Peter's Blog

One of many great things about Mac is that you can do a lot of stuff just after launching your computer for the first time. So here is another one, you can create iso image of your CD/DVD just using apps which are already in the OS. Lets start then:
1. Put the disk into your drive.
2. Go to Apps -> Utilities -> Disk Utility.
3. Choose your disk from the list on the left and click New Image.
4. Browse to location where you want to save the image, put the filename you desire and select DVD/CD master as Image Format.
It would create cdr image, so now you need to convert it to iso. You can do it with single command in Terminal:
hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o .iso .cdr
That’s it. You have created iso image of your disk without using any third party software! Isn’t it just great.

I’ve just read on Noise’s blog (PL) information that Paragon is offering some of their software for free! Head to their website and enjoy following apps (serial will be provided to you after filling short form):

• Partition Manager Free Edition
• Backup & Recovery Free Edition
• Rescue Kit Express (also for Mac – Rescue Kit for Mac® OS X)

If they would give away their NTFS for Mac® OS X 8.0 for free as well, I would be in ecstasy, but still it’s a bunch of great programs. I’m using Partition Manager and it’s pretty good. Now would gonna give a try to Backup & Recovery. If you like these tools you can consider becoming a fan of Paragon on Facebook.

I don’t have anything to do with these company and have no benefits for promoting them, just wanted to share info about possibility of having useful tools for free.

Today I’ve read about new bot, HoneyBot. It’s bot designed to use on IRC and Facebook chat. The way how it operates is both simple and clever. It enters the chat and starts chatting with two people (preferably with different sexes, it uses nickname analysis to distinguish it), then it passes text from one human to another, so there is no way that they would notice a bot, because they’re indeed talking with human being. Now bot is waiting for the link to be sent by one of parts and then changes it to its own directing to malicious page. Smart. So listen to your mother and don’t talk with strangers:)

Some time ago I’ve wanted to post excerpt from the book I was reading on Safari Books Online on my Facebook wall. Everyone who have ever used Safari knew that their books are displayed in special way, so you can only use their applet to copy text (probably they’ve done that to avoid people copying entire books). As a result you’ll obtain text which would reside in your clipboard. To publish it on Facebook you need just to paste it into appropriate field and…

Yes, Facebook limits text to be posted to 420 characters, so if you want to post something longer you need to find other way. And that’s how Facebook Text Hoster was born. It’s web application written by me to host text which can then be posted to Facebook. When you’ll go to fb.liox.eu you’ll find a field to enter your text and Send button, I believe it’s self explanatory. When you’ll click Send simple check is done to calculate length of your string, so if it’s less than 420 characters then it would not be hosted as there is no reason for it. Then you’ll see a page with your text, full link to your text, bit.ly shortened link and Facebook share button. After clicking Share you’ll be navigated to page as the one below.

It’s typical representation of Facebook generated link, as you can see there is shortened version of the text and bit.ly link, you can also add short description to it. Now click share again and voila your text is on your Facebook wall (of course you should be logged before sharing or you’ll be asked to log in), when somebody would click on it he would be navigated to hoster page and able to read full text.

Now let me say a little about project itself. It’s written in PHP and all data is kept in MySQL DB. It was great opportunity to learn new things, so I’m happy that I’ve done it, but I know that there are probably better ways to do the same. My wife says it’s waste of time as you can simply make a screenshot, publish it somewhere and post a link to it on FB, I love to receive support from my spouse. But no chance of learning something new is ever waste of time and if you’ll post image you would block ability to copy your text to your readers (which is not always so bad). Anyway in current shape it’s exactly what I’ve wanted it to be. Light, simple to use and creates descriptive Facebook posts. This took me some time as when I’ve written the app posts generated by it contained text from the app itself, not shortened version of hosted text. But I’ve studied FB documentation and found out that you need to specify two meta tags:
<meta name="title" content="title" /> <meta name="description" content="description " />
And fill them with information you want to be part of FB link. So I’ve created simple formula to do that. I could probably go without using bit.ly to shorten links, but I find them looking better than the long ones and it should be useful when sharing text outside FB, for instance via IM.

At the end I would like to say that this project has been created just for learning purposes and to help people who would want to post long text to Facebook. That’s why I’m not taking responsibility for texts hosted in my apps (as I’m not able to control that) and reserve the right to close it down and swipe DB if it would be abused. If you have any proposition of improvement, want to report abuse or bug, or just want to say something about this app please do so by commenting this post.

UPDATE1: I’m escaping special characters to prevent SQL injection, so instead of ‘ you’ll see \’. I hope I would figure out something better soon. Haha! I’ve solved it! I couldn’t go to sleep knowing that my “baby” is not acting as it should:) Now you can enjoy your text being displayed in exact way you’ve provided it.

