Willy Dobbe - This Blog should have been an instrumental, but the words got in the way. [Blog of Bert Boerland]

How to install Dexter Screensaver on the Mac

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:39:47 +0100

24, lost, house. Sure good tv. But nothing compared to Dexter. Dbxter, By far the best American serie I have seen. Consider me a fan.

So when I saw that Dexter (wiki) had a mac with a bloody screensaver and found out it was available for the Mac, I had to get this as well.

On http://www.sho.com/site/dexter/downloads.do you can download the Mac and Windows version. The mac verson is zip with and .app in it. Howerver, double clicking the application does not give you anything.

So if you want to install this screensaver (not that good by the way) on your mac, here is the workaround:

Download,
unzip,
right click on the file (control-click),
go to "show package contents,
go contents>resources>dexter screen saver.saver

This will open system preferences with a dialog box prompting an install. Say yes and the screen saver will show up in the left hand navigation menu in screen savers. Select it and you are good to go.

And in case you want to become the "dark Defender" yourself, learn from this video series.

What Google could do to make its' service even better on mobile devices (spelling)

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:05:24 +0100

I love my iPhone and I love Google. And the combination of these to leads to a nice user experience; when an iPhone user visits Google with Mobile Safari. Google reads the user-agent string and gives the user a page optimized for the user experience on the phone. As stated before, it is not the user that should change and go to m..example.com but the site that adepts to the user('s browser).

This leads to an optimized situation, one can swipe through images in Google images and has the least HTML overhead when visiting Google.com. There is however one thing google can do better. Spelling. Okay, there is also one thing I could do better, but that is not my point

If google reads a search string and a user-agent, they could guess if the user/iPhone made a small error on the keyboard and hint to that word, just like the iPhone itself most of the times does.

So when I would search for "Ftupal" Google should see this and even though the word Drupal has only a few characters the same, changes are that I wanted to press the D next to the F and the R next to the T.

Doing this makes Google smarter then the iPhones' OS. And better at spelling and syntax as me are. For sure.

Bert Boerland is een top 25 twitter gebruiker in Nederland

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:15:53 +0100

Ondanks dat elke celeb nu 100.000 volgers heeft op zijn twitter account dat ge spook-vult wordt door een stagiaire en elke krant een rss-to-twitter account heeft met 10.000enden gelovigen, ben ik nog steeds on top .

In 2008 top 20 gebruiker in Nederland op Twitter, in 2007, in de top 30. En ook in 2009 was ik in de top25, volgens deze lijst van Jeroen althans. again: kiss my ego, stelletje youpen!

Drupal at FOSDEM 2010

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:34:51 +0100

( source flickr, copyright faerie)

Next weekend on Sunday, February 7, we'll have a full day of Drupal talks at the 10th edition of FOSDEM, Europe's biggest, free-est and open-est software conference.

FOSDEM, is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. The Drupal project was granted a developer room at FOSDEM to do exactly that: to share knowledge about Drupal.

The presentations schedule for the devroom was published a week ago on http://groups.drupal.org/fosdem. It features interesting speakers such as Robert Douglass, Károly Négyesi, Roel de Meester and Kristof van
Tomme and even more interesting subjects as mobile device design, AHAH, eID and Views 3. Everyone is invited to attend the presentations.

On Friday the giantesque beer event kicks off the conference. For Drupalistas there is a sprint on Saturday in Zaventem.

Please join, I have been to a couple of FOSDEM's and if you ever attended an Oreilly or Gartner con, you are in for a surprise

FOSDEM takes place at ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.

Hagelingerweg Santpoort op ansichtkaart en Google Streetview

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:35:33 +0100

Hagelingerweg Santpoort. Twee shots, een straat

Jammer dat er niet meer ansichtkaarten vanuit verschillende hoeken zijn. Zouden we streetview van historie kunnen voorzien. Ik zou best eens door het Rotterdam van 1939 willen "lopen". Welicht maakt Google deze optie ooit nog eens in combinatie met sketchup.

Willy moved

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:01:18 +0100

I finnaly moved this website from my 15 year old pentium 166 with a load over 20 to some better iron, some decent 3 year old hardware. The new machine had a newer PHP version and my /ancient/ Drupal install was fine with that. However, I was unable to log in. Took me some time to see if this was caching or Cookie related but found it, adding
register_shutdown_function('session_write_close');
to the sessions.inc did the trick

So this website should be more stable now, and faster. I will get a new ADSL line in a couple of week upgrading to 20Mb so should be even faster in some time. With some downtime however, I will get a new IP address as well and need to change my zones when I know what this address will be.

Thank you bas for giving me "havenmeester" (aka tug) 5 years ago. Even at that time dated hardware but served me well. It is just that the fan of the CPU makes an enormous amount of noise now.

shutdown -h now.

