Mac OS X: Automator image resize trap

Beware of the hidden traps of using the automator to batch resize images.

Instead of resizing a few pictures by hand I thought I be intelligent and use the automator to resize the pictures. So I spent a few minutes to find some documentation about 10.5 and preview functionality being available as automator workflow tasks.

All done in a few minutes and it felt great. So I continued to upload the pictures and only saw much later that the quality of the pics is far worse than manually clicking in preview -> tools - > adjust size and only modify the height to 550.

It really looks that OS X 10.8 is not using the preview functionality but something else, or slightly different settings maybe.

Now I have to manually resize the images and be sure that the quality is a expected.

DNS: noise

I don't necessarily see the connection why checkpoint links to the dns noise from their vulnerability advice.

http://www.mentby.com/Group/nanog/dns-noise.htm

Mac OS X: Access ftp site for beginners

The more you think you know the more complicate things get.

On Mac OS X, if you need to access an ftp site, just use

CMD+K and
type the ftp://sitename.site and
you'll be asked to provide username and credentials and the site appears in your finder.

I'm so used to actually only use filezilla and or filezilla server, that something as easy as this for down and upload does not even come to mind.

page that describes this nicely:

http://osxdaily.com/2011/02/07/ftp-from-mac/

Use with caution on massive up- or downloads, as the connection to the server disconnected quite often and the OS X had trouble to reestablish and work through it, so actually: FileZilla rules!!

Update2: Even after more than 10 minutes after trying to disconnect all open connections and clicking stop on the copy dialog box, the thing is still there and displaying stopping... while FileZilla has finished downloading files and directories (1200 files in 20 directories), why do the easy things not just work out of the box.

Firefox: You really want to store your password don't you. (partially solved)

autocomplete=off on a web page and firefox will not show the password save dialog.

I noticed some strange things happening lately to some of my pages that I visit frequently, such as that I always was able to directly click on a link and be logged in.

Power to the people! or at least freedom from pages that won't let you save your passwords in firefox.

The problem comes from the fact that some sites don't want you to make the choice but they make the choice for you.

So the solution for me was the bookmark as recommended from this page, which you press after you filled in your username and password and then log in.

"Note: This is the perfect way for other people to steal your account! So for me firefox should provide the override button themselves!"

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/764457

Ok, but this won't give you the same functionality as I had previously, you still have to start typing your username and then select from the list. Since autocomplete=off is still true for the fields.

On some webpage there is an extension mentioned that does rewrite some code on the fly. kejab, but that's long gone.

IP Protocol numbers

http://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/protocol-numbers.xml

Windows 8 Media Center Pack: Don't forget to get it for free until Jan 2013

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/feature-packs
http://windows.microsoft.com/de-DE/windows-8/feature-packs

Excel: pad text column up to a certain amount of characters

Was looking into creating some formula to make sure that a concatenation of texts will always look the same on a switch.

Ended up using A1&REPT(" ", 15-LEN(A1))

This made sure that A1 always ends up being 15 characters long.

Maybe there are better ways?

Windows 8 Pro: worse than Windows 8 Enterprise eval and RC? -Updated

Update: The screen driver came back after 24 hours, the audio driver is still crashing my system. CXT - Network - HDAUDIO Soft Data Fax Modem with SmartCP. Even after the manual removal and reading the machines crashes. Also the SD card slot driver is not installed.

At least for my old Acer the new Windows 8 Pro installation does not really work smooth, every time the notebook goes to sleep it crashes in the aftermath; has to do with the audio chip.

And the graphics card and flash driver are not loaded. With the Windows 8 Enterprise eval and RC all of this were non issues. All worked flawless.

Google datacenter on many peoples background

I just love nice pictures of data centers, that look clean and colorful.

Currently on many people's desktop I see this picture of one of the google data centers:

O boy, I would wish I would be able to go around the world and check on all google datacenters, some kind of Safari, but instead of animals we'll get to see the pulse of the internet. It'll be boring, since we cannot actually have some fun by ripping out a server or storage or so, or go into the tape roboter cage and exchange some cartridges. (Probably more interesting are the offices and the canteen, I would be most interested to work at google and have strong opinionated discussions about the future of knowledge centralization and put the whole wisdom of humanity at the interface (not anymore keyboard, but brain interface, think flower, grass, tree and you'll get all the knowledge and wisdom there is and you'll be instantly able to plant a flower, some grass, even a sequoia and know what's going on and what they need to live for the next 4000 years. Yeah baby, yeah). Zotero is not a bad idea as well as Wikipedia, but they are far from being the real stuff that we need to be able to be efficient and solve real issues.

I only hope that I don't have to near one of those and rip out 300 fiber optic cables as I had to a year or so ago.

