The blog has moved to a new location: www.freshblurbs.com

I hope everybody had a good Santa this year and if it was not what you haped - just remember, it can always be worse :)

A little smile from the past to you, from me

If you want full control and flexibility over sharing folders from OS X to Windows:

sudo vi /etc/smb.conf

Add new section:

[Hawaii]
comment = Hawaii Photos
path = /Volumes/Smth/subfolder
browseable = yes
read only = no
create mode = 0750

Uncheck/check Windows File Sharing in System Preferences->Sharing, Services tab to restart it.

Internet Explorer is the worst browser ever, no doubt about that, yet, alas, it is still the most used one.

If you use Drupal you probably want to use the neat JSCalendar plugin, since it creates a nice date-picker for date fields. Unfortunately, the out-of-the-box version of it does not show datepicker icon in IE (it works just fine in Firefox/Safari etc.).

Apparently, the solution is to remove the following from jscalendar.css:

text-indent: -1000em;

 

I was looking for a small, nice, light, PHP-based IMAP webmail, today. Open-source, of course. I have been using SquirrelMail for the past couple of years and it was doing a decent job, more or less. For some completely unknown reason it stopped functioning, last week, though. We could still check e-mail but Compose screen would never open anything more than a blank page.

Too lazy to debug 2-years old code, I decided to either upgrade SquirrelMail or find an alternative. That's when I got fortunate enough to stumble upon: Round Cube

THIS THING IS AMAZING. Not just as far as webmails go, but it's an amazing example of Web 2.0 design and user-friendliness at its best! It's one of the most clean, professional code I have ever seen; And the amazingly well-thought through, rich set of features, that the code implements.

Even if you do not need a webmail, you have to see this toy, to once again re-affirm how beautiful, simple, elegant and comfortabel a web 2.0 app can be (there is a demo on the website).

I have no doubt that Round Cube will make a lot of buzz and will soon (give it a year?) become de-facto standard, role-model for webmails.

Two thumbs up!

One of the most useful Firefox plugins for a developer:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3208/

I was messing with some more sophisticated Drupal modules, today, on my Mac.

Usually, I try to have minimalistic configuration of PHP on my computer to make sure whatever i write is fairly portable. The PHP4 installation that comes with OS X Tiger falls under such classification. So I had the default. But I had to make the aforementioned module work. It was not for hobby - it was work, so I had to upgrade my PHP, ASAP. Most importantly I needed some PHP modules like mhash and GD that do not come with the base installation.

Recompiling PHP is a pain. No offense but especially so on a Mac (at least for me) since Mac has non-standard Unix layout and it is not an orthodox Unix system, anyway.

That's where Marc Liyanage's wonderful package saved my day - Enthropy installer upgraded my PHP to ver 5 with a wealth of modules installed (all that I needed) and did so in Universal binary. Furthermore, it did not ruine my existing Apache installation (I had to back up config and restore but that's it).

Thanks, Marc - you really made my day! Your package rocks.

This appeared on my Google home-page this morning, when i tried to open it in IE:

"Google recommends upgrading to the new, safer Firefox 2.0"

Cheers, Google! Not bad, not bad, at all :)