UPDATE2: Must figure out how to maintain correct alignment of text, so it would display exactly how you’ve formatted it, not in one line as it’s now. But that needs to wait, I’m tired, goodnight. Done. Now you can enjoy beauty of line breaks thanks to nl2br command. I’ve also added auto select function to link fields. Enjoy!

Within past three months I was called couple of times by my ISP’s (UPC) representatives. They offered me to change my Internet plan from 15Mb/s to 10, of course price would be lowered by 80-100 CZK, but I’ve declined it as I prefer to have faster than cheaper connection. Last call wast a little offensive as guy when I’ve declined his offer became angry and was very close to call me an idiot (at least it’s my feeling). He was trying to daunt me saying that they’re planning to lower rates for everybody in my block anyway, so I would stay paying more for the same what everybody else got. I’ve refused it as I got my contract signed for certain speed. But on Friday they’ve called me again and offered 25Mb/s for 25 CZK more (around 1.20 USD), obviously I’ve accepted it and since Saturday I’m enjoying higher speed. Don’t let anybody fool you, if you have a contract it’s obligatory for both sides, not only you.

I’m reading Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy now (great book) and found this funny fragment.
Marge Saunders would drive to the Safeway every Saturday morning in the Volkswagen and upon her return ask her husband, “Would you like to help me bring in the groceries?” Bob Saunders would reply, “No.” Stunned, Marge would drag in the groceries herself. After the same thing occurred a few times, she exploded, hurling curses at him and demanding to know why he said no to her question.

“That’s a stupid question to ask,” he said. “Of course I won’t like to help you bring in the groceries. If you ask me if I’ll help you bring them in, that’s another matter.”

I love programmers way of thinking. It’s like in this joke:
Wife sent her husband to buy some groceries and said to him:
- Buy 10 eggs, if there would be pineapples buy two.
So guy gone to shop and asked seller:
- Do you have pineapples?
- Yes – said seller.
- So give me 2 eggs.

Quick note how to list files without directories.

Windows:
dir /a:-d

Linux:
ls -l | grep ^-

Second command should work also in Mac OS X from terminal, but will have to check it just to be sure.

I was really excited when ABC launched Happy Town. I thought that at last there would be horror TV series to follow. I’ve watched first episode and it was not bad. It had mystery, some suspense, town was like from Stephen King’s books, mysterious lady was hot. What else do you need from decent horror? And then in second episode it started to collapse. Focus was set to dilemmas of main characters more than to mystery and thrill. It started to be another typical American TV series, just in creepy setting this time (and not such creepy as well). I’ve decided to give it a chance and watched third episode, but it sucked even more. So no more Happy Town for me. It could be good, they’ve made it as usual. With Heroes at least first season was cool, then they’ve ruined it. With this series they’ve killed it in second episode. Shame.

Remote Desktop Gateway is a role of Windows Server that allows you to connect with hosts in your network through its encrypted gateway. I’m quite impressed by this service and decided to write a little HowTo, so it would be easier for others to deploy it. I’ve actually hit two birds with one rock, because I’ve written it using xml and php, so it was opportunity to learn something useful. Final effect can be seen here. As you’ll notice thanks to xml and simple php form you can choose between English and Polish version of text.

If you’ll examine my xml then you’ll see that I still have some problems with links, so I’m keeping it in different tags, but I hope to deal with soon. Current workaround is working fine, but it’s far from being elegant (although it’s not visible to end user at all). Enjoy!

Again thanks to Techcrunch I’ve learned about cool new Internet service – CC Everybody. It’s a blogging/forum service where you can start or reply to a post/thread by sending email to designated email address. You can even cc your personal @cceverybody.com address when you’re exchanging emails with your friends and entire conversation would appear on website. It’s quite cool, I’m thinking about using it to exchange funny pictures with my friends and family. I don’t know about storing email conversation there as everybody can see it, but maybe some discussions on general topics, why not. It’s still in beta, but Techcrunch offers 500 invitations, so if you’ll be fast you should be able to join. One thing that is annoying, as for me, is the fact that when you’ll send email to your designated @cceverybody.com address from the account you’ve supplied when registering, you still have to approve it on site before it would be published. Maybe it’s meant to provide you with more security, as you’ll have another chance to check if you really want to post this content. But I find it really unfriendly.

It reminded me about situation when I’ve sent a joke to everybody in my company. Not everybody found it funny and I’ve got a conversation with my boss. So be careful what you’re posting as it’s very hard (or rather impossible) to delete something from Internet.

If you want to post something on my page you can send email to: pczajkowski @ cceverybody.com (delete spaces).