The thing that surprised me about this, I suppose, is that Pixar allow people to take copies of their work-in-progress movies home. I would have thought they'd be incredibly paranoid and lock everything down as much as possible to prevent leaks.

Then again, they didn't exactly say that the machine Galyn had at home wasn't locked down - they had to take it into the office to extract the data instead of just making a copy and taking that in.

Storage issues aside, imagine if they'd had distributed version control...

It seems to me that there is a group of people who believe that all markets eventually commoditize and everyone will be satisfied with sub-standard products as long as the prices are lower. Not coincidentally, these people also tend to write sub-standard analysis of Apple.

Commoditisation will occur when enough of your competitors figure out how to produce something as good as what you have for less than you can. Apple's trick is consistently being a step or three ahead of the market - this is how they avoid commoditisation.

The Power Mac, the iBook, TiBook & MacBook Air, the iPod, iPhone & iPad - each one defined or radically altered how the hardware of it's class should look and how software should interact with it. You can see their influence in how the products of competitors resemble them a year or so after their introduction (although usually with some significant flaws).

If, like Apple, you can consistently innovate, then by the time your products become commoditised, you've already moved on to the next big thing so it doesn't affect you.

Back to uniqueness though. We don't really need our GUIDs to be truly globally unique, only unique within our system. Ideally we'd also like them to be short so if you email someone a url their client won't wrap the line in the middle of our GUID.

The simplest way to ensure this would be with a number. This is easy to maintain as they can be sequential, generated by a database and don't need any special rules. The only problem is the namespace is not very big. If you allow five characters for your GUID in the familiar base 10 number system, you have 10,000 potential values, or 10⁵.

10,000 is a good start but what if you've got entities in different tables? Entity#1 in table A is not the same as entity#1 in table B. Perhaps we can do better.

The canonical GUID implementation is the Universally Unique Identifier or UUID. UUID has been standardised as RFC4122 by people a lot cleverer than me so let's assume it's pretty good. A UUID takes the following form:

550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000

Right away we can see that it's going to result in a much larger namespace than using numbers as it incorporates letters as well. This expands the value each character can be from 10 to (26 + 10), giving us a base 36 namespace. A five character GUID in base 36 has 60,466,176 possible values, or 36⁵.

Version 5 UUIDs are calculated by taking an existing source of uniqueness (a URL is recommended) and hashing it using the SHA-1 algorithm. This is not fantastic for us as we're trying to create a GUID which will be used in the creation of a URL, so we're going to have to look elsewhere.

The simple thing to do would be to generate them randomly. This is not as bad as it sounds and appears to be a standard way of doing it. We've just introduced a subtle problem though. As we are now randomly generating the GUID we become vulnerable to the birthday paradox. From this rather nifty calculator, we can deduce that we'll reach a 99.9% probability of a collision (eg. two items with the same GUID) with a five character GUID in base 36 after 29,903 items. Although this means we are fairly likely to have collisions with randomly generated GUIDs, it's still much better than using integers which reach 99.9% after just 372 items.

Clearly the way to increase the namespace is to increase the base of the number system we are using. There's easy thing we can do here - include capital and lower case letters. YouTube do this to great effect, even including punctuation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOU8GIRUd_g

So lower case (26), upper case (26), integers (10) and underscores (1) gives us base 56 - 550,731,776 potential values at five characters, or 56⁵. No need to stop at underscores though - RFC2396 tells us that the only restricted characters for URLs are ; / ? : @ & = + $ ,. That leaves !@£%^*()[]{}"'\|><. etc etc.

At 11 base 56 characters, YouTube can accommodate nearly 17,000,000,000,000,000,000 videos (or 1.7 x 10^-8 hella videos) before running out of GUIDs. When they do, they can just add another character on to literally increase the namespace exponentially or simply allow additional punctuation marks. Taking the birthday paradox into account, they can have 15,325,262,787 videos before a 99.9% probability of collision occurs. If they currently have 120,000,000 they are still a long way off needing to extend their namespace.

So there you have it. Increase your number base to reduce the chance of GUID collision and make your life easy when trying to make everything in your database have a unique, email friendly identifier.