BTW: most of the people say they love the blue and dark upper part of the picture and that the rest is so lala.

Windows 8 Pro: run upgrade assistant in Windows 7 compatibility mode

Short: You Windows 8 some version and want to run Windows 8 Upgrade web download, save assistant and set it to Windows 7 compatibility before starting the assistant.

Most of my machines at home run Mac OS X, but I have a quite an old ACER laptop here that I keep in some corner until there's time to test another version of windows. Recently I've been running Windows 8 in different flavors, last one was Windows 8 Enterprise eval.

So today came the offer to upgrade from XP, Vista, Windows 7 to Windows 8 Pro and I chose to do so, since the price seems fair (download price that is). Even though I could not install it up to 5 times as with Mac OS X.

But I could not purchase it, since the upgrade assistant always wanted to make me believe that I cannot buy this in my country/region.

But sometimes the easiest things don't come easily to mind such as saving the assistant and configuring it under the properties to run in windows 7 compatibility mode. And voila, it goes through.

At last I could spend some money on Microsoft products that I have avoided for the last 5 years, but to be fair, my daily work is spent on a company laptop running windows 7 with all of office, i.e. I earn my money working on Windows and I spend the rest of my available time on Mac.

I wish myself a happy installation. Also hope to spend some time with the Office 2013 preview. The only thing missing will be the pen input, but the best in my opinion was/is MotionComputing, but I just could not afford it.

Excel: copy paste of cells with multiline text show up with quotes "

Current workaround is to copy paste into word and then into any editor/terminal of your choice.



Again I have not been able to copy the cells as how they are shown, i.e. not quotes, without going through word. 

Excel: Transpose anyone? Much needed feature easily accessed

I started it all wrong with some excel table and decided I need to switch rows with columns and thought that it takes me some time to actually do it manually or find a feature in excel to do it.

Excel to the rescue: Transpose

Just select the table or rows/columns then CTRL-C, go to a new Sheet or wherever and CTRL-V, then select T or transpose icon. Done.

I just have not been able to do this without choosing another place or Sheet, i.e. no same place transpose? Anyone any idea?

for fun: use beautiful google datacenter pictures as windows 7 login screen image

The process is quite simple but I like this little utility much more:

http://www.julien-manici.com/windows_7_logon_background_changer/



I even did not have to reboot to check out if it works, just used WIN+L and boom there it was

links:
http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-change-windows-7-logon-screen-easily-without-using-hacks-tools/

End of the debate: Microsoft SMB can work over tcp/445 period, over and out.

The many discussions you're facing if you don't want to open ports udp/137, udp/138 and tcp/139 in your firewalls end here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc940063.aspx

Direct hosting over TCP/IP uses TCP port 445 instead of the NetBIOS session TCP port 139.

Direct hosting has been available since Windows 2000!

Ok, but just yesterday we have had a machine that we could not teach to use tcp/445 for SMB it always defaulted to NetBIOS over TCP/IP. Was a W2K8 R2 and has some registry corruption issue that prevented it to connect to any fileshare. Solution to that was to set the server to DHCP and then back to static, but it now only goes over 137-139.

Sony Ericsson T610 reset code: 0000

Excel: row numbering

It took me more than 5 minutes to actually find the right link for my problem to number rows automatically with some correction on where to start.

=ROW()-9

If placed in A10, this will give you 1.

Here's the original article, where I found it from:

http://agsci.psu.edu/it/news/2010/11/automatically-number-rows-in-excel

Did apple steal the clock design in iOS 6 for iPad from Mondaine?

The first thing you'll notice after upgrading to iOS 6 on iPad will probably be the clock application. Since it is the biggest improvement for many people not having to rely on other clock applications and stop watches. (No you probably only have to wait for iOS 7 to deliver the weather app).

But for any swiss person or someone having travelled through switzerland it's apparent that the design is from our official swiss rail clock (mondaine), which we have come to love.

Is it licensed or just ripped of?

tcpdump: output to pcap file and display on console

Many thanks for this blog entry where it explained on how to use tcpdump to write to a file and simultanously print on the console.

tcpdump -U -w - host 1.2.3.4 | tee file.pcap | tcpdump -r -

http://jbits.se/blog/2010/02/19/tcpdump-output-to-file-and-console/

Google Calendar sync issue: Use DocMessageClass to resolve the issue

You might notice that some entries are not synced from outlook to google and this is because Outlook has different Message classes especially for meeting requests.

I use a free portable app DocMessageClass to fix these items, but it is a manual process and I've seen some scripts on the web but have not made the effort to actually put them to work.





http://www.publicshareware.com/public-share-outlook-utilities.php