Posts filed under Annoying

My iPhone 3GS and iOS 4

Apple released the latest Operating System/software/firmware for the iPhone. This new OS (iOS) adds several new features and lots of enhancements (which I wont be going into).

I upgraded my iPhone earlier this week. No problems with that. The only real hick-up I ran into was the Voicemail number. The phone had forgotten the Voicemail, MMS and Tethering settings, so I needed to add it again. Even tethering was still available on the SIM-lock free iPhone with the KPN carrier.

There's one thing that's not 'Apple' about this update. With the regular Apple operating systems there's always the experience that an upgrade to a new release (10.4 -> 10.5 -> 10.6) leaves you with a faster/snappier OS. Even if the hardware is relatively old. Don't know how they do it, but it's something that Microsoft hasn't accomplished yet since MS-DOS 3.

Anyway, the OS upgrade on the iPhone is completely different. The device is less snappy. It looks like the device goes into some sort of suspended animation and when you need to use it it takes a couple of milliseconds (it's not much, but it's noticeable) for the phone to react. After a couple of seconds it seems to be gone.

For me, the new/improved features are more important than the snappy-ness of the device, so I'll stick to the new iOS for the moment.

Posted on July 1, 2010 and filed under Annoying, Apple, Personal, Review, iPhone.

SquareSpace Traffic Statistics

First; I would recommend SquareSpace [2] to anyone who wants to run a website with lots of features and easy as 1-2-3. It's extremely easy to use, and no HTML knowledge is required to start modifying the layout etc. (it helps if you do though).

With the website comes a management center (Dashboard) where you can view traffic/visitor statistics (among a dozen of other things regarding the website). Every now and then, I see the traffic increase.

Green = Visiting IP's / Grey = Pageviews

Initially I thought;

Damn, they started the DDoS again....

After that;

They Slashdotted me (one can always hope)

Posted on June 2, 2010 and filed under Annoying, Website.

The 'Legalized Meaning of Words' According to Wordpress.com

I got an e-mail from an 'old' friend Hunter (probably not his real name) today. He helped me out regarding the exposure of online scammers last year. He (and his 'team') offered to continue my work in regards to exposing online retailers that 'forgot' to send the goods, after you payed..... I couldn't go on with this (important) work for several reasons. Reasons I won't go into at this time.
Anyway, he moved the available content to the public (and free) Wordpress platform and continued what I had left behind.

Posted on May 12, 2010 and filed under Annoying, WordPress.

Droplets in Photoshop CS5

Every photo I upload to Flickr goes through a watermarking process. To do this, I created a watermarking action within Photoshop (started this in the CS3 days). These actions can be 'converted' to so-called droplets. These are 'shortcuts' you can place on e.g. your desktop. Every image you drag onto this droplet gets opened in Photoshop and the preconfigured actions are applied.

This worked in Photoshop CS3, and CS4 (after some modifications to the original action). But in Photoshop CS5 the droplets won't execute. The action itself runs smoothly within Photoshop, but when you export it as a droplet, the action won't start. You have to start the action manually.....

I even tried to create an action / droplet from scratch in Photoshop CS5, but that one won't run either when I drop a JPEG on the droplet. This is a reason for not upgrading to CS5 on my main machine (which also still runs Leopard for compatibility reasons).

According to the online Adobe Photoshop CS5 helpfiles regarding droplets, the droplets should still function. So I write this of as a bug in the initial release of Photoshop CS5.

Posted on May 5, 2010 and filed under Annoying, Photography, Review, Software.

SafeSign and Apple OSX Snow Leopard

Last week I got an e-mail from one of the product managers @ AET Europe regarding the availability of SafeSign / Tokenlounge for OSX Snow Leopard.

The content of the e-mail wasn't very encouraging.... It seems that the Snow Leopard of SafeSign / Tokenlounge release is delayed by a bug in the Apple Keychain;

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We use systemkeychain -T to create a login keychain (for a new FV user) associated with our token. When trying to unlock this newly created keychain during login with the smartcard, we get prompted with the "unable to unlock login keychain" panel - as you have observed -.
This is basically our main concern, as this was perfectly running under 10.5. Any idea why the system wants to update the login keychain password, prompting the user with that panel???

What we have discovered beside, is that when you click Create New Keychain on that panel, the keychain gets encrypted with the PIN of the smartcard instead of the RSA key, which is a major security issue (Same behavior if you click Update Keychain Password)...
You can easily verify this last issue by removing your smartcard, launching Keychain Access and entering your PIN code to unlock the keychain...

Once again, we didn't have this kind of problems with Leopard.

As long as this issue isn't resolved, there will be no version for Snow Leopard. The (security) risk is just too big.
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So, we need to be patient, and wait till Apple solves this. In the mean time, when you need the SafeSign software for your every day work, you shouldn't upgrade to Snow Leopard.

Check the follow-up on the original SafeSign post for the availability on the Leopard version of SafeSign / Tokenlounge.

Posted on April 22, 2010 and filed under Annoying, Apple, Security, Software.

Installing & Configuring CentOS 5.4 (Day 2)

Oké. Day 2. After the successful installation and configuration of CentOS with Adobe Coldfusion, I needed to install MySQL as a database. So, I started the virtual machine, and found out why Linux will (probably) never cut it as a common desktop environment.

X11 - No DesktopYesterday I (properly) shutdown the system (which had the GNOME Desktop), and today it started with some back to the 60's desktop. Every icon gone. All that I'm left with was a terminal window, clock, and a FireFox window. This environment is the basic X11 desktop.

Posted on April 2, 2010 and filed under Annoying, Linux, Operating Systems, Personal, Tips'n Tricks.

Adobe Coldfusion 9 on CentOS 5.4 (x64)

A while back I figured out how to install Adobe (could have been Macromedia back then) Coldfusion MX on an Ubuntu linux server. This config still runs as it should, but in the mean time several things have changed in the world of software. I've been leaning towards Centos 5.4, and Adobe released Coldfusion 9 somewhere in 2009. These two 'events' made me decide to combine the two.

Before I continue, I must warn you that the Coldfusion installer is still broken..... So there's some manipulation of code involved.

Since the new 'server' is going to run in a virtual environment I started in a VMWare Workstation. This way I could make snapshots of my progress. This made it easier to start from scratch. The problem with Linux and me is that I tend to reinstall the OS when things go haywire. So VMWare is a safe way out in this case.

Posted on April 1, 2010 and filed under Annoying, Linux, Software, Tips'n Tricks.

Apple Snow Leopard and FileVault (part deux)

A while back, I wrote a couple of blog posts about the FileVault quirks in OSX. The problems seemed to be gone with the upgrade to Snow Leopard, but this week I ran into a (new??) 'feature'?

When I remove a directory on a (SMB) file-share it removes the files and directory (or so it seems). But after a couple of seconds the (empty) directory re-appears.

Posted on January 20, 2010 and filed under Annoying, Apple, Software.

Adobe Flash Player Problems

Since I encountered some problems with flash on certain websites, I decided to check if my Flash player has been updated since 1972. Normally you can check the Flash settings (incl auto-update functions) through a page on the Adobe/Macromedia website. Which is weird, since you would think that this is a local setting (incl. privacy settings and audio functionalities).... But no. Macromedia/Adobe decided that you have to do that through their website.
The reason being that they can check whatever you are doing with your player.......

Posted on December 16, 2009 and filed under Annoying, Internet, Software.