Robert Sinclaire » hacks

What an interesting few weeks it's been.

Robert — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 02:22:41 +0000

Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account got hacked by Anonymous. – This has been all over the news, so I’m sure you’ve heard it by now. But in case you haven’t, here’s some coverage. – PC World, ComputerWorld, Fox News.

International Space Station infected by a Virus. – That’s just sad. Really, really sad.

Google launches Chrome – I wanted to wait until I had some alone time with this browser before I wrote about it. It’s very sleek and super fast, especially if you use a lot of Google’s services (which I do). There is a darkside however. For you security consciousness people out there, you may want to check out Steve Gibson’s security podcast, aptly named Security Now. I’ll be sticking with Firefox for the time being.

Ubiquity, yet another reason not to ditch Firefox. – As you all know, another reason why Firefox is so near and dear to our hearts is because of all the great extensions available for it. Ubiquity is just another fine example of what a great extension can do for you. It has sped up my surfing by 28.37%, no kidding. Install it, check out the tutorial, and take it for a spin.

Google to Acquire Valve? – Say What? I’ll believe it when I see it. If you don’t know who Valve is, don’t bother clicking the link. If you don’t know who Google is, get off my site.

Amazon buys Shelfari. – Old news, I know, but I’m still excited. One of the reasons I stuck with Shelfari over Goodreads was the fact that Amazon was an investor in the company. Now that they own it, let all the Amazon goodness ooze right down onto it. Oh, and check out my shelf. Sweet stuff there.

I’ve been using runningmap.com – This isn’t new either, but it’s new to me. I thought I’d throw this out there to my fellow runners. This is what I ran today.

Mozilla's Ubiquity

Robert — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:47:04 +0000

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Just installed this. It’s only an early alpha release, but it looks just too promising for me to wait for the beta.

Google, the new Napster

Robert — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 20:46:27 +0000

I saw this little trick on Digg this morning. It actually sorta, kinda works.

Cut and paste the following text into Google:

{-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "DIGG"}

Replace the word “DIGG” with the name of your favorite band and voila, a listing of open indexes containing downloadable music files. Of course you could just go here and let them do the dirty work for you, but where’s the fun n that?

Join two Ventrilo servers simultaneously

Robert — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 21:05:19 +0000

A friend of mine showed me this simple little trick that allows you to login to two Ventrilo servers simultaneously. I thought this could come in handy from time to time. Here’s what to do.

***click on the pictures to enlarge***

First, locate your Ventrilo short cut.

Next, right click on the shortcut and choose properties.

You will see a dialog box show up like the one below.

Add the switch -m after the last quote as shown below. Click Apply and then click OK to close the dialog box.

You can now launch multiple instances of Ventrilo by clicking on the shortcut as many times as you wish.

The last step is to make sure you bind a Hotkey (push to talk key) for each instance of Ventrilo that is open. See the two images below.

and

Voila, you can now hang out on two (or more) Ventrilo servers at the same time.

You’re probably not going to want to do this a lot because it can get kind of crazy trying to keep track of who’s saying what and from where. It’s definitely a nice little addition to anyone’s bag of tricks though.

Speaking of Ventrilo, Zen Geeks just launched its very own Ventrilo server. It’s a members only server, but membership is free so it’s essentially a public server. Stop by the forums for more information.

Show hidden files in OS X

Robert — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 22:31:46 +0000

I’m blogging about this so I don’t forget how to do it, but some of you may find it useful too.

I needed to edit my .htaccess file from my web server, but when I downloaded it to my desktop (OS X), the file magically disappeared. So I downloaded it again. This time it asked me if I wanted to overwrite the existing .htaccess file on my desktop. That’s when it hit me, .htaccess is a hidden file. Duh!

I did a quick scan in Finder for a “Show Hidden Files” option, but I had no luck. Google here we come. And this is what I found.

In a terminal, type the following:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE killall Finder

To revert back to the way it was, repeat the above step, but this time replace the TRUE value with a FALSE value. Voila! Nice and easy.

IE7 problem fixed

Robert — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:32:21 +0000

I finally fixed the IE7 problem that plagued this site, although it’s really only a temporary fix. It’s also a very ugly fix. I had to use a conditional comment in my code which detects Internet Explorer 7 browsers and then loads a separate CSS file.

It sucks that I had to do it this way. I was warned by multiple web developers that this is not the preferred method and I completely to agree with them. For now though, the site works in IE7 and it will buy me some time until I can really look over the code and see what, if anything, is causing this stupid, annoying, pain in my ass behavior. It should be fun.