Phillip's Ponderings -

Senile Agitation

Presidential Aging

Being president is a stressful job and as you can see, it can have a real impact on aging the President prematurely. Maybe Obamba may turn into Morgan Freeman, but what will McCain turn into?

Stirring All Natural Peanut Butter

The problem with all natural peanut butter is all that tasty peanut oil comes to the top of the container. When I tried to stir the oil back into the peanut butter some of the oil would slosh out of the jar. A friend suggested a good way to combat this was to store the peanut butter container upside down in the pantry when you get it home from the store. When you open it, all the oil is at the bottom and easier to stir in without sloshing. Once it is opened up we stick it in the refrigerator right side up and it pretty much stays combined.

Claw for Candy

We were out to eat tongiht a a mediocre burger place and noticed they had a claw game. But this one enticed you with candy instead of toys. We were seated near it and many people attempted to buy a candy bar but non succeeded.

Symfony PHP MVC Framework

I just recently heard about Symfony, an MVC framework for PHP. I've been going through the tutorials and it seems pretty well put together. They have an online book with a ton of documentation. The tutorials seems very well done and professional. Checkout the 24x1 hour 'advent' tutorial for creating a Yahoo Answers type application, askeet.com.

Mail.app IMAP with SSL over SSH Tunnel

I recently tried to get Mail.app in OSX 10.4.10 working with IMAP with SSL over an SSH tunnel and ran into nothing but problems. I had an ssh tunnel setup mapping a port on my local network to the IMAP SSL port. Since I am not starting tunnels as root, my local port has to be >1024, so I picked 2993 locally forwarding to the remote IMAP SSL host on port 993. Mail.app appears to let you specify a Port in the Advanced tab in Accounts configuration. However, it seems to not have any effect. Running tcpdump on the host with my tunnel confirms that Mail does use the port specified at least initially, but it doesn't use it for communication. Regardless of what you put in the Port #, if you have "Use SSL" checked it will force itself to use tcp port 993.

I don't know of a workaround in Mail itself. I tried checking the prefs files by hand and the custom port is listed properly but just is not used. My solution was to setup netcat to just forward the port 993 on the host where the tunnel is running to the tunneled port.

My tunnels run on a debian linux machine so I just setup an inetd entry like this:
imaps stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd /bin/nc localhost 2993

If you run your tunnels on OSX directly, check out Lingon (an open source utility for creating launchd config files) and setup a launchd entry to run netcat for you.

Helicopter Advertisement

This is an ad on the DC Metro (subway). I'm not sure why they think a helicopter needs advertising. Is this something commuters consider buying? Perhaps this is why defense contractor budgets are so large.

google it on Yahoo!

Tired of googling it on Google? Try googling it on Yahoo! instead.

Ugly Car

Today on our walk with Lazlo we came across one of the ugliest cars I have ever seen.

Read further for more photos.

Safari2Yahoo

Description

Safari2Yahoo is a simple AppleScript application that is workaround for a bug in Safari that doesn’t allow you to change the search engine from Google to something else. Safari2Yahoo creates a copy of Safari.app named SafariYahoo.app and modifies the files in the bundle such that the SafariYahoo.app will use Yahoo! search instead of Google search. For now it only uses the main yahoo.com search and not any country specific search.

It has been tested on both OS X 10.3 and OS X 10.4.

Changes

01.18.2006: Works on OSX 10.4. Some string labels got moved to new files
04.15.2005: no longer version dependent, makes a copy of Safari instead of editing original
06.09.2004: updated for OS X 10.3.4
03.16.2004: updated for OS X 10.3.3
02.25.2004: Initial release

Known Bugs

On OS X 10.4 I am unable to find a way to change the contextual menu that pops up when you select text on a page and control-click or right click. It says “Search in Google” still, but it will actually use Yahoo! instead.

Download Safari2Yahoo.zip

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