Three days to set up and have a Linux desktop ready to use.  Yep, that about tallies with my memory of it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/21/reglinuxguide_1

The thrill of getting a root shell using a well crafted buffer overflow is a joy few non-geeks will ever know. Security cracking is skill that requires an in depth knowledge of networking, operating systems and programming. Helping your kids build these important skills without turning into web site trashing script kiddies is every good parent’s job.

Operating system updates on the Mac are all rolled together, so if you are on 10.5.3, updating to 10.5.7 is one step (and a big download).  On Windows you need to repeatedly visit Windows Update to ensure that no new updates have been unlocked by installing the last set.

After selecting your desired updates, on the Mac any further interaction is done right at the start of the process - EULA clicking, etc.  On Windows the process is constantly interrupted with wizard after wizard after wizard, meaning that you can't just click "go", put the kettle on and come back half an hour later.  No, you have to constantly hand hold the process like some it's some sort of attention seeking toddler.

It also offered me the option of installing something called Microsoft Genuine Windows Notifications which promised, if my copy of windows was not "Genuine", to constantly bombard me with nagging reminders to "solve" this problem.

Who in their right mind would actually choose to install such a piece of software?  If your copy is legit you don't need it and if it's not, you don't want it.

It then prompted me to follow a link to a list of benefits of using "Genuine" Windows software.  I didn't follow the link, but presumably it's just a picture of Steve Balmer in a bath of money.

Sorry that this post is so unashamedly pro Mac.  I'd have mentioned the Linux update process as these days it's pretty painless.  The update process itself is painless, I mean.  The pain comes after the update when you find that half of your shit doesn't work any more.

From the article the CEO a doomed startup whines:

What about all the websites that have been storing all their documents with Flashpaper? It will be a major job having to transfer all those documents to a new solution

It works like this:

flashcommand -p -s /path/to/fla

The -p switch means 'publish' and '-s' specifies the path to the source .fla file. It works by opening Flash CS3 in the background and instructing it to compile the movie, consequently it will respect the publish settings you've defined in the .fla so the generated .swf file will end up in the right directory.

Combining this with Flash CS3's ability to import an external AS3 file to use with each movie means bar the initial .fla file creation you'll never have to use Adobe's painfully bad authoring environment ever again.

Assuming it works (it won't) then at least they'll realise just how bad the spam situation is.

To help out anyone else trying to do the same thing, here's how I did it.

First you need to install nspr

emerge -uDv dev-libs/nspr

Add a user/group for it to run under:

groupadd fms
useradd -g fms -d /dev/null -s /bin/bash fms

Then download and extract the media server as per usual. Before installing it, you need to fiddle the install script so that it will install on your "unsupported" platform. Open installFMS in your favourite text editor and find the line that reads

DISTRO=`check_distro`

Change it to something appropriate like

DISTRO=redhat-RHEL4-i686

Then start the installation script as normal. Tell it that you don't want it to run as a daemon (as it requires the Red Hat only chkconfig command) and that you don't want it to start the server when done.

After you've installed the server, you'll need to make the bundled libasneu.so.1 library available for use:

ln -s /opt/fms/libasneu.so.1 /lib/libasneu.so.1

For some reason the install messed up the configuration files, adding things like the administrative user name twice. Check conf/fms.ini to make sure this hasn't happened to you.

The installer creates init scripts at /etc/init.d but in order to use them you first need to create a file called .autostart in the installation directory:

touch .autostart

You should then be able to start and stop the server normally:

/etc/init.d/fms start
/etc/init.d/fms stop

And use rc-update to have the server start on boot:

rc-update add fms default

Good luck.

"section=blo%g&id=45".toQueryParams();

To save you the trouble of running it yourself, I'll tell you what happens - the unescaped percent symbol causes a URI malformed error to be thrown.

Very odd. The Prototype documentation for toQueryParams says:

Parses a URI-like query string and returns an object composed of parameter/value pairs.

Since it's a URI-like query string and not an actual query string (by which I mean one that's been through the browser address bar and as such subject to whatever text munging the browser does), my example above should be a legal use case.

After a little digging around in prototype.js, it seems that the problem is caused by the JavaScript function decodeURIComponent() not enjoying being given a string that contains an unescaped percent symbol. Usually percent symbols are used in conjunction with a number to represent a non-alphanumeric character in a URL - %20 for space, etc, but in the above it's a literal percent symbol.

