Mac Geeks

Now there is a Ipernity Upload Button for Picasa available at the Ipernity website. It’s also working with the Mac version of Ipernity.

I made a screencast on how to install and use.

Picasa Ipernity Upload Button Screencast from Falko Zurell on Vimeo.

One glitch I noticed is that the tags you enter during upload from Picasa wont be transfered to Ipernity. You have to reenter them after upload is complete on the Ipernity website.

Of course you are using Little Snitch to control the application traffic of your MacOS X, don’t you? Now there is a update to Verison 2.0.5 which brings a few bugfixes and improvemnts regarding memory consumption.

The release notes say:

General

• Improved compatibility with various screen savers.
• Improved Little Snitch Installer.

Network Monitor

• Fixed context menu entry “copy IP address”.
• Fixed memory consumption problem.

So go and get your hands on the fresh release and update your installation.

If you still wonder what Little Snitch can do for you….

Little Snitch is some kind of Firewall and Network Traffic monitor which controlls the outgoing traffic of your applications. Freshly installed it will ask you to allow, deny or temporarily allow the traffic of certain applications. So you can see where your applications try get or send data in the internet. This is sometimes very interesting to see which applications when are trying to get internet access. If on doubt you should deny the traffic or only allow it for this session.

With the Little Snitch Network Monitor you can also have a glimpse on which application is currently consuming all your bandwith.

So Little Snitch is one of the most usefull programs on my Mac and thus the app. 30 € for the single seat license is absolutly OK with me.

For some years I used to make full screenshots of Websites with Paparazzi. This is a little free tool wich renders a website and saves it as a image file. In contrast to a normal screenshot you can make a picture of websites which doesn’t fit on your screen. This is very usefull when it comes to blogs and news websites. These often have very long pages.

Paparazzi hasn’t got an update for quite a long time and I was afraid the developer had fiven up. But to my positive suprise I saw an update announcement of Paparazzi at macupdate.com this morning.

The new release is a bug fixing release with a few minor feature enhancements. Paparazzi uses the WebKit rendering engine which is the same as the one from Safari, Apples popular browser.

One of the enhancements I noticed is the capability of Paparazzi to batch render URLs which are read from a text file.

You can do the very same with some add-ons for Firefox. The Screengrab! add-on will render and save the pages from within Firefox. The Pearl Crescent Page Saver add-on has a pro version and is controllable via the command line. I used the latter on to create a website render monitor.

I got a special album on my Ipernity Account for my website screenshots.

I just worked on a software project where subversion is used as version control system. MacOS X has the subversion client (although an slightly old version) already build in. I got some fancy GUI tools as subversion frontend like Versions, Cornerstone or SmartSVN.

In this projekt I have to work on the code on different machines with different operating systems. Some of the machines are Windows, I usually work on a mac and sometime on an Ubuntu Linux machine. This is where the trouble begins.

I always think of MacOS X as BSD like Unix system with a charming graphical front end. But this doesn’t hold true for some very basic facts I’m used to on Unix/Linux systems. Especially the per default case insensitive HFS+ filesystem on my Mac almost drove me nuts these days.

I added some files to the said project when working on my Linux machine. I got these from a developer working on a windows machine as ZIP file, unpacked them and commited them to the subversion repository.

Back on the Mac and Windows systems I wasn’t able to check out the new revision of the project. This is because the one developer used capital letter filenames of some already there files. No problem on windows as cases doesn’t matter. But the linux system recognized these files as new and added them as additional files to the repository.

If I try to check out or update on a case insensetive system then of course I got errors from the subversion as it tries to check out two files with the same name but different meta data.

So be warned when working in heterogenous environments. A Mac with default filesystem settings is not case sensitiv which might be unusual if you come from the Unix/Linux world.

I once tried the case sensitive HFS+ filesystem under Tiger (MacOS X 10.4) but remember vague that there where some problems. Maybe I check that out again on Leopard.

MacGeek sind soeben auf einen neuen Server umgezogen. Sollte sich ein bisschen schneller anfühlen

If you don’t have MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) but as well starving for a nice and easy backup then try this shell script. MacOS X provides some simple command line tools for doing a convinient backup out of the box. I wrote a little shell script which sports RSYNC to do regular backups and even archive deleted files for a certain time.

Simply modify your source and destination folder in this script and call it regularly. This can be done with cron. Your contrab entry should look something like this:


0 */2 * * * /Users/youraccount/pmt.sh > /dev/null 2>&1


This will start the script every full 2 hours. Should be sufficient.

#!/bin/bash
# poor man's timemachine backup script
# Author:
# $Date: 2009-01-07 13:46:08 +0100 (Wed, 07 Jan 2009) $
# $Author: fzurell $
# $Revision: 93 $
# $HeadURL: http://fzurell@svn.explain-it.org/trunk/tools/pmt.sh $

# this is where your backup will go
# hence the special character " " ... must be quoted with \
BACKUPDIR=/Volumes/Time\ Machine/pmt

# This is the folder where the Backup should start from
# it will be backed up recursivly
SOURCE=/Users/fzurell/Music

####################################################################
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
WDAY=`date +%A`
MDAY=`date +%d`

# if you call this script without any parameter
# then deleted files will be archived for one week
# you can optionally choose to keep them one month

case $1 in
	"woche")
		BDAY=$WDAY
		;;
	"monat")
		BDAY=$MDAY
		;;
	"--help")
		echo "Usage: $0 [woche | monat]"
		exit 10
		;;
	*)
		BDAY=$WDAY
		;;
esac

if [ ! -d "$BACKUPDIR" ]; then
		exit 1
fi

/usr/bin/rsync -a -q --delete -b --backup-dir="$BACKUPDIR/$BDAY" "$SOURCE" "$BACKUPDIR/BACKUP"

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
	say "Your Backup finished successfully."
else
	say "Sorry, there went something wrong with your Backup."
fi