Dave Metzener's Weblog

Normally, I don’t get all that excited about a new television series. However, I have to admit that I am a huge Stargate geek. I have all 10 seasons of Stargate: SG1 and all 5 seasons of Stargate Atlantis on DVD. I have found both series to be very entertaining and visually stunning. The stunt work is outstanding and fight scenes are a thing of beauty.

There was a lot of concern over the newest series of the Stargate franchise, but from what I have seen in the trailers and read about from fan sites and the official SGU website, I am very hopeful that the series will be as interesting as the previous two series have been.

Plus, I am dying to find out the explanation for why the entire gate spins in this new series. Or at least that’s what it appears to do.

Here in St. Louis, the series starts Friday, October 2nd at 7pm CDT on SyFy.

I just discovered that if you hold down the Option key when clicking on the fast forward/rewind controls in QuickTime Player X, you will increase the speed of playback by 0.1x per click.

This is a great trick if you have limited time and want to watch a video at faster than normal speed. 1.3x to 1.5x is still pretty understandalbe and will save a decent amount of time.

This tip was originally mentioned on Max OS X Hints, but the post claimed that the Control key was the key modifier to use when, in fact, its the Option key. I’m not trying to claim this tip as my own, just wanting it writing in such a way as to not cause any confusion over how to use it.

All I can say is: “It’s about f**king time!” Man, what a crock of stuff to have to wait all this time for something that every other phone on the planet has been doing for years.

There is a bit of a procedure to updating your iPhone to make MMS work. After I updated my phone, I still didn’t see any MMS features. I haven’t seen anyone else talking about their experience activating the service so it may just have been my experience. I still want to let you all know in case anyone out there has issues getting MMS to work.

My experience was to do the check for updates in iTunes as one normally would. I got a message that there was an update that needed to be downloaded and installed. “An update to the carrier settings for the iPhone is available. Would you like to install now.” I told it to do the update. It only took about 30 seconds and it didn’t have to reboot the phone or really do anything out of the ordinary. So I get the impression it was a patch or a command to set a flag turning on the service.

I then had to reboot my phone in order to get MMS to work. I made a bunch of attempts to use MMS prior to rebooting the phone, but no luck at all. After rebooting, MMS was available and ready to use.

I took a brief peek at some of the features that MMS provides for the iPhone. Sure, you can send the typical pictures, videos and sounds that other MMS users have come to love. However, I also found that you can send address book entries, Map locations, and possibly others that I don’t know about yet.

All in all, some nice features above sending pictures and videos. I’m looking forward to sending my first contant to someone who needs the info, or Map location who wants to know where I am.

1Password Pro [$7.99] / 1Password [$4.99]

1Password Pro and 1Password is the iPhone/iPod touch equivalent to the Agile Web Solutions 1Password for the Macintosh. 1Password is by far, the best data encryption software available to the public for the Mac in iPhone/iPod touch. The price listed in this review for the Pro version is currently 50% off. It’s been that price since Aug. 4th, so I don’t know when the price will jump to it’s final $15.99 price, so I suggest grabbing it now while it’s still on sale.

1Password has a great feature list:

• Securely store your website names and passwords so you never forget them again
• Save important information like credit cards and membership numbers
• Jot down other notes too sensitive for stickies or bar napkins
• Synchronize it all with 1Password for Mac (sold separately, available at http://1password.com)
• Automatically log into Web sites on iPhone and iPod touch to avoid remembering and typing usernames and passwords
• Hardware-accelerated AES encryption and Auto-Lock keep your data protected even if your iPhone is lost or stolen
• All cryptographic operations are performed using standard iPhone libraries to ensure there are no security gaps or backdoors
• Two-layer defense with Unlock Code and Master Password to combine security and convenience
• Data Backup & Restore option available on Mac, Windows and Linux.

1Password Pro adds the following list of features:

• Special easy switching mode allows you to quickly copy-and-paste usernames and passwords to Mobile Safari.
• Support for copying multiple field values (for example, both username and password) from 1Password to Mobile Safari.
• Folders for better organization
• Features coming soon: Favorites, MobileMe/WebDAV syncing, and more.

This app has been a huge life saver. I store information like my wife’s Social Security Number, all my credit card numbers, detailed information about the vehicles we own (VIN numbers, License Plate numbers, etc…), and other sundry items that I would never feel comfortable storing in a standard notes application.

1Password has two security codes. The first is a 4 digit pin number that is used to log into the application. Once in, you can see any information that you have deemed with simple PIN security. The second security code is a password that you enter when first starting up the application. Actually both the 4 digit PIN number and the larger Master Password are prompted for when you first start the application. Attempting to look at an item with the Master Password Proctection flag set will prompt the user for the Master Password before they are allowed to see the item.