We salute you Tug, the oldest webserver on the net

On Push Technology , or why Push companies will never get it

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:28:52 +0100

In 97 wired had an article on how push will make a browser obsolete. On why everybody should want to watch, listen, breathe, eat what other pushed at you. It was on of the last isues (if not the last) I bought.

Push never made it. Push is "one point ooooh". Push is radio. Push is TV. Push is not the internet. The Wired article was wrong:

As everything gets wired, media of all kinds are moving to the decentralized matrix known as the Net. While the traditional forms - broadcast, print - show few signs of vanishing, the Net is being invaded by new media species. The Web is one. Yet with each additional node, each new T1 line, the media the Internet can support become richer, more complex, more nuanced. The Net has begun offering things you simply can't browse.

Very wrong. The old media are dieing. The web is not one, but a diversity of nodes, people and information. And even if you do not browse the net anymore (plexapp is a very cool way to see that non browsable traffic is still browsable and without being pushed) the net never became a push medium.

People want to be in control. And control is more then flipping a page, using a "remote control" or changing a radio channel. People want hulu, plex, a real browser, be interactive on facebook, twitter or any other social medium. And this can not be pushed away.

So my law is:
Push companies will never get it.

Data.gov.uk running Drupal

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:28:06 +0100

Advised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt and others, government are opening up data for reuse. This site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data and is under constant development. We want to work with you to make it better.

Sir Berners-Lee -together with Al Gore- the inventor of the web (not Internet)- knows Drupal, his personal website runs Drupal. And he seems to know a bit about the "Semantic Web" as well ...

It is very good to see that the UK government is opening up its' data sources to the public. And for the Drupal community it is a big win to see that they have chosen the same Content Management System / Framework as Obama and many others did.

I really wished all governments would open up their back-end data like this and hope that the Dutch government will focus on Drupal as well. Note that there is a strong movement under the Dutch for this, combined under the "Hack the Government" mantra. See this older nice presentation / screencast I made about this in Dutch.

So great news for the British and great news as well for Drupal!

In case spotlight is not working on your Mac

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 22:14:28 +0100

Today I had a nasty reboot of my iMac. Nothing too bad but I hate to bring all applications up and try to bring shutdown times to the bare minimum. Unfortunately the most used function on my mac (spotlight, command, space) was not working.

If this is the case with you as well, try this:

Problem #1) Spotlight menu icon highlights, but no search form appears

Problem #2) Spotlight search form appears, but no results are shown

Problem #3) Spotlight search works, but results are poor and incomplete

While not entirely sure what causes any of these problems, try these troubleshooting methods that frequently work to repair Spotlight:

The Solutions: Troubleshooting Spotlight

Solution #1: Kill SystemUIServer

Launch ‘Activity Monitor’ (located in /Applications/Utilities/)

Locate the process ‘SystemUIServer’, highlight it, and click the red button “Quit Process”

Within a few seconds the menubar will rebuild itself and often Spotlight will magically work

Solution #2: Rebuild the Spotlight Index manually

Launch ‘Terminal’ (located in /Applications/Utilities/)

At the command prompt, type this exactly: sudo mdutil -E /

You will be asked for your password, provide it, as this command requires administrator privelages to run

You will receive a confirmation message saying that index will be rebuilt

Wait until index is finished rebuilding, this can take a while depending on the size of your hard drive, amount of files, etc.

Note: You can also rebuild the Spotlight index with MainMenu, mentioned in Solution #4

Solution #3: Change Desktop Resolution

This is a strange fix but it works everytime for me when my Spotlight menu icon highlights but the search form doesn’t appear

Open “System Preferences” via the Apple Menu

Click ‘Displays’ and select a resolution smaller than what you are currently using, 640×480 seems to always work

Select your native resolution again, changing your screen resolution back to normal

The Spotlight search tray will magically become available again

Solution #4: Clear caches and preferences

Clear caches and preferences relating to Spotlight, this is best done through either the free tool OnyX, or the free tool MainMenu, we recommend MainMenu because it’s easier for novices

Download MainMenu here

Download OnyX here

Install MainMenu

a little Hammer and Wrench icon will appear in your menubar

navigate down to ‘Cleaning’ and clean out User Cache, System Cache, and Font Caches

Note: Some users discover that just cleaning the Font caches is adequate to repair a screwy Spotlight, but it won’t hurt to clear them all

Solution #5: Reboot your Mac

This should almost be listed as #1 just because sometimes a simple reboot will fix Spotlight, but if I can avoid a reboot I will, and often, a reboot isn’t good enough

Hopefully that covers it, and Spotlight should be working good as new again. If we missed something, feel free to contribute in the comments below.

