Wesley's Tool-Box

Shinhan Bank, which recently completed integrating the recently acquired Cho Hung Bank's account database to its own, is also known for its commitment to Mac platform. So far, it is the only Korean bank that provides internet banking solution for Mac OS X. Most other Korean banks are locked to Windows platform when you want to do internet banking on your computer. With the aforementioned database integration, Shinhan Bank has updated their Mac banking solution, 'EzPlus for Mac', to accommodate the changes.

Well, no more jumping through the hoops now. Hot on the heels of the release of Flip4Mac WMV component 2.1, the first official universal binary version, the latest VLC Player nightly build for both PPC and Intel Macs have the ability to decode WMV3 video codec (a.k.a. Windows Media Video 9). Click on the picture above for the full look.

Apple Store / Experience Center in Samseong-dong, Seoul had just stocked boxes of Hangul Word Processor (HWP) 2006 for Mac today, which was announced a week ago. HWP is one of the most popular word processor in Korea (it used to be THE most popular, but Microsoft Word has made headways), and many companies and most government agencies / education institutes use it as the standard document format. But Mac users have largely been left out cold since the last HWP version came out in 1997. Since that version, OS X came out, and then there was a CPU platform shift from PPC to Intel. In other words, Macs haven't been able to 'natively' run the application for half a decade.

Here it is... Korea's first imported Mac mini based on Intel's Core Duo processor! Of course, its older brother, the one with Freescale G4, was also the first to land on Korean soil. My earlier experiment with running the website on a Pentium M system with Windows didn't go so well, so it's back to Mac mini's job again. I'll probably try Linux next time.

While those of you who don't use a Mac or have large collection of video it may have gone unnoticed, there has been a weird and annoying hole in video playback compatibility in Mac platform. Specifically, AVI videos that use Windows Media Video 9 (a.k.a. WMV9 and also called WMV3) codec could not be played, let alone viewed with subtitles. Due to the availability of the 'WMV9 VCM' for Windows it has been possible to use that video codec in AVI container instead of the WMV container originally intended. However, in Macs playing this sort of file (and preferably with accompanying subtitle file) had following roadblocks until early this year.

I use a Diamondback 'Salamander Red' mouse from Razer. Yes, its something I won in AMD Mania Day 2004 AND 2005. The mouse is quite good, living up to its reputation. The problem is, I use it on my Mac mini. Razer's driver download page sadly tells me to "Download a third party Mac driver at USB Overdrive". I've used USB Overdrive a while back and I didn't quite like it. I've been in 'generic driver' mode since. However, that was about to be changed.

MySQL documentation gives some examples of creating users in MySQL. Among the examples are creating users that only have access to a specific database, or 'tied-to-database', as I say. This is preferred from a security standpoint because you can avoid using root to access services like s9y and use this 'limited' user instead. Let's look at one of the examples in there.

GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,DROP ON bankaccount.* TO 'custom'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'obscure';

This is supposed to create a user called 'custom' on the 'localhost' domain that has the password of 'obsecure' and can only access 'bankaccount' database. Now this looks alright, but it poses a bit of problem with s9y.