Since everyone is talking about Macs today — did you see the iPhone — I thought it would be a good time to pose to my highly intelligent readers a question that has vexed me for months. I have a Dell 24″ monitor attached to a Mac Mini, my preferred configuration for this is vertical (you can turn the Dell on its side) but I can’t find the setting in OS X that lets you put the screen into portrait mode. Any tips? Update: It was right under my nose. System Prefs -> Displays -> Rotate. Thanks to Daniel and Barry.
Category Archives: Apple
Mac Theme Development
New WP JP book
Looks like there is a new Japanese WordPress book out, cool! I hope it says good things. 🙂 BTW, you can buy the WordPress 2 Visual Quickstart guide in most Apple stores. I must admit it was surreal to run into WordPress in an Apple store.
Mac Woes
After a security update my 12″ Powerbook asked me to reboot, after which it decided that it will only boot to a command line. I have no idea how to even start to fix this, I can navigate around it like it’s Linux but there is no indication of what went wrong or how to fix it. I’m going to take it to the Genius bar in hopes they can do something, but all-in-all this is pretty disappointing.
Plaxo Revisited
It recently became more important for me to sync my address book across several computers on various platforms. Solutions like LDAP seemed like a pain and had bad support in Thunderbird. I don’t want to go to a hosted app like Joyent or Zimbra, and I need to be able to work offline. Anyway in my searches I came across Plaxo. In the past I grew to hate the Plaxo contact update spam I used to get every day, so I had pretty much permanently written it off.
However this time when I saw they had support for Thunderbird, Mac OS X address book, and Yahoo and I got pretty excited. I tried it out, and I am now syncing a Mac Mini, a Powerbook, a Macbook, my Windows desktop, and a Vaio laptop to a single address book. It cleaned up dupes pretty well, and the online interface is surprisingly usable as well. This is also the best way I know of to get Thunderbird to use the OS X address book, so you get integration with all the other apps like Adium which feed off that.
What could be improved? Sync is really hard, and few do it well. My experience with Plaxo has been pretty good thus far—I think I’ve avoided spamming anyone for contact updates—and I’d love to connect other bits and pieces into the Plaxo cloud. They should open up their API so developers can start to integrate the system into other products and services, and it can become a de facto standard.
Update: They do have an API, I had just missed it. Cool!
Mac OS Forge
Apple has made a few important open-source related announcements today, including Mac OS Forge whose site powered by WordPress.
On Podcasting
More love from Apple.com: “IMHO WordPress is the best single user blogging system available (did I mention its free?) […] I came accross this really simple tutorial on how to use WordPress as a podcasting engine … take a look at it. What is so amazing is how easy it really is! Before you know it, you’ll have thousands of listeners, be listed in the iTunes 4.9 Podcasting Directory, and be a media darling.” We’re turning the media darling thing into a plugin in 1.6. Hat tip: Pete Quily.
Mac-like WordPress
The day after the Apple news comes TUAW asking WordPress: Most Mac-like Blogging Tool?. The comments are interesting too, someone points out another Apple weblog using WordPress that I had never heard about before.
Dave Hyatt Switches
Dave Hyatt, best known for his work on Mozilla and now Safari, has switched from MT to a new blog on WordPress.
Mac Attack
Forget the Mac triumvirate, I’ve got a new photo up reminding you to Think Different, just like everyone else in San Francisco. 🙂
Apple Commercial Archive
Andrew has made a Bittorent of every Apple commercial ever, or at least the ones he could find.
Apple Announcements
Well the Shuffle and mini look pretty rocking, and both seem absolutely something I’d want to by. The Shuffle fits my listening habits pretty well and the mini looks like it could make a pretty swank gateway server for my living room. (I have a big beige box running Gentoo in there now.) Hook up two big external drives and you’re good to go. In other news, the official Apple WordPress Student blog has been pretty busy lately. When the story about it first broke there wasn’t a whole lot of content up there, but now it has filled out nicely.
Old and New Apple
Tantek put an old Apple sticker (as old as me) on his iBook lit logo and you can see how they’ve changed the shape. It also just looks cool.
More Synergy
Synergy seems to work a lot better with Windows as a server than Mac OS X. Before I was experiencing weird bugs, like the there was no 8 on my numpad. When I pressed 7 8 9 it would print 7 9 9. Alt+tab didn’t work from the Apple keyboard, something about the Apple key not quite being the equivilent of ctrl. Anyway the deal breaker was it was taking far to long to get the mouse from monitor one to monitor four, especially when I was, for example doing email on 4 and chatting on 1. The obvious solution is to loop the displays so when I go to the edge of 4 it takes me back to the beginning of 1. I couldn’t get this to work and on a whim I started up Synergy as a server on one of the PCs and all the old problems have gone away.
Eric Meyer – Pro?
Eric Meyer is featured on Apple Pro. “Have you noticed web pages loading a bit faster than usual? You might thank Eric Meyer.” Eric revels here. Interesting tidbit: If you look at the client list, in addition to AOL (I wonder what he’s doing there?) they list Apple itself as a Complex Spiral client. Did he have a hand in this quiet revolution on their site?
New Mac Toys
On Michael’s recommendation and a few other favorable reports I looped by the Apple store today and picked up an iCurve and Apple bluetooth wireless keyboard. So far I’m loving the iCurve and getting used to the keyboard. I’m doing an unusual amount of typing these days so I should be able to give the keyboard a good test. Contrary to popular reports, the keyboard does have more than one button.
WordPress.org Search
I’ve ripped out the guts and redone the search on the WordPress.org support forums in the hopes of making it something more people will use. Try it out! The new system searches the wiki (hosted on a different machine), thread titles, recent posts, and does a FULLTEXT post search for the most relevant posts. It has contextual search highlighting (like Google).
When I have some time to get back to this every section will have a “more of this” link to take you to more results (paged). It does this currently with the wiki search, counting the total results and linking to the wiki search directly if there are more than 5 results. Probably still a few bugs to work out. The fulltext query was taking over two seconds to run until I tweaked the JOIN type to get the MySQL optimizer to use the proper index and join order. Everything should validate as XHTML.
A new system is also in place to inject custom results at the top of the page. We’ve been logging searches for the last few months (over a 129,000 so far, about 43,000 unique searches) and I’m going to be working closely with the documentation team to identify which searches are most common and what tailored information would be best to present the user with when they search for targetted terms, be it a blog post, an external resource, someplace on WordPress.org itself, a wiki page, or a specific thread. We can watch trends and spikes in searches to identify any problems in the application itself or features that may be insufficently documented or hard to use.
The work is far from finished, but I think it’s a strong first step into fully integrating search as a support mechanism and bringing the WordPress team even closer to the pulse of the users.
Voting Machines
Voting machine glitch during demo, Murphy’s law applies to elections as well. It sounds like Sequoia is trying to do the right thing. I can’t think of a single good reason not to have a hard paper copy of every vote. “Election officials say that putting printers on voting machines would create problems for poll workers if the printers break down or run out of paper, and the paper records will cause long poll lines with voters taking more time to check the record.” Oh no! People would be checking their votes! We don’t want that. I will personally donate to the paper fund if they’re really that worried they’re going to run out.
Cool Powerbook Cases
My bud Kelly just pointed me to these cool Powerbook bags. This looks like it could work. I want something very slim and form-fitting for my 12″ to basically protect it from scratches. Most of the time it’ll probably be inside my messenger bag, but I need to protect it from scratches inside of that. Any suggestions?
Client does not support authentication protocol
MySQL Manual – Client does not support authentication protocol, how to get new MySQL (> 4.1) to work with old clients (like PHP4 installed on my Powerbook).