Friday, 1 August 2008

Strange but True

Things are a little bit weird here. As you see my blog is somehow messed up and I had a hard time to locate the problem. It turned out that using Apache and Mod_JK is the culprit because using the JBoss web port is delivering a fast and good result whereas going over Apache things are getting messed up and also slow done. Unfortunately I cannot fix that by just running JBoss standalone because I have my other web site: j-community.org on the same box. So for now I cannot solve it but I am working hard on it.

Have fun - Andy

Posted by schaefera at 9:56 PM in Mac

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Thursday, 26 June 2008

Rip a DVD to post on Dot Mac

For my folks back home I wanted to put the video from my first jump on Dot Mac so that they can watch it over the Internet. Unfortunately this was a longer undertaking that expected. Anyhow I finally succeeded with some help from the folks at the sky diving school. ATTENTION: this is not an invitation to publish copyrighted material / DVDs but rather to convert material legally even though the entertainment industry has a quite corrupted view of that but that is another story, isn't it.

First, I downloaded keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 12:28 PM in Mac

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Saturday, 3 May 2008

Good Apple or Bad Apple?

Today I was in San Diego to visit the Zoo with our kids. Luckily for me there is an Apple Store fairly close by and so I went there to see what I can do with my broken power adapter for the older MacBook Pro laptop. Since a while my wife was complaining about the battery not being loaded over night and since a few day the light on the power adapter where it connects to the laptop was not glowing at all. Using another power adapter showed that it was not a problem with my laptop. Because I bought an extended warranty called Apple Care I thought I give it a chance to see if they are going to replace it and eventually they did.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 7:44 PM in Mac

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Friday, 18 January 2008

How Apple Marketing tries to Screw Us Over

As you all have already heard Apple is renting Movies through iTunes lately with the ridiculous restriction that I have to watch the Movie in 24 hours. But in order to make that look good they phrased it somewhat like this:

The Movie is available for 24 hours and will be deleted after it expires to save space on your hard disk.

Both me and my wife just laughed out loud about that. I have more enough space to store hours after hours of movies and if the need arises I would go and delete them myself. But isn't it nice that Apple is so concerned about our hard di  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:13 PM in Mac

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Tuesday, 15 January 2008

No MacBook Air for Me

I got an email from Apple about their new Toy: MacBook Air and even though I was tempted I am not going to buy one. For starters I need a big screen because of the many windows I have open and the space I need to work with several projects, consoles, browsers etc. Well a 13'' screen is not going to cut it for me and just to have a portable DVD player this toy is way to expensive. Especially based on the fact that it does not come with a CD/DVD drive.

This toy is like having a Ferrari in Los Angeles freeways. It looks great, turns a lot of heads but i  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 5:48 PM in Mac

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Thursday, 1 November 2007

New Mac OS X Leopard: Despite Apple's Assurances the Upgrade is Not Without Problems

Update: after some further investigation I figured out that using the IP address of Google or the other servers fixes the issue. Also a ping on Google is pretty fast around 100ms. And when I use an Ethernet cable hooked onto the Wireless router the problem is gone as well. So, it seems to be an issue with the Airport inside the Mac OS X 10.5. I played for several hours with the settings in the Wireless Network but nothing did the trick. It is especially annoying because with Windows or even the iPhone everything works great.

Upgrading to the new Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is not without troubles when you upgrade from 10.4. There are a lot of issues that can make a Mac user's life difficult and frustrating. For example I now get a Pop-up from time to time telling me that the PubSubAgent wants access to my keychain but it does not say what the PubSubAgent is nor who is the vendor of it or what it is supposed to do. Then I had a lot of troubles with .Mac and Sync to it. Suddenly my iDisk space was reduced and the System Preferences tells me that I did not do a sync ever even though I just did one a few minutes ago.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 12:12 PM in Mac

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Monday, 15 October 2007

How to Morph from a Apple Hater to a Mac Addict

Since James Duncan Davidson started to show off his Mac at the No-Fluff-Just-Stuff tour I was a hard-core Apple Hater. It always annoyed me that Apple had this "we are better than you" image and though that they invented Windows. Well, time has gone by and one day I started my own company where time is money and wasted time also means wasted money. Looking from this angle the price of a Mac is not that high anymore. Looking back buying a MacBook Pro laptop maybe was the best investment I made for my own company and just working for a brief time on a Windows box makes me shiver.

Now  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 3:34 PM in Mac

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Thursday, 13 September 2007

Annotating PDF File On the Computer

I just stumbled over a nice little Mac OS X tool called Skim that lets me annotate a PDF file on the computer rather than having to print it out and then using markers and pencils. In addition I can export my annotated PDF together with the annotations so that any other PDF reader can see my notes, highlights and circles even though the document cannot be annotated anymore outside of the application. Here is a screenshot of the application:

keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 1:46 PM in Mac

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Monday, 6 August 2007

SuperDuper! really is what the Name says

Since a few months I have a 500GB external hard disk (iBook from Western Digital) which I used to do backup of the data on my Mac. Still the backup software that came with the hard disk is not working well, is dog slow and I could not easily test if the saved data are really going to restore my Mac in case of a disaster.

Then a week ago a friend told me about SuperDuper! backup software. Even though the name sounds funny I downloaded, installed and tried a full backup. After an hour or t  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 11:46 PM in Mac

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Friday, 12 January 2007

Homegrown iSync Server

As mentioned yesterday I am looking into a way to run my own dot Mac server on my own server because I am not willing to pay $100 per year for such a lousy service. Lousy does not just mean that it is not worth the money but the data is sent clear text over the wire. Bad, Apple, bad. After some googling around and getting the keywords right I found a web page about Mac's Backup tool which then led to Jeremy's web page that actually talks about how to get your own iSy  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 11:41 AM in Mac

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Thursday, 11 January 2007

Windows to Mac Conversion: Part 1

Just for Mac World DreamWeavers released CrossOver which I already talked about their beta release earlier on. For my wife's Mac I installed the trial version to run some Windows applications. Some of them are some simple games but they fail when I start them and I assume that is because they change the screen resolution and occupy the entire screen. Even though my wife will not be happy with the outcome an  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 11:48 PM in Mac

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Friday, 22 December 2006

VMWare on Mac in Beta Test Phase

Today I got the announcement that the VMWare Fusion project went into the beta test phase and so I downloaded and installed it. I don't need it for Windows for now so I tried to install the latest release of SuSE: 10.2. After downloading the ISO file for the DVD I realized that I need to burn it onto a DVD because mounting a ISO file is not yet available in VMWare for Mac. But at the end I was ready to fire up the virtual server and, voila, the initial screen of Linux boot DVD comes up. After selecting a new installation the kernel is loaded and then the screen went somewhat black and noth  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:35 PM in Mac

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Wednesday, 20 December 2006

Sweet: Thunderbird and Mac Address Book Talking

After I discovered how well iSync works with the Mac Address Book and iCal I wished I could use Mac Address Book in Mozilla's Thunderbird eMail client. It seems I am not the only one and today I found an entry in Robert Coleman's blog where he announced another build of the latest Thunderbird with the Address Book patch. After making a backup of my profile I installed the latest build, added the necessary configuration entries and voila I could access the entries in the Address Book through Mac's Address Book. The only drawback so far is that I can only   keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 5:58 PM in Mac

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