Category Archives: Programs

ML-1710 & Tiger

Has anybody gotten their Samsung ML-1710 printer to work with Tiger?

I’ve installed the drivers from Samsung’s website (for Mac OS X 10.3), but they do not seem to show up when I add the printer.

Textile 2.0.8 & WordPress

Since the server this is running on was upgraded to PHP 5, the old Textile 2 plugin no longer functioned.

I have updated this plugin to use version 2.0.8 of the TextilePHP class. Thanks to Adam Gessaman for the original plugin.

You can download textile2.0.8-smartypants.zip or textile2.0.8-smartypants.tar.gz.

Note: This was updated from Adam’s 2.0.3 plugin (not the more recent 2.0.5 plugin) by merging the changes in the Textile.php class into the plugin using the GNU utilities diff and patch.

Tiger: First Impressions

At first, I must admit that it doesn’t seem like there is a whole lot new. Spotlight is neat, but I already had much of that functionality with Quicksilver. Dashboard is a good idea, but I’m not sure I’ll work it into my daily routine quite yet.

Here’s a list of applications and neat additions:

  • iChat
    • Ability to choose between Away and Logging Off when using Fast User Switching… this was a huge annoyance for me in the past.
    • Multiple AIM/Jabber accounts
    • Mobile users show up with the word Mobile next to their name. This means I won’t accidentally IM Gary’s phone anymore.
  • Group support is much better! (It’s actually usable now, because they adopted a method similar to how all the other IM clients do it).
  • Safari
    • RSS: I’m not sure I’ll use this here. I’m quite used to NetNewsWire.
    • Undo in forms! (Was this is Safari 1.3?)
  • New page pops up helping you get on the internet if you lack a connection when you try to load a webpage.
  • Airport/Wireless
  • The menu bar meter seems to always show more bars… nice psycological effect.
  • iCal
    • Calendar Groups (much like Folders in iPhoto, etc). Not sure what use these have.
  • Show birthdays in iCal (no need for extra programs or plugins).
  • Mail
    • Smart mailboxes
  • Different interface (unsure about my feelings on this).
  • Dictionary
    • Very useful
    • Pretty interface/font selection
  • Looks very professional
  • Preview
    • Annotation features
  • New display options (continuous pages, book mode, etc).
  • Spotlight
  • AWESOME
  • System Preferences
  • I like the ability to search for what I’m looking for. Doesn’t always pop up with what I was thinking (e.g. a search for ‘scroll’ doesn’t highlight the Keyboard and Mouse Preference Pane).
  • Grapher
  • Cool program for plotting 2D and 3D images. It won’t replace gnuplot for making graphs for papers, but it is easier to use than say Mathematica for quickly making and manipulating a 3D graph.

Update: I just remembered I posted my inpressions on the Developer Preview last July. It’s an interesting read to compare my views… some things (like Safari and iChat) were fixed up, but other problems (Dashboard) remain.

Xanga RSS

I always had a problem with Xanga RSS not working in NetNewsWire.

So I hacked up a solution in the form of a php file:

<pre><?
$f = escapeshellcmd($_GET["q"]);
$g = shell_exec('curl -s http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user='
. $f . ' | sed -e "s/<rss version="0.91">/'
. '<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/'
. '02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns="'
. 'http://my.netscape.com/rdf/simple/0.9/">/"'
. ' | sed -e "s/</rss>/</rdf:RDF>/"');
echo $g;
?></pre>

And then I just call the script by subscribing to http://path.to/script/?q=username. It’s ugly, but functional.

A copy is also available for download.