Silverlight crashes Firefox

I never see Firefox on a Mac crash; ever.

That is unless I am on a Silverlight enables site, in which case it is up and down like the proverbial drawers. Maybe I need to install a later version of Silverlight but it is inelegant behaviour on both the Browser and possibly MS

This looks like a jolly good idea. I wonder what the fat cats who like to preach the power of market forces will feel if this develops and the real power of the market is brought to bear on the carbon emissions cap and trade bureaucompromise?

Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome

It is interesting to note that Mitchell Baker is relatively sanguine on her blog about Google's parallel parking their tanks. The amusing thing is that Firefox makes most of its enormous income from the Google search bar at the top right. So all this time they have been inadvertently funding the competition, as they now appear to be.

CLI Ethernet action on the Mac

I have been doing an install that required 9000MTU and bonded Ethernet ports and there is no way that I could find to do this in the GUI on a Mac. Turns out it is easy to do with the command line networksetup command. Here are all the things it can do!

networksetup -listnetworkserviceorder
networksetup -listallnetworkservices
networksetup -listallhardwareports
networksetup -detectnewhardware
networksetup -getmacaddress
networksetup -getcomputername
networksetup -setcomputername
networksetup -getinfo
networksetup -setmanual
networksetup -setdhcp [clientid]
networksetup -setbootp
networksetup -setmanualwithdhcprouter
networksetup -setv4off
networksetup -setv6off
networksetup -setv6automatic
networksetup -setv6manual

networksetup -getdnsservers
networksetup -setdnsservers [dns2] [...]
networksetup -getsearchdomains
networksetup -setsearchdomains [domain2] [...]
networksetup -create6to4service
networksetup -set6to4automatic
networksetup -set6to4manual
networksetup -getftpproxy
networksetup -setftpproxy
networksetup -setftpproxystate
networksetup -getwebproxy
networksetup -setwebproxy
networksetup -setwebproxystate
networksetup -getsecurewebproxy
networksetup -setsecurewebproxy
networksetup -setsecurewebproxystate
networksetup -getstreamingproxy
networksetup -setstreamingproxy
networksetup -setstreamingproxystate
networksetup -getgopherproxy
networksetup -setgopherproxy
networksetup -setgopherproxystate
networksetup -getsocksfirewallproxy
networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy
networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate
networksetup -getproxybypassdomains
networksetup -setproxybypassdomains [domain2] [...]
networksetup -getpassiveftp
networksetup -setpassiveftp
networksetup -getairportnetwork
networksetup -setairportnetwork [password]
networksetup -getairportpower
networksetup -setairportpower
networksetup -getnetworkserviceenabled
networksetup -setnetworkserviceenabled
networksetup -createnetworkservice
networksetup -renamenetworkservice
networksetup -duplicatenetworkservice
networksetup -removenetworkservice
networksetup -ordernetworkservices <...>
networksetup -getappletalk
networksetup -setappletalk
networksetup -getMTU
networksetup -setMTU
networksetup -listvalidMTUrange
networksetup -getmedia
networksetup -setmedia [option1] [option2] [...]
networksetup -listvalidmedia
networksetup -createVLAN
networksetup -deleteVLAN
networksetup -listVLANs
networksetup -listdevicesthatsupportVLAN
networksetup -listpppoeservices
networksetup -showpppoestatus
networksetup -createpppoeservice [pppoe service name]
networksetup -deletepppoeservice
networksetup -setpppoeaccountname
networksetup -setpppoepassword
networksetup -connectpppoeservice
networksetup -disconnectpppoeservice
networksetup -version
networksetup -help
networksetup -printcommands

Mapping fun

I am loving this; currently I am using the incar Garmin but soon I will be saving out the GTX data from my HTC phone and using that.

ProRes422 for the PC

About time - here it is

Finally nailed the annoying Excel 2007 slowdown

I have been dogged by massively slow performance in Excel 2007 on and off since I installed it on Vista running as a VM on my MacBook when they were both released. When I installed XP instead I was delighted to find that performance of Excel 2007 improved massively; I put this down to XP.

Recently I have had the same slowdowns and now I have fixed them, I hope, I realise Vista may not have been entirely to blame for the slowdowns in Excel. It turns out that if you have an unavailable printer set as the default printer in Windows Excel is trying to contact it more often than one would expect (or seems sensible). By making my default printer the VMWare printer (as it would have been when I first installed XP) I have returned Excel to its previously zippy state. Hurrah!

CLI text editor that is not VI

My colleague Dave put me onto the CLI text editor - on the Mac - that is Pico.

No more VI hell for me as I try and recall all those crazy Unix hippy keystrokes. Pico is easy to use and gets the job done!

For example you can drop into the CLI and type sudo pico /etc/hosts and then the root password and you are away and it is all there on the screen

Off site backup by the drink

Ever since I read an interview with Jeff Bezos by Tim O'Reilly when Amazon launched the idea of S3 I have really wanted to find a way to use it, and now I have. Unfortunately it is a bit beyond me to develop something for it from scratch but thanks to the clever people at Jungledisk I dont have to.
We were asked to create an alternative suggestion for an offside backup solution for a large company who had been quoted £100K a year and we have created a rather natty alternative solution for about £30K a year; all using off the shelf tools (scripted of course) and Jungledisk.