My first attempt to fix it changed lines 98 and 100 of string.js in the Prototype source to use the built in escape function:

var key = decodeURIComponent(pair.shift());
...
if (value != undefined) value = decodeURIComponent(value);

to

var key = decodeURIComponent(escape(pair.shift()));
...
if (value != undefined) value = decodeURIComponent(escape(value));

This worked for my use case but caused Prototype to fail a different unit test. Changing them to the following worked out okay:

var key = unescape(decodeURIComponent(escape(pair.shift())));
...
if (value != undefined) value = unescape(decodeURIComponent(escape(value)));

Granted the unescape(...(escape(...)) is a little clumsy, but it seems to get the job done.

Adding the following unit test to string.html allows to test for the above:

this.assertHashEqual({'key1': 'va%lue1'}, 'key1=va%lue1'.toQueryParams(), 'rogue percent symbol test');

I've created some test pages which demonstrate the problem.

There is also a patch file available. Apply it to /src/string.js in your Prototype source tree.

Update

I've also filed a bug.

Recently I've been trying to get into programming applications for Mac OS X - I use it on a day to day basis so thought it would be best to get involved.  I've put some new things on the Stuff page for your perusal.  They are:

Backgrounderer

Mail RSS Exporter

TouchMe

SimpleHTTPd

All of the above require OS X 10.5 Leopard as coming from a Java/PHP background I have a strange fetish for garbage collectors and consequently find manual memory management tedious.

They are all BSD licensed and source is included with each program so go crazy.

I'll get round to posting about each one in more depth in the near future.

Please note that a new version of JavaOSC has been released that includes the patches below. Please use the new release in preference to patching old versions of the source. This page remains here purely for informational purposes, or posterity, or something like that.

• Introduction
• Download
• Compilation
• Installation
• Usage

Introduction

This may not be a problem for most, but if you are using the number for, say, insanely accurate timing data, it's a pain in the behind.

The solution: a small patch to the source code.

Please note - this patch will probably be incoporated into the next release of JavaOSC, so no worries about upgrading..

Download

Compilation

patch OSCByteArrayToJavaConverter.java < OSCByteArrayToJavaConverter.java.patch
patch OSCJavaToByteArrayConverter.java < OSCJavaToByteArrayConverter.java.patch
rm ./*.patch
cd ../../../../../
ant

You may also need to edit OSCBundle.java and OSCMessage.java in the directory /src/com/illposed/osc/ to get it to compile under Java 1.5 - just change the variable named 'enum' to something like 'vecEnum' throughout the two source files and you should be fine.

The above assumes you are either on Linux or OS X. If you are on Windows, google for an alternative to patch, or open the patch files in notepad and make the changes manually (there aren't very many..).

If you downloaded the patched source, untar the archive and build with ant as normal.

If you downloaded the .jar file, no compilation is necessary - jump straight to the installation instructions.

Installation

Usage

My final year project for College. Auditorium is a system for turning musical input in to a stream of data that can be used to generate highly specific visuals, movement, animation or other effects. Check it out. »

Java OSC

A small patch to the otherwise excellent Java implementation of Open Sound Control by Chandrasekhar Ramakrishnan. This patch ensures that when you hand an OSCPortOut object a BigInteger, you get a BigInteger from the OSCPortIn object at the other end. Please note that the current JavaOSC release already includes this patch. Check it out. »

Introduction

Plugins for various applications are written as XML files containing AppleScript commands that are executed on the server to control their respective applications. The plugins are loaded by a System Preferences panel.

Download

• TouchMe 3.8MB

Installation

Finally, use the preferences panel to import plugins from the plugins folder and start/restart the application.

Usage

It is not currently possible to change the port TouchMe runs on but I may add it in a later release if it is requested.

Once you have accessed the page it presents a list-style interface that should be familiure to iPhone/iPod Touch users.

