New Laws?

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Well, the police will be busy now…. In Rochester, Ny…

Starting Monday, all homes must have working carbon monoxide detectors in them.
CO is the gas is known as the silent killer, as it has no color or smell.
The new law requires that a detector be installed on the lowest floor that has bedrooms.
Carbon monoxide detectors cost between $20 and $50 and must be replaced every five years.

I know the arguments, I know the reasons…  But really, is this enforceable?  Will the police or Fire dept. be going house to house, and verifying that they are working?  Why not instead just do a public service campaign?
Why?  Because now if for some reason someone notices a bad device, you\’ll be fined and potentially sent up the river (yeah, right…).  The keyword here is fined.  It\’s an excuse to get some additional cash out of you…
I\’m sorry, but I seriously wish that we could force a law through that would require the government to only be able to pass enforceable laws through, and the law would require the enforcement personnel to be indicated where the forces will be coming from.
Passing laws to pass laws is stupid, and creates chaos and confusion.  Both for the enforcers as well as the man on the street….

Google Officially Ditching Gears for HTML5, Drops Safari Support Entirely [HTML5]

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

We\’ve known for a while that Google wasn\’t actively improving Gears, their tool that offers offline support for many popular web applications. Now the Official Gears blog explains their transition to the game-changing HTML5:

If you\’ve wondered why there haven\’t been many Gears releases or posts on the Gears blog lately, it\’s because we\’ve shifted our effort towards bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5. We\’re not there yet, but we are getting closer. In January we shipped a new version of Google Chrome that natively supports a Database API similar to the Gears database API, workers (both local and shared, equivalent to workers and cross-origin wokers in Gears), and also new APIs like Local Storage and Web Sockets. Other facets of Gears, such as the LocalServer API and Geolocation, are also represented by similar APIs in new standards and will be included in Google Chrome shortly.

The HTML5 transition should mean great things for users in the long-run, but it\’s a bummer to see good solutions fall by the wayside while we wait for the major browsers to catch up to, agree on, and support the latest standards. The cost of progress, I suppose.

Doctor Who, a unknown Documentary

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

<object width=\”425\” height=\”344\”><param name=\”movie\” value=\”http://www.youtube.com/v/Z6CIWUTVF_I&hl=en_US&fs=1&\”></param><param name=\”allowFullScreen\” value=\”true\”></param><param name=\”allowscriptaccess\” value=\”always\”></param><embed src=\”http://www.youtube.com/v/Z6CIWUTVF_I&hl=en_US&fs=1&\” type=\”application/x-shockwave-flash\” allowscriptaccess=\”always\” allowfullscreen=\”true\” width=\”425\” height=\”344\”></embed></object>

The Time Travellers Companion…

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

\"\"What a day this has been for Doctor Who fans!

Not only has the BBC screened its new one minute trailer (see below) for the new season (starting at Easter) with Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor (an advert clearly designed with its 3D use in cinemas in mind) – but Game Geeks has done a great video review of Doctor Who: Adventures In Time & Space (see above) and publishers Cubicle 7 has released details of its next supplement for the game.

The Time Traveller\’s Companion, due out in June, is another beautiful-looking £24.99 box set which \’gives more information on Time Lords, temporal mechanics and time machines.

\’It also takes an in-depth look at earth\’s important role in time and space, covering prehistory to the 51st Century – a vital aid for running historical campaigns at any time in Earth\’s colourful history.\’

Ease Screen Sharing in Snow Leopard

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

One method to help automate screen sharing with Mac OS X, was to create a vncloc alias for each system that you were connecting to.  In 10.6 this has been mostly automated.
To find these shortcuts, navigate to your user’s Library -> Application Support folder, where you’ll find a folder named Screen Sharing. Inside that folder is a .vncloc file for every system that you have connected to.
To make things even easier, though, you can drag this folder to your Dock or Sidebar, where you’ll be able to get at it with a click mouse click.

Preference plist was NOT a dictionary — solved?

Benjamin Schollnick1 Comment

The full post on this is here, but I wanted to make sure that everyone saw this, since there is a lot of traffic on this issue….
I believe that a solution has been found in the Apple Customer forums…  The following command, will reproduce the plist was not a dictionary error message…

/System/Library/CoreServices/PreferenceSyncClient.app/Contents/MacOS/PreferenceSyncClient –sync –periodic

and the next command will display all the files that have any array in it…

egrep \’^<array>\’ ~/Library/Preferences/*

I do not suggest deleting these files, instead move them to a different directory.  For example, my iTunes preferences was detected as a file in question…  As well as the iCal alarmscache file….  And neither application was indicating or showing any issues…  So move the file to a different location, and test to ensure that you are not receiving a false positive….
egrep just does a pattern match, so it just scanning the files for \”<array>\” being found at the beginning of a line.  I hope to have this confirmed as a solution in a few hours, when I don\’t see this error message in the log file any longer…