Musings

20 cool things in Tiger - and I haven’t heard about most of them… The best hint for me, was the hint for Keychain Access. I know that there is something that is called keychain, but I didn’t realize that it’s a full blown application that not only stores all your passwords (duh), but also allows you to retrieve them (what a concept). It also stores encrypted notes (think credit card numbers). ...

Last week my article on Ruby on Rails came out in Infoweek.ch. It briefly describes Rails, Ruby and gives a very high-level overview over the development and the advantages of Rails over other development frameworks. Thanks to the guys at Infoweek, I’m allowed to give you a PDF version of the article. Enjoy (and beware: it’s in german): Technorati Tags: [ruby on rails](https://technorati.com/tag/ruby on rails) **UPDATE: ** The PDF has disappeared from my server, but the original article is still available online. ...

The tale of the joys of asynchronous vs. synchronous processing. In one of my application users edit rich text in a web browser. This has been working well for 2 years, but all of a sudden problems have appeared. When the users edit very large portions of text, it sometimes is cut off at an arbitrary position. Time do do some debugging… **Insert:** One thing I like about my job in IT - and I mean really like - is the fact, that all strange behavior can be traced back to a cause. The cause may be hidden, it may be beneath several level of seemingly wrong things (that turn out to be correct) but it's there. Always. It may take some time to find it, but I have found each and everyone in the past. This fact gives me a lot of confidence and my clients hear “that’s the way it is, and I can’t solve it” a lot less than earlier in my career. ...

It took a while, but now it’s online: The swiss (and the scandinavian) itunes music stores. The price for a track is CHF 1.50 ( around 1 Euro or 1.2 US$ - quite expensive, but this is Switzerland, where the money comes from). Also, version 4.8 of iTunes itself is available, and it’s playing videos now. Now if only the quality of the downloads would be better - allofmp3.com is much more advanced in this regard. (I’ll leave the legality discussions for the moment) ...

Because we moved our TV from our home to our vacation flat, the only way to watch TV is to go on vacation. And here in the mountains, we have satellite TV. Most of the stuff on TV is crap. But there are a number of documentary channels that bring really interesting stuff. Like the documentary on the “Eirik Raude”, a mobile oil rig. Seeing how this gigantic piece of machinery is being constructed and built is amazing. Many ten-thousand tons of metal that are swimming, not tethered. It’s computer controlled 6 rudders can keep the colossus in a position of +/- meters in any kind of weather, with a drill reaching down 3000 meters through the ocean. ...

After reading a bit about iSync & Tiger at vowe, I decided to give the solution outlined a try. However, I managed only to create a Kernel Exception on the phone, and to wipe out all my calendar entries. Yes, I had a backup (through the excellent mobical.net service, which allows to sync the phone (and a lot of others) through GPRS. Not giving up so easily (though it is tempting to drop the Nokia 9500 on Ebay and get a Trea 650 instead), I managed to export both contacts and calendar entries from mobical.net and import them into iCal / Address-Book on the Mac. One stumbling block was that the Addressbook only imported about 70 of 370 entries. Looking at the contacts.vcf file that mobical created, I noticed two entries with a PHOTO tag. Deleting those entries from the vcf-file got the import running. ...