Writing plugins

    iTunes
    Play it loud, OK?
    0.1
    iTunes
    
        Play/Pause
        <![CDATA[ tell application "iTunes" to playpause ]]>
    
    
        Next track
        <![CDATA[ tell application "iTunes" to next track ]]>
    
    
        Previous track
        <![CDATA[ tell application "iTunes" to previous track ]]>
    

description is used to give a sub heading and version to keep track of, well, the version number - it's displayed in the System Preferences application.

application should be the name of the application that the plugin controls (without the .app extension) and is used to start, stop and force quit the application.

The available AppleScript commands are defined by any number of command tags. The name tag is displayed in the interface and the contents of the exec tags are internally passed to the command line osascript program to actually execute the command. Multi line scripts are supported. Wrapping the AppleScript in CDATA tags is optional but is advised.

The commands are passed in as-is so while it's technically possible to control more than one application from a plugin that sort of thing is discouraged.

When you are done editing, save the file with the extension .touchme and use the System Preferences panel to import your new plugin - TouchMe should then be restarted automatically. Reload the page in Safari and try it out.

If you come up with a neat plugin, send it to me and I'll create a page for them.

Changelog

Version 0.2

Version 0.1

Introduction

It's based on SimpleHTTPServer written by Jurgen of Cultured Code (ace Mac developer of Things fame) and the article he wrote for O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center. The improvements I've made include handling POST requests, handling requests split over multiple packets, changing the listening port, the web root, and advertising the server via Bonjour.

Download

• SimpleHTTPd 68KB

Installation

Ensure that it is copied into your application bundle as part of the build phase.

Usage

// create the object
SimpleHTTPResponder  *simpleHTTPResponder = [[SimpleHTTPResponder alloc] init];


// listen on port 80
[simpleHTTPResponder listen:80];

// where to serve files from - in this case, a folder
// called "httpdocs" under "resources" in the
// application bundle
[simpleHTTPResponder setWebRoot:[[[NSBundle bundleForClass:[self class]] resourcePath] stringByAppendingString:@"/httpdocs"]];

// set the index file
[simpleHTTPResponder setIndexFile:@"index.html"];

// open port and wait for requests
[simpleHTTPResponder startListening];

Bonjour publishing

// set the service name for Bonjour
[simpleHTTPResponder publish:@"MyWebsite"];

Server delegate

// set the object that will respond to requests
[simpleHTTPResponder setDelegate:myResponder];

- (SimpleHTTPResponse *)processPOST:(SimpleHTTPRequest *)request;
- (SimpleHTTPResponse *)processGET:(SimpleHTTPRequest *)request;

- (SimpleHTTPResponse *)processPOST:(SimpleHTTPRequest *)request
{
    return [simpleHTTPResponder processRequest:request];
}



(SimpleHTTPResponse *)processGET:(SimpleHTTPRequest *)request
{
return [simpleHTTPResponder processRequest:request];
}

Responding to a request

// returns the requested URL
(NSURL *)url;


// POST or GET
- (NSString *)method;

// The headers that accompany the request
- (NSDictionary *)headers;

// Get an individual header
- (NSString *)getHeader:(NSString *)byName;

// The body of the request
// e.g. in the case of POST, the raw POST query string
- (NSData *)body;

// The current connection
- (SimpleHTTPConnection *)connection;

// The time of the request
- (NSDate *)date;

// Get a POST variable by name
- (NSString *)postVar:(NSString *)byName;

// Get a GET variable by name
- (NSString *)getVar:(NSString *)byName;

// Adds a header to the repsonse
- (void)addHeader:(NSString *)key withValue:(NSString *)value;


// Defaults to "text/html"
- (void)setContentType:(NSString *)mimeType;

// Defaults to 200
- (void)setResponseCode:(int)code;

// Sets the response body (e.g. read in binary file data or similar)
- (void)setContent:(NSData *)toData;

// A convenience method for sending back text (e.g. HTML)
- (void)setContentString:(NSString *)toString;

- (SimpleHTTPResponse *)processPOST:(SimpleHTTPRequest *)request
{
    if([request getHeader:@"magicHeader"] != NULL) {
        SimpleHTTPResponse *response = [[SimpleHTTPResponse alloc] init];
        [response setContentString:@"You sent a magic header"];


    return response;
}

return [simpleHTTPResponder processRequest:request];


}

Changelog

Version 0.2

Version 0.1