Wesley's Tool-Box - Mac Fun

Stubborn stuff slows server swap

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:55:00 +0900

The old (Mac mini) and the new (iMac)

With marriage, I moved into the new home. This meant moving everything out, including the servers. However, I was not sure of the quality of internet connection that the new place would provide, so I relocated the KT line (fiberoptic-to-ethernet 100Mbps line) first, and along with it, the Intel Mac mini which hosts XiGL.net on early April. Hanaro line (same quality as KT line) and its accompanying G4 Mac mini which hosts Tool-Box.info would be left behind for the time being.

It turns out that KT did not provide the 100Mbps connection at the new home, but only the traditional 30Mbps VDSL line. This persisted for several months and I did not see any sign of them upgrading to 100Mbps fiberoptic, all the while the competitors Hanaro and LG Powercomm were both providing 100Mbps line services of their own since at least May. My patience ran out, leading me to call Hanaro Telecom to relocate my connection. This would also mean that Tool-Box.info server would be moved to the new home as well.

Had I simply moved the old G4 box, the relocation would have been simple. But I decided to use this opportunity to replace the server hardware outright. That's when the trouble began.
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Modifying Shinhan EzPlus for Mac for the better

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 22:26:00 +0900

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.
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VLC Player for Intel Macs play WMV3 files!

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 12:30:00 +0900

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.
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Hangul for Mac: too little, too late?

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Thu, 04 May 2006 21:24:59 +0900

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.
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Korea's first Intel Mac mini

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 22:08:07 +0900

En route to its new home

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.

Hole in Mac video playback plugged

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 09:49:30 +0900

Something I've been waiting for.

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.
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Mac driver for Razer gaming mouse

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 14:21:00 +0900

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.
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Problem with limited MySQL user and s9y

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 11:12:00 +0900

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.
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DVD creation footnote: a pet peeve

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 08:00:00 +0900

Here's a minor annoyance that didn't affect the DVD creation process but still merits a mention. If you look at the 'Status' of the DVD being created, the maximum DVD capacity will show up as 8.0GB for double-layer project and 4.0GB for single-layer project.

The unit 'GB' is calculated under 'kilo is 1000', which is used by the storage device manufacturers, not 'kilo is 1024', which the operating system generally uses. Now, the unit itself isn't really a problem since as long as I know exactly how much I'll be using, I'm fine with that. The annoyance arises from the fact that under this unit, a double-layer DVD holds 8.5GB and a single-layer DVD holes 4.7GB. This means that iDVD does not let me choose to add 500 or 700MB worth of more video onto the disc even though the space is available. That's a sad waste of space. The extra space could have been used to either put more footage, or if 4-hour (or 2-hour for single-layer) limit must be kept, used to increase bitrate and thus quality of video.

Long DVD creation woes on a Mac

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 11:00:00 +0900

Mac mini, as with any Macs you buy today, comes with great tools for creating and watching DVDs out of the box. You would edit the video on iMovie HD, then use iDVD to prepare the menus and burn the actual DVD. Later, the DVD can be watched using an application appropriately named 'DVD Player'. But I hit a couple of annoying snags while creating an extremely long DVD.
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Cracking open Korea's first Mac mini

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 00:20:00 +0900

This is a long overdue story. It began exactly 7 months ago, on January 11, 2005.

Jobs with Mac mini

At Macworld Expo San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced a small form factor Macintosh computer called 'Mac mini'. Right up to that point, I had almost no interest at all in using a Mac. Why, my AthlonXP desktop computer was working fine. I had no need to use a largely incompatible and expensive computer that wasn't even small. But the moment I saw that Mac mini, I was absolutely shocked. A supposedly decent performing computer that has a mainboard that probably measures only about 15cm on each side, and fully operational unit costing as low as $499.

Interestingly, I already owned a computer smaller than this: Sony VAIO VGN-U50, an ultraportable notebook computer the size of a normal 3.5" hard disk. Hadn't I already filled the 'own a tiny computer' need? Apparently not. I saw the potential for replacing my desktop computer in Mac mini. VGN-U50 would still be the 'second unit', a portable device I would continuously carry around with to fill my needs. I needed something small that can be kept sitting around the house. Mac mini was it, I envisioned.
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Updating server components

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 11:21:13 +0900

A little hiccup this morning... I was updating some of the server components. To make sure I don't mess up anything next time I do this, I'll write down the procedures.

1. phpBB

Straightforward, actually. Go to phpBB downloads section, and get the latest 'Changed Files Only' version. Decompressing it will give you a bunch of 'version x to version y' zip files, with common files on their own.
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Solving IP loopback problem

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 10:50:00 +0900

[Related to: Use Mac as a Web Server]

Your Mac, which is also the webserver, is behind a router. You enter your website's domain name on your web browser. You cannot connect. You can still connect via your internal IP address, so the webserver is not down. What gives? Here's what might be happening.
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Fixing quirks with s9y on the Mac

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 22:02:00 +0900

[Related to: Use Mac as a Web Server]

Two issues may come up after installing s9y on the Mac.

1. Quicksearch Error

Attempt a search on the Quicksearch box and you may get this:

The search function did not work as expected. Notice for the administrator of this blog: This may happen because of missing index keys in your database. On MySQL systems your database user account needs to be privileged to execute this query:

CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX entry_idx on serendipity_entries (title,body,extended)

The specific error returned by the database was...

That's because the query was not run and the 'Fulltext Index' is not available. Time to pay Terminal a visit.
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Use Mac as a Web Server (Appendix)

wesley96@gmail.com (Wesley) — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 16:01:42 +0900

[Related to: Use Mac as a Web Server]

After setting up a domain name for your website, you might want to change the domain name setting for phpBB and s9y so you can administer them from anywhere.

phpBB

Login to phpBB and click Go to Administration Panel. Re-authenticate and you'll be at the admin page. Click Configuration under General Admin. The first setting should read Domain Name. Enter your domain name here instead of 127.0.0.1 or whatever IP address it had before. Scroll down and press Submit to complete.

s9y

Login via Blog Administration. On the admin page, click Configuration under Administration. Open up Path and find URL to blog. Enter http://domain_name/serendipity/ where domain_name is your domain name and serendipity is the folder where your s9y files are in.