps publications create an HTML5 touchscreen version of their websites challenges Rupert Murdoch's new iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, to give the web a chance.
The performance problems caused by battery auto learning go many years back. We wrote about it, other people from MySQL Community too. The situation did not get better, at least not with Dell RAID controllers, H700 and H800 have the same problem…
I've mentioned myPhoneDesktop before, including listing it as one my best apps from 2010. It is, by far, my favorite way to send information to my iPad or iPod touch (works with iPhone, too): URLs, codes, phone numbers, anything that I need to get from my…
So now that I work at Mozilla, I figured it was time to develop a “web app” just to make sure I understood it all. And since my team is working on educational resources for web developers, I wanted to see what it was like to learn how to use some of them…
(Photo: LifeSupercharger)MediaWiki is a pretty fast piece of software out of the box. It's written in PHP and covers a lot of features, so it can't serve pages in 0 time, but it's reasonably well written and allows use of PHP accelerators or caches in most…
We at Macworld are always looking to improve and streamline our product testing, and as hard drives boast bigger storage capacity and increasingly faster transfer times, our editors and interns at Macworld are updating the way we test these devices in our…
Pages doesn’t ship with any built-in label templates, but it’s actually easy to create and use standard labels with the program if you know a few tricks.
Sparrow announced today that version 1.0 of its popular email application is now available in the Mac App Store. The developers listened to customer feedback and dropped the price from US$25 to a much lower $9.99. The paid version is free of…
eggyknap writes "Thanks in large part to the oft-hyped 'NoSQL' movement, database performance has received a great deal of press in the past few years. Organizations large and small have replaced their traditional relational database applications with new…
(I was tempted to call this Integration by Parts, but I think the other calculus fans reading Planet Mozilla would raise a pitchfork or two.) In my last blog entry, I talked briefly about an idea I had: > Aggregation by proxy, though, means you could daisy…
I did my first upgrade of a lenny box to squeeze today; a test server in work. All went pretty smoothly but I had a handful of things I had to frob manually that I thought I’d write up here: * collectd SNMP plugin needs MIBs or it won’t start: installed…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, A frequent question I see from people new to iOS programming is why access to an objects instance variables (ivars) sometimes goes via the self object (but not always). For example consider…
A while back I wrote an article describing a way to move the root EBS volume from one running instance to another. I pitched this as a way to replace the hardware for your instance in the event of failures. Since then, I have come to the realization that…
Where I share my adventures as a Mozilla Build & Release Engineer and keep notes on my interests, participation, and development in F/LOSS.
It just got a lot easier, and faster, to get a cloud in the house. Simply buy a starting cloud from Dell, and add to it as you need it to grow. You’ll get a reference architecture of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud on Dell’s cloud-focused, dense PowerEdge C…
So, you want to work for Apple. You're not alone -- a lot of people love the company so much that they'd do anything to work for Apple. Blogger James Holland at Electricpig has written a detailed guide on how to increase your chances of being hired by the…
wiredmikey writes "Now that the last IPv4 address blocks have been allocated, it's expected to take several months for regional registries to consume all of their remaining regional IPv4 address pool. The IPv6 Forum, a group with the mission to educate…
angry tapir writes "Dell has released two servers for the US market that have been customized to run Ubuntu-based cloud services. The company has outfitted its PowerEdge C2100 and C6100 servers with Canonical's Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), an…
Like many people, I have two major calendars to maintain. The biggest parts of my appointments is located in a Zarafa calendar at work (Zarafa is an Open-Source groupware application). My personal calendar is stored on another Zarafa server (in my private…
Thanks to all of my @posterous peeps. Y'all made this a crazy ride and it was an honor and pleasure working with all of y'all. Thanks to all of the users. Thanks to the academy. Nobody will read this.
Hey—we've moved. Visit The Keyword for all the latest news and stories from Google Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture Google Hotpot now on Google.com and around the world Back in November, we introduced…
Sometimes you just need some data to test and stress things. But randomly generated data is awful — it doesn’t have realistic distributions, and it isn’t easy to understand whether your results are meaningful and correct. Real or quasi-real data is best.…
With Skype's group video chat features firmly locked behind a paywall, it might be time to consider some alternatives. Here are five applications that will let you share your smiling face with your friends near and far.
When the built-in color panel's eyedropper magnifying glass won't match your image's background color, what do you do? DigitalColor Meter will get you the exact color you need. When adding images with flat color backgrounds (such as logos) to your desktop…
On iOS, GameKit offers a simple way for applications to connect to each other using ad-hoc peer-to-peer communication without having to be connected to a common network. Despite its name, GameKit has been used for many non-gaming purposes as well as for…
GadgetTrak is an anti-theft app tracks your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch if it should be stolen.
Hey—we've moved. Visit The Keyword for all the latest news and stories from Google Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan’s recent post: “Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying…
iMovie trailers offer more than what appears on the surface, including a way to use the trailer as a starting point for a larger project. Jeff Carlson takes you through the steps.
How did I project my iPad's screen during Macworld 2011 without the aid of an overhead camera? Here are the steps.
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and student outreach programs.