A great side feature of 1Password is the ability to help generate secure passwords for any use. In 1Password, you select the Passwords tab and tap the “+” button. A Generate screen appears with a slider that you can slide from 4 characters to 20 characters. You can tell it to allow/disallow Numbers and allow/disallow Special Characters. You can then save the password for a website or just give it a description so you can find it for what ever need you wish.

If you have the Macintosh version of 1Password, you can sync all your information stored on you main computer to your iPhone/iPod touch. This allows you to have super secure passwords for any website you want. Just tap the Logins tab and find the site you want to log into. Tap the address field and you will be taken to that website using the 1Password web browser with the username and password already filled out.

Now, to be fair here, the Pro feature that allows the user the ability to use folders seems a little “lite” considering the price difference between the Pro version and the standard version.

The “special easy switching mode” is really nothing more than a bookmarklet that is added to the iPhone/iPod touch’s bookmarks. Once on a page that needs a password, you use the bookmarklet, which launches 1Password Pro so that you can use the Login item stored in it’s database to grab the password. Not the most efficient way to get the info, but really the only way since applications can’t talk to each other on the iPhone/iPod touch.

The only real useful features of the Pro version are the ones that are “coming soon”. Favorites and MobileMe/WebDAV syncing will be a huge plus with 1Password and the iPhone/iPod touch.

So, I have to say that the Pro version is probably not work $15.99 right now, but I would say that it’s worth the $7.99 being asked right now. Otherwise, $4.99 for piece of mind when it comes to credit card, social security, and other very sensitive numbers is well worth it.

I came across this little tip on a development twitter post. Turns out you can see hidden files and even open one up for editing if you enter Cmd-Shift-. in an Open File dialog.

As with pretty much all of Apple’s shortcuts, it’s a toggle, so typing it once displays hidden files and typing it again hides hidden files.

Here is a standard Open File dialog window:

Here is the same Open File dialog after typing ‘Cmd-Shift-.’:

I really wish Apple had a page somewhere on its website that described all these hidden gems. There are literally hundreds of these things hidden through out OS X and other Macintosh applications.

After searching the Internet and Apple’s support forums, I decided I would try my hand at figuring out how to add custom Genre Artwork into iTunes 9. Turns out, its not all that difficult to add custom artwork for Genre’s.

In my case, my iTunes Genre grid view looks pretty good, but as you can see in the following screen shot, there are some genres that don’t have any artwork. As you can see, I don’t have any artwork for Ambient, and I don’t have a generic Classic Rock genre artwork for Classic Rock. if iTunes can’t find artwork stored internally for the Genre, it will attempt to use album artwork instead. If there is no album artwork either, it will display a generic grey musical note. Not very attractive.

To begin with, close out iTunes and make a backup copy of iTunes! This is a very important step. If you mess something up, you don’t have to download iTunes again or attempt to restore the application from a backup.

Make sure that iTunes is not running before making any of the following changes.

Now, find the application on your hard drive. Most likely, it’s located in the /Applications folder. You are going to want to “open” the application folder. You see, applications in Mac OS X are really just folders named “application.app”. To open an application folder, right-click/Ctrl-click on the iTunes icon in the Finder, then select “Show Package Contents”. This will open a new Finder window with a single folder called “Contents”.

Now, open the “Contents” folder, then locate and open the “Resources” folder. You are now in the folder you need to be in in order to add the new artwork. You will see a bunch of JPG files already in this folder that are the genre artwork that Apple supplies with iTunes. Apple uses a naming format “genre-genrename.jpg”

You can find some pretty decent genre artwork at flickr.com in the group pool Genres. If you can’t find what you are looking for there, you could try searching everyone’s uploads for “itunes genre genrename“. Not every possible genre is represented at flickr.com, but its a good place to start.

Once you have the genre artwork you want, make sure to name the files like Apple does. It’s probably safe to name them whatever you want, but better to error on the safe side.

Copy all the artwork you want to add to iTunes into the opened “iTunes.app/Contents/Resources” folder. Make sure not to overwrite duplicates. No point in losing what Apply supplies. Just rename your version something close and then copy it over.

Now, locate the file genres.plist in the same folder. Open the file in a text editor like TextMate or TextWrangler, not TextEdit. You don’t want to put stray characters into the file and TestEdit is an RTF (Rich Text Format) editor. It can edit text files, but to be safe use a real text editor. TextWrangler is free from Bare Bones Software.

Locate an entry in the genres.plist file that looks something like this:

<dict>
	<key>matchString</key><string>blues</string>
	<key>resourceFile</key><string>genre-blues.jpg</string>
</dict>

Simply copy that block of XML and paste a copy of it just under it. You can not change the text “blues” to what ever genre name you are adding. Special symbols are treated as spaces: “R&B” is “r b”. Next, change the name of the JPG to the name of the JPG for the genre you are adding.

Save the genres.plist file and startup iTunes. You should see the new genre in the Genres Grid view. Do the last step above several times. Once for each new genre you are adding.

When finished your Genre Grid view will look more like this:

You may have some genre’s that you can’t find artwork for. If those genre’s only have a couple of songs/albums, it might be better to change the genre of the music to something else rather than use the album art or the gray music note art. If you don’t mind that, then more power to you, but if you are like me, I prefer to use nice genre artwork, so I just changed the genres. I didn’t have that many tracks that didn’t “fit” or have artwork for their genres. So changing them wasn’t an issue for me.

Update 9/22/09: For Windows users the process is almost identical. The location of the Genre artwork image files is: {drive}:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.Resources (unless you installed iTunes someplace else. Just look in the iTunes folder for a folder called iTunes.Resources)

Place all your Genre artwork in the iTunes.Resources folder. Once you have all your artwork copied, edit the ‘genres.plist’ file in the same folder using a true text editor. NOT ‘NotePad or WordPad’. There is a great freeware text editor out there called NotePad++ located at: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/.

Once those steps are completed, you should be able to startup iTunes for Windows with your new Genre Artwork too.

Either way, hope you found this How-To useful.

Daring Fireball: Regarding WordPress and Security:

…

Is WordPress poorly-designed, security-wise? Is it just a matter of WordPress being phenomenally popular? Or is it both? I don’t know. The same argument continues to rage, 15 years after it started, regarding Microsoft Windows. WordPress has much to offer, starting with its large, generous, active developer community. But I can’t recall any widespread security attacks against Movable Type or Expression Engine, or against hosted services such as Squarespace, Posterous, Tumblr, or, yes, even WordPress.com (a hosted service, rather than software you host yourself).

…

First off, I call BullShit to the statement that Movable Type or Expression Engine have not been attacked by hackers. I know of several people that host/hosted those applications and were hacked in one form or another. As far as the attacks on those user-hosted sites being “widespread”? All I can say is the same thing I say about Windows vrs. OS X viruses. There are way more attractive WordPress sites than there are other blogging application sites.

Now, I can’t speak for why Daring Fireball hasn’t been attacked more frequently than it has assuming it has at least once. Mr. Gruber certainly posts articles that rub folks the wrong way at times. (The above quoted article comes to mind…)

As to the need of having “constant vigilance” when running WordPress, if you run a weblog, no matter what blogging application you use, keeping it up-to-date is an important process. Just like Operating Systems, Windows or Mac, if you slack off keeping the OS up-to-date, you are running the risk of being hacked/getting a virus.

WordPress has always been extremely easy to keep up-to-date. Even before the semi-automatic process that is in place now. I have run WordPress for many years and upgrading to the latest version was never more complicated than uploading the latest files to my host, and running the upgrade script. Five minutes (at most) later, I was up and running again.

I have tried other blogging applications like Movable Type and Expression Engine. My impression was that none of the tools were as easy to update as WordPress was. In fact, I have made several attempts to “install” Movable Type and have never been successful in the last two years. The process is way more complicated than it should be, in my opinion.

So my sympathy goes out to the folks that have had their sites hacked/destroyed in this latest attack of WordPress installations. However, I don’t feel to sorry for them since it takes a just a few minutes out of anyones busy schedule to upgrade WordPress, no matter what version they are running prior to the latest version.

There are literally tens if not hundreds of reviews of Snow Leopard out there in the blogosphere that are written by folks that are way more qualified to write the review than myself. However, I thought I might point out some cool changes and bug fixes to OS X that probably have slipped through the cracks of other reviews yet are truly important to folks who have seen them first hand.

First, let me say that if you are running Leopard, the upgrade to Snow Leopard is pretty much a no-brainer. It costs $29 retail, $25 at Amazon.com, or $49.99 retail for the 5 license family pack, $43.99 from Amazon.com. So the cost of the upgrade is not really an issue for most people.

This version of OS X is something that Microsoft should also be doing. It was a chance for the developers at Apple to take all the little nagging bugs and finally fix them. Also, revamp behind the scenes in order to vastly improve the performance of the OS. Some of the improvements are truly revolutionary.

The Finder program, the software that allows you to see files and folders on your computer, has been rewritten totally in Cocoa. This means that it runs in 64bit mode which means a major performance boost, almost 2 times faster. Believe me, its very noticeable when you bring up a folder with a lot of files. Scrolling that list in the Icon view mode is just as smooth as can be.

The Dock has had some big changes. One of the biggest being the ability to use Exposé by just clicking and holding the mouse button down on an icon in the Dock. If a window is minimized, or just behind other windows, Exposé will pop up, you can then click on the window you want. This also works while dragging files around. Drag a file you want to copy/move to a different folder down to the Finder Dock icon, wait a sec and Exposé pops up, then just drag the icon to the window that contains the folder you want for your destination.

One of the biggest changes to the OS that a lot of people are talking about is in the Services menu. Yep, I said Services. If your like me, you might not even know what that is, much less have ever used it. Before Snow Leopard, Services was a mess. It’s menu item is in the Application Name menubar item. So, if you are running Safari, you would pull down the Safari menubar item and the Services menu item is just below the middle of the menu. When opened in Leopard, you would get a list of near to 100 items, most of which were grayed out (not available) and the rest didn’t seem all that useful. Snow Leopard has massively improved that menu. When opened in the Menubar, the list of item visible are only items relevant to what you were doing just prior to opening the menu. Apple has also put the Services menu in the Right-Click/Ctrl-Click popup context menu and other menus (the Tasks popup menu in a finder toolbar for example) making it very convenient to access.

Thanks to the new Services system, I was able to create a very simple Automator Service item to refresh thumbnail images of files easily. I simply started up Automator.app. Choose “Service” from the template panel that appeared. Used the search bar to locate an automator action to create thumbnails by typing “thumbnail”. Dragged the “Add Thumbnail Icon to Image Files” automator action to the workflow pane in automator. Selected “image files” from the Service receives selected” popup menu and left “any application” in the other popup menu. Selected File->Save from the Menubar and gave the Services workflow a name and that was it. I now have a way of refreshing thumbnails in the Finder when I make a change to an image and want to see the new version in the files thumbnail or icon.

There are many more changes that others have reviewed to death. What I want to go over now are the bug fixes I have found that used to really burn me up when they happened.

First is in the Finder. You create a new folder after opening a folder full of files. In Leopard, as the Finder started populating the list of files with thumbnails, if you tried to rename the folder from “Untitled” to something else, you would be taken out of edit mode almost instantly as the next thumbnail is updated. Snow Leopard has fixed this so that you can change the name of a file or folder while Finder is populating thumbnails without being interrupted. That’s a big one for me. It was incredibly frustrating to have the edit box go away while trying to rename a file/folder like that.

Another fix is with a system that has dual monitors. I tend to drag icons from Safari’s address bar to keep a URL to a page on the desktop for later use. I also would drag images from web pages to the desktop. I use most of the screen for my windows, so I would use the second screen to drag the icon/image to. When I let go, the icon/image would wind up being added to someplace on the main screen, not where I dropped it. This meant that I would have to use Exposé “move all the windows off the desktop” feature (F11 for most of us) so that I could access the new icon/image and move it to the second screen where I had originally dropped it. Snow Leopard fixes this to. The icon/image is placed exactly where you drop it. Hallelujah!

Now, don’t get me wrong here. Snow Leopard isn’t without its own set of bugs. I can’t create or reply to email messages in Gmail in either Safari, FireFox or Fluid.app. I can in Opera or Mail.app, so at least I have options, but not being able to use Gmail from the two most common browsers is a problem in my book. Hopefully, this can be fixed soon. I hear that there are OS X 10.6.1 seeds being sent out as I type this, so here’s hoping.

Also, the upgrade didn’t go as smoothly as I would have hoped for either. I attempted to start the update on my MacBook first only for it to fail almost immediately. After a very quick call to Apple (really, I got someone from America within 10 seconds of being put in the queue!), I found out that my MacBook’s hard drive was damaged and needed to be repaired with Disk Utility before the upgrade process could take place. After it was repaired, it still didn’t upgrade successfully, so I just blew it away and installed Leopard, then Snow Leopard and was up and running again. My Mac Pro update when very smoothly and I was back up and running in less than an hour. So definitely make sure to run Disk Utility’s Verify on your main OS boot drive to make sure it’s clean and ready for the upgrade.

Also, I would suggest heading over to http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/ and make sure that mission critical software you need is compatible with Snow Leopard. More than likely it will be, but there are some issues with Adobe’s Creative Suite that you might need to be aware of. Plus, if you are running any hardware that has proprietary software, you will need to make sure that those manufacturers have updated their software to the new OS before updating an important machine.