can't use it

I don’t know why, but after transferring my account from my old Macbook to the new one, 3-finger and 4-finger multi-touch gestures stopped working (in Snow Leopard). To solve this, just reset the PMC. The following procedures is for Macbooks which have internal batteries.

• Shut down your computer normally.
• Press (only once and shortly) left shift + left control + left option keys and the power button.
• Wait 5 seconds
• Turn the computer on. The sleep light should blink shortly.

After doing this the 3- and 4-finger gestures started working again.

After updating to 10.5.7 I started to get kernel panics and the system would not start.

To fix this, restart your Mac in safe mode by pressing shift. Then launch the command line and use this to uninstall the VPN client:

sudo /usr/local/bin/vpn_uninstall

This will remove the kernel extensions which prevent the system from booting up.

There is an incompatibility between Gnuplot and the readline library shipping with 10.5.1. The workaround is doing the configure this way:

./configure –with-readline=builtin

Then you will avoid this error:

Undefined symbols:
“_rl_forced_update_display”, referenced from:
_restore_prompt in command.o
“_rl_ding”, referenced from:
_alert in mouse.o
“_history_list”, referenced from:
_write_history_list in history.o
“_rl_complete_with_tilde_expansion”, referenced from:
_rl_complete_with_tilde_expansion$non_lazy_ptr in plot.o
ld: symbol(s) not found

Since the launch of the last update, Facebook opened up the news feed to applications as well. While this allows for greater flexibility for developers, practically what happened was, suddenly your wall is full of pointless quizzes that people fill out in their spare time.

Facebook doesn’t let you anymore control what shows up in the News Feed and what not after the update, so there is no way to get rid of the quizzes. Actually there is, somebody just wrote a Greasemonkey script for it.

Get Firefox if you don’t have it, get Greasemonkey, and install this script.

And you won’t see the posts made by applications anymore, yay!

After reading numerous complaints, I decided to share the way I painlessly cancelled my efax account.

Welcome to chat.
The session has been accepted.
{- Bruce B.}    Hello, Cemre. Welcome to j2 Global online support. I am Bruce, your online Live Support Representative. How are you doing today?
{Cemre Gungor}    Hi. My efax number is XXXXXXXXX and PIN is XXXX. I want to cancel my account because the short-term project I am working on is complete and I don’t need to send faxes anymore. I am not interested in a trial period or any extensions.
{Cemre Gungor}    Could you help me?
{- Bruce B.}    I am sorry to hear that you have decided to cancel the account. Kindly give me a moment.
{Cemre Gungor}    Sure.
{- Bruce B.}    Okay, I understand and respect your decision for cancellation. I will cancel your account with us immediately.
{- Bruce B.}    We are sorry that you are leaving eFax. At eFax, we are continuously improving our products and services. Please do consider us if your faxing needs should change in the future.
{- Bruce B.}    Is there anything else you would like to have assistance with?
{Cemre Gungor}    No thanks.
{- Bruce B.}    You are most welcome.
{- Bruce B.}    It was my pleasure assisting you.
{- Bruce B.}    Thank you for contacting j2 Global online support. I hope you found our session helpful. Goodbye and take care.

Yes, so say that thing up front, nothing else is needed.

UPDATE: Fishtext now has an iPhone app too in addition to the Java app. Get it from the App Store.

I’ve been using Fishtext for a couple of months to send SMS from my phone. Normally SMS costs TRY 0,22 (with Turkish taxes %18 + %25, which make %47,5, it’s TRY 0.33), which is around 16 Eurocents. Sending a message abroad is 50% more expensive, making it 24 Eurocents. Fishtext’s tarriff is 2 Eurocents per message for all countries (and even 1.5 Eurocents for some carriers).

Fishtext makes you install a Java app on your phone. After registering your number, outgoing SMS you send with Fishtext appear like coming from your own number. The only hassle is having to fire up the Java App and letting it connect to the internet, but one gets used to it after a while.

So I’ve been paying 2 cents per message instead of 16. That’s a deal! :)

American carriers apparently didn’t like somebody offering their subscribers cheap messages, so they prevent your original number from showing up when you text people from the US, messages seem to come from random numbers. I remember a similar case with Rebtel, when US carriers prevented them from obtaining a short number to offer better service. How pathetic of them.

I noticed a similar service the other day for the iPhone called biteSMS. It has a slick app, but it costs 6 Eurocents a message.

We are using a common VirtualBox image for the development of our graduation project. The files reside in our own computer, so the virtual instance only runs the Apache, which pulls the files from our computer and executes them. So for Apache, the files it serves appear to be mounted with NFS (that’s the way virtual systems represent folder sharing)

While a brilliant idea, this led to very strange caching problems. For one, the CSS files I was writing weren’t getting updated. If I put a lot of stuff in a CSS file which is already cached, it would spit out other PHP code in our project!

A few days of confusion and a fellow blogger has the result. So go to the configuration file of your Apache instance in the virtual image and add these two bold lines.

<Directory “/var/www/public_html/”>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
EnableMMAP Off
EnableSendfile Off
</Directory>

This is a supposed to be a performance-improving default setting, but not very useful for development environments, and especially when the NFS-mounted files are actually on the same computer.

A practical way to find out what takes space on your hard drive. Fire up the console, navigate to the folder whose subfolders you want to examine and type

du -a . | sort -n -r | head -n 20

This will show the largest 20 files and folders on your hard drive starting from the direcory you are at.

I grabbed a trial version of CS4 and it crashed while initializing the first time.

It turned out that fonts are the cause of this. Disabling half of my fonts at a time I noticed that the problem was these two fonts that I had:

• Hybrid
• hybrid

So the same font name in different case. That apparently confuses Fireworks. Simply disable one of them.