Random Musings

mobileme: orphaned sub-account

admin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:53:13 +0000

Recently my mobile me family pack account was up for auto renewal. The main account renewed fine, but my wife’s account (sub-account in the family account) stopped working one fine day. No warnings, no alerts, just authentication errors on the iphone mail app.

Taking a closer look at my me.com account settings showed that there were no sub-accounts any more! *Poof*! FAIL!

After some investigation I found that not only had the sub-account become orphaned, but also stopped receiving emails. Using the me.com sub-account Assign account feature & Convert Existing Account option I was able to link it back. But the days while the account was unlinked, all email probably bounced back as there are no emails in the sub-account for the duration it got orphaned. So much so for “auto renewal” and paid “services” from Apple.

gnuplot 4.4 on OSX

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 07:35:54 +0000

gnuplot is a great open cross platform data visualization application, that beats just about every other graphing application hands down specially with large volumes of data. I use gnuplot on a daily basis to analyze application and systems performance data on my linux and windows machines. I was hoping there would be an OSX binary ready for me to download and use (wishful thinking). In order to build gnuplot on OSX from source, you will need to do the following

Download and install developer tools (XCode) on the OSX machine.
Download the gnuplot 4.4 source code.
gnuplot on mac does not support PNG and PDF terminals by default. In order to enable these terminals, one must install the GTK X11 package available from research.att.com. Installing the GTK package will make cairo based terminals for PNG and PDF available in gnuplot 4.4 on OSX.
miscdebris.net has step by step instuctions on how to build gnuplot from the resources downloaded from above. I am mirroring the instructions here for future reference.

—x from miscdebris.net x—

Download the GTK_2.18.5-X11.pkg package fromhttp://r.research.att.com/ and install it
Add to your .profile file in the home directory:

1 export PATH=/Library/Frameworks/GTK+.framework/Resources/bin:$PATH
(Re)start Terminal.app and see if pkg-config cairo --libs works.

Then download Gnuplot 4.4.0, untar, configure and compile it:

Download Gnuplot 4.4.0 from Sourceforge.
tar xzf gnuplot-4.4.0.tar.gz
cd gnuplot-4.4.0
mkdir build && cd build

../configure --with-readline=bsd --disable-wxwidgets. In the configure output you should find something like

  wxt terminal: no (requires C++, wxWidgets>2.6, cairo>0.9, pango>1.10)   cairo-based pdf and png terminals: yes

make
sudo make install

egads! Firefox SSL stopped working in OSX!

admin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:09:27 +0000

One day out of the blue, Firefox SSL stopped working on OSX. OSX very helpfully prompted me with the message that I should fix the issue and relaunch the application. Reinstalling Firefox did not resolve the issue. I ended up deleting my Firefox profile under ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox. This resolved the issue, however I lost all the addins that I had installed in Firefox.After reinstalling all the addins, i made a backup of my Firefox profile, so that in the future if the SSL issue should reoccur I can simply switch to the backup profile without losing any of my addins!

Update: Deleting the cert8.db file under ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/XXXX.default is enough to resolve this issue.

Notesync: One app to sync them all…

admin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:52:42 +0000

One of my pet peeves is the lack of a good note taking app, that works across platforms (Linux, Windows, OSX). I want to be able to write notes on whatever OS I happen to be using at the moment and then pull it up from another and from a browser and from my phone and so on. Notesync is an AIR app that works on Linux, Windows, OSX and uses Google Docs to store the notes (and so works from a browser on my computer or iphone too). It only supports simple text notes, but you will soon find yourself wondering how you got along without this app (specially if you use multiple computers and operating systems).

1&1 .htaccess

admin — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:14:46 +0000

Having spent several hours on this, I think its appropriate that the first blog post should be about 1&1 .htaccess setup. The .htaccess,password file and group file configuration is standard as described here, however the catch is that the home directory is in fact the “htdocs” directory under the “Document Root” specified in the 1&1 control panel under Domain data.

If the Document root specified under the Domain data is /homepages/XX/XXXXX and the password/group files are in a directory called private in your root directory, then .htaccess needs to use the paths as specified below.

AuthUserFile /homepages/XX/XXXXX/htdocs/private/password.file
AuthGroupFile /homepages/XX/XXXXX/htdocs/private/groups.file

Also its a good idea to create a .htaccess file as below and place it in the private directory above

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all