Happy Spotlighting!

And watch for the spotlight icon when you do a change, it should have a small fading dot in the middle so you can see it is rebuilding.

(from OSX Daily)

Mac OSX hidden shortcut, look up word in dictionary

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 14:14:30 +0100

There is a hidden shortcut in Mac OSX 10.5 and higer, when you press control/command/d in anay cocoa application, it will popup a dictory entry about the word you are hovering. As stated, it only works in cocoa apps like Safari, iWorks and iLife and not in firefox, word or chrome.

Having distored sounds when using Java applications on your mac? Solved!

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:47:21 +0100

Every time I used a JAVA app on my mac that sends sound to the speakers, It sounded bad, distorted. At least on my iMac, not on my mini or either of my Macbooks.

Turns out that Adobe might be the bad one changing some Java libraries. When surfing aound I found many peopel having the same problem and in the end the solution, or at least an easy fix.

Find in the Utilities directory under Programs the application "Audio Midi Setup" (might have a different name when using localised Mac OSX). And set the input and output sampling to 44.1 kHz.

Solved my problem.

The commercial arm of Drupal

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:17:03 +0100

Yesterday I tweeted something some might feel offended by on my account. Since it contains both a strong opinion and some strong language, I will not repeat it here. But I will explain my strong opinion. The point of the tweet was that Drupal is Drupal. It is an open source CMS, moving towards a "CMF". My definition of open source consist of three elements:

Code
Community
License

Without one of these items, you will not have a (successful) open source project. You need code, you need an open source license and.. you need a community! Of these 3 elements that make up open source, the "community" part is the one that is the hardest or even not to define. We are all parts of communities; in our families, our volunteer work, our church, our village. Everybody is daily part of a community. And as stated I can not define what a community is, but the closest thing I can come up with is people helping people, people caring for people and people loving people. And within a community there is mutual respect and benefits to help, care and love for free. Note that the word community is derived from Latin, a combination of "cum" (together) and "munus" (free gift).

When these three elements get together, great things can happen! As Drupal showed us for the last 8 years. The code is far ahead of the competition, proprietary or open source. The license is strict and thereby we do not suffer from "Joomladisation" and our community is real. Real people helping, caring, loving real people.

This does not mean that one can not make money with open source projects, people have been doing so for decades. This does not mean that people making money cannot be part of the community, companies have been active in the bigger open source ecosystem longer then the term "open source" exists.

I am not to sure I agree fully with Linus on Open source without commercial interests = crap but it is for sure that there is room in any community for commercial help, care ... and even love.
But just as there is not one company claiming our church, volunteer work, family or village, there is not one single company that can claim a (healthy!) open source project. Just as Redhat doesn't / can't claim GNU/Linux, no company can claim Drupal. And more important, there is not a company that claims the opensource project Drupal. Not even.. there goes the A word

Acquia with close ties to the Drupal community. In a good way. They have been sponsoring the Drupal project in money and time and maybe in the last two years more then any other company has in the previous 8. But Acqiua is not Drupal, they are a company with good ties to the community, helping, caring and loving other people (and their customers). But they are not Drupal.

And every time I read about "Acquia, the commercial arm of Drupal" my hair raises. Drupal is not MySQL or SugarCRM. Drupal is Drupal. And it does not have a commercial arm. It has many commercial arms, the list on http://drupal.org/drupal-services is just a very small part of that. There must be thousands of people contributing to Drupal core, modules, documentation and to lesser extend themes. Many of them making a living proving Drupal related services. And we do want to keep this healthy system of helping, caring and loving. And there is room to make money providing Drupal services. But there is no "Drupal INC".

Note that Acquia never claimed that position and I do not think they ever will. They made it clear what Acquia is, they reacted on my tweet and on the ZDnet story and make it clear in their press-releases. It is lazy journalist that -in this realtime web- want to have an easy digestible text for their readers. Meaning no room for nuances, no room for explaining and no room to tell the complete story.

So that is why I told the complete story, in a 140 characters tweet.

Google FriendConnect module for Drupal

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:03:13 +0100

On googlesocialweb.blogspot you can read about a nice module that Google made for Drupal, Friendconnect.

Friendconnect is

"... an Open Social application offered by Google that started in May 2008. Google Friend Connect main focus is to simplify the connection between social and non-social websites and standardize the handling and presentation of social applications and content. It uses a blend of open standards, such as OpenID for signin, oAuth to control data, and Open Social for applications."

(Wiki)

More information about FriendConnect can be found on Google's site and a live demo can be found at globant.

Though this is a nice open standard and a nice module, there are two downers IMHO that show that Google doesn't really get the Drupal community or has another agenda:

They house the code on their own servers, with own issue queue at code.google.com. Sure they are free to do so but the strength of Drupal is that all modules are on one place, not all around the web.
They have licensed this code under the Apache license. All Drupal code and thereby all Drupal modules -and to some extend themes- are released under the GPLv2 or higher. Read this FAQ about the license on d.o for some background. The Apache License 2.0 is compatible with the GPL v3 (not 2!) and since you can accept version 3 of the GPL when downloading Drupal, legally they are in teh clear but it would have been best if they released this under GPLv2 IMHO

Still, nice work Google!

update
Heine Deelstra (hint: lead Drupal security team) warns NOT to use this module on production site at his blog. Something about the quality of code, tweetsource. See Google, if you would have used GPL and drupal.org we could have solved this issue via the proper channels. Now we have to use the public issue tracker of google.code.

Sneeuw pret 2010

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:14:41 +0100

Heerlijk. Met de kinderen veel sneeuw pret gehad in het begin van het nieuwe jaar. En omdat ik me heb voor genomen meer te bloggen dit jaar (200 postings per jaar moet weer eenvoudig mogelijk te zijn, dan maar wat minder getwitter (35k tweets! :-) ) as if).

Brecht is trouwens een gillertje, maar het ging dan ook echt hard.

Alle 4 heuvel af from bert boerland on Vimeo.

EyeTV and Plex app integration (alpha code)

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:04:49 +0100

Since a couple of weeks I have a nice Mac Mini (unboxing) hooked up with EyeTV to my telly so I can record, timeshift, commercial skipping and do all the other PVR stuff from my chair. Yes, I have been using MythTV the couple of years, but the box was more under maintenance then in production. So I went the easy way and went Apple, like I will do for all my client computers (still using Linux for servers!). The Mac mini is cool and I use other standard apps as well, especially Plex. I like easy and it integrates with my iPhone so I can watch recorded and live shows on my iPhone as well (picture).

Plex, iTunes, iPhoto and EyeTV make up 99% of the programs I use on my mini. And in fact, since iTunes can be access from Plex, as well as iPhoto can, I should only use EyeTV and Plex. If you do not know about Plex as a Apple user, shame on you. It is the best thing since sliced bread, including an appstore, modules, themes and a /beautiful/ user interface. And free as in open source as well.

Still, watching TV and switching between applications does not give the right usability to my girly (and to lesser extend :-), my kids). So I would really like to see EyeTV and Plex integrated. There has been lots of talk about integration, for over a year or so. But no code was ever made available. Up to a couple of weeks ago!

Yes, there is actual Open Source code that you can use to access your EyeTV recording and live TV within Plex! Read this thread at the plexapp forums!

Not that the code is very alpha and does not have any EPG integration yet. But still, this is so cool!

Here is a short install howto from the forum pages (not complete

1) Ensure Snow leopard is up-to-date - 10.6.2

2) Ensure Plex is up-to-date - 0.8.5

3) Ensure EyeTV is up-to-date - 3.3

4) Ensure Xcode is up to date -3.1

5) Ensure iPhone streaming is enabled under EyeTV>Preferences

6) Install MacPorts from http://www.macports.org/

7) Once Installed -normall diskimage- , run Terminal from Utilities>Terminal.app

8 ) At the prompt "sudo port install ffmpeg" (without quotes)

9) Typ your password

10) ffmpeg takes long to install about 30 minutes to d/l and install each component.

11) Install Imagemagick from Macports using similar command in the same Terminal "sudo port install imagemagick" (without quotes)

12) This can take another 15 minutes to install after supplying system password

13) Installed the EyeTV/Plex Plugin 0.2 (se link above) OR LATER!

14) when the plugin is installed, a cytv.app(a modification) should be opened together with eyetv. in the dock click on cytv to have this app active. then in menubar click on "EyeTV - CyTV-Install Plugin".

15) Right click (ctrl+click) on cytv in the dock, and choose "show in finder". then right click on the app and choose "Show Package Contents". navigate to Contents - Resources and rename ffmepg_custom to ffmpeg_custom_old and ffmpeg_custom_0.5 to ffmpeg_custom.

16) Unable to rename these files? Pressed Apple+I, in the Info screen at the bottom of this window is the Permissions option, change the permissions of my user on these files to read+write, I was then able to rename both files.

17) change rights with the following 2 lines in terminal (use your username instead of $USER):

chmod a+x /Users/$USER/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Plug-ins/EyeTV.bundle/Contents/Helpers/*
chmod a+x /Users/$USER/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Plug-ins/EyeTV.bundle/Contents/Helpers/CyTV.app/Contents/MacOS/*

This should do the trick. But if you are not that good with Unix best to wait until this is beta or production code. All I need now is an asterisk integration and I will never leave